Hadaway wi ye

The responses to the story last week about Sacred Heart Primary in Middlesbrough correcting their pupils' use of non-standard English are still coming thick and fast.

The most original is from the author, David Almond, who was born in the North East. In his phonetically written article for The Guardian, he argues that "the commin langwij cums from the hart an sole, and must neva be forgot". It takes a minute to tune in, but it's a good read once you're on his wavelength.

This article in yesterday's Independent on Sunday is great stuff too, because it's written by a genuine expert, a sociolinguist from King's College, London. Here, Julia Snell  shows that it's more than just a question of promoting "good English" - which is what all English teachers are trying to do in pretty much everything they teach - but also to recognise the close link between language and identity.

As Snell says, "Ultimately, it is not the presence or absence of non-standard forms in children's speech that raise educational issues; rather, picking on non-standard voices risks marginalising some children, and may make them less confident at school. Silencing pupils' voices, even with the best intentions, is just not acceptable".

Sadly, this article by a teacher called Pete Turner is less exciting, partly because it has no real style and partly because it's just a rather predictable moan about young people's language. Sorry Pete, but if you'd opened your ears a bit more to some of your students' language styles, it might have made a more engaging read. And as for northerners having large, extended families and southerners getting their slang from grime? Right...

The fact that two of the articles have over 600 responses shows what a live issue this is out there in the real world, not just in our English Language lessons. If you're looking at doing your Language Intervention for ENGA4 coursework in the next few weeks (and you probably should be) then this is exactly the kind of language debate that you should be getting stuck into.

(HT to Ellie Aslin, Jon Dolton and @backwellengdept and @UKLiteracy for first link, Paul Kerwsill via the EMC Facebook page for the second, and Alasdair Mackenzie for the last.)

Edited on Monday 11.02.13 to add 2nd article and restructure references.

Driving up standards by driving out the non-standard

A school in Teesside has become the centre of an argument over acceptable English, with its headteacher's decision to send a letter home to parents asking parents to "correct" their children's language "errors".

According to the local paper, non-standard English such as 'I done it' (rather than 'I did it', or 'I have done it'), 'yous' (instead of 'you') and 'gizit here' (instead of 'give it to me, please') are all considered off-limits at the school, and risk making the children's employment prospects lower than those who use Standard English.

Standard English is what we're supposed to teach at school, and it's what we use to communicate in writing, most of the time - unless we're online or on our phones, in which case different rules apply - but the argument that's been stirred here is over whether it's acceptable to limit what young people say to just Standard English and whether we should be describing these usages as "incorrect".

Schools have tried similar things before,  with Sheffield Springs Academy having a "slang ban" (which is also how the Daily Mail headline about Sacred Heart School in Middlesbrough - mistakenly - puts it in their story), Manchester Academy doing the same a year or two before, and a school in Basildon allegedly trying to eliminate Essex accents through elocution lessons, a claim denied by the school itself.

Linguists have long argued that non-standard varieties of English are not "wrong" at all. In fact, some of them might even be seen as more logical: yous is a perfectly reasonable way of differentiating between second person singular and plural, which Standard English doesn't have, for example. Studying the differences between standard and non-standard is something that Key Stage 2 children do as part of their Literacy curriculum, so it's not as if they don't understand the differences, but is it really OK to ban certain terms or suggest they're inferior.

Peter Stockwell, linguist and Teessider, thinks not and is featured in an interesting follow-up piece. York University's Paul Kerswill, an expert in sociolinguistics (and writer of a damn fine chapter in this book) was interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, alongside Simon Gibbons of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) and had some eminently sensible things to say about the whole furore.  You can listen to it here until next week and it's 1 hour 40 minutes into the programme.

Elsewhere, the Daily Mail has its take on it here, and you don't need to be a genius to work out that its online readership have plenty to say about it in the comments that follow, which range from the considered and quite descriptivist in outlook (see comment 1 below) to the dubious and rather poorly written (see comments 2&3).

