Another slang ban attempted

Basically, tings is getting bare random with this kind of shizzle, yeah?

In another (futile) attempt to control behaviour in a school - and language is clearly a powerful type of behaviour - the Harris Academy in Croydon has tried to implement a "slang ban".

The BBC covered it here, the Daily Mail here and The Guardian here. It was also discussed by the linguist Paul Kerswill on today's World At One (start listening after 13.30 to hear it).

We've gone over the arguments about this kind of ban on several occasions on this blog - first in London, then in Manchester, then Sheffield, and finally in Middlesbrough - so there's not much else to add.

Edited on 17.10.13 to correct Guardian link and add Guardian Comment is Free link to Will Coldwell article

A war on the young? More like a unilateral assualt

In a week or so, we'll be looking at the representation of young people as a social group for our ENGA2 AS English Language lessons, so it's kind of nice of David Cameron to give us some extra ammunition for our classes, even if in the process he's basically sticking two fingers up to every under-25 in the country!

Here's Ally Fogg of The Guardian on Cameron's announcement yesterday:

It would be wrong to think of David Cameron's proposals to take key benefits away from the under-25s as a new initiative. They form merely the latest chapter in a chilling horror story that began shortly after the coalition took the reins, with the tripling of university tuition fees, the abolition of educational maintenance allowance and the future jobs fund, and was still under way this summer when the chancellor's spending review slashed another £260m from the further education budget.

It would be also be a mistake to describe this as a "war on the young" as many commentators have done. A war implies two sides vying for supremacy. This is a strictly unilateral assault, a grand act of persecution. Indeed watching the prime minister singling out unemployed youngsters for uniquely punitive measures while pretending it is for their own good, cheered on by a gang of braying chums, it looks less like the behaviour of a national statesman and more like the petty vindictiveness of a schoolyard bully.

 There's some lovely stuff to analyse in there, not just in the language used to characterise the policy announcement - playing on the semantic field/discourse associated with war and conflict - but in the way he represents Cameron and his "chums".

We'll have a look at the whole way in which discourses around young people are often based on fear, threat and otherness, but in the meantime, this makes a good read.

A culturally relativist academic speaks...

While I was tapping out a blog post about Lindsay Johns' Four Thought programme, the linguist Paul Kerswill was already on the case, writing a response directly to him, which he has kindly allowed us to post here.

As one of the linguists involved in the Linguistic Innovators project - the work that put Multicultural London English (MLE) on the map and kicked off so much discussion about slang, dialect and code-switching in the media - he's well placed to offer a more considered reflection on what Johns has presented in his programme.

Thank you for your Four Thought programme this evening, which taught me how linguistic action on the ground can make a difference to young people. But I feel I need to challenge you on several points. First (and let me get this off my chest straight away), exactly who are these middle-class, culturally relativist academics who wish to oppress young people by withholding Standard English from them? Maybe you are thinking of academic linguists like me or some of my colleagues, and if so I'd like to engage in debate with you to show that you are some way off the mark. I'm keen to understand why some young people are failing to get a good education and failing to get good jobs, and I have always believed that the use of Standard English is part of the solution.

Second, you don't consider why so many, particularly black, youngsters speak what my colleagues and I call Multicultural London English. The criminologist John Pitts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd3SJ6qakyY, 29 minutes in) locates the origin of it to the East End in the early 1980s, when young black people's deteriorating position in London was preventing them from living up to their parents' expectations for them. Pitts argues that the new dialect reflects a 'resistance identity'. As such it's akin to youth language the world over and in all historical times, and is a kind of 'anti-language'. In London, it's an expression of some young people’s feeling that they have nothing to gain from investment in society. So you risk putting the cart before the horse by fixing the language and not the social attitudes (amongst many other things) that hold them back.

Third, you may be underestimating the breadth of young people's linguistic repertoires. For some purposes, they need Standard English and an avoidance of slang, but that's precisely the point: they need to be linguistically flexible - code-switching, if you like - though I know you reject that notion. Teenagers have rather specific needs in terms of belonging, and language expresses that. Then they grow out of it, or rather change their needs, in adulthood. Linguistic flexibility can be taught, and I'm pretty sure most teachers are aware of this, and act accordingly.  
Fourth, you seem to equate this way of speaking with impoverished language. It's true that kids vary enormously in the size of their vocabulary. This has nothing to do with speaking Multicultural London English. It relates entirely to social class, not ethnicity, and so you might as well criticise any local accent or dialect in the same way. You also castigate the use of ‘ghetto language’ editions of Shakespeare: don't these merely demonstrate that language is infinitely flexible and rich? William Labov, way back in the 70s, proved that African American English, including that spoken by gang members, is grammatically precise and richly expressive.

Your language work with the kids in Peckham is reaping rewards for them. The life of the young man you mentioned is undoubtedly the better for it. But aren't you in danger of turning him against the music he (probably) identifies with and alienating him from the family and friends he loves? I would bet he is now a proficient code-switcher, not just linguistically but also culturally.

Thanks very much to Paul for letting us print his response. 

Dissing ghetto grammar to Mikey G and Funkmaster David C

Fresh from his appearance at the Conservative Party conference, where he angrily denounced "trendy teaching" and "hip hop Hamlet" productions as "viciously racist", while (not so freshly) trotting out a tired Stevie Wonder joke, Lindsay Johns made an appearance on Radio 4's Four Thought programme, with a 15 minute attack on his old favourite, "ghetto grammar". 

We've looked at Johns' arguments about this subject - the need for Standard English and the dangers of street slang to inner city youths - on this blog before and, to be honest, much of what he says in the Four Thought lecture is a slightly reheated version of his older articles which you can find here and here.

Unlike Johns, who sees the issue in stark terms - Standard English = good, slang = bad - the issue is more complicated than he suggests. I think he probably realises that, but why let research, reality and facts gets in the way of a good rant? And hey, it seems to be doing him some good, as he gets to stand on stage among an overwhelmingly white, pensionable and right wing crowd and denounce lefties to big applause.

One of the stand-out moments in his Four Thought piece (apart from the Stevie Wonder joke - Stevie Wonder is blind? LOL!) is his hugely overstated attack on white, middle class liberals, who espouse a doctrine of "cultural relativism" in which all language styles are just as good as each other and where street slang is viewed as the authentic voice of the streets and therefore not to be discouraged.

