Electronic renaissance

Thanks to Mr G for this one; it's a report about research into instant messaging, a blended mode of communication like text language that's somewhere between spoken and written. Parents, teachers and prescriptivists have long been concerned that this sort of electronic communication will lead to falling literacy standards, poor spelling and sloppy communication. But as the report in New Scientist tells us, this panic seems unjustified: young people seem to be much more standard in their IM language than might have been expected. They use fewer abbreviations than the stereotype of lazy teens might suggest: LOL, TTYL, KMT, OMG only making up 2.4% of the vocabulary studied.

Perhaps this shouldn't really come as a great surprise. As we've studied in the Language Change topic, many prescriptive views about falling standards have little basis in fact and have been floating around for centuries in one form or another. Have a look at Julie Blake's excellent Bilious Pigeon article in emagazine for a survey of such attitudes and how they're often founded in prejudice and snobbery.

So, as one of the Toronto University researchers puts it, IMing is "an expansive new linguistic renaissance" rather than a slide into illiteracy, short attention spans and moral depravity.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA1 (next year's AS spec) - Language and Mode

ENA5 - Language Change

Now the AS exams are done and dusted, let's have a look at the A2 units. You should still have a good few weeks to revise for ENA5 and ENA6, so there is plenty of time to plug holes and think about the wider issues for each paper and each topic. I've uploaded quite a few files - worksheets, powerpoints and audio - to a separate website (and if you're an SFX student it should all be on Moodle) so you can access various online.

With the first question on ENA5 texts from a different time, there's no real substitute for wide reading. But if you can't face wading your way through long texts, try this link* to shorter extracts.

One idea is to apply the same basic GASP (Genre, Audience, Subject, Purpose) framework to each extract and then use this as a starting point for more detailed study of meaning, attitudes and how the text reflects the period it was written in. This is more complicated at A2 because you might not be as familiar with some of the genres: diary entries were very popular; travel writing was common; sermons, treatises and homilies found their way into print. But as with any genre, there are certain language features you would expect to find, so start looking for things like 1st person pronouns, past and present tense, modal auxiliaries, ellipsis, sentence type variation and sentence functions.

Another complicating factor is that your grammatical labelling must be more in depth: at A2 you're expected to know about tense and aspect (present, past, progressive, perfective), clause and sentence types: simple, compound, complex sentences; subordinate, coordinate and relative clauses, as well as the more basic word classes from AS. You're also being asked to look at the text is an historical document and to place it somewhere along the language change continuum.

So to revise grammar, use either this link or this one.
To get a sense of how language has changed over time, try these language change time lines, but remember that the earliest period you will be assessed on is 1600 (Early Modern English).

*Edited 24.11.10 to fix broken link

Good luck!

Good luck to everyone taking ENA1 and ENA3 tomorrow morning.

Remember to have a good night's sleep, eat some breakfast to feed your brain and get to the exam hall by 8.45am at the latest!

See you there (grisly daughter permitting).

ENA1 child language acquisition revision

Child language acquisition might seem tricky but if you've got the basics of the linguistic framework - lexis, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology and pragmatics (you know it really) - and some idea about the stages and theories, you'll be laughing. Oh, and make sure you have plenty of examples of what children say.

Here's some stuff from the blog 2 years ago about preparing for this topic. The same things apply, but it's probably worth noting that there's been a more recent focus on data-based questions; these are ones that give you some child language data and ask you to comment on what it tells you about "the nature of child language acquisition". It's therefore a good idea to look carefully at the data and think about what it might reveal about issues like imitation, interaction, cognitive and . Check the feedback sheet here for some ideas about the data from a year or two back. Also, check the feedback sheets that I put together for 2 other questions here and here if you want some more detail.

There's also more feedback and some data examples in this powerpoint.

Top tips for ENA3 transcript analysis

Following on from yesterday's quick tips for ENA1 textual analysis, here are some for the transcript analysis on ENA3. I'm not an examiner for this unit, but have picked up advice from those who are, so hopefully this will help. If you want more detail, check Beth Kemp's excellent site.

Do:

• Read and annotate the transcript carefully at the start of the exam.
• Use highlighters to mark out different speakers' turns if this helps you see patterns more quickly.
• Label word classes, sentence functions and sentence types (e.g. The use of the noun phrase acting as a minor sentence "stupid men" by speaker x is a humorous utterance which serves to draw the speakers together.).
• Discuss and label the features and effects of interaction (e.g. The use of a tag question by speaker y when she says "we studied this text last week didn't we" helps to facilitate a response from the other students in the class.).
• Think about context all the time - much of what the speakers say will be linked to the type of talk they are engaged in and what they are doing.
• Use the bullet points on the question paper to help cover all the assessment objectives.
• Take an overview of the whole interaction and discuss patterns that you see across the transcript.

Don't:

• Discuss the transcript line by line; this is usually boring and unhelpful.
• Make "deficit judgements" about spoken language with comments such as "this is bad grammar", "speaker x uses broken English" or "no one really speaks like this".
• Try to apply theory to everything, especially if all you're doing is talking about Grice's (bloody) maxims; if you see accommodation, patterns of female/ male converstaional behaviour, face threatening acts, by all means mention them, but don't write too much.
• Forget the context; context is everything in spoken interaction.
• Assume every micropause or non-fluency feature is a significant hesitation; we all use micropauses and false starts.

ENA1 textual analysis top tips

Just a quick one this time to flag up a few reminders for the ENA1 textual analysis.

Do:

• Make sure you read the text properly and make notes as you read it.
• Think about GASP (Genre Audience Subject Purpose) and address these in an intro paragraph.
• Try to pursue at least one of these in your first paragraph proper e.g. look at the ways in which the purpose of the text is reflected in certain lexical and grammatical choices (imperatives in a recipe, modals in an advice column, 1st person pronouns and past tense verbs in an autobiography).
• Label word classes wherever possible, with as much detail as you can: a proper noun gets you more marks than a noun.
• Try to look at how the subject of the text is represented by the writer, be it an issue, a person, a film etc.
• Think about how the audience is positioned in relation to the subject matter.