If you've been studying Jean Aitchison's models of crumbling castle, infectious disease and damp spoon, you'll see nearly all of those appearing somewhere in the prescriptive comments put forward, with discourses of laziness, ugliness, infection and erosion, all making an appearance somewhere.

So, what do you think of the school's attempts to drive out non-standard English? Do they have good educational intentions, or are they misguided prescriptivists? Here are what some Mail Online readers thought: what about you?

Comment 1:

The school is just plain wrong. To call informal English wrong is to mess about with personal relationships: this is where you get some children looking down on others because they think they speak wrongly. What is more, it is actually a disadvantage to speak formally if you are in a service industry where you have to get on with ordinary people. You can always tell people who have been trained to talk formally all the time: they sound like daft, unconfident and untrustworthy pseuds. Besides the fact that there are historical reasons for dialect speech: North-eastern dialects use words which go back to the Vikings and put children in touch with a continuing culture which has existed for a thousand years. There is the formal English you need for interviews and work and there is the informal English that enables you to speak quickly with friends, family and locals. All children are capable of understanding that formal English is not right, it is simply for use in formal situations. - Dave , Wimbledon, 06/2/2013 17:24

Comment2:

Sadly, kids nowadays speak only one language and they use that single language in every social context. When I was a kid I spoke three types of English. One with my parents, another with my mates and a third in more formal circumstances such as education, police and other levels of authority. The component that has disappeared today is authority.

- André, Peckham, United Kingdom, 5/2/2013 20:13 

Comment 3:

Laziness from children and parents nowadays...and its shocking. Most kids seem to think talking in slang is cool, but its further from the truth. God help them with job prospects and further education ( if they're even attempting to better their lives! )

- flash25, glasgow, United Kingdom, 5/2/2013 19:41

Vive la resistance

Not for the first time, the French Academy has taken a stand to prevent more English words entering their language. This time, the word is hashtag, which as we have seen from the posts about 2012's Word of the Year, has become a nearly ubiquitous term in lots of online discourse, and even in spoken language too. According to the Academy, the term should, wherever possible, be replaced with the French term mot-diese.

In the Daily Mail, the story is reported with a degree of relish, but look at the comments below and you get an even better sense of how, for many people, ideas about the English language are linked inextricably to a sense of national identity and history.  But among all the celebration that the old enemy, Johnny French, is losing the language battle, there's a realisation even among some of the more rabidly nationalistic Mail readers that while English is spreading around the world, it's not necessarily the same English that's been used in the UK in the past.

As we've looked at here - and as David Crystal, key speaker at next month's emagazine English Language conference, has commented upon many times before - English is changing as it spreads, but also growing differently in different parts of the world. The model is not necessarily one of English getting weaker as it spreads, but separate poles of English varieties growing and evolving in their own distinct ways.

That's probably not much comfort to the French who won't really care if it's English English, American English or Indian English "threatening" their language, but it's part of a bigger global picture of change and variation that is evolving all the time.

The phono-morph war

A report about research from Portsmouth University in the Southern Daily Echo suggests that a new approach to literacy teaching, which involves teaching about the structures and meanings of words (morphology) is more effective than the sound system based teaching of phonics that has been promoted over the last decade.

With a morphological approach, children are taught about the units that make up words (like we've been doing in Child Language recently with morphemes like -s, -ed, -ing , -er, -ist and -est):

Dr Victoria Devonshire, of the Department of Psychology, trialled a new method of teaching reading and writing with 120 children aged five to seven and found the average reading age increased by 14 months after just six months. She said: ''We were surprised at how compelling the results were.
''When children were taught to understand why English works the way it does, we saw a leap in their ability to learn to read and write.

''The written word is about conveying meaning, not the sound of speech. Expecting children to just figure out the rules of our language is worryingly common and it isn't helping them become as proficient and confident as young children in many other languages.'' 

