Yorkshire dialect: variation and social values

In this guest blog, Paul Cooper takes a look at Yorkshire dialect, how we identify whether someone 'sounds Yorkshire' and the variations that can be noticed within Yorkshire dialect. Dr Paul Cooper is a lecturer in English Language at the University of Liverpool. He's primarily interested in historical sociolinguistics and you can find more of his work here.

The idea that there is a Yorkshire dialect has been around for a very long time – since at least the seventeenth century, as evidenced by the anonymously-authored A Yorkshire Dialogue Between an Awd Wife, a Lass, and a Butcher (1673). Today, we can see examples of Yorkshire dialect in many different contexts including in dialect dictionaries, on commodities like t-shirts, tea towels, birthday cards, and coffee mugs, in media representations, as well as online in Facebook and Twitter posts, and people seem to have a reasonably good idea of what Yorkshire dialect is, where it is spoken, and what they think about it.

My research takes a language-ideological approach to analysing Yorkshire dialect which illustrates the specific language features people think of as being Yorkshire dialect, as well as the social values they associate with it. By doing this, I’ve been able to identify a repertoire of features that people broadly consider to be Yorkshire dialect, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Repertoire of Yorkshire dialect (see also Cooper 2019)

These features are most likely to make people think “Yorkshire” when they hear them, or if they wish to affect Yorkshire dialect they will employ these features. There is also wide awareness of these features – my research highlighted that people from all over the world could identify these features as Yorkshire dialect in some cases. This is because the repertoire has been enregistered, meaning that it has undergone ‘processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’ (Agha 2003: 231).

In the case of Yorkshire dialect, the linguistic repertoire is comprised of the features listed in Table 1. We can say that this repertoire has become differentiable and socially recognised by virtue of the fact that people identify it as Yorkshire, they can talk about it and they can provide commentary on it.

In order to investigate the kind of commentary we can see I conducted interviews with 19 speakers (10 female and 9 male) from across Yorkshire who had lived there all their lives and were highly familiar with the dialect. These interviews highlighted the social values linked to both Yorkshire dialect and Yorkshire speakers, which included ‘plain speaking’, ‘authenticity’, ‘independence’, ‘sense of humour’, ‘geniality’, ‘hospitable’, as well as the perception that the dialect is ‘unintelligible’ to outsiders, which is seen as a positive thing and adds to a sense of in-group membership for Yorkshire speakers. This came up in an interview (see Cooper 2019: 77) with Alfred (an older male speaker) who described the scenario in extract 1 where switching into ‘broad’ Yorkshire dialect meant that people who weren’t familiar with it couldn’t understand him:

1) Alfred: years and years ago me dad once went to Spain fishing sea fishing=
PC: =mhm=
Alfred: =and on this boat me dad and me brother there were two Spaniards on the boat and they were speaking Spanish
PC: yeah=
Alfred: =so me dad and me brother started talking Yorkshire broad Yorkshire they couldn’t understand they come up to ’em and said what language is that we don’t understand it and they’d no idea they said can you talk in English because we can’t understand

However, in addition to the social values listed above interviewees also perceived Yorkshire dialect to be internally varied, leading them to discuss features not included in the repertoire in Table 1. For instance, several speakers discussed notional differences between Sheffield and Barnsley (two urban areas in South Yorkshire that are roughly 16 miles apart), exemplified in extracts 2 and 3 where Nora (an older female speaker) and Esme (a young female speaker), both from South Yorkshire, highlight the distinctive nature of Barnsley dialect relative to Sheffield dialect:

2) Nora: yeah cos the Barnsley is the Barnsley accent’s totally different to t’ Sheffield
3) Esme: It’s true though innit because like from Barnsley and Barnsley’s still in Yorkshire but it’s still completely different to Sheffield

The main way in which they perceived Barnsley dialect to differ from other parts of Yorkshire was in the pronunciation of the name ‘Barnsley’ itself, which they demonstrated as having a different vowel to their own pronunciation, as illustrated in extracts 4 and 5:

4) Nora: if you ask somebody that comes from B[ɑː]nsley where they come from they’ll come from B[aː]nsley
5) Esme: We’d say B[ɑː]nsley they’d say B[aː]nsley

In the first instance the first syllable of B[ɑː]nsley would be pronounced the same as the word ‘barn’ in RP, whereas in the second, B[aː]nsley, features a more fronted vowel (which I call the ‘Barnsley vowel’), rendering it something more like ‘Baaarnsley’. This is a pronunciation that Barnsley speakers themselves appear to be aware of. For example, in the run up to the 2014 Tour de France, some of which passed through Barnsley, the Barnsley-based graphic design company Black Bee Creative posted a blog article which described how the word ‘Baaarnsley’ was written in large letters in a local field as ‘a pun on the local accent plus the noisy sheep in the field’ (Black Bee Creative 2014).

Ultimately, despite the long-standing nature of the dialect and the wide awareness of its enregistered repertoire, it seems that the term “Yorkshire dialect” only broadly applies to certain language features. When we look at the situation more closely we can see that there is more localised variation within Yorkshire that local speakers are aware of, and there are varieties within Yorkshire that are simultaneously associated with a particular town or city as well as Yorkshire itself, and may be distinguished from other areas by the pronunciation of a single vowel.


References
Agha, A. 2003. The Social Life of Cultural Value. Language and Communication 23, 231-273.

Black Bee Creative. 2014. Putting baaarnsley on the map [Online]. Available at: http://www.blackbeecreative.com/putting-baaarnsley-map. [Accessed 12th October 2017].

Cooper, P. 2019. The enregisterment of ‘Barnsley’ dialect: Vowel fronting and being ‘broad’ in Yorkshire dialects. Language and Communication, 64, 68-80.

Kellett, A. 2007. Ee By Gum, Lord! The Gospels in Broad Yorkshire. Smith Settle, Skipton.

#TwitterTwang

One of the big topic areas on the new AQA English Language AS level (and the A level) is Language Diversity, in which we look at how language varies from person to person and place to place. Much of the work done on this topic has focused on spoken language - accents and dialects, for example - but language can vary in written and electronic forms too.

Twitter has proved a really useful way of both producing and collecting this kind of data and more is explained in an article looking at the work of Brice Russ at Ohio University, who examined the language in some 400,000 tweets, looking initially for how people in different parts of the USA used either soda or pop to describe fizzy drinks.

Gabriel Doyle explains some of the ways in which Twitter can be used to chart change in language and how changes in language spread in this lecture clip.

Rachael Tatman, blogging from the Northwest Linguistics Conference in April of 2015, also noted how Twitter cold be used to identify not just lexical but phonological differences in how people used Twitter: in other words, the ways in which people used different spellings on Twitter to represent the ways they spoke with an accent:

Ok, so people will sometimes spell things differently on Twitter based on their spoken language dialect. What’s the big deal? Well, for linguists this is pretty exciting. There’s a lot of language data available on Twitter and my research suggests that we can use it to look at variation in sound patterns.

So, how is this relevant to those us doing English Language at A level? Here's the plan...

With #TwitterTwang we'll try to gather data from UK A level students using Twitter and a few helpful teachers. Over a 3-4 week period before the end of the Spring term, we'll identify a handful of ways in which data can be elicited in similar ways from students in different places and ask each group of students to hashtag their tweets with #TwitterTwang and a number to indicate where they're from (Essex as 1, Leicester as 2, Hackney as 3, Southport as 4, East Norfolk as 5 etc.). We can then make use of the data collected to see if there are patterns in regional dialect and/or accent apparent in the tweets.

I'm still thinking about different elicitation techniques and open to ideas (so please tweet me @EngLangBlog) if you have good ideas or think mine are rubbish, but here's the tentative plan:

• a post-lunch tweet to describe what each student has had for lunch
• a Gogglebox-style tweet/series of tweets about a programme that everyone agrees to either watch at a given time or on catch-up (e.g. Britain's Got Talent, The Voice, Take Me Out etc.)
• a tweet about a picture/photo that we can all agree on an share

If we can agree on exactly which of these (or all?) to use, we'll have something to start with. We then need to identify a time to get this started. One of the best things about using Twitter for this is that we don't necessarily have to deal with the data as it comes in but can catalogue it using the different hashtags and save it for later. We could even use it for different things (language change, gender, individual tweeting styles) as the course goes on, or use it to compare with data in future years to see if language styles change.