Instructively, he doesn't name a single one of these sinister lefties, or tell us about a single paper, article or case study that they've produced to make such a claim, but he reaches heights of rhetorical flamboyance in making these claims:

Contrary to the risible notions promulgated by cultural relativists - often white, liberal, middle class ones - notions which are deeply patronising, obnoxious and offensive, not to mention viscerally racist, of accepting black kids from Peckham speaking in inchoate street slang because they deem it to be the "authentic rhythms of Africa", I tell my mentees "We don't live in Timbuktu, or the south Bronx; we live in England, so speak proper English".

For a man who likes teaching young people how to use adjectives, he sure uses a lot of adjectives...


But, as I stated back in 2011 in the response to his original ghetto grammar piece:

Firstly, you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find any linguist or educator who doesn't argue that a mastery of Standard English is a prerequisite of a good education. Who are these cultural relativists that Johns is referring to? It smacks of the right wing arguments about the "PC brigade": some nebulous and sinister cabal of liberals and lefties hell-bent on messing up everything about young people's education with their crazy commie views. They don't really exist...

Secondly, code-switching is not that difficult for young people. They do it all the time. But only if they have another form to switch into. That's essentially the point that Johns is missing. The young people he works with - if they have as poor a command of Standard English as he claims - don't have a problem with slang: they have a problem with basic literacy. To lay the blame for these young people's inability to write and speak clearly at the door of street slang and those people who don't condemn it out of hand is a very weak argument.

While Johns is clearly right to say in his articles and lectures (and yes, even his speech to the Tory conference) that "language is power" and that some of the most marginalised and underprivileged in our society desperately need that power more than their pampered Eton-educated counterparts (err, not that he said that at the Tory party conference), he's spectacularly wrong in claiming that slang is the problem.

Yes, there may be some young people who struggle to grasp a sophisticated level of Standard English - that has pretty much always been the case and we should strive to help them - but there are many many more young people who know exactly how to code switch when they use language in different situations and who know exactly when and when not to use slang and the value of that slang.

In attacking street slang, Johns misunderstands the real power of language: its ability to serve us in different situations and with different people and to convey a massive range of different, nuanced attitudes. Language is power, but rather like in the anecdote Johns tells us about being pulled over by the police and bamboozling the Met copper with the word "abstemious", Johns seems to equate power with the superficial quality of knowing a few more adjectives than the next guy. Really? Is that it? If anyone is patronising young people, it's not an anonymous collective of liberal lefties but Johns himself.

Putting up with prejudiced sit

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

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

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

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

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

Grammar do and grammar don't

Last time there was a teachers' strike, I put the blog on strike for a day; this time round, I've decided not to. I'm on strike but have decided that the blog is a labour of love, for which I get no payment, and anyway, I update it so infrequently at the moment that nobody would be able to tell it's on strike. A bit like my teaching, in fact...

Anyway, today's post is a quick one about the rules of grammar - which ones to worry about and which ones not to - by The Guardian's Style Guide author David Marsh. In it he deals with some of the arguments people have about things like split infinitives, starting sentences with conjunctions, who/whom and all the rest of it.

It's a particularly useful article for A2 students looking at ENGA3 and Language Discourses, but is also handy for anyone who cares about writing clearly and how clarity can be improved with a a bit of careful thought.

When autocorrect attacks

The AS English Language course involves a pretty steep learning curve for many students coming from GCSE, what with its terminology, its theories, its terminology and its... err...terminology. But, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and no, it's not Noam Chomsky dancing with a glo-stick; we'll soon be looking at technology and communication and the ways in which technology offers us scope to communicate in new ways (its affordances) against the limitations that can sometimes be caused by the devices we use and the kittens - sorry, keyboards - we type on (i.e. the constraints of technology).

So, just for a taster of what can happen when technology constrains us more than usual, have a look at this link showing what can happen when autocorrect attacks.

"Prejudice about accents is alive and well."

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

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

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

Swears wot scare

If you like swearing - and frankly, who doesn't like to have a little swear when George Osborne appears on TV, a puppy does a poo on your favourite shoes, or a cold caller asks you about your pension plans while you're listening to Leeds United concede a 96th minute goal against an inferior team - then have a listen to Stephen Fry's Radio 4 show, Fry's English Delight.

This week he's been exploring the history of the multi-faceted F-word. It's not just a rude word; it's a flexible friend, functioning as a verb, a noun, an adverb and probably every other word class too, in some way or another. But you'll have to get an F-ing move on, because it's only on i-Player for a few more days.

"Try being Jewish at a Chelsea match"

Following last year's heated debate about the use of the terms "yids" and "yid army" to describe Tottenham Hotspur's fans, the flames have been fanned further by interventions from both sides.

As The Guardian reports, both the Football Association and David Cameron have waded in, threatening to fine and ban fans on one hand, or to forgive them on the other. David Baddiel (who is Jewish) has also joined in with a provocative and interesting article in The Guardian and a radio discussion with David Aaronovitch (also Jewish) about whether "yid" is a race-hate term or a proud badge of solidarity among Jewish Tottenham fans and their fellow supporters (on this link from about 33 minutes in).

One of Baddiel's key points is that if you're Jewish and have suffered the abuse directed at Jews by some of the minority of racist scumbags from Chelsea, Arsenal and West Ham, you're unlikely to view "yid" as a friendly term, however it appears to be used by Tottenham fans, who are historically seen as a club with a strong Jewish following.

As we discussed back in November 2012, this is a language topic that crops up as part of ENGA3 and could well form a good topic for the Language Intervention part of the ENGA4 coursework. Have a look back at the longer post here to see where it all fits in.

Taking selfies while twerking off the food baby

It's new words time for Oxford Dictionaries Online and that means lots of media coverage for the new(ish) words that have been added to the dictionary. This is one of those areas of language change that often gets a good press (unlike other changes which tend to cause snorts of derision the press).

Here, Oxford Dictionaries Blog explain some of their new words, while The Guardian picks a few of them up in this piece and The Daily Telegraph has a look too. Elsewhere, twerking - recently popularised by Miley Cyrus, but disputed by several commentators - gets a more in depth look. My personal favourite so far (probably because I have developed a summer one of these) is food baby, which is defined as "a protruding stomach caused by eating a large quantity of food and supposedly resembling that of a woman in the early stages of pregnancy". Excuse me while I go and twerk it off.

Accents and dialects

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

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

Lucy Mangan on accent adaptation and prejudice

A guide to Nottingham accent and dialect

A piece on the changing nature of the Leicester varieteh

Public service announcements

Colleagues at two universities have asked this blog to publicise a couple of things that might either be of interest to you, or that they need help with.

The first is a job opportunity at UCL, which involves working on the new Primary English part of the Englicious project. You can find more info on it here.