Don't:

• Waste time talking about clauses and sentence types (simple, compound, complex): these are not assessed on this paper.
• Go on about graphology: graphology is for losers. If you spend more than 1 sentence talking about graphology draw a big L on your head, remove your clothes and leave the exam hall claiming mental feebleness.
• Talk about how alliteration "makes the text flow": texts don't flow; rivers do.
• Misspell common words: alot, grammer, sentance, writter. Get these write. I mean right.

If you have any more ideas or suggestions, please add them as comments!

Thieving and promiscuous

Thieving and promiscuous: a description of binge-drinking, ASBO-served British teenagers? No, it's a description of our beloved English language as discussed in this review of a new book called The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English. I'm reading it at the moment and it's an interesting survey of where our vocabulary comes from. Then again, I'm only 15 pages into it, so what do I know?

The review is very useful reading for ENA5 revision, as it gives lots of reminders about processes such as borrowing and coining. As the review of this book points out, English has always been an acquisitive language, trading words (mostly nouns) with foreign countries (often the French, it has to be said) and exporting our language and culture around the world in the process.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

Back to beige

No, beige it is. That's it, no more fiddling.

That's settled...

I'm going to stick to this template, so sorry for the psychedelic/ beige nightmare yesterday.

Language & Representation revision

For those of you working on ENA1 revision for next Friday's exams, here are some top tips for Language & Representation that I originally posted in 2006, which I've updated for this year. This essay question deals with the links between language and thought - whether we control language or it controls us - and the ways in which language is used to label different groups in society. First off, it's important to be clear that this topic has nothing to do with how men and women speak (that's on ENA3) so don't start writing about interruptions, overlaps etc. Secondly, you need to be clear that when the question talks about "social groups" (as it often does), it's referring to ethnic groups, the different genders, social classes, age groups, or even what people often term subcultural groups like grungers, goths and rap fans. You can also add to that list groups defined by their sexuality and people with disabilities. Of course, some of these labels themselves are problematic and you can talk about how they define individuals as parts of larger groups, removing their distinct identities and generalising about them, if you wish in your answer. Thirdly, you could (for revision purposes only of course - it's not a good idea to do this for fun) write down as many unpleasant words you can think of for each of those social groups and start to look at the common threads that emerge. We might find that words used to label gay people focus on their difference from the norm ("queer", "bent"), their supposed sexual practices ("batty man", "shirtlifter", "arse bandit") or throw up some words which you'll have to explore more etymologically (Where does "faggot" come from? What did "gay" used to mean? What's a "chi-chi man" when he's at home? Well, probably still a homosexual, but you get the picture...). For women, many of the words that emerge are used to trivialise females as sweet, edible, consumable items, usually a bit decorative, but certainly not there to be taken seriously ("tart", "crumpet", "sweetie", "cupcake"), or again focus on a particular body part to define a woman solely by her appearance/sexual function to men ("the club was heaving with fanny", "oi, big jugs!", "gash"). Ethnicity and the words used to label different ethnic groups allow us to explore the etymology of terms like the n-word and p-word, "pikey", "cracker", "coon", "half-caste", "taffy" and "gyppo". A quick look at the OED online or online etymology should help you track how these words have originated in racist attitudes (or not, as the case may be) and developed over time. And remember, white people are an ethnic group too! Have you ever met a black chav?! Actually, Croydon readers need not answer that rhetorical question... But of course, words like "black" and "white" can be explored in themselves for their negative and positive connotations, the words they tend to collocate with, and indeed the word "chav" is interesting as it is believed to has its roots in Gypsy slang for "child" or "lad" but has been used against Gypsies (and now any working class white person who dares to sport Burberry, Reebok Classics or sovereign rings). The next step is to look at some of the linguistic concepts and terms that can be used to explain these words and the patterns we notice. This sheet on the SFX Resource site should help. You could also look at research/texts by linguists such as Dale Spender (Man Made Language), Deborah Cameron (Verbal Hygiene), Muriel Schultz and Mary M Talbot whose work on gender is pretty interesting. There have been loads of blog posts about racist language so you could do a search on here using keywords and find material to bolster your knowledge. In terms of theory, it's important to understand linguistic reflectionism, determinism and wider concepts such as relativism and universalism, so check the article I did for December 2005's E Magazine which should help you. If it's not on the E Magazine site (log in details are in the LRC), it's certainly in the periodicals section of the LRC. Alternatively, you could use Wikipedia and look up "Sapir Whorf" and find out where my (ahem) "inspiration" from. While you're at it, you could search for "Political Correctness" as key words and have a look at why there has been a move to change language. The trickiest part is linking this together, but good answers can take many forms. You could explore the links between offensive words and the attitudes that create them - or even the language that shapes these attitudes - or you could take a range of examples and look at why they've changed over time and what this tells us about the society we live in. There are plenty of good, model answers we can give you too. Have a quick look at this planning sheet and this one too if you're after a more detailed model for your writing. And for more on arguments about Political Correctness, try this link. I've probably missed lots of things out here, but you can fill in the gaps...

ENA6 Question 2a - editorials and letters

Here are two texts that might help you revise for the 2a) part of this paper. The first text is an editorial from The Guardian which should give you some idea about how to put together a piece of writing like this. Note the lack of first person pronouns (no I or we) and the emphasis on strong opinion expressed through modal auxiliaries, in the last paragraph particularly. If you’re asked to write an editorial, remember that you’re expressing the newspaper’s own view on the issue and that while you should look at both sides of the debate (arguments about male female talk, political correctness going too far, language change being a bad thing etc.) you should always come down one side of the debate more than the other (e.g. “texting can be a useful tool, but if it is allowed to spread into the written language of this country’s young people, standards will fall…” or something like that).

The second text is the nearest equivalent to a letter to the editor that I could find. On the exam spec a letter is mentioned as a possible form for this question, but most letters in broadsheet newspapers are pretty brief. This personal response is structured a little like a letter. It responds to a previous article (so you might be responding to one of the texts in the exam paper); it refers back to the original article by paraphrasing a few points and quoting briefly from it; it then constructs an argument against the original article, using personal observations and statistics. This is exactly the sort of structure you could use if you were set a question like this.

