Rebecca Wicker · Speaking & Executive Training
Language is
never neutral.
Rebecca Wicker is a linguist who studies how power moves through professional language — who gets credited, who gets believed, whose words become the decision.
Pragmatics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics — applied to where language does real work.
Most linguists have never sat in a strategy meeting. Most strategists have never read a transcript closely enough to see what's actually happening in it. Rebecca has spent her career in both rooms — running linguistic analysis on real business decisions, not theorising about language from outside them.
Linguistics gets framed as an academic discipline removed from daily life but linguistic analysis reveals how power operates: who gets interrupted, whose ideas get credited, what "professional communication" actually means, why AI sounds confident even when uncertain, how English proficiency tests function as colonial gatekeeping.
Rebecca brings that same lens into organisations and events, as a keynote speaker and executive trainer. The room changes. The question doesn't: what a sentence does, and for whom.
If you're here because you've felt the weight of invisible hierarchies, heard algorithmic responses that felt off, or watched workplace dynamics favor certain voices over others—this is the science behind what you're experiencing. More importantly, once you see how the machinery works, it becomes harder to be moved by it. That's the point. That is the work, it's a translation: making visible what's being deliberately hidden in language and what's being accidentally overlooked.
Bring the framework into your organisation or event.
Linguistic analysis applied directly to how people communicate, decide, and lead.
Keynote Presentations
A 45–75 minute keynote translating linguistic research into a single, concrete argument: the language patterns your organisation already uses are quietly deciding who has authority in the room.
- How credibility is built and lost in speech, not just content
- The mechanics of interruption, hedging, and attribution
- A framework leaders can apply the same week
Executive Training Workshops
Half-day and multi-session workshops for leadership teams, built around your organisation's actual meetings, reviews, and decision-making language.
- Discourse analysis applied to your team's real language
- How culture cascades from a leader's language into a team's performance
- Where authority gets distributed unevenly in meetings
- Tailored to sector, team size, and specific challenges
For leadership teams who already suspect language is doing more work than anyone's tracking.
These engagements suit senior leaders, professional services partners, and cross-functional teams shaping how a company communicates internally and externally. No prior linguistics background required — just a willingness to look closely at language your organisation already uses every day.
Grounded in linguistics. Built for the room you're in.
Every keynote and workshop starts from your organisation's actual meetings, reviews, and decision language — not a generic curriculum.
Available in-person or virtually.
Tell me about the room, and what you want people to understand differently by the time they leave it.
Audience, timeline, and the dynamic you want addressed — that's enough to start.
Get In TouchInterviews and press commentary on language, AI, and workplace authority.
Language Theory
The Framework That Changes Everything: Why Context Creates Meaning
Erving Goffman's insight was deceptively simple: we're always interpreting "what's happening here." That shared understanding of the situation—the stakes, the roles available, the appropriate ways to behave—that's a frame.
Read essay 02Identity & Power
When Gaslighting Becomes the Story
Gaslighting gets framed as a personality trait, a red flag to watch for. That framing misses the point. This piece examines how it operates as a linguistic mechanism — with identifiable structural moves that work regardless of the speaker's intent.
Read essay 03Accent & Authority
The Invisible Hierarchy: How Voice and Accent Shape Identity and Authority
What "sounds authoritative" is not a neutral quality — it is a culturally constructed one. This piece examines how accent functions as a proxy for competence and belonging in professional life, and the invisible gatekeeping built into what we call "credibility."
Read essay 04Language & Power
The Grammar of Expectation: How Language Shapes Who Gets to Lead
How language bias distributes opportunity at the grammatical level—not through explicit refusal, but through the presuppositions embedded in voice, nominalisation, and modal choices.
Read essayThe Strategic Linguist's Syllabi
Frameworks to carry into the room.
Workplace Language
The Speech Community Trap
What begins as efficient professional shorthand—shared vocabulary, evaluative norms, ways of signalling competence—solidifies into something closer to a closed linguistic system.
Writing and AI
Metalinguistic Awareness in Writing
Metalinguistic awareness—the conscious understanding of how language functions as a structured system—is the foundation for both clear writing and effective AI interaction.
Workplace Language
How Hegemony Works in Frames
Hegemony doesn't use a fist—it uses language. It makes its own version of reality seem so obvious, so natural, so simply the way things are, that alternative versions barely register as possible.
Linguistics and AI
The Default Voice: What LLMs Learned
Language models present one communicative style as baseline. The question is: working for whom?
Paid subscribers · New model every Thursday
The Podcast
The Strategic Linguist Podcast
Longer-form conversations and close readings. The podcast brings it to life. Episodes on accent, AI, authority, and what language is actually doing in the spaces we move through.
120K+ downloads in 95 countries
The Newsletter