The second is from Sue Fox and Jenny Cheshire at QMUL. They would like feedback from students and teachers who have used their English Language Teaching Resources and Linguistics Research Digest and just need a few quick responses to this survey.

ENGA3 June 2013 collected revision tips

With the exam coming up on Monday, I've collected together a few of the revision tips from 2012, 2011 and 2010 here. Hopefully, they'll help you target your last day or two of revision:

Tips from 2011
Revision tips from 2012 (BTW World Englishes has cropped up now as a discourses question in Jan 2013)
General ENGA3 exam advice from 2012

I'll add a few more bits and pieces on Sunday, if I get a chance.

Dealing with AO2 on ENGA3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, evaluation of knowledge is critical:

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

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

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

Language Discourses revision June 2013

For those of you revising for the ENGA3 exam next Monday, there have been some really good recent examples of articles that focus on attitudes to language use and abuse. A few of these have featured on the @EngLangBlog twitter feed, so thanks to the various teachers and students who alerted me to them.

Last year's ENGA3 paper featured a Section B question all about the Queen's English Society and their prescriptivist views about language. Some really on-the-ball students - readers of this blog, no doubt ;-) - managed to mention the demise of the QES as reported here in their answers to the June exam: exactly the kind of contemporary reference that always impresses examiners.

The recent articles that you might like to have a look at all take a look at how people feel about the ways in which language changes.

In this one, Steven Poole looks at how the internet has both spawned linguistic development and, for some at least, linguistic abominations such as LOL and bad spelling.

In this one, Simon Horobin, an English Professor at Oxford University, stirs up the readers of The Daily Telegraph into splenetic projectile-vomiting by telling an audience at the Hay-on-Wye Festival to chillax and STFU about apostrophes and spelling errors.

In this one, Michael Rundell of MacMillan Dictionaries has a dig at those who tell us we should strictly adhere to grammar "rules" just because they say so.

All of them provide plenty of food for thought and ammunition for the exam.

Gender revision

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

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

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

Good luck for ENGA1 tomorrow.

Good luck, everyone.

The language of the workhouse

Val Gillies has written a great piece on the revival of a "Victorian lexicon" to describe class in the UK which echoes and magnifies some of the points brought up in this blog post from January about the polarised discourses surrounding people in work and out of work.

If you're looking for ENGA3 topics related to language and representation (for PC discourses) or are thinking ahead to ENGA2 topics for next year's coursework, it makes a good, if deeply depressing, read.

Language Development essay advice

You can find plenty of advice for the data question on ENGA1 in previous posts on this blog (like this and this), but if you want help on the essay, here goes...

With my examiner hat on (it's a bit like a wizard's hat, but less fashionable), I'd say that some of the things that examiners really want to see are as follows:

• People who answer the question . This may seem blindingly obvious, but lots of students seem to write very generic answers which don't really address the question that's been set. So, avoid this by actually addressing and deconstructing the question right from the start. By this, I mean try to define what you think the question is really asking about and how you are going to deal with it. So, if the question says "Discuss the ways in which children develop their grammatical skills" you need to define what's meant by "grammatical skills" (i.e. syntax and morphology). 
• Examples.  Give examples. It's all very well knowing plenty of the bigger picture, but you also need to bring in examples of what children (and sometimes adults) actually say. Have examples of your own ready. Failing that, use some from the data question.
• Evaluation. Many questions are phrased with "How far..." or "To what extent...", so you should be able to see that it's not just a question of raising a flag for Chomsky, Piaget or Skinner, but to really evaluate how different theories might explain how children acquire language. And remember, just because conditioning seems to work in a way with politeness features, doesn't mean it works for everything else. Think about different elements of language and how - for example - social interaction theories are very good at explaining children's pragmatic development, but pretty poor at explaining the overgeneralisation of grammar rules.
• A clear structure. You've got to write clearly and offer a logical and developed argument. Think through your answer, use a plan and paragraph it!

Do I not like 'like'

There's a pretty sketchy and rather vague piece from yesterday's Mail on Sunday here which uses work on a corpus of contemporary English to make some rather sweeping claims about declining standards of "correct grammar". Needless to say, it's full of prescriptivist claptrap.

One of their particular bugbears is the apparently increased appearance of "like" in colloquial talk. Fair enough, they might not (like) like, it, but to claim that "The average English child is likely to say the word 'like' five times as often as his or her grandparents..." is a bit silly. The word's use may well have increased over time - no one would deny the growth of like as a filler - but that's not the only use we put it to. As, the excellent Linguistics Research Digest at QMUL points out, many linguists have started looking at how like has developed as a quotative (as can be seen in the excellent Zack bike transcript on their site) and even as what are called "it's like enactments". So, not just a word we use to fill a gap, but a word that's like lots of others, doing, like, lots of different jobs and not getting much, like, love.

Sadly, for the Mail, they also seem a bit confused about what grammar actually is. Is the pronunciation of 'going to' as 'gonna' really grammar? And, if they are so upset about declining standards, why write a sentence using just an adverbial clause of time ("While Janet Street-Porter and footballer David Beckham are viewed as more 'demotic'."). Tut tut.

But even worse than this is the response from the readers of this paper. In a bid to obtain Mick from Scunthorpe's crown as King of Unintentional Irony for his mighty "keep talking like that and see were it get`s you, muppets no wonder some kids are as thick as to short planks" comment about an article on youth slang in The Sun, a guy called "Big Kev" gets very angry about Jamaican accents. While showing a disdain for the accurate use of his own language (sic):

The fake 'Jamaican' accent seems to be norm amongst comprehensive educated children in London. The cockney accent may of had it's day.
- Big Kev , New Addington, 18/5/2013 13:59

Arsetrumpets

It's unlikely that swearing will turn up as a topic on ENGA3, but it's an interesting area of language change to have a look at, all the same. The Boston Globe features a piece on the history of swearing here, while Four Thought also covered the same topic on Radio 4 this week.

Language Development data revision 1

Question 2 on the ENGA1 paper is your 10 mark data question, so here's an example with some extracts taken from Jean Aitchison's The Articulate Mammal.

Your job is to comment linguistically on 5 features of the child language below. All we need is an example and an accurate description (with a linguistic label) of what you've identified. If you add answers as comments, I'll give you a mark out of 10. If you're one of my students, the best answer will win an exciting prize from the Happy World of Haribo.

Child Aged 2
I singing
Blue shoes
He is asleep
He is a doctor

Child Aged 3
He wants an apple
I helped mummy
I am singing
He's a doctor
I'm singing

Poetic hustla upsets bearded prescriptivist

...because American signs are better than foreign ones

This link came from @aboutworldlangs and is good for some ENGA3 analysis. It's full of the usual moans and groans about language changing for the worse and uncultured morons ruining English, so should provide fertile ground for a bit of discourse analysis.