Anyway, that's a start, I hope. If we could work out a plan in more detail through @EngLangBlog that would be great.

Paper 2: accent, dialect, sociolect and occupational discourse

If you're looking for material on the topics for paper 2 of the new AQA English Language spec, there'll be some posts coming up after half-term. There's plenty on the blog already, though but it's labelled using the old specifications.

• So, if you're looking for stuff on regional variation, try here.
• Accent material can be found here.
• For social variation - class and social groups, try here and here.
• For occupation and language, try here and here.
• And for gender and language, try here.
• And for Language Discourses and attitudes to variation try here and here (but be aware that language change, ethnicity and world Englishes are A-level only topics and don't appear in the AS level).

General Dejection

You might have missed it, but there was a General Election last week. While many of us in Sixth Form Colleges are still weeping, wailing and gnashing our teeth - not to mention drowning our sorrows in red red wine - at the prospect of another 5 years of underfunding and fragmentation, at least the election gave us some good stuff to look at for language analysis. Every cloud has a silver lining...

Anyway, here's a quick round-up of things that you could look at for English language A level related to the recent campaign.

First off, it's the rise of the hashtag #Milifandom. For a while, it looked like people might actually vote for Miliband, and the rise of the Milifandom hashtag seemed to crystallise the feeling among a (clearly deluded, in hindsight) minority that the time of the geek had come. Obviously, it hadn't...

Accommodation was also under the spotlight: not the kind of accommodation that we need - you know, houses and stuff - but accommodation in the form of Howard Giles' Communication Accommodation Theory. A year or two ago, we looked on this blog at George Osborne's attempts to converge to working class speech but this time round it was Ed Miliband who was mocked for his apparent convergence to Russell Brand's Essex/mockney style.

Have a look at this piece which explains some of the background to the Milibrand interview and the ways in which such convergence can happen and is often viewed.

And in a separate article, David Shariatmadari looks at the glottal stop and its stigmatisation, making the following observation:

The glottal stop (more specifically, the glottalisation of “t”) is a feature traditionally associated with male, working-class speakers. But even as far back as 1982, linguist John Wells noticed it being picked up by young speakers of “prestige” British English – otherwise known as received pronunciation. It’s difficult to say exactly why that happened, but Labov’s idea of “covert prestige” makes intuitive sense. Some sounds, even though they’re generally regarded as markers of an “inferior” dialect, are nevertheless used to signal group membership, solidarity or cool.

Away from the two main male players in the General Election, Cameron and Miliband, the three female party leaders of the Greens, Plaid Cymru and SNP attracted much media coverage. Was this the first election since Thatcher's in 1979 that would see women making a splash? Well, yes and no, Sturgeon's splash appears to have seriously dampened Miliband's chances of taking power or exerting any influence on a hung parliament, with the SNP butchering Labour in Scotland and then Labour failing to make gains in England.

But what about the speech styles of the female party leaders? Were these women breaking the mould of adversarial Punch and Judy politics by injecting some much needed co-operation and civility into the debates? 

Deborah Cameron, ace linguist and author of The Myth of Mars and Venus, looked at this with a sceptical eye in this really interesting piece about gender and the debates, arguing that much of the coverage of the three female party leaders has succumbed to tedious stereotyping:

The specific ways in which women are said to differ from men (more supportive and less aggressive, more into consensus and less into point-scoring, etc.) could come straight from the pages of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. These are hoary old gender stereotypes, which in other contexts feminists would decry as crude and sexist. Yet in the context of the election campaign they are being dusted off and trotted out as if they constituted a feminist argument. ‘Look, women are different from men, that’s why we need more of them in politics’. There is an excellent feminist case for equal political representation. So why use an argument whose basic assumption is that women deserve a place because they’re from Venus rather than Mars?