Phonics has been promoted by successive governments as a  means of rapidly improving children's ability to decode the sounds of English, but it's come in for some stick because - as we can all see with words like plough, through and cough - the spelling system in English isn't regular or even very logical. The introduction of phonics testing at Key Stage 1, where nonsense words like wib or vog (or even our old favourite, wug) are given to children to read has provoked yet more concern among many literacy experts, because - they argue - it's articifial and pointless to give children made-up words out of context when readign is not just about individual sounds or words, but about making sense of words and sounds in their specific contexts.

The fact that some people who are quite close to government advisors are set to make a few quid out of phonics schemes is also a cause for scepticism among critics of the phonics-or-bust approach, but plenty of research suggests that phonics can help some children; the argument is not really about if it does but how and why and also in which contexts.

So, what about teaching morphology as this research suggests? It's not necessarily a new approach; back in 2006, Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant published Improving Literacy by Teaching Morphemes, which looked at work done in schools to promote the study of morphology as a means of improving spelling and reading. What Victoria Devonshire is doing sounds really interesting and it sounds like it will add another dimension to literacy teaching. Hopefully, there'll be more information about this approach to come out.

Are you a QUILTBAG?

Labels for different social groups are a shorthand way of defining people and we use a lot of them in our language. Recently, we've looked at terms like handicapped, the handicapped, disabled, people with disabilities and wheelchair users as part of our work on ENGA3 Language Change, but on the Johnson blog they take a look at some of the rapidly evolving acronyms and initialisms for groups defined by their sexuality.

So, we have LGB (Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual) and LGBT (Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual and Transgendered) but in the past the labels weren't quite so neutral. Gay has had a fascinating history as a word, and queer has been reclaimed to some extent, but read more of the piece in Johnson to see where we're going now and what a QUILTBAG is...

For a full set of LGBTQIA (and more) terms, have a look here. A term that's fairly new to me, but seems to have been knocking around for a while, is cisgender (explained, I think, here). The recent media firestorm about Julie Burchill's 'transphobic' article in the Observer (removed from the Observer site but reprinted here) brought this term to my attention and it's another example of how language and identity are closely linked, and the ways in which language can be used to hurt others.

More child language

This week's The Life Scientific on Radio 4 featured an interview with Annette Karmiloff-Smith, who is an expert in children's development. There's some good content here for anyone wanting to look at interaction and language development, as she talks about how exposure to different kinds of language - speech from parents, TV, internet language - shapes children's early development.

The podcast can be found here.

Child Language resources

As we're now well under way with the Language Development topic for ENGA1, this link from Jill on the English language List is well timed.

It's the Talking Point website which has masses of material for parents and teachers about children's language development, including a handy set of ages and stages, where you can check what is normally happening in a child's language development at various ages. There's also some useful material on language impairments and the communicative development of children with learning difficulties, which can be really useful for A2 language investigations.

This week's Word of Mouth on Radio 4 had a really good segment on autism and language, which focused not just on the language development of young people with autism but the language used by carers towards people with autism.

Skivers and strivers, workers and shirkers: why words matter

In a cracking Guardian article today, Zoe Williams takes a critical look at the new language used to split the haves and the have-nots. With this week's vote on limiting benefit increases affecting millions of people - many of them/us actually in work - it's clear that to successfully turn one part of society against the other, you need to win the language war first.

As Williams explains, the false dichotomy created by labelling one group as strivers - working hard, supporting themselves, not relying on benefits - and another group as skivers - not working, sponging benefit taxpayers' money to pay for a feckless lifestyle on a council estate - has rapidly been established and spread into our own language and thinking. But why?

Don't tell me it is because it rhymes. It will destroy my faith in humanity, and that's exactly what they want. But the point is not that politicians spout it, nor that people who haven't given it any thought believe it. The point is that it has seeped so far, so fast, into the national consciousness as a meaningful idea that the very people vilified by it – the people who know they are unemployed by circumstance and not by choice – feel their lives judged against its fictional benchmarks.