ENA6 - Investigating Male & Female Speech Styles

Thanks for all the responses, questions and follow-up discussion for last week's snappily titled "ENA6 question 1b challenge". Ufuoma, Lisa and Adesola win the Haribo.

This week, the question is about gender and conversation styles: how would you go about investigating similarities and/or differences in the ways men and women use language to interact?

Remember to follow the 5 point plan as laid out below:

• AIM/ANGLE
• METHOD of DATA COLLECTION
• FRAMEWORK for ANALYSING YOUR DATA
• CONSIDERATION of EXTRA LINGUISTIC VARIABLES/ VALIDITY/ ETHICS
• WHAT YOU EXPECT to FIND

On your marks...get set...Haribooooooooooooooooo

ENA6 - Investigating Attitudes to Offensive Language

OK, so no takers for the last one on Language Change, so how about this one?

How would you go about investigating people's attitudes to offensive language?

I'm after a 5 point answer using this structure:

• AIM/ANGLE
• METHOD of DATA COLLECTION
• FRAMEWORK for ANALYSING YOUR DATA
• CONSIDERATION of EXTRA LINGUISTIC VARIABLES/ VALIDITY/ ETHICS
• WHAT YOU EXPECT to FIND

...and it's completely up to you what you define as "offensive language"; in fact, that's part of what might make your answer a good one. The usual bag of Haribo goes to the best answer.

Filling column inches

No, not another spam email about "manhood enhancement", but a quick piece about fillers. You know, like...err fillers yeah? Ha ha, can you see what I did there? Sorry...

Anyway, The Daily Telegraph (which is normally really good on language stories) has this terrible non-story about how English language speakers use loads of fillers and how this reflects a lack of care for our language. According to Phillip Hodson, speech expert and Fellow for the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (who may have been selectively quoted, it has to be said):

It seems to me that the Anglo Saxon countries - Britain and America - are the worst for using these filler words to pad out our conversations. I think it is because unlike other countries like France we do not protect our language. There is little teaching of best practice. Some say that fillers are a sign of intellect, used to consider what to say next. However, research shows that if your speech is full of padding, you’re harder to understand, which makes listeners tend to tune out.

Erm, not exactly true though is it? Fillers are just normal parts of our spoken language; we use them as a form of punctuation for the most part, and it's not really true that we associate fillers with padding and a lack of clarity. In fact, this piece of research suggests that fillers, hedges and indirect constructions actually make us more convincing in some situations, more human and likeable even.

Useful for:
ENA3 - Interacting Through Language

Sexist grammar?

A piece of psychological research covered on the BPS Research Digest takes a look at gender in grammar. In some languages (French and German for example) nouns possess gender: not gender in the sense of socially constructed sexual identities, but gender as a grammatical concept, in which certain nouns are classed as masculine (le chapeau = the hat) or feminine (la plage = the beach). But gender in a more conventional sense also applies to French nouns, so you get le chien for a male dog and la chienne for a female dog, spectateur for a male spectator and spectatrice for a female spectator. OK so far?

But when you get a mixed group and need to use a plural pronoun, the tradition in both French and German has been to use the male pronoun ils to refer to the group, regardless of the gender of the participants. But as ils is a masculine pronoun, does it actually convey a gender neutral meaning?

The equivalent in English is the false generic pronoun he, which many people have historically used to refer to both men and women, as in the rather odd statement "Like other mammals, mankind breastfeeds his young". But as we have looked at in ENA1 Language & Representation, there's a problem with these generic pronouns (and nouns like mankind) because they don't really bring to mind gender neutral identities and often exclude women.

So anyway, back to the research. The result appears to have been that when French or German listeners hear a male plural pronoun they tend to assume that it refers to males and take longer to process the words if they're followed by clearly feminine nouns. More detail here. But how is this relevant to ENA1? Well, it's a bit of a long shot, but it could be argued that this sort of research helps support the linguistic relativist or linguistic determinist perspectives, that language can control or shape our perceptions. It could also support the Dale Spender Man Made Language position that sexist attitudes have become encoded in the language we speak, reflecting the dominant positions of males in the history of society and language control.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

What is genital flip flop?

You may well ask. Is it when you drink one too many pints of Stella and can't perform up to the usual standard? Or could it be some kind of Max Mosley-esque nazi spanking ritual involving beachwear? Actually it's a form of semantic change in which a word associated with "naughty body parts" (ie the genitals) changes meaning in different English-speaking cultures so that no one's really sure what the word means anymore. A good example is the word fanny which means one thing in American English and quite another in British English. I mean who, in the UK, would say "I tripped and fell on my fanny"? Exactly...

My usual obsession with rude things apart, why cover this on the blog? Well, it's all about euphemisms isn't it? We often avoid saying rude (or otherwise taboo words) by using euphemisms: sugar, oh my days, oh gord, little girls' room, a number two, Mr. Winkie will see you now, partying hard, jesus h price...and many more.

This week's edition of Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth programme on Radio 4 has a really interesting interview with Australian linguist Kate Burridge on the ways in which euphemisms develop and change over time. You can listen again to the whole programme here or hear just the Kate Burridge clip from here.

For those of you revising ENA6 and thinking about scripting radio shows, it's a good example again of how these things work, plus the content is suited to either ENA6 topics on Language Change or Language & Representation.

It's a good listen too for some silly euphemisms, and a prize of the usual Haribo goes to the first person to add the real meanings of these 3 euphemisms discussed on the show:

1. "A patient who failed to fulfil his living potential"
2. "Chronologically gifted"
3. "To go to bed"

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates

ENA6 - Investigating Language Change

On the ENA6 A2 paper you're expected to answer a 5 mark question on your methodology for investigating a language issue. To help you revise and prepare for this, I'm going to set a question a week up, on a different topic each week, until the exam itself, asking you to explain how you'd investigate each topic.

The format I'd like you to follow in your answer is outlined here, so you need to give a 5 point answer which outlines your:

• AIM/ANGLE
• METHOD of DATA COLLECTION
• FRAMEWORK for ANALYSING YOUR DATA
• CONSIDERATION of EXTRA LINGUISTIC VARIABLES/ VALIDITY/ ETHICS
• WHAT YOU EXPECT to FIND

A packet of Haribo goes to the best answer each week.