As she points out elsewhere in her article, female speakers aren't all the same:

Some differences among women are produced by the intersection of gender with other social divisions like ethnicity and class; others reflect variation at the level of individual personality or life experience. It’s true that ‘female politicians’ is a much smaller and less internally diverse category than ‘women’. Even so, it cannot be assumed that they have a single style of speaking. In fact, it’s obvious they don’t: even among the three female party leaders I've been discussing there are clear individual differences.

Perhaps what has shaped so much of this coverage of the female party leaders and their 'female language style' is the sheer novelty of seeing women in power, and that is hugely depressing in 2015. As much as I detest pretty much everything Margaret Thatcher ever did, I can still recognise that having a female Prime Minister was still a pretty big moment in history, but 36 years later there still hasn't been another woman PM and we are still short of equality for the sexes in parliament. 

So, even when things look apparently very different, they actually stay the same. Or get worse...

Women lead the way

Yesterday's Word of Mouth on Radio 4 had a really good discussion of how language change around the world - and not just in English, but other languages, including Arabic - is being led by young women. It's definitely worth a listen if you're revising gender for ENGA3 Language Variation or even Language Change and reasons for change.

You can find it here.

The focus on women as linguistic innovators is also picked up in this 2012 New York Times article, which suggests that features as diverse as vocal fry (or 'creaky voice'), high rising terminals and new slang are all driven by young women. It's not just in spoken language that women are having an impact; in this Slate piece from 2013, Amanda Marcotte looks at how language styles on Twitter are often related to gender and speculates on how this might lead to men adopting a more 'female' style (more emojis, ellipses and exaggerated punctuation).

Slang archive

Following yesterday's post about other top tips for articles about language, Tony Thorne of King's College London sent this link to a whole range of articles he has gathered on the topic of slang. There's plenty there for anyone studying Language Change and Variation at A2 and lots of good stuff to read. Thanks very much, Tony.

ENGA3 June 2014 - revision tips part 3

So... here's a post to help you revise for ENGA3 Section A Language Variation. And if you're wondering why I'm starting this post with so, starting everything with so is apparently undergoing a boom. Just look here for something on this from 2010 and here for something even more recent.

And how is this relevant to your ENGA3 exam? Well, the questions on Language Variation don't have to be about regional or national variation - or even variation according to class, ethnicity or gender - as they have been in the last few years; they can also be about the ways in which language varies in other ways, like rising intonation (uptalk or HRT), the use of vocal fry or even something like so, or innit, or this is me. All of these are recent variations in the ways people use language to communicate and what's interesting about them is that they represent the intersection between so many different factors.

We're no longer in a world of language study where we say that x speaks y because she's z, but that x speaks y in one situation because she's sometimes like z, but often like a, b or c, but might also want to sound a bit like d, e or f. But never u, k, i  or p. So...in many ways, with Language Variation, what makes a good answer is an awareness that people don't just use language because of some accident of birth (born male/female, white/black/Asian, to poor/rich parents in Birmingham/Bermondsey/Jaywick) but that language identity is so much more fluid. Good answers to questions on Language Variation will always acknowledge this.

There'll be more on Language Variation tomorrow, including the topic as a Language Discourses question for Section B.

ENGA3 June 2014 - revision tips part 1

There's just over a week to go before the ENGA3 exam, so my plan is to do a short post each day with advice about how to approach this difficult (but rather splendid) paper.

Seeing as there is still a whole week of half-term in which to revise, the first tip I'd offer is to read a couple of books. Yes, whole books.

First off, read Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars. It covers pretty much every Language Discourses question you could hope to get and it's a damn good read.

We've covered it here on the blog lots before (like here and here) and I did an interview with the author for emagazine a couple of years ago. Click here to visit the emagazine website and use your school/college log-in to find it under Language Topics: Attitudes to Language Change: At War With the Pedants.

Secondly, if you haven't already looked at it, Jean Aitchison's Language Change: Progress or Decay? is a fascinating read. It's got many of the things you'll no doubt have covered as part of your course (the crumbling castle, damp spoon and infectious disease models, for instance) but lots of other excellent stuff too, including discussion of how and why language changes, which is pretty much a staple of Question 1 on Language Change on the paper.