So, while Iain Duncan-Smith (a man who recently claimed that £70 a week was too much for Job Seekers' Allowance but allegedly put in a £39 bill for a single breakfast, charged to the taxpayer) is busy chipping away at what already impoverished people can get in support, he must be happy that there are massive misconceptions among the public about how much of the government's budget goes into social security payments or how much those payments actually amount to and that people are so easily convinced that they are shirkers while we are workers. Williams goes on to argue that the shift in language - especially the move from the positive connotations of social security to welfare - has coincided with a shift in attitudes:

People sometimes ascribe this adoption of "welfare" as an Americanism, designed to convey some of the US's sneering synecdoche where the name of the government support becomes shorthand for the person being supported. I think it's also an attempt to dehumanise people on state benefits – we never used to talk about welfare in terms of humans, but the word has been in everyday UK usage, for as long as I can remember, to describe animals. To be in receipt of state benefits thus tacitly becomes a passive, piteous, dumb thing to do. You don't necessarily begrudge the animals their welfare, but you wouldn't mistake yourself for one of them.

It's exactly the kind of language technique we've looked at on the AS level course, using animalistic imagery to describe young people as feral or hunting in packs. Once you demonise the group you're attacking through language, it makes it easier, not only for the dominant group to carry out more attacks, but for others to sympathise with the attacks and align themselves with the persecutors rather than the victims, even if they themselves are probably next in the government's firing line.

This is the kind of language that the linguist Norman Fairclough highlights in his Critical Discourse Analysis approach to language study. If we don't analyse and challenge language choices, we get sucked in by them and end up accepting such false dichotomies, such intrinsically unfair outlooks, and even end up recycling it ourselves. With critical language analysis, however, we can start to pull apart those choices, highlight the ideologies that lie behind them and make our own educated choices about what we think or feel.

That's how language matters and why we need to analyse it.

#BiffyClyro

#Jahmazing

Sorry for taking such a long break from blogging over Christmas and New Year; this was partly down to lots of work and partly down to a bad case of man flu (not wine flu, which is one of the Australian Macquarie Dictionary's nominations for Word of the Year 2012).

Many recent language stories have picked up on the end of year new word round-ups and votes, so you can find a summary of recently fashionable English words in this Observer piece by Rafael Behr (HT to Jon Dolton for the link) which includes some from popular culture and some from wider social changes. So, we get X Factor's Nicole's shamazing (jahmazing, more likely, given it was invented for Jahmene), the song that had uncles dancing badly everywhere, Gangnam Style, Tory incompetence (rather than their usual malevolence) with Omnishambles, and the big winner this year, Hashtag, becoming not just a ubiquitous octothorpe (#) but a real, spoken expression (just like guest blogger Emma Bertouche said on this blog back in 2011). Fearne Cotton off of that there Radio 1 even slotted "Hashtag Biffy Clyro" into one of her pre-Christmas shows, as a reference to the angular-haired Scottish riff-makers. While it's clearly become accepted as a new way of making reference to something in speech, it still made me choke on my cornflakes and SCOMK (Spit Coffee on My Keyboard).

Hashtag was the winner in the American Dialect Society WOTY 2012 poll. You can read more about the nominations and winners in this pdf, but their choice of hashtag has been celebrated and discussed further here and questioned here.

Meanwhile, the Australian Macquarie Dictionary has its poll still running and there are some crackers on there, including the aforementioned wine flu, and  dramality.

What were your winning words of 2012 and which bugged you the most? Personally amazeballs tickled my fancy, but reem irritated me in ways that I can't really explain. Also, what are your predictions for 2013?

Grammar for teachers (and students)

Michael Rosen - poet, socialist, writer of the mighty Bear Hunt and all-round good guy - has been adding some new material to his blog recently, posting material aimed at Key Stage 2 teachers who are worried about their own grammar knowledge, in the run-up to the new KS2 grammar tests. This is something I'm particularly interested in , both as a father of twin boys who are going to sit the test in May this year and a sad grammar nerd, but I think it has relevance to A level students too.

Grammar teaching has had a pretty vexed history, with arguments raging for decades about its use and effects. I  won't go into all of that here, because I've tried to cover it in a previous incarnation as a language researcher at the Survey of English Usage at UCL and posted a lot about it on this other blog, but it is well worth taking a look at Michael Rosen's stuff to get a sense of the bigger picture where grammar is concerned.