So, to kick start it, this week's question is: How would you go about investigating people's attitudes to language change?

Useful for:
ENA6 - Language Debates

A brum deal

Speaking in a Birmingham accent gives a worse impression than saying nothing at all.

So say researchers at Bath Spa University who have been investigating stereotypes associated with accents. The BBC news website reveals more here.

The Daily Telegraph has a longer feature on the same story, adding that "People associate the Birmingham accent with criminal activity and that criminal activity is associated in people's mind with low intellect". But the accent that comes out on top is that of Yorkshire whose speakers are perceived to be wise and intelligent.

The Telegraph also has a feature here where you can contribute your views about accents and read what others have said.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties
ENA6 - Language Debates

Rudeness, racism and religion

Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth programme on Radio 4 is a good source of news and debates about language, and the new series kicks off with a look at bad language: blasphemy, racial abuse, naughty words and all that stuff.

You can listen again by clicking on the relevant box, and I would suggest that you have a good listen to it as you're likely to face a radio script either in your mock ENA6 paper or the real thing in June.

Useful for:
ENA6 - Language Debates

Potty mouths

"I know what the worst swear word is," said one of my boys the other night as I put him and his brother to bed.
"Oh yeah," I replied, expecting it to be something like bumhead or weeface, the recent phrases of choice to describe me when they don't get their way.
"It's f*cking," he replied with a smile.
"Yes, it's f*cking and you always say it," added his brother just to make sure.

Now, if this sounds exactly like the incident described in this link to the ways in which imitation works in children's language development, then that's probably because it happens to a lot of us. But as the article goes on to say, imitation is only part of the story. Kids will pick up swear words but it's the social interaction with parents and peer group that determines how swearing is used and whether or not children understand the impact of what they're saying.

As the article puts it, quoting psychologist Paul Bloom:

Another part of growing up is knowing how to speak with adults and in formal situations. "So we'd like our children to grow up knowing when it's appropriate to use these words," Bloom says.

As most parents come to recognize, teaching good judgement is not a one-time event; it's a process.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition

A nation ov illiterats and twitz

Texting is blamed for many of society's ills - repetitive strain injury to the thumb, lamppost accidents, car crashes - but its impact on the nation's literacy skills is always a hot topic.

The Daily Mail and The Guardian have picked up on a press release from an online parenting site, Bounty, who claim that parents are so crazed by text speak that they can't even spell their kids' names properly and are resorting to txt spk. So we're getting names like Flicity, Ana, Samiul, Conna, Lora and Cam'ron.

So, are these the result of grim educational standards brought about by text language, attempts to make otherwise dull kids' names sound so very special, or just the result of deranged parents being a bit dumb? The Guardian likes to think it's smarter than The Daily Mail - and of course, it is - so its writer Tim Dowling suggests that Cam'ron is actually named after a rapper, while Samiul is a fairly common Pakistani name. The Daily Mail, obsessed as it is with all things terrible in this society - teenagers who chew gum, crazy environmentalists who want to save the planet, nasty immigrants - sees the dark side: we're all doomed and its txspk wot dun it.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates

The spread of Scouse

The history and future of the Liverpool accent aka Scouse is discussed in two different articles linked to research being carried out by linguist Andrew Hamer. The BBC news website looks at the background to the accent, while today's Telegraph looks in more detail at its spread.

The Telegraph also features a leader article (editorial) which stops just short of patting the scousers on the head, rubbing their little chins and calling them "plucky little northern types", but does describe theirs as a "cute" accent. It's worth a read if you're thinking about the kinds of attitudes that are around to regional varieties of English, while the news story is a good read if you're looking at dialect levelling and accent change.

And don't forget that BBC Voices and the British Library Sounds Familiar sites have excellent material - including audio files - on all sorts of varieties of English.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Variation & Change
ENGA3 (new spec) - Language Explorations

Panglish and the future of English

The future of English is taking shape right now, in the mouths of billions of people who grew up speaking something else.

So ends an article about the changing English language in this week's New Scientist magazine. According to the article (which you can access if you use your college's Athens account log-in/ New Scientist subscription details), the English language is evolving at a much faster rate than ever before. The causes of this change remain broadly similar to those we always look at when we study this unit - technology, immigration, social change, the influence of the media etc. - but another major factor is the growth of English as a world language. The real drivers of change are not us - native speakers - but English speakers in China, Singapore and south America.

Linguist Suzette Haden Elgin sees two possible outcomes: "Panglish - a single English that would have dialects but would display at least a rough consensus about its grammar - or scores of wildly varying Englishes all around the globe, many or most of them heading toward mutual unintelligibility."

The article itself looks in detail at the ways in which English has developed to its current state, so it's excellent reading for anyone revising ENA5, but it also takes a longer term view about where English is going and what kinds of phonological, grammatical and semantic changes are occurring and where they might lead us.

The Daily Telegraph features a very brief article on the New Scientist piece here as well as The (spit) Daily Mail here.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA3 (new spec) - Language Explorations

This is why we need Deborah Cameron

As many of you are aware, Deborah Cameron's Myth of Mars and Venus is recommended reading for students taking ENA3. I reckon that her critique of the industry that has been built up around male and female speech differences is detailed, meticulously argued and convincing. In the words of Shakespeare "dis book is da shizzle". You can find extracts here and here and make up your own mind.

So, have a look at this dubious article from the BBC news website about how differences between male & female brains, male & female speech styles and male & female work patterns mean that women should be business managers. A large pack of Haribo goes to the most incisive analysis of this drivel!

Useful for:
ENA3 - Male/ female conversation

Lies, lies, lies!!!

Her husband famously claimed "I did not have sexual relations with that woman", "that woman" being Monica Lewinsky, not the Mrs...obviously. Now Hillary Clinton's in the frame for telling porkies.

But it's OK. They weren't lies; she was just guilty of misspeaking. Have a look here for more about this great political euphemism and the history of the word.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

Abusive acronyms

Acronyms are a great example of how language changes to reflect new social trends, or how government bodies and market researchers dream up new, crazy categories to place us in. So, TWUNCERS is new term for "two or more walkers using non-essential cars" as featured here in today's Telegraph.