Tomorrow, we'll start looking at each question on the paper in turn and some ideas about how to prepare for them.

Exaggerating the differences?

On Monday Lynne Murphy, of Sussex University and Separated By A Common Language fame, came to talk to our students at Colchester and it was great to hear her bust the myths of US English 'destroying' English English. As she put it, in many ways American English has (kinda) saved the English Language.

So, it's good timing for all of us doing ENGA3 World Englishes, and especially Language Discourses around American English, that Lynne has also posted an interesting response to an article by the linguist Geoff Pullum about what he sees as the minimal differences between the American and English varieties.

In his original article, Pullum claimed that "the differences have been wildly, insanely overstated" and  "the one thing that has always struck me about the differences, particularly in grammar, is how tiny and insignificant they are". He concludes by saying, "Many people seem to enjoy getting hot under the collar about Americanisms in Britain or Britishisms in America; but it can’t be the linguistic differences that motivate them. Looked at seriously, the tiny differences between standard American and standard British English are trivial, barely even worth mentioning".

And he's kind of right...

Many people do enjoy getting hot under the collar about one variety influencing another, American creeping into English, or Britishisms (yes, they exist!) permeating American conversation. But maybe that's because they are worried about culture and identity, rather than language per se. It's the age-old argument that Henry Hitchings, author of The Language Wars identifies when he says that "These debates quickly become heated because they involve people’s attitudes to – among other things – class, race, money and politics".

But, as Lynne Murphy tells us, to underplay the differences between US English and British English is a bit daft too. As she explains in her recent post on Separated By a Common Language, many of Pullum's grammatical definitions are rather narrow and his article doesn't really address pragmatic differences between the two varieties. As she concludes in her blog post:

Are the differences exaggerated due to cognitive biases and prejudices? Absolutely. Are we still mostly able to communicate easily? Yes, certainly.  But that doesn't make the differences that are there any less interesting to me. And the fact that there are so many biased perceptions about national differences makes me feel like this blog provides a public service in countering the myths. I hope you do too. I even hold out a little hope that Pullum might.

Rising intonation lowers career prospects

Rising intonation is a feature of phonology that has been discussed for a couple of decades now, often inciting strong feelings, most of them negative. Also referred to as HRT (High Rising Terminals) and AQI (Australian Question Intonation), but sometimes just labelled uptalk, rising intonation occurs when the normal descending cadence of a statement (dropping off towards the end) is replaced with a rising tone (like when you lift your voice to ask a question). We looked at it in this post back in December.

Recent research reported in the Mail Online suggests that HRT doesn't just rub people up the wrong way but can actually affect career prospects. According to Pearson who surveyed 700 men and women in managerial and ownership roles, a striking picture emerges:

The majority (71 per cent) agreed that AQI is a 'particularly annoying trait', with 85 per cent adding the use of the trait is a ‘clear indicator of a person's insecurity or emotional weakness.’ More than half said AQI would hinder the prospects of promotion and a better pay grade in their own organisation. While 57 per cent believed AQI has the potential to damage a person's professional credibility by revealing an inability or reluctance to speak their mind. Of the respondents responsible for interviewing job applicants for senior roles, only 16 per cent said they would be willing to gloss over AQI and focus purely on an applicant's strengths and aptitude.

The same picture of irritation and annoyance emerges in the gripes of various language commentators, including this piece in The Daily Telegraph.

(Edited on 09.03.14 to fix Daily Mail link)

Language article round-up

As you might have noticed, I haven't posted much since last year but I'm hoping to add some more articles in the next few weeks. In the meantime, the EngLangBlog twitter feed is worth following.