Which themes can you pick up from this? I can see a bit of damp spoon, a touch of crumbling castle, a whole heap of declinism and even a subtle waft of infectious disease.

ENGA3 topics so far

Thanks to Ellie, we now have a complete list of all the topics set for Sections A and B on ENGA3.

Watching badgers

The BBC site has a nice list of 'naughty' euphemisms today. Among them are several wittily ambiguous ways of describing drunkenness or extramarital trouser-dropping, including "Watching badgers" and "Hiking the Appalachian Trail".

They make a lot more sense if you have a look here. But no entry for "taking the dog for a walk" (and subsequent euphemism of "dogging") which Essex is so famous for?

Grammar and Gove

It probably comes as no surprise to regular readers that this blog is not a fan of Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, but his pronouncements last week were particularly grim, even by his own standards. And, while this blog is primarily concerned with A level English Language and not politics, we all know that arguments about the English language  - as Henry Hitchings, author of The Language Wars, puts it in his interview with emagazine - are often really about "people’s attitudes to – among other things – class, race, money and politics".

A quick look at today's BBC News Magazine article about attitudes to grammar and punctuation (a really nice intro to the topic if you're still looking for a way into this for the ENGA3 exam) helps illustrate this very point.

In a speech last week, Gove attacked a number of teaching approaches, teachers and journalists with an interest in education, while once again trying to fly the flag for "correct grammar". He also had a go at the Mr. Men. It's interesting that he referred to grammar in his speech, as Year Six pupils are doing their National Curriculum Tests this week , and a new grammar test has been introduced as part of this: something that Gove is keen to trumpet as a new, 'rigorous' approach to the teaching of English.

Now, you might expect an Education Secretary to have a decent grasp of what grammar is and how it can be taught, but Gove clearly doesn't. He certainly has some knowledge of it, but it's a very narrow, blinkered view, and one that doesn't really match the reality of how language is actually used.

In his speech , Gove states the following:

We are introducing a basic test of competence in spelling, punctuation and grammar at the end of primary school.

But again the unions - and their allies - have objected to the suggestion that eleven year-olds should be able to spell words in Standard English, use full stops and commas with confidence or deploy adverbs appropriately.

One of the critics - Michael Rosen - attacked the proposed assessment in his column, “Letter from a Curious Parent”, in the Guardian.

Mr Rosen criticised the test on the basis that there was no such thing as correct grammar, but if you were perverse enough to want to ensure children knew how to use Standard English you could of course devise some form of assessment. However, such a test was only ever accessible to a minority because when a comparable test of grammatical knowledge existed in the past, only a minority of students passed that. So this new test was clearly a fiendish exercise to brand hundreds of thousands of children as failures so that they were reconciled to a future of supine wage slavery.

I could argue that nothing is more likely to condemn any young person to limited employment opportunities - or indeed joblessness - than illiteracy. I could point out that the newspaper Mr Rosen writes for has a style guide, a team of trained sub-editors and a revise sub-editor as well as a night editor and a backbench of assistant night editors to ensure that what appears under his - and everyone else's - byline is correct English. I could observe that it was a funny form of progressive thinking that held that the knowledge which elites have used to communicate with confidence and authority over the years - and which they pay to ensure their children can master - should be denied to the majority of children.

To Gove it appears simple: there is a correct form of English and that is what young people should be taught. End of.

Now, I don't actually think that Gove believes this; he's a clever man and is no doubt aware that language can change, that the "rules" we have often followed in the past haven't really been rules, as such, but preferences for particular styles. As Henry Hitchings points out so convincingly in The Language Wars and Robert Lane Greene so clearly in You Are What You Speak, these preferences are often rather misguided, relying on models of grammar (for example, Latin) that don't really match the flexibility and fluidity of English in its various forms. And clearly, grammar consists of different structures, some of which might be seen as non-standard when compared to formal, written English, when it is used in a spoken form or online.

No, I think Gove is aware of all this but chooses to present the argument in such a simplified, polarised and partial way because it suits his political agenda. He wants to help educate young people; the lefties and linguists don't care about that. It can't be a coincidence either that he's currently positioning himself as David Cameron's heir apparent to a sympathetic audience on the right-wing of the Conservative Party who are disaffected enough to vote UKIP.

As the other (better) Cameron (Deborah) explains in Verbal Hygiene (1995), grammar is a useful touchstone because it can be made "...to symbolize various things for its conservative proponents: a commitment to traditional values as a basis for social order, to ‘standards’ and ‘discipline’ in the classroom, to moral certainties rather than moral relativism and to cultural homogeneity rather than pluralism. Grammar was able to signify all these things because of its strong metaphorical association with order, tradition, authority, hierarchy and rules". Last week grammar and "dumbed-down" teaching, this week Europe, next week immigration?

If this is where Gove is coming from , then fair play to him. In studying Language Discourses for ENGA3, if we haven't discovered that different people construct their own discourses around language for their own reasons and with their own agendas, then we haven't really discovered very much at all. But what we've also learnt along the way is that we can analyse the arguments and language used to present them, to identify the positions being adopted and take them to task, if necessary. And what's more, we can use grammar to do that analysis.

Gove's arguments fit into a long line of prescriptivist thinking that we've seen characterised in Jean Aitchison's models from The Language Web, in Simon Heffer's belief that grammar is logic and in Lindsay Johns' assertions that "ghetto grammar" is destined to destroy the employment prospects of young people. These arguments can be quite convincing: who doesn't want young people to develop clear communication? Crazy people and communists, obviously. But is it really that simple?

In response to Gove's attack, Michael Rosen - one of those specifically singled out and named in Gove's speech - argued in a piece for Saturday's Guardian that Gove had got it wrong on grammar. While part of Rosen's objection is philosophical and stems from a socialist, humanist position, he's also a writer and educator, and not exactly a slouch when it comes to grammar.

 I can agree with some of Rosen's points on a gut level: "A problem that arises from talking about "correct grammar" is that it suggests that all other ways of speaking or writing are incorrect. This consigns the majority to being in error. Gove might be happy with that way of viewing humanity, but I'm not". However, I also need a bit more than gut feeling to go on.

A more convincing argument, to my mind at least, appears at the start of his article:

All language has grammar, otherwise it wouldn't be language. Grammar is what gives words sense. We produce language in strings of words, and the means by which they stick together and make sense is grammar. This applies to all language, all dialects – not one particular way of speaking and writing. So grammar is not a matter of being correct or not. It's a way of describing how all language works. All linguists believe there is grammar, but linguists do not all agree on grammatical terms or categories. Pretending that there is only one correct way to describe language is confusing and untrue.