It's not quite a full acronym, more an acronym with a suffix (the -er morpheme added to derive an easily usable noun) a bit like yuppie and buppy from the 1980s (young upwardly-mobile person + ie and black upwardly-mobile person + y respectively).

The article gives some silly examples of made up acronyms, such as banana and gravitas, so have a look if you want to see language being used inventively.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

The changing face of "gay"

Here's an interesting article about playground and classroom insults on the BBC magazine site, tracing the nature of abuse and the ways in which gay has become the insult of choice for teenagers and younger kids. Linguists including Tony Thorne - an expert on slang usage - and Clive Upton explore the ways in which the word has changed meaning over time and how it's used today.

The word has had many meanings over the centuries, often sexual, says Clive Upton, professor of Modern English Language at Leeds University.

"In the early 19th Century it was used to refer to women who lived off immoral earnings," he says. Around the 1970s it was claimed by the homosexual community as a descriptive term for their sexual orientation, now its most popular meaning. By the 1980s it was finding its way into schools as a playground insult.

"Every generation grows up with a whole lexicon of homosexual insults, in my day it was 'poofter' or 'bender'," says slang lexicographer Tony Thorne. "They were used much more because they were considered more offensive than 'gay', which is more neutral.

So, is gay used homophobically or is it now a generally pejorative term with no real link to sexuality? Can an essay be gay? Or is just people who can be gay?

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates

Revision tips

Quite a few people have asked me about what to revise for the different exam units, so here are some links to advice on what to do for each one.

Lots of tips for ENA1, 3, 5 and 6
ENA5 and ENA6 advice
Top tips for all papers
Language Change timelines for ENA5

If you have any questions, please add a comment.

Language changes at the OED

The Oxford English Dictionary is a great book and its regular revisions have provided fascinating snapshots of how language has changed over the last few generations. But now, according to John Simpson at the OED, the ways in which they publish their revisions are being changed to pay particular attention to "important English words whose meanings or application have developed most over the past century".

Which means that in the latest set of revisions we get heaven and hell, computer, gay and that old favourite, f**k. The revisions include some interesting points about the words' etymologies (their origins and development over time) and give us a sense of how language changes to reflect a changing world.

The link to this update came from the excellent World Wide Words website, which itself has a very good piece on the origins of the verb to denigrate - literally to blacken - which has come in for some stick recently over its perceived racist connotations. Check here to find out more.

And this has also been covered here in The Guardian 24th March 2008.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA1 - Language & Representation

To the barricades!

The French have long complained about the encroachment of English words into their language, and have had a running battle with terms like le weekend and le parking. Now they're using technology to fight the spread of English. Oh they're so cunning, these Johnny Foreigners.

According to an article in The Daily Telegraph, also covered here in The Mirror, a new French-friendly spell-checker has been devised to replace English words such as email and carjack with their proper French equivalents: courriel and piraterie routiere respectively. Even last year's big word, subprime (the apparent cause of our current world credit crunch and *apparently* the reason why some scrote at Abbey National won't let us get some extra money to double glaze our Dickensian windows) has a French equivalent, the catchy prix hypotecairé à risque. Mmmm, that'll catch on... like the colds my unfortunate offspring now have thanks to the *sniff* windows.

But while the French alternatives may seem a bit clunky and awkward, many French people see them as a necessary evil in the long war to defend their language, culture and identity from the spreading, globalising power of English, as the article reports:

"I think that the defence of a language is the sum of a multitude of small battles, and it's worth the fight", culture minister Christine Albanel told the Telegraph. Even if only two out of ten words stick, the language has moved and breathed and we have marked our territory", she said at a ceremony to launch the "week of French language". Each French ministry has its own commission of terminology and neologisms, whose job is to track down English terms and offer French alternatives. They send their proposals to the Académie Française, a council of guardians of the French language, who debate the new terms and rubber stamp them. Once published in the statutes book, French civil servants are obliged to use them. About 300 such official French terms appear each year.

But what of the significance of this to English Language students? After all, this is English Language at SFX, not Francais Parole à Sexytime (or whatever). Jonathan Swift tried to introduce an English Academy centuries ago, in an attempt to regulate the English language. As you know, it didn't happen, and the debates about our changing language have raged ever since. But would an Academy, along the lines of the French system, have any real impact on our language? Would it be a good idea for a government body to regulate our language, deciding on what's acceptable usage and which new words would be invented?

I don't think so. So much of our language change is actually very democratic: it's a bottom-up spread rather than a top-down imposition of government diktats. Just take a look at how slang evolves: the language of the streets gets picked up by older and more middle class users and then filters through the media into general usage.

But this article also flags up another issue around language change, that of technology and language. Many of us have as our default spell-checker US English - it looks like The Telegraph's sub-editor has it too, given their use of program (the American spelling) as opposed to programme (the English spelling) - and this is having some kind of impact on the way our language is evolving, as this link explains.

And it's not only American spellings - humor, color, recognize - but American lexis. I become a raging prescriptivist when I hear young people talking about the police as the Feds. The Feds?! We don't have a Federal Bureau of Investigation in this country dammit. We have cops. We have rozzers. We have the old bill.Get with the program already, or something...

But is American English really a threat to English as much as English is seen as a threat to French? We've been using American terms for a much longer time than many of us realise as this 1995 article by Henry Porter points out (and this worksheet goes with it if you're looking for a way to use it in a lesson or for revision) and our language has expanded to accommodate it. We may have our own personal prejudices about words that sound American, but that's probably a generational thing. In a sense, because we have no Academy to tell us what is right or wrong, we all have the choice for ourselves, to express ourselves in ways that we want and with whatever mixture of English English, American English or even Franglais (ooh la la) that we want.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates

Feminazis and language control

A recent post on Language Log blog discusses a mad anti-PC rant from a respected Yale University computer scientist. Among David Gelernter's concerns are the use of he/she or they to replace he, the replacement of fireman with firefighter and person or human to replace man.

Of course, the logic behind such gender-neutral alternatives should be fairly clear to most AS and A2 Language students. Linguists have for a long time argued that he is a "false generic": in other words it's believed by some to really mean both genders, but in reality is rarely interpreted as such. Man or mankind are the same: linguists have expressed concern that they exclude women or render them invisible.