Wrath of the grammarbot

Yesterday's Independent features a story about grammar rage on the net which is well worth looking at if you're studying language change, technology and/or attitudes to change.

Outraged at the apparent upsurge in grammar errors on the web, grammar nerds have programmed deadly (ish) attack bots to roam the Twittersphere looking for mistakes and immediately punishing them with sarcastic replies. Basic homophone errors like their/there, your/you're and where/were are the prime targets, but others are facing the wrath of the grammarbot too, like the overuse of CAPS LOCK or the misspelling of sneak peek as sneak peak.

But are Twitter and other forms of digital communication making us worser and worser with are grammer and spelling? Apparently not, if recent linguistic research is to be believed.

In fact, (Tim) Stowell says there is no evidence that any form of "specialized speech" has corrupted spoken or written English, and plenty of recent studies have come to the same conclusion. In September, researchers at Coventry University in Britain ruled that there's no link between text-message conventions, which are also used on Twitter, and bad spelling or grammar in other forums. A 2009 study from the University of Alberta concluded that text-speak should be viewed as a dialect that people can switch into and out of.

Others disagree - sometimes quite violently - and the whole debate is one that we look at when we study the Language Discourses part of ENGA3. There are masses of posts about this very topic here on the blog, so have a look and fill you're boots.

And on the sixth day He made meggings

Can these ball-crunching jodhpur variants really be the next thing in male fashion, I ask Albus, a balding builder from Lithuania?
Nah. "I don't like them," says Albus. "I like more traditional designs. Jeans. Combat trousers. Military stuff. It's a personal choice."

As if jeggings (jeans + leggings) wasn't a blend too far, we now have meggings (men's leggings). I'm reliably informed that treggings (trousers + leggings, or tramp's leggings, if you prefer) also exist. Blends are nothing new, but what differentiates a man's leggings from a woman's leggings? In other words, why can't a man just wear jeggings? It's something that Patrick Kingsley asks in his short piece on meggings and one that applies equally to other man-words like manbag (a man's handbag), mankini (see below) and mantyhose.

Perhaps, given that these items are generally seen as being the preserve of women, men feel more self-conscious about wearing or using such items unless they've been rebranded and renamed as manly clobber. Stan Carey, blogger and contributor to MacMillan Dictionaries excellent language blog, has written about Manguage here and it's worth a read if you're into new words or just fancy some tight-fitting full-length budgie-smugglers.

Filth and fury

We've often looked at attitudes to language change and variation on this blog, and this post on the excellent Linguistics Research Digest refers to some work done in Australia by the linguist, Kate Burridge (whose books on the topic are a very good read and highly recommended for those of you studying ENGA3 for the AQA A spec).

Burridge is interested in how people feel about language and where their views come from, so as well as surveying  national media for letters, online comments and opinion pieces, she has used questionnaires with university students and found that - even among younger people brought up on social media, texting and a curriculum that supposedly teaches that non-standard usages of English are valid - attitudes are pretty firmly against change and variation, especially when it comes from the USA.

On a related note, if you're interested in contributing to debates about language, this competition is now running as part of the  build up to the emagazine English Language conference. Go on, have a go.

Say 'Hi' to Hinglish

For those of you doing the AQA A spec, World Englishes is a fairly new topic which appears as part of the ENGA3 exam. Today's BBC News Magazine has a story on the spread of English in India and the growth of what has been termed Hinglish, a new form of English, spoken there.

If you want to find out more about English around the world and issues around how it's viewed, differences in how it's spoken, arguments over intelligibility and influence,  I'd recommend Jane Setter's chapter on it in the EMC's Language Handbook (available here and here and currently helping contribute to my kids' xmas list) and to have a look at some of the other World Englishes links from the last couple of years.