This is it, in a nutshell. Grammar tests that judge answers as right or wrong, without giving proper consideration to context and usage, are not really going to help anyone develop their language skills. And if you don't want to take my word for this, then just ask Debra Myhill, one of the advisers to the government on the new test. When interviewed by the TES she said "The grammar test is totally decontextualised; it just asks children to do particular things, such as identifying a noun ... But 50 years of research has consistently shown that there is no relationship between doing that kind of work and what pupils do in their writing".

Grammar is a huge part of what we do in A level English Language, and as a grammar nerd, I also think it should be part of what we teach at Key Stages 2-4 as part of a wider English curriculum. But, unlike Gove, I don't agree that there's such a thing as a single "correct" grammar that we should teach, that there's a right or a wrong answer to every question. I think it's essential that we develop an understanding of how language works and tools to describe its use, its development and its variety, just not in the way that Michael Gove reductively claims that we can.

Analytical sentences

One thing that can really help you pick up marks in ENGA1 is developing a kind of template for your analysis that includes some kind of content for each of the three assessment objectives. It's a flexible template, rather than a straitjacket, so you don't need to include all four of these things every time, but it's certainly a good idea to hit at least three in every key sentence that you write:

1. identification of a significant language feature (with appropriate labelling) 
2. a clear example of this feature (ideally with the word, phrase or clause you’re specifically referring to underlined) 
3. an explanation of the effect of the language choice/ representation of the subject matter created by it 
4. a comment on how this is a feature of the mode of the text 

You might decide that  you don't want to talk about mode in every sentence of your answer, so it would make sense to maybe hit points 1-3 in most sentences, and then concentrate on 1,2 and 4 in other sections. As I said, it's not designed to restrict your writing or stifle creativity, but it's important to hit the three AOs as often as you can: AO1 Language labelling and identification; AO3i mode; AO3ii meaning.

Because you're worth it?

Just as spoken language can be transformed into the written mode, so the written mode can be made to resemble the spoken.

We recently looked in class at Tesco's attempts to address their customers in leaflets, as if they know them and really care for them (sounding, with their desperate "We are changing", like a repentant wife-beater, swearing it won't happen again). L'Oreal too have used the same technique - synthetic personalisation - for years. And now this tweet captures it slightly more rudely:

Writers - copy writers for advertising agencies, especially - know that by capturing a spoken tone in their written words they can present themselves to us in ways that position them as more normal and approachable. The combination of direct address, positive politeness and facework is designed to make us believe they are somehow like us. But they aren't, are they? They're faceless corporations spending big money on trying to relate to potential customers because they want our money.

Even some of the apparent good guys - Lush and Innocent - use synthetic personalisation to create a brand identity that chimes with what they hope will be an ethical consumer who feels that the folksy, colloquial, even slightly quirky tone is really addressing them as an individual.

Changing channel

Several recent ENGA1 Language and Mode questions have used texts that contain a mixture of spoken and written mode characteristics. Occasionally, students have complained that these aren't as easy to analyse. I think they pose their own challenges but can often allow you to explore some of the most interesting dimensions of mode and score really high marks across all the AOs.

While it might reassuring to open an exam paper on this topic and see a straightforward transcript and a straightforward extract of written language, the grey areas of mode open up areas such as how one mode has been made to look like another and why that might have been done.

For example, in this January's paper, there was an extract from an article about women's football that featured a written version of an interview carried out with three women who had gone to the Women's World Cup. While some aspects of their speech had been modified in the written version of the interview - non-fluency features edited out, punctuation added, prosodic features removed - there were still elements that remained from the spoken mode: fairly casual lexis ("It gives you a buzz"); some non-standard grammar ("Neither me or my mum had ever been outside Europe"); sentence punctuation such as splice-commas reflecting a more casual and free-flowing style ("We didn't ask anyone else to come along, it was a girly trip.").

Each of these examples can be identified and described linguistically (AO1), discussed from a mode perspective (spoken mode & aural channel changed to written mode & visual channel - AO3i) and then considered in terms of meaning (AO3ii), i.e. why it has been conveyed in this way and how it represents the women's views about the experience.

To test your own grasp of these kinds of texts, why not look for a few yourself? A good place to start might be the NME website, where the spoken words of various musicians (and Funeral For a Friend) are conveyed in a written form. A previous ENGA1 paper used the They Work For You website, which has written versions of MPs' spoken questions and responses in parliament. Just find a short extract and do a quick analysis of it, building an analytical paragraph up as you go along:

• Identify and linguistically label the features of language you spot.
• Link them to the mode characteristics of the text.
• Provide a clear example.
• Discuss the meaning of the extract and/or the representation it creates of its subject matter.

Foetal prepositions

Here's a quick link to some new research that backs up work by people like Fifer and Mehler (which we've looked at as part of Language Development for ENGA1) on children's early capacity for understanding and picking up language around them.

Is that a mode continuum in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

Today's ENGA1 revision post (the first of a few in the next week) is a tip that can work for pretty much anyone, anywhere.

Here's one I made earlier...

The first thing is to turn out your pockets, find your phone, laptop, tablet (or similar electronic device) or even gather a bundle of things off your kitchen table (see picture above).

• Have a look through the things you find: bus tickets, receipts, prescriptions, books, notes from school/college, text messages, tweets, emails, voice mail recordings.
• Choose 5 or 6 of the "texts" that you find. Basically, you can treat any of these as "texts" of some sort.
• Locate each item on a selection of dimensions from the mode continuum (see here). So, for example, you might choose the formal/informal, standard/non-standard and planned/unplanned dimensions.
• Find a piece of language evidence from each text to back up your mode placement (e.g. "I can tell that this text is planned rather than spontaneous because of this complex sentence" or "I can tell that this text message uses some non-standard features because of this non-capitalised first person pronoun").
• Find the right linguistic label from one of the top bands of AO1 to apply to the feature you've noted.
• Try to write an analytical paragraph about each text, making reference to the purpose of each text, the mode characteristics and the language features.
• Bob's your uncle.

I managed to find:
NUT magazine
Blurb of son's book
Letter from school
DPD missed delivery note
Markscheme
CD cover
Sainsbury's Active Kids token

Revision posts for 2013 coming soon...

I'll be adding short (and, hopefully, sweet) revision posts in the next week or two for ENGA1 and ENGA3. One good way of keeping up to date with new stuff on here (and from other sites and blogs) is to follow @EngLangBlog on Twitter.