Gelernter's arguments are nothing new. They're part of an anti-Political Correctness backlash which casts feminists as deranged, dungaree-clad thought fascists who are trying to destroy the traditions of our language with their crazy (and probably hairy-legged) new language. But as the erudite* linguists of Language Log point out, so many of these arguments about the language being changed are actually very dubious. There has been a long tradition of using the pronoun they to avoid assigning gender, and he has always been contested.

So for ENA6 students thinking about Language Debates for this June's paper, why not have a look at both Gelernter's rant and Language Log's great response, and then think about other arguments about Language and Representation that often crop up. You could always try searching this blog with key terms like Political Correctness, Sexism, Racism and even ENA6 for some links to good articles about these issues.

Go on, you know it makes sense...

Useful for:
ENA6 - Language Debates

*look it up for a bit of A2 vocabulary stretching, ENA6 students!

Cracking the drug slang

A quick link to an article which mentions drug slang helps to illustrate the different uses and purposes of slang, this time as a code to exclude outsiders and hide criminal, drug-related activity. Perhaps the rapid turnover of new words for drugs - tea, cabbage, burger - as quoted in this article, reflects the nature of language change and how the we create, discard and recycle words to keep up with society's changing needs.

The end of English?

A lecture by David Crystal (who shouldn't really need any introduction to English Language students, but is a top language expert if you haven't been paying attention) to mark the start of Project English (see here) has suggested that English is fragmenting into different global dialects. He argues that with English being spoken by so many different nationalities around the world and the spread of English as a world language, that Indian and Chinese varieties of English may well start to become the global "standard".

We've had different varieties of English since the time the language started to evolve from different versions of Angle, Saxon and Jute way back in the 5th Century, and American English has long been established as a variety of English with international power and prestige, but the sheer power of numbers is what Crystal thinks will drive the language change of the next part of this century.

"In language, numbers count. There are more people speaking English in India than in the rest of the native English-speaking world. Even now, if you ring a call centre, often it's an Indian voice you hear at the end of the phone. As the Indian economy grows, so might the influence of Indian English. There, people tend to use the present continuous where we would use the present simple. For example, where we would say: "I think, I feel, I see" a speaker of Indian English might say: "I am thinking, I am feeling, I am seeing". This way of speaking could easily become sexy and part of global Standard English."

While the focus of our A2 Language Change unit is strictly on English as spoken in the British Isles, the processes of change that are at work globally could well be related to how our language is shaped back here in Britain. And if you;'re a teacher reading this and planning ahead, next years' s new AQA A spec for students starting AS in 2008-9 has a focus on global English.

The comments posted by Daily Telegraph readers, at the end of the article, make for a really interesting read: a mixture of reactionary prescriptivism ("Nigerian English is just nasty" - possibly written by a bitter Ghanaian flushed with patriotic pride on their country's independence day) and expert inside views on global dialects like Singlish and Hinglish. Worth a read.

New blends

Ever on the look out for new words, we bring you:

kindie = kid+indie

This is "Kindie" -- a combination of kids' and "indie" or independent music and a genre which is taking hold of British pre-schoolers and bidding to oust the grinding of "The Wheels on the Bus" from the family car CD player. Reuters

manorexia = man+anorexia

Medical researchers are discovering that anorexia is not limited to women and that the idea of starving yourself in order to achieve the perfect body is crossing gender lines. ABC news

Useful for:
ENA5 - Contemporary Language Change

Words for Women

Let's get the caveat out of the way from the off. The five women murdered in Ipswich were tragic, lost souls who met a grisly end. I sincerely hope whoever killed them is caught, charged and convicted.

No one with a shred of humanity would wish upon them their ghastly lives and horrible deaths. But Mother Teresa, they weren't. And I know this might sound frightfully callous in the current hysterical, emotional climate, but we're not all guilty. We do not share in the responsibility for either their grubby little existences or their murders. Society isn't to blame.

It might not be fashionable, or even acceptable in some quarters, to say so, but in their chosen field of "work", death by strangulation is an occupational hazard. That doesn't make it justifiable homicide, but in the scheme of things the deaths of these five women is no great loss.

These were the words of Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail columnist and right-wing skuzzball, in a December 2006 piece about the murders of 6 women in Ipswich.

Last week, Steve Wright was convicted of the women's murders and, given that he was only one of three high profile murderers of women to get convicted in the last few days, it may seem disrespectful or frivolous to start talking about the language used to discuss these matters amid such horrific circumstances. But language is the means through which we describe and define our world, and if we can't talk about language in relation to these kinds of events, I think we're missing an opportunity to highlight the importance of language in shaping our attitudes and responses.

A response to Littlejohn's article came in the form of this piece on a feminist blog, while the stand up comedian Stewart Lee has performed a sketch in his most recent show 41st Best Stand Up which attacks Littlejohn's attitudes to these women and the language used to label them. Elsewhere, The Guardian's Joan Smith looks with a little more optimism at what she sees as changing public attitudes to "women who work in the sex industry", comparing the media coverage of the Ipswich murders favourably with that given to the victims of the notorious Yorkshire Ripper in the 1970s.

To begin with, it seemed as though nothing had changed since the 70s when Sutcliffe's murders unleashed a torrent of insensitive headlines about the women he preyed on in the red light districts of Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield and Manchester. The Sun's "Fears for vice girls" on November 16 2006 was followed the next day by the same paper's "Fears for hookers", while the Times joined in on December 5 with "Ripper murder strikes fear into vice girls".

But public attitudes to women in the sex industry have changed, as the press quickly discovered. In Ipswich and elsewhere, people were outraged by TV and radio bulletins that baldly announced five "prostitutes" had been murdered in Suffolk. Many people are uncomfortable when the word is used in headlines as though it's no different from "teacher" or "dentist"; the dead women were daughters, mothers and girlfriends but their whole lives were being defined by something they had embarked on out of absolute desperation. "As soon as it became a national story, it became apparent that the language used to describe the women was inappropriate," says a journalist who went to Ipswich when the third body was found. "Everybody knew one of the victims or had been to school with one of them."