Here are a few things that have appeared in the last week or two:

A new study on how young people manage to text and write formally. It's almost like young people aren't completely stoopid.
 - useful for ENGA3/ENGB3 Language Change and Language Discourses (and ENGB1 Technology for B spec people)

Why because isn't (always) a conjunction
- useful for ENGA3/ENGB3 Language Change

Lynne Truss loses the plot and maybe going insane over compound words.
- useful for ENGA3/ENGB3 Language Change and Language Discourses

Dialect words from around the north of England
- useful for ENGA3 Language Variation

Uptalk top-ranking

Uptalk is on the rise? And it's not just girls who are using it; it's boys as well? A BBC programme called Inside Science covered this last week (available here and from about 23 minutes in) and it has been picked up by the BBC's own Science writers in this article.

Uptalk - or what linguists often call HRT (High Rising Terminals) or HRI (High Rising Intonation) - is a feature in which the usual falling cadence at the end of a statement is replaced with a rising intonation, so that - to some listeners, at least - the tone sounds more like a question. Like y'know, one time at band camp?

In previous research, the phenomenon was shown to be spreading out of the USA and Australia where it might have originated (although views are mixed on exactly where) and into the language of younger British people, mostly young females. But work done by Amalia Arvanati, from the University of Kent suggests that uptalk is spreading into male speech too, although its use may be under-reported by males because it's felt to be a female feature or perhaps because it carries connotations of insecurity.

Uptalk is a useful feature of language, because it can signal a desire for the interlocutor (conversational partner) to confirm something that a speaker has said, but it can also grate on some listeners, because of this perceived lack of self-belief and certainty. As Arvanati explains on the programme, "It grates on people - some people think it sounds really ditzy or insecure".

We looked at uptalk back here in 2010 and you can find a lot more about it in this article from 2001 by Matt Seaton and in this piece by the linguist Mark Liberman on Language Log (which suggests, incidentally, that HRT is not a good term to describe uptalk). If you want to track uptalk back to its origins then this piece in the New York Times by James Gorman is credited (by Liberman, at least) as being the first recorded reference to it (from 1993).

Put up or shut up

We're all aware that people from the different regions around the UK tend to use certain words and meanings, pronunciation and even grammatical structures in different ways: that's a basic principle of geographical variation and has its roots in the history of Britain. But a new study at the University of Manchester has identified some interesting trends which suggest that some regional variations - particularly in word choice (lexis) - might be disappearing as southern terms spread north.

I'd call them Vans, myself

The research is reported on in the Daily Telegraph and the Mail Online, but if you want the real detail and a full look at the language maps that have been created by Laurel Mackenzie and her team at Manchester, go straight to the Multilingual Manchester website. Here you can look at the questions that were asked of the 1400 respondents throughout the UK: questions such as "What word would you use to describe the footwear featured in this picture?". The most popular answer for this question is pumps, followed in descending order of popularity by plimsolls, trainers, daps and shoes. With many of the other questions, the results can be compared with previous research findings, allowing a diachronic study (i.e. a study over time) to be made.

Interestingly, some of the questions also assess attitudes to what is standard and non-standard, asking respondents to say whether they think expressions such as "Give it me" or "I done it" are acceptable.

We'll be looking at this whole area in more detail when we go back to ENGA3 and Language Variation and Discourses after Christmas.

Teacher told to "lose her northern accent"

Following on from Friday's post about another attempt to 'ban' students from using dialect and non-standard terms (and/or slang, depending on your definition of the term), another story - this time about accent - has appeared.

According to The Cumberland News and Star, a Cumbrian teacher has been told to ditch her regional accent and make it more 'southern' to suit her Berkshire pupils. Now it appears that it's not just students who are having their language policed, but teachers are also being told what to say and how to say it. Where will the language police strike next?

Back in 2010, Ofsted raised a similar issue at a school in Portsmouth which prompted this blog post and this response in the TES, among other things.

Dialect dissing

First it was slang getting slagged off and now it's dialect being dissed. Is this a slippery slope towards linguistic fascism?

We've reported several examples of so-called slang bans on this blog over the last few years - a few are listed below - but in many cases, the definition of what constitutes 'slang' has been pretty broad, and more often than not, just plain wrong. And that's before you even start to look at the whys and wherefores of imposing 'zero-tolerance' policies towards forms of non-standard English.

In The Daily Mirror yesterday, Martin Fricker reported on a school in Halesowen, part of the West Midlands' Black Country, where such a zero-tolerance approach to local dialect had been introduced.