If you're looking for top tips on previous years' exams, then just click on the exams link in the labels list on the right hand side of the screen.

Nappies, dummies, baby wipes and elocution lessons?

There's a nice, brief post on yesterday's Independent Voices pages by Ellen E.Jones about accents. In it, she responds to a news story about posh parents paying for private tutors to "correct" the speech patterns of their poor little darlings, who have picked up "incorrect" forms from their foreign nannies.

Jones makes some good points, which relate closely to what we've been looking at in recent A2 English Language lessons, about attitudes to different accents, and notes that the once-sanctified RP accent is now just as likely to provoke hostile reactions among many people as strong regional accents did among the polite classes in years gone by.

The real folly of elocution training is premised on the myth of the “non-accent”. This is a delusion that some people entertain which suggests that while Scouse/Cockney/French accents are cuddly/aggressive/sexy (delete according to your prejudice), one’s own RP English does not count as an accent all. I’ve got bad news: it does. And it’s equally likely to be the subject of snap judgements – just ask poor old, posh old Benedict Cumberbatch. So your child may emerge from elocution lessons talking proper, but they will still have an accent – the accent of someone whose parents were silly enough to pay for elocution lessons.

It's interesting that, for many people, RP is now a rather antiquated and stuffy accent to use, with estimates from linguists suggesting that as little as 3-4% of the UK population actually uses RP. Estuary English, regional varieties such as Geordie, Scouse and Brummie are still stigmatized by some, but increasingly seen as more honest and genuine.

What we don't know is if these regional varieties still attract - as Ellen Ryan put it - status or solidarity: do we like the apparent warmth and honesty of regional varieties but still only really trust the voice of power, the voice of the posh?

Today's Word of Mouth picked up the theme of accents in a really timely way, interviewing a number of people about their perceptions of their own accents and how others view them, as well as addressing the issue of accent reduction. You can listen (for a week, at least) to this episode here.

HT to Sally Flower for Daily Mail story

Some words in your ear

If revising ENGA1 using the visual channel (your eyes) is too much for you, then try something through the aural channel (your ears).

Here's a new episode of Radio 4's Digital Human which talks about how the internet has changed some of the ways we interact. It's not specifically about language throughout, but it's good background for Language and Mode.

Then this is a 15-minute lecture by acclaimed US linguist, John McWhorter on texting and language change. You can read more about it here too. It's very useful for both AS Language and Mode or A2 Language Change and Discourses.

Last Friday's The One Show had a great segment on the changing accents of London, with particular focus on MLE and Cockney, so that fits very nicely with the topic we've just started in ENGA3. You can catch it here until Friday 26th April and the bit you want is from 11 minutes in.

Revisiting hen

Back in April of last year, we reported on this blog about a move in Sweden to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun, hen. In a really excellent article here, Jenny Zhang takes a look at the issues around the decision and the longer term background.

Why do we need a gender-neutral pronoun? How long have we been using "they" to do this job? Why does it matter? All of these are looked at and in a way that's very accessible if you're revising ENGA3 Political Correctness and Language Change issues.

Pidgins and creoles

We've finished work on World Englishes, but if you'd like to see a bit more about two areas we didn't really dwell on, there's some clear and  helpful coverage on creoles and pidgins on the About World Languages website.

Bend it like Beckham

There's been a lot of recent discussion about accommodation - the way in which we shift our language style towards, or away from, that of others - particularly in the field of politics. But, an edition of this week's Newsnight also featured some discussion about how David Beckham's voice has changed from his Estuary accent in the 90s to his apparently more "posh" tones these days.

The clip above provides a good explanation of what's happening and why, but if you want a bit more detail about it, have a look here, and if you want some more on "Estuary English" itself, you can't really get much more detail than what John Wells offers here.

Texting and language discourses

Susan Boyle wants you to come to a party. But what kind of party?

In recent lessons for AS English Language we've been looking at the affordances and limitations of new communication technologies like texts, tweets and message boards as part of work on ENGA1. So, we've seen how technologies allow near-synchronous communication across huge distances, give us the chance to interact with journalists and readers in collaborative acts of communication, rant uncontrollably on the Daily Mail message board, and more worryingly we've stumbled across internet trolls, misunderstood text messages and emails and Susan Boyle's unfortunately ambiguous hashtag (#susanalbumparty).

But as well as being a topic for AS, these new technologies (Can we really call texting new, any more, by the way?) are fair game for work on ENGA3 as well, both in Section A, where we look at change, but also in Section B, where it's more to do with attitudes people have towards changes in language.

This article from the Daily Telegraph is a good example of a prescriptive language discourse around technology and change. Anne Merritt, an ESL lecturer, argues that - despite evidence to contrary from people who have studied texting and literacy - texting is bad for young people:

Call me a traditionalist, but it doesn’t look like a revolution to me. Instead, it looks like a simple decline in proper language skills, born out of a digitally literate culture that has grown too comfortable in an age of abbreviations and spellchecks.

It's worth a read, as it's exactly the kind of article that holds a language topic up for discussion and takes a side: in this case, a side you'd be perfectl;y entitled to agree or disagree with if you were putting an answer together on ENGA3.

For those of you doing ENGA1 Language and Mode (or maybe the AQA B spec's ENGB1 Language and Technology topic), it's interesting to have a look at the abbreviations mentioned at the end. Are these still widely used, or falling by the wayside as technology develops further?

Technolexis

If you're looking for examples of how technology shapes our language for your revision on ENGA3 or ENGB3, then you could do worse than check this article by Tom Chatfield which plugs his new book, Netymology: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World.

It includes hashtag, which was the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year for 2012, and geek, which is not necessarily new but has certainly shifted in meaning as time has gone on, plus plenty of others.

One of the terms Cupertino, might be new to you (and me), but the basic concept is pretty well known; it's all down to how new technologies sometimes "correct" our language, even when we don't want them to. Ben Zimmer of the excellent Visual Thesaurus website, talks about it in more detail here.

A gap to plug

Yesterday's post on 'The language deficit' picked up on Tina Rosenberg's article in The New York Times about programmes designed to bridge the gap between kids brought up in rich language environments (i.e. those getting a great deal of language used around and towards them) and those in a more impoverished (often economically, as well as well as linguistically) environment.

Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus has written a piece on it too, which can be found in The Boston Globe, and in this he looks at similar territory to Rosenberg but also brings in a bit more of a linguistic focus, quoting Deb Roy, whose Speechome Project is something we've looked at in class (and through the links here and here).