Urban tweetz

As we saw last week, Twitter is proving to be a great way of tracking language change and variation, admittedly with a few limitations about tweeters' real identities and the like. This week, New Scientist reports on research by Jacob Eisenstein and his team at Georgia Institute of Technology which seems to indicate that new word formations and abbreviations of older ones are more likely to spread via Twitter from US urban areas with large African-American populations.

Slang - and some of these formations like CTFU (Cracking The F*** Up) and bruh (brother) probably fit under that umbrella term - has long had deep links with the black community. Julie Coleman's excellent book, The Life of Slang looks at how some forms of slang have been created and kept alive in African-American culture, so it's not a great surprise to find that this ethnic group is still leading the way in lexical innovation where a new technology is concerned.

There's more here too. 

 

The geeks shall inherit the earth

Sheldon Cooper - reclaiming 'nerd' and 'geek'?

In good news for nerds and geeks and those caught somewhere in the middle - neeks - Big Bang Theory has returned to E4's screens. But in even better news, the words themselves seem to have gone through a process of amelioration, gaining positive semantic associations from their initially rather negative origins.

In this piece for the BBC News Magazine, the history of the words is outlined and examined by lexo-boffins and neologo- nerds, who tell us that the words are subtly different in their meanings and even carry different connotations depending on which side of the Atlantic you live on:

It's easy to argue that "nerd" and "geek", with their very different roots, retain different meanings, arguably with the former still more derogatory than the latter. And some see a transatlantic divide, with "geek" used in US and UK, but "nerd" somehow feeling less British.

And as the writer of the article, Kathryn Westcott, goes on to say, the gradual shifts in meaning are not a new occurrence in language. Yesterday, we looked at the word yid and its changing meanings to Jews and non-Jews, and in other posts over the years, we've considered queer, the n-word, slut and bitch. Are geeks and nerds now reclaiming these once-negative labels and marching proudly under their new banner out of the labs and libraries and into the mainstream?

Tracking tweets

Twitter is proving to be a fantastic resource for linguists and you can see several examples of what's been done with it in these previous blog posts.

More recently, researchers at UCL have been looking at what tweets in London reveal about patterns of language use. The people looking at it, Ed Manley and James Cheshire, aren't linguists but an engineer and spatial analysis lecturer (eh?) so they're more interested in where things happen rather than necessarily exploring why - which might be more interesting for English Language students - but it raises good questions about why certain languages don't appear as often as might be expected- Bengali and Somali, for example - while others do make an appearance - Haitian Creole, Basque and Swahili -among them.

But what might be of even greater interest to A level English Language students is how Twitter is proving to be a source of fantastic data on gender and language, and what we might term communities of practice: groups of people that you "do" language with in your various day to day activities and whose language styles influence your own.

This excellent article by Ben Zimmer in the Boston Globe gives you a clear introduction to what Twitter is offering linguists and you can see more of the work of Tyler Schnoebelen and his colleagues in this powerpoint of their presentation to #nwav41 (Warning! Contains advanced statistics to boggle the mind).

In other Twitter-related research, this link to a paper by Rebecca Maybaum  gives you a glimpse of how Twitter can be used to track evolving slang: in this case, the words used to describe people on Twitter. Tweeps? Twiends? Tweethearts?

Getting rid of 'Yid'

Football supporters aren't renowned for their delicacy when it comes to the chants 'sung' (or in Millwall's case, grunted) at games, so it's not much of a surprise to find that homophobic, sexist and racist abuse often plays a part in many of them.

Recent events involving Chelsea supporters monkey chanting at black Man Utd players, Leeds Utd supporters singing songs about Sheffield Wednesday's manager Dave Jones and (unfounded) allegations of child abuse against him, and Sheffield Wednesday supporters goading Leeds' fans with references to two murdered Leeds fans have been in the press recently, but another element of racist chanting is picked up in this great article by Anthony Clavane on the use of the word yid.