The Daily Telegraph reported it as well, but what is striking in so many of the responses quoted from parents of children at the school is how insulted many of them feel at being told that their variety of English is sub-standard.

Take for example, what parent Alana Willetts was reported as saying: "I got a double A in my English GCSE and I have a Black Country accent. I think it is patronising and insulting to say that people with a Black Country accent are disadvantaged. All the parents are outraged, English is a living language, we can't all talk the same, we don't all speak in ye olde English and new words are being added to the dictionary every day".

Compare that with the language being used to describe the local dialect: language such as "top ten most damaging phrases" and "zero-tolerance", which taps into discourses of punishment and destruction.

Even worse than what the school itself says, are the ways in which the comments below the line pick up the intolerant attitude towards non-standard forms and rapidly extend to damning whole groups of people, areas of the country and even races.

The delightful 'Stew' on The Daily Telegraph site comments "When so many childrens dialect is polluted with west indian slang!.", while 'Coley170'  from the Daily Mirror site gets their geography a tad confused and states "fair I think....they should speak proper English, they won't get anywhere in life speaking Cornish slang" and potential UN ambassador Chris Marshall decides that West Midlanders should be sent home to err....the West Midlands: "If you can not speak the English language then you should be deported".

Me, I'm with Alana Willetts on this, rather than the wrong-headed headteacher of Colley Lane or the backward bigots quoted above.

Edited on Monday 18th November 2013 to add Guardian link

Other links to "slang bans" and dialect discrimination:

Croydon
http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/another-slang-ban-attempted.html

Middlesbrough

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.ie/2013/02/driving-up-standards-by-driving-out-non.html

http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/local-news/debate-over-teesside-dialect-accent-3666223

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2273821/Middlesbrough-parents-clamp-local-expressions-home-children-learn-standard-English.html#axzz2KEG69Psp

http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/2013/02/05/anger-as-middlesbrough-school-tells-parents-to-stop-children-speaking-teesside-84229-32748896/

http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/theres-nowt-wrong-with-childrens-dialects/

Sheffield

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/playground-prescriptivism.html

Manchester

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2435923/School-bans-youth-slang-and-sees-exam-results-soar.html

Basildon

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9044053/Essex-school-gives-pupils-elocution-lessons-to-lose-their-accents.html

 

 

Putting up with prejudiced sit

Following on from last week's Tonight programme and its focus on attitudes to regional accents, here's a great piece by accent coach Erica Buist on what she describes as snobbery and disdain for foreign accents among many English people.

While accent prejudice is nothing new, it's troubling to see how it can apparently stand in the way of well qualified people getting jobs and being accepted. As Buist points out:

Even out-and-out xenophobes start sentences with, "I don't mind foreigners, but …" While it's tedious to hear bigotry tarted up as a point of view, at least the lie is an acknowledgement that xenophobia isn't acceptable. But companies don't start sentences with, "we're not xenophobic, but …" – they make it company policy.

Elsewhere in the piece she quotes research from the University of Chicago that suggests foreign accents undermine a speaker's credibility with listeners, even if the listeners aren't aware of it at the time. Rather like the ComRes survey for the ITV Tonight programme (also reported in The Telegraph) it appears that it's not just what you say but how you say it that affects how you're viewed by others.

Buist is going to have watch out, though - sounding a bit like a Jenny Foreigner and having the nerve to criticise anything to do with the UK -  while Paul Dacre's Daily Fail is still frothing at the mouth and accusing one and all of hating the country.

"Prejudice about accents is alive and well."

ITV's Tonight programme last night (available on ITV player) featured some good coverage of attitudes to different accents, including a survey by ComRes into how people rate certain regional varieties. The overall findings suggest that many people still feel that their accent pigeonholes them socially and that prejudice is often rife among some employers towards people with certain accents. As the programme blurb states:

...even in modern Britain, where equality is the new God, prejudice about accents is alive and well. And we often found it thriving most - along the north-south, “us and them” fault-lines of old.
Our research not only shows that more than a quarter of Britons (28%) feel they have been discriminated against because of their regional accent but also, according to another batch of research by the law firm Peninsular, that 80% of employers admit to making discriminating decisions based on regional accents.