The language deficit

If you're revising child language for ENGA1 (or ENGB3 on the AQA B spec), you might find this link a useful one to have a look at. Tina Rosenberg, writing in The New York Times, takes a detailed look at research into the amount and range of language that children hear around them, or have directed at them, and the gap between rich and poor kids that seems to exist.

Rosenberg refers to the work of Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley (which we referred to here a while ago) and recent programmes designed to close this gap. But what kind of gap are we talking about?

The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental.

The programmes to close this gap sound really impressive and are exactly the kind of thing that Sure Start was supposed to help in the UK before its funding was brutally slashed.

More recently, Dana Suskind, a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon at the University of Chicago who founded the school’s Thirty Million Words project, did a study with 17 nannies in Chicago. Each attended a workshop on the importance of talk, strategies for increasing it, and how to use the Lena recorder. Then they used it once a week for six weeks. Suskind found (pdf) that the nannies increased the number of words they used by 32 percent and the number of conversational turns by 25 percent.

We've talked in class a lot about the competing influences of nature and nurture in children's language acquisition, but here's a really interesting approach to improving the quality and range of what children hear, and subsequently it would seem, produce.

Accommodation for the world

And for fans of accommodation (which itself is a form of style-shifting), this piece - grandly titled How Code-Switching Explains the World - is an interesting look at how we all change the way we speak in terms of our accent, dialect, slang, register, you name it, depending on who we're talking to.

This clip from Comedy Central illustrates it nicely.

As the NPR blog honestly explains, their definition of code-switching is a tad looser than linguists might have it:

Linguists would probably quibble with our definition. (The term arose in linguistics specifically to refer to mixing languages and speech patterns in conversation.) But we're looking at code-switching a little more broadly: many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We're hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities — sometimes within a single interaction.

When you're attuned to the phenomenon of code-switching, you start to see it everywhere, and you begin to see the way race, ethnicity and culture plays out all over the place.

You see it in the political world. In January 2009, then-President-elect Obama went to Ben's Chili Bowl, a famous eatery in a historically black D.C. neighborhood. When the (black) cashier asks him if he needs change, Obama replies, "nah, we straight."

It's clear that we all do this to some extent; I know I do when I switch between talking to other teachers in the workroom and talking on the phone to an electrician. It's a natural part of language use: adapting what we say to fit in with our perceptions of how we might be perceived. You get me?

Accommodation for the nation

In a week when one (dead) Tory is making big news, another (living) Tory managed to make a speech that slips neatly into the post-Thatcher (but, sadly, not quite post-Thatcherite) landscape.

And while making his speech, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, Second Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer and heir to the Osborne Baronetcy, slipped into something more comfortable: Jamie Oliver's accent.

You can watch and listen in the clip below and also read about this particular type of accommodation in an article about it by Victoria Coren.

But it's not just Tory toffs who feel the need to switch from one accent to another. In this Daily Telegraph article from last week, Victoria Ward refers to recent by Michelle addison at Newcastle University which makes the point that many people deliberately change their natural voice to avoid prejudice. So, while Osborne shifts down (downwards convergence) to his working class Morrisons audience, according to Addison, university academics with regional accents shift up (upwards convergence) to fit in with the voices that they believe have power and status in their institutions and line of work.

A more detailed report on the study by Michelle Addison (including some critical responses) can be found here.

Apostrophe errors lead to feline feast?

Apostrophes are back in the news again. No, stay with me; it's actually quite interesting... don't go...please.

With the news that a council in Devon was set to formally ban apostrophes from its street signs, many custodians of the language were up in arms. According to The Daily Telegraph, the move "sparked fury". One person felt more than fury; Mary de Vere Taylor felt a mixture of confusion, patriotism and self-doubt all in the space of a few lines:

"It's almost as though somebody with a giant eraser is literally trying to erase punctuation from our consciousness," she said.
"To me there's something terribly British and terribly reassuring about well-written and well-punctuated writing.
"Some may say I should get a life and get out more but if I got out more and saw place names with no apostrophes where there should be I shudder to think how I'd react." 

The image of an actual, literal, giant eraser, replacing the gun barrel of a Chieftain tank, going around the highways and byways (but mostly byways) of Devon rubbing out apostrophes,  paid for by the council tax of honest residents, is one that will stay with me to the grave. Largely because I've just made it up in my own head and am now a bit scared. But that's beside the point. These things matter to lots of people and not all of them are mad.

A year ago, Lindsay Johns of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard (and writer of a few pieces I've had a go at before) bemoaned the disappearance of the apostrophe from the name of the bookshop  Waterstone's. In his article for the Mail he sounds like a man who's washed down his Weetabix with a few too many dictionaries, arguing "My stance here is not one of supercilious grammatical pedantry. For me, this is about something bigger. This is about the debt we owe both to the English language (as custodians of an ineffably rich, august and venerable tongue) and also to future generations".

This all sounds great and even quite touching, until you start to look at what he's so passionate about: a little squiggle. The apostrophe is actually - as David Crystal, the bearded lord of language, explains on Newsnight here and on his own blog here - a bit of a late arrival in the punctuation pantheon, only becoming standardised in the 19th Century.

Crystal goes on to explain the problem in a bit more detail on his blog:

It's impossible to say how long the apostrophe will last. For almost a thousand years of its history, English writing did very well without it. During the 19th century it came to be seen as obligatory, and the rules governing its use were formed. But during the 20th, its role became questioned. Was it really needed? It was sometimes useful in distinguishing meanings, but it seems it could be left out without causing ambiguity most of the time.

So, when Lindsay Johns and other punctuation police get so excited about the apostrophe as a symbol of our great language's mighty and rich history, they are probably overdoing it a little bit. Just as poor Mary de Vere Taylor said to the Telegraph, there's "something terribly British" about clinging on to outward symbols of a fading past.

So, can we do without the apostrophe? Yes and no. In this age of flashy-looking fonts and online search engines, the apostrophe tends to get in the way, either looking a bit incongruous or messing up an otherwise seamless stream of code. We can also, generally speaking, get by without it in most contexts, because it offers clarification about ownership on pretty rare occasions.

But, again pointed out by Crystal, it's currently part of what we consider to be standard English punctuation, so it has a status and value which can't be ignored:

The old order still rules, and has to be respected. Omitting an apostrophe may not cause a problem in a text message, but it can cause a huge problem in essays, job applications, and other kinds of formal writing. Not because it makes meaning unclear, but simply because it goes against what society considers to be acceptable English. Students have to be taught how to manage this situation, so that they know what's expected of them.  