Clavane has written extensively on Jewish involvement in football, most recently in his book Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here?, but previously as part of his excellent book on the mighty Leeds United, Promised Land, so he knows his stuff. Clavane points out that there's a clear difference between non-Jewish rivals using the word yid, - as he puts it "a term of opprobrium equivalent to words like the n-word and “P*ki”" - and the Spurs fans themselves claiming the term as a badge of pride.

What makes this such a good topic for discussion within the English Language A level is that it's all about words, meanings, identity and context. Words themselves are rarely - ever? - bad in and of themselves, but some words can pick up such negative connotations that they rarely escape disapproval. With yid being a term used for so long by anti-Semites - Moseley's fascist blackshirts in England, Hitler's nazis in the 1930s and 40s and Chelsea's neo-nazi supporters in the 1980s and early 1990s - can it ever be used without carrying associations of prejudice and genocidal hatred?

Well, if the n-word is anything to go by, then yes. But only with some heavy qualification. Who is using the term? What do they intend by it? What position are they adopting when they use it - solidarity or opposition? What context is it being used in?

Spurs - a football club with a long history of Jewish involvement, but arguably as much a Jewish club these days as any other - has fans who may well see the word yid as their own and describe themselves as yiddos or the Yid army, but the chucking around of terms like this by a now largely gentile fanbase runs the risk of making the term seem acceptable for general use.

That's why, as this Mirror article explains, the Society of Black Lawyers has called for those chanting it to be prosecuted. But is the case as cut and dried,  as simple, as they say?  The Mirror reports that Tottenham Hotspur have released a statement which sounds more nuanced and intelligent than many of the bland club releases that generally reach the press:

"Our guiding principle in respect of the 'Y-word' is based on the point of law itself - the distinguishing factor is the intent with which it is used ie if it is used with the deliberate intention to cause offence. This has been the basis of prosecutions of fans of other teams to date.

"Our fans adopted the chant as a defence mechanism in order to own the term and thereby deflect anti-Semitic abuse. They do not use the term to others to cause any offence, they use it as a chant amongst themselves."

But how do we deal with this? Could, potentially, Jewish Spurs fans end up in court accused of racial chanting against themselves? That would seem ridiculous.

As Clavane points out, "In a perfect world, the Y-word would not be used. But it would be idiotic to report to the police any anti-Semitic chants heard at White Hart Lane. The real evil emanates from the anti-Semites who taunt Spurs – and, it should be noted, Jewish players and fans from other teams."

WOTY not YOLO but GIF? KMBCT

It's reaching that time of year when the dictionary publishers and lexophiles start assessing the new words that have popped up and bobbed around in the public's consciousness over the last 12 months and select their favourites. There's often a difference between the ones that the UK and US dictionaries go for and so far we've had the following:

The Oxford English Dictionary has gone for Omnishambles which is also considered here on the BBC site.

Oxford Dictionaries USA have plumped, controversially and rather strangely, for the verb 'to gif' (an acronym to noun to verb conversion, apparently) which is a choice criticised here on Slate's website.

Meanwhile, the American Dialect Society get very serious about this (while enjoying the silliness too, I'm sure) and vote for their WOTY at a big ceremony/party. Last year they chose Occupy, and this year the contenders might be frankenstorm, romnesia and robama, among others.

Soon, we'll have plenty of lists appearing in the papers, so have a think back to the words (and by words we can actually include noun phrases like squeezed middle and fiscal cliff) that have made an impression on you. Perhaps it's going to be gangnam style or even an old word that has been made popular again, pleb.

The rise of the regions

A research project based at Aston University is finding that local varieties are on the up. This follows years of concern that local accents and dialects have been in decline as a result of people's increased mobility, the spread across regional and national boundaries of new media and technologies, and the belief that such changes might lead to dialect levelling (more here and here).

You can read more about it in The Daily Mail or go straight to the source at Aston University through this project site* or through Urszula Clark's summary, You Are What You Speak which raises lots of good points about accent, identity and class in the UK.

And for a lighter look at West Midlands accents, have a look at this piece from The Guardian**


(*Thanks to Jon H @ruchbah for this one and for doing it in the first place)
(**Thanks to Nicky W for link to this)