As part of ENGA3 we've been looking at language variation and attitudes towards accents and dialects, and many of us will have been running through last summer's assignment on Victoria Coren's take on  George Osborne's downwards convergence towards Morrisons workers,  so this programme is well-timed from that point of view. It also offers plenty of extra ammunition for debate and discussion in the form of the survey results which you can find here on the ITV Tonight website.

Accents and dialects

Welcome back to blog followers from last year and hi to new people starting the course this year. I've tried to keep regular tweets going from the @EngLangBlog account over the summer holiday in place of blog posts and I've rounded up a few of the most interesting ones about accent and dialect here for you.

These should be particularly helpful if you're doing ENGA3 this year, especially those Colchester 6th Form College students doing the summer assignment in the packs from last term.

Lucy Mangan on accent adaptation and prejudice

A guide to Nottingham accent and dialect

A piece on the changing nature of the Leicester varieteh

Dealing with AO2 on ENGA3

ENGA3 is assessed using three AOs - 1,2 & 3 - but AO2 is the chunkiest of these on this paper, accounting for 40 of the 90 marks available.

While you should still be using the close textual analysis skills you've been learning throughout the course (i.e. the linguistic labelling with clear examples for AO1 and the discussion of meanings, effects and representations created for AO3), it does mean that you need to think carefully about addressing the wider issues of change, variation and discourses that usually appear as part of the 2nd bullet point in each question.

What exactly is AO2, though? The AQA spec says "AO2: demonstrate critical understanding of a range of concepts and issues related to the construction and analysis of meanings in spoken and written language". I've generally taken the first part of this as the most important, namely the concepts and issues part.

In the top band for AO2, you can see what they're after each year from the non-italicised descriptors (i.e. the bits that remain the same each year, whatever the question set):

So, from the top 4 descriptors you can see that it's mostly about theories, research and ideas about language. It should also be clear from this that to hit the very top of the mark scheme, you need to do more than just regurgitate all the ideas you've learnt and revised.

To use a tortuous analogy from the world of rubbish, you need to do more than just wheel out your wheelie-bin of knowledge and dump it across the pavement for the examiner to sift through. You've got to be a bit more like the person who sifts through their recycling and splits it into various types - cardboard, paper, tin cans, bottles -  working out where things go before you put it all out for collection.

(Of course, this analogy breaks down the minute the council rubbish truck (aka the AQA examiner) comes along and just tips it all into one big pile before shipping it off to Albania to be dumped as landfill. But why let truth get in the way of a tedious attempt to make exam revision entertaining?)

So, evaluation of knowledge is critical:

• weigh up ideas and look for competing explanations (e.g. reasons for people using non-standard English)
• discuss contrasting models (Charles Hockett's bull's eye theory or Paul Postal's "non-functional stylistic change" versus Jean Aitchison's functional approach, as outlined in Chapter 8 of her Language Change: Progress or Decay*)
• think about alternative explanations for the same linguistic features (Robin Lakoff argued that women use more tag questions because they're insecure; Janet Holmes found that women use more tags but only of a certain type, and that male tags tend to be the ones seeking reassurance)
• be prepared to challenge ideas within the texts you are given in the exam (especially true in Section B where the texts are non-specialist and often caricature, or present simplistic versions of, linguistic arguments)

We'll come back to ENGA3 again before Monday's exam, but in the meantime it's probably a good idea to chase up a few references to various theories about language change (such as those described and evaluated in Aitchison's book) and variation.

*thanks to Sherif for raising the issue of AO2 evaluation and these ideas

Gender revision

If you're revising ENGA3 Gender and Language Variation (like the students at the Convent of Jesus and Mary Language College in Harlesdon - hello!) then this interview with Deborah Cameron from Woman's Hour might come in handy.

Cameron is one of the key thinkers in this field and her Myth of Mars and Venus is an excellent book to study before the exam.

A quick look at other posts about her would also be handy and you can find a load of them here.