I'm all in favour of ditching apostrophes altogether, but while they're part of the current system of punctuation, you can expect your work handed back with red rings around errant or missing apostrophes. Otherwise you could end up like this poor family, worrying about whether their teenage sons are really eating their pet cats...

The lack of an apostrophe has the potential to cause even more alarming misunderstandings (Letters, 21 March). While away on holiday I received a message from my teenage boys at home, declaring: "We have completely run out of food and are so desperate we are going to have to eat the cats."
Adrian Brodkin, London

from The Guardian letters page 22.03.13

Words of war

In a great article for today's Guardian, the lexicographer and language blogger, Kory Stamper looks at the language of war, and in this case the language that has emerged in the ten years since the invasion of Iraq.

As a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster in the USA, she is well-placed to offer an overview of this, because as well as helping provide definitions for words, the Merriam-Webster has taken to tracking the words that are looked up at given moments or across longer periods of time. To put it simply (and with a degree of exaggeration), they have an insight into what the American public is thinking about - or checking that they know about - as they think it.

You can see spikes in certain words around key moments in the US presidential campaign if you track back through the tweets of @PeterSokolowski, or the prominence of certain words around other major news events, but it's the overview of the ten years that follow the Iraq invasion that Stamper concentrates on. So, we can see early appearances for the famous (and non-existent) WMDs. Then, later on, we find waterboarding and roadmap, alongside the supposed reason for the whole affair, democracy. The article is a great read and really useful for those of you looking at how and why language changes for ENGA3.

Who cares?

Who cares about English? While this is a question I'm increasingly asking myself - especially when I get given A level essays two weeks late, written on Hello Kitty notepaper and handed in with a cheery "It's crap!" - this post isn't part of my usual moaning about students these days and the need to do lots of work for the exam. Well sort of...

Who cares about English? This time, the question isn't aimed at the heavens, but at a panel of experts and kind-of experts. And the answer of course should be, "We all do", or at the very least, "I don't really care, but I can do a very good impression of caring for the purposes of my exam".

Anyway, have a look here where you can watch (and read the answers from) a panel discussion between four language lovers, including one of my favourite people, Henry Hitchings, and the rather unfortunately named Prudence Raper, from the almost as unfortunate Queen's English Society.

The questions they're addressing in this discussion are:“What are the effects of social media, such as Facebook, on English?” and “What is English, given that it is spoken in so many different countries?”, which are exactly the kinds of things a soon-to-be-revising A2 student should be thinking about.

The language of love

There's a short and informative piece by David Shariatmadari in today's Guardian about the changing terminology used to label and describe people of different sexual orientation. In the comment piece, he talks about the terms that have developed over time and the arguments about such language.

Linking his points to a wider discussion of the role of language in shaping or reflecting people's attitudes to sexuality, he asks "Does language change politics, or is it the other way round? Or perhaps language is more like fashion, in having something to do with prevailing attitudes, but not, ultimately, being all that important".

It's a question we've looked at in A2 English language lessons recently, particularly around the language of race and discrimination. Shariatmadari goes on to raise this too.

Language certainly feels important if you've just been shouted at by a racist or a homophobe. But it's worth asking whether zero tolerance of the N-word, for instance, might be a precursor to, or an after-effect of, more enlightened thinking. Or whether in the US, where it is perhaps the biggest linguistic taboo of all, racism has, in fact, ceased to be a problem.

When we've looked at Political Correctness (PC) and the movement to change language or highlight its potential problems, we've often speculated on the relationship between language and attitudes. Can removing bad words remove bad ideas from people's heads? Or does it just create a vacuum for another bad word to rush into?

Shariatmadari argues what is essentially a reflectionist perspective: "Language is the imprint of our culture. It encodes – though it does not determine – the character of the age". The language that is used to label people who are gay, bisexual, transgendered or questioning is changing to reflect the range of sexual identities that are now gaining prominence (but were probably always there) rather than necessarily shaping identities.

There was another article on this topic a few weeks ago, which you can find here. It's good to have a range of references when you're answering ENGA3 questions about Language Change and Language Discourses, so have a read and make a few notes...

Keep buzzing

MacMillan Dictionaries have had a really good web presence for a while now, with plenty of accessible articles for A level students (and normal, everyday people who are just interested in language).

One of the best and most useful features for A level English Language has been its Buzzwords section, a weekly feature in which the ace lexicographer Kerry Maxwell takes a look at a new word that's appeared and explores its origins, formations and uses.

It's exactly the kind of thing that feeds into the work we do on Language Change for ENGA3 (or ENGB3 if you follow the AQA B spec) and provides the kind of up to date and well-referenced examples of words and word formation processes that can make your essays on this topic a much better read, and keep you topped up with new and original illustrations.

Buzzwords is now ten years old, so Kerry has written an overview about what's happened in the world of new words, which you can find here. We'll be looking at this in class in the run-up to the exam in June, but it's definitely worth having a read now and looking back through the Buzzwords for 2012 here and the archive here.

Speak now, pay later

There's always been lively debate among linguists and non-linguists alike about the extent to which language might influence or even control the way we think. At its most extreme, we find the strong version of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (largely the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf) which argues that the way we interpret the world around us is heavily influenced by the language available to us:

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language...

Many have taken this to mean that he believed that language helped control and shape the way we think (a view originally put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt) but others suggest that Whorf was never really making such a bold claim.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of this, there has been a lot of interest in the idea that the languages we speak, the words we choose and the grammar we use might have an impact on how we view the world. This week's BBC news website carries an account of Professor Keith Chen's research into language and economic habits, wherein he suggests that speakers of languages that have a strong "future time reference" (i.e. use a separate tense to indicate future time) are less likely to plan ahead in terms of money and health. As the BBC story puts it, "... if you speak English you are likely to save less for your old age, smoke more and get less exercise than if you speak a language like Mandarin, Yoruba or Malay".

According to Chen, languages either have a strong or weak FTR (future time reference) and those with a strong FTR tend to separate present and future, making it less likely that the speakers connect present actions with future events. In other words, the stronger the difference between your language's representation of present and future, the weaker the speakers' ability to link present and future. He argues that this then leads to an inability to plan ahead.

Of course, this is a very difficult idea to prove, particularly if you're not actually a linguist (Professor Chen is primarily an economist), and Professor Geoff Pullum cautions against taking the research at face value in an interesting response on Language Log. One of his key points is that Chen is mistaken in claiming that English has strong FTR, given that we tend to use the present tense (I am going to play football to morrow) or modal verbs (I will play football tomorrow).

The story has been picked up elsewhere, including here, where other links between language and thought are discussed, and in this debate between Lera Boroditsky and Mark Liberman.