So, what of the language choices made by these different commentators? What connotations spring to mind with terms such as prostitute, vice girl, hooker, or even Littlejohn's own touching tribute disgusting, drug-addled street whores? And what of women who work in the sex industry, or women who worked as prostitutes? Do these alternatives - clunky and awkward as they may sound - offer a shred of humanity for us to hang an otherwise unpleasant label on?

Useful for:

ENA1 - Language & Representation

Great news for current Year 8 students!

Yes, it's amazing news for current Year 8 students*...because in 2012 you'll be doing your AS Levels (if they're still called that and not Ronald McDonald's Vocational Awards in Basic Wageslavery) and if you choose English Language (which you should, because it's obviously the best) you might even get a trip out of it. Woo hoo!

For so long English Literature students have been able to boast of school/college trips to dubious theatre productions, Media Students of trips to see gritty urban films (like Notting Hill and Love, Actually), and Film Studies students of trips to Lithuanian Grimcore "art" films, but English Language students have had nothing.

Which is a very long-winded way of introducing Project English, a museum dedicated to the history and development of the English Language which opens in 2012 in Winchester, as explained in this piece in today's Times. The article gives a very potted summary of the history of the language (very potted - 6 bullet points!) but the websites of Winchester University and a powerpoint presentation of the plans for the project might give you some more insight (but don't worry too much about the several slides given over to costings and locations).

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

*living in the south of England and studying AS/A2 English Language in 2012

Words of 2007

Michael Quinion's World Wide Words site is a great resource for any English Language student or teacher, and it has a very handy feature on last year's polls of new words here. There's also a link from that page to definitions of some of last year's most innovative words. So, if you want to find out more about pod slurping, subprime and carbon offsetting have a look.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Contemporary Language Change

The appliance of science

How and why do languages change and what forces act upon languages to standardise them? These were some of the questions that linguists and physicists (weird, I know, but we'll get to them later) set out to answer in a study of the New Zealand dialect and its origins.

But for those of you who are not sure what a New Zealand accent sounds like, have a look at this clip from the rather brilliant Flight of the Conchords in which Bret and Jemaine (the Conchords) challenge a racist fruit and veg seller...

According to a report in The Daily Telegraph and a feature on the Radio 4 Today programme (click here to listen to the relevant part) the New Zealand accent took about 50 years to standardise itself from its initial mix of various English, Scottish and Irish accents, a staggeringly rapid process.

This is where the physicists came in. Using the same mathematical modelling that is applied to work out the constituent parts of a gas, the physicists studied the language, poring over a wealth of recorded data including interviews with early settlers. In doing so they realised that the speed of change was too quick to be explained by the previously accepted theory: that emigrants from broadly similar social classes had gradually mingled together and that the changes had slowly worked their way through the language.

What they started to think was that perhaps a particular group of people - perhaps from a certain region or certain social class - had influenced the other speakers. This could be an example of prestige in action: the linguistic effect of one group on another through the influence of factors such as social class or some other form of cultural capital. In other words, one group whose speech style might have been perceived as "better" or whose status was aspired to more by others, might have had a bigger influence on the path of the new accent than other varieties.

So, why care? After all, New Zealand is a long way away and you only have to study British English for this A Level. Well, language is interesting anyway wherever it occurs, but also the same processes which affect the development of a new Zealand accent affect the language we speak every day. You just have to have a look at the history of RP (Received Pronunciation) or the more recent research into MEYD (Multi-ethnic Youth Dialect) to realise that one social group can have a disproportionate impact on wider language change, whether it's the upper classes or immigrants from the Caribbean.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA5 - Language Varieties

Word nerds, infomaniacs and slacktivists

Apologies for such a long delay in getting new stuff up on the blog - loads of January exam marking and extra work to do - but thanks to ex-SFXian Charissa for keeping things ticking over. We'll be keeping the posts as regular as an old lady on prune juice from now on. So, from turds to nerds...

There's nothing wrong with being a nerd. I, for one, am proud to be a word nerd. It's the best type of nerd, perhaps followed by speech geeks and lexicographin' boffins. You get the general idea.

Anyway, here is a great article from New Scientist magazine (in pdf format) all about how word nerds are tracking new words using the power of modern technology - not betamax video recorders and Action Man walkie talkies, but the internet and stuff. It gives a fascinating insight into how new words are tracked and recorded in the digital age and seems to prove beyond any doubt that the pace of language change has picked up with the growth of the internet.

The article features a guest appearance from The Simpsons' fandiddlytastic religious loon, Ned Flanders, whose love of indiddlyfixes has led to a linguistic reappraisal of how they're formed. Fascinating stuff.

Elsewhere, this article from The Times takes a look at 21st century neologisms (that's new words and phrases to you and me). These examples are linked to what advertising execs and lifestyle commentators call "social trends": new labels for different groups of consumers in society. We covered a similar article 2 years ago here when we looked at Ladults and HEIDIs. While many of the groups described only exist in an ad-man's wet dream, the word formation processes are interesting to look at. Take these for example - infomania, preheritance and slacktivism - and have a think about how they've been formed.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Contemporary Language Change

'Londonstani'

Hey guys,

Apologies if you are already aware of this novel and it's potential for the Language student, I've only just 'discovered' it, and have literally just come back from a seminar where the author himself (Gautam Malkani) has been talking about the book. Even if you are aware of this novel, perhaps my ramblings will be useful anyway, if not to shed some light on what Gautam must have been thinking to write this work.

To give some background, 'Londonstani' is a novel about a group of Asian middle class boys who are part of the nineties 'desi' culture [I think!] They are a sort of a gang who are trying to please their parents at home whist maintaining their tough-boy attitude to their peers.

[In this way the novel is comparable to the novels of black writers Alex Wheattle and Courttia Newland-'East of Acre Lane'-see Biscuit struggling to tide things over at home- and 'The Scholar' -see Cory trying to protect Sonia from knowing what's going on with Sean-]

Amongst all this, the teenagers find their own take on religious racism and ethnic issues that prove interesting, but for Gautam Malkani the book has an essentially class focus. The plot is an especially recommended one on account of the controversial twist it has at the end [one I wish I could tell you but would completely spoil the book if you read it!] The rest is, at it's simplest, an Asian's take on growing up in Hounslow and what it means to be a man in light of your culture, religion and race.

Before I continue, it has to be said that this is no Asian ghetto story, and the author admits and prides the novel on that, he focuses on the superficial persona of thug/gangster and how it aids and hinders middle class youth at the time he is writing about (90s.) In this way, it is somewhat different to those texts by black writers I mentioned before- NOT that I'm trying to make out that Brickie or West London are ghettos! I hope you understand what I mean and choose to move on..

Background roughly completed, to us linguists (or linguistic enthusiast in my case,) it is important A- how this text came about and B- that the characters talk in a mixture of slang.

The language used by the characters contains a high percentage of swearing, some urban London/street lexis, some Pakistani and other Asian words from different regions that I now can't remember and haven't seemed to have documented in my notes.. never mind. I thought this interesting in comparison to the MEYD studies and the latest work by Ben Rampton on the 'new' language of Asian teens today:

• Rampton, Ben, Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School, (Cambridge, 2006) )[this book is EXCELLENT but don't read it all in one go.]

And also his 'Crossing' book where it goes into more detail:

• Rampton, Ben, Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents, (London and New York, 1995 [you can find this in SFX library]

I obviously haven't studied into this area but for those of you interested in this type of speech I think 'Londonstani' has great potential here that could enhance and complicate Language A Level work.
More generally (in relation to linguistics), the fact that this book resulted from socially scientific research I think is interesting, as we can compare the way he attained his data to the way in which samples are taken for linguistic studies and the various methodologies used. [The differences noted by comparing his methodology to yours for example, may help you in tailoring to the concerns of your argument/research.] The author explained that the criteria he had to follow in order to make his data usable is distinctly different to that of linguistics, but I couldn't help but draw parallel.
To again take a step contextually outward, Gautam Malkani's novel came from an interest he pursued whilst at university in Cambridge [boo..] where he studied SPS (Social and Political Sciences) [again, boo..] and wrote a dissertation in his final year about the use of the term 'coconut' and the gender issues surrounding teenagers (especially 16-17 yr old Asian males.) He was selective in his sample groups, making sure that he has a mix of ethnicities [but at the same time the contacts he named on interrogation suggest to me that he had more Asian participants than others], and, like a linguist, went into 6th form common rooms with tape-recorders to talk to people. He also separated males and females somehow, but admits that his most useful data was gained on receiving information from the mixed groups.
Some of the research he came across on his way seems of particularly useful for those of you interested in the re appropriation of the N-word, as he compares this to the attempted re appropriation of the P-word. Debate ensued about this between Commonwealth lecturer Priya' Gopal (Cambridge) and the author on this, with the latter stating enthusiastically that the P-word could never have the same effect as the N-word with the black community because: 'there are too many divisions in the Asian community' for this to occur, and the author arguing that the low-nil political consciousness of youth culture resulted in this failure to ameliorate the word, as well as his belief that fears of emasculation and not-being-man-enough on-the-streets was and is the more pressing issue underlying the issue. I thought this was worth noting. There is a quote I'd love to use to exemplify this issue in the book but since I feel bad about copyright issues I'll let you try and find it amongst the extract given in the following link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5590750
The extract really speaks for itself and so I'll refrain from my rambling on and end here. I hope the points raised by my seminar that I found useful will also prove useful for you, or at least were as interesting to you as they were for me.
P.S, for those of you who don't mind admitting that at the heart of things superficial things do matter, the author, is, quite hot.

New words Australian style

According to the BBC news website, the Australian Macquarie Dictionary is running an online vote to decide Australia's word of the year for 2007. As with many of these articles about new words, there's a novelty element to the coverage, with lots of silly words that are hardly ever used making headlines but as always it gives us material to look at for ENA5 and Language Change. And this time there's a little Haribo competition for you, to encourage you to be interactive.

So, some of the words up for nomination are listed below and I'd like you to describe the word formation process/processes (eg blending, affixation, semantic shift, borrowing etc.) at work with each word and post them as comments below. The person with the most correct answers receives a large bag of Haribo.

1. Floordrobe
2. Tanorexia
3. Griefer
4. Kippers
5. Man Flu
6. Baile funk
7. Exergaming
8. Cyberathlete

Useful for:
ENA5 - Contemporary Language Change

The A to Y of teen slang (continued)

There's more on the teen slang dictionary of 13 year old Lucy van Amerongen including the revelation that she's a pupil of Cheltenham Ladies College, an exclusive private school in... err Cheltenham, so the closest she's ever been to the ghetto would have been when she sent her chauffeur out to score her some KFC. But it would be cruel and bitter to pick on a 13 year old girl who's got a publishing deal with a bigger advance than I'll ever see, so I won't.

Here's what The Telegraph and its readers thinks about it all. And here's the same story covered in The Times too and comment from some 15 year olds on the slang featured.

The A to Y of teen slang

Today's Daily Mirror has a story about a teenager who has published her own dictionary of teen slang, selling 3000 copies through high street retailers. The Mirror has helpfully published examples of A (Antwacky) to Y (Yoot) but seems stuck with the letter Z - any ideas?

This isn't the first attempt to produce a guide to slang - there are loads about - but this one seems to be specifically aimed at parents in an attempt, the author Lucy van Amerongen says, to help them decode their children's language. But some slang tends to change so rapidly that any guide is bound to contain some already obsolete terms by the time it appears in shops.

There are also some interesting varieties of definitions for some slang terms, many of which might be regional in origin. For example gash is defined as ugly or unpleasant, but in south London usage it usually refers to girls. Shizzle is defined as someone you worship, which might derive from its origins in Bay Area rap as slang for shit (the shit = the best stuff, a weird example of flipping or amelioration, like wicked, sick and bad changing from their original meanings to become terms of approval).

Later this term, I'll be setting up a detailed online slang questionnaire to find out what particular expressions mean in different areas of the country and I'd like your help to complete it, but in the meantime, here are some slang terms I'd like you to help define. If you have a definition, please add it as a comment but please also include the area you're from, so we can get some idea of the geographical spread. Ideally, please add a brief example of how you would use it (eg Butters = ugly as in "that boy is butters").

Slang terms:

swag
bare
merk/murk
hench
nang
prang
peng
air
sick
road

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change