Sledging: bad. Carpet beating: bad

According to an article on the BBC website, many old laws still exist in the statute books, including the following gems: You must not wear armour to Parliament (Royal Prerogative 1279); fire a cannon close to a dwelling house (Met Police Act 1839); use any slide upon ice or snow (Town Police Clauses Act 1847). That's my weekend ruined then...

But what's this got to do with language? Well, many of these old laws are being displayed by the Law Society and the wording of them is something to behold. Perhaps an investigation into legal language would be an idea for coursework in A2? Maybe looking at changes (or perhaps a lack of any change) in the language of law would be an interesting focus.

On another level though, the laws of the time are a bit like the language: they reflect a society's concerns and preoccupations at a given time and are interesting to look at as a result.

Useful for:
EA4C - Language Investigation
ENA5 - Language Change

H.E.I.D.I.s thrive while Ladults leer

This post started with an article in Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter which got me chasing up some links. In it he reports on the rise of two new words, "Ladult" - a blend of "lad" and "adult" supposedly describing a particular type of bloke in 2005 - and "HEIDI" - an acronym standing for Highly Educated Independent, Degree-carrying Individuals, a particular type of woman.

For more on each word, read on:

Enter the Ladult

A year after the wristband generation sought to Make Poverty History, we are on the brink of a nouveau hippy movement, combining spirituality, care for the environment and other people and a life code , says Ian Pearson, futurologist at BT. 'We've had Make Poverty History and this is part of the same trend. It only needs one or two charismatic people to trigger it, which could happen at any moment,' he said.

The New Man and the Metrosexual are dead. Long live the Ladult. He is single, assured, solvent and secure in his new-found masculinity. Aged between 25 and thirtysomething, the Ladult works moderately hard at middle management. His suits and shirts come from Paul Smith, Zegna, Thomas Pink and Reiss. He spends a lot on gadgets and DVDs, and enjoys poker, online gambling and even fly fishing. He irons his own shirts and can cook simple meals. He has no problem with the notion that women are his equals, but secretly thinks they are different.

Further up the age spectrum, the baby boomers are hitting 60, which could ignite generational conflict. 'They're the best-off, best-educated parents ever,' said Tom Bentley, director of the think-tank Demos. 'They have a postwar consensus mindset that tells them not to sink quickly into middle age. They want to make the most of the consumer and spending power they have. But the thirtysomething generation - the David Cameron generation - is moving into instrumental positions and has different priorities.' These include climate change; will the baby boomers do their bit, or turn into grumpy old men and women?

HEIDIS on the march

Highly Educated Independent, Degree-carrying Individuals, or HEIDIs, are set to become one of the most influential sectors in modern British society and any self-respecting brand ignores them at their peril. According to a 2005 study by Allegra Strategies and The Future Laboratory’s findings from its 2,500-strong LifeSigns Network, there are almost 7.2m HEIDIs in the UK.

They are in their late 20s and 30s and their contribution to the economy is vast. A typical HEIDI is selfmotivated, in control and articulate about herbespoke needs and brand-related purchases. Thanks to an affluence born of credit, lifestyle is her buzzword, and achieving one that is smooth, luxurious, immersive, hassle-free and aspirational is her goal.

So there you have it; if you exist as a human being, someone out there in focus group land has a word to label you with. But what's driving this language change? Are there really new "types" of people emerging who have to be labelled? Is this like the Industrial Revolution where new words sprung up to label the multitude of new products and inventions, or existing words were co-opted into employment? Hardly...

What seems to be driving this change is not supply and demand, but a very 21 st century phenomenen: consumerism and its reinvention of existing material, marketed in a new way, to sell us what we already have, or don't actually need. In other words, the creation of "new" social groups and their subsequent promotion in lifestyle magazines and newspaper articles is part of a process that targets us as consumers. So "new words" might be seen as complicit in all of this - they make these new classifications seem exciting or sexy.

Or am I being paranoid? Do we really take these words at face value and unthinkingly adopt them as part of our vocabulary? Probably not: we're clever enough to raise a quizzical eyebrow, laugh it off and get on with our lives most of the time. But it's an interesting idea, I think, that new words are being created as part of a commercial strategy.

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

Politician in talking sense horror!

After this morning's narky post about Tony Blair's language, here's one to redress the balance and prove that not all politicians use weasel words and Nu-Labour jargon to hide the absence of any real policies (there I go again...).

Tony Banks, who died last week, was one of the few decent lefties left in the Labour Party, but more to the point a man that had a wicked way with words and was a master of put-downs. An article in The Guardian a couple of days ago reprinted some of his wittiest quips. Worth a look for a bit of entertainment and to see some good language play in action...

R-E-S-P-E-C-T find out what it means to me...

When he's not steam-cleaning graffiti off estate walls, imposing ASBOs on 4 year olds with ADHD or strumming a Foreigner tune on his Stratocaster, Tony Blair is giving language enthusiasts exciting new meanings to words. Praise be to our glorious leader!

"Respect" is his latest one. Not that it's a new word:it briefly appeared as a slang term on the streets before Ali G made it fashionable as a parody of urban speech; George Galloway's bunch of Islamo-Trot chancers adopted it for their party a couple of years back (and now see Galloway showing no self-respect in the Big Brother house); but now it's different. Respect isn't just respect anymore. No, it's so much more.

As Simon Jenkins points out in today's Guardian, what are really needed are not new words and cryptic jargonistic phrases, but local communities having real power. What's the point of inventing a "Baby ASBO" or "Sin-bins" for anti-social families when people don't feel they actually have any say in how their local communities are run? I could go on, but I fear it will turn into a rant, so I'll just link to a site or two where people actually involve the local community in decision-making and leave it at that.

Defending PC

A report by the Civitas think tank earlier in the week about PC sparked debate on several radio stations and crowing articles in the right wing press. The main arguments can be found in this posting.

But in yesterday's Observer, columnist Will Hutton makes a number of good points defending PC, or rather what he terms courtesy, arguing that we're not living under some liberal jackboot (a bizarre and distinctly unsexy image, like Simon Hughes in drag) but in a society where words matter and can create division and hatred.

Interestingly, Hutton ties in language used to label and discriminate with the racist or totalitarian societies that produced them, arguing:

"Derogatory words laden with prejudice not only degrade those they describe, who find themselves categorised in ways they do not deserve - they degrade the social currency. The aggressive, dysfunctional language of hatred of the American South, Nazi Germany or Mao's China helped both to create and sustain those societies. Words were crucial to the governing ideologies".

So, while the trendy argument on the right of the political spectrum seems to be that PC is taking away our rights to free speech, Hutton makes the persuasive point that PC is in fact defending our rights to live in a peaceful society free from abuse.

(Thanks to Anjuli for this link.)

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

Ladies first

Today's Sunday Times runs a story reporting on the American Dialect Society's annual meeting. According to one of the speakers at the event, Sali Tagliamonte associate professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto, “Girls are the single most powerful force in the English language today”. Young women are leading the way when it comes to lexical change: in other words, girls are picking up on new words and coining new expressions much more readily than boys, leading the way in changing our language.

So are young women more innovative with language or do they just talk about each other more and therefore find new ways to bitch about each other? "Muffin top":a bulge of flesh over low-cut jeans, and "whale tail": the appearance of a thong above the waistband, are just great two great examples of phrases used to describe other women's appearance!

If girls are leading the way, how much of what they come up with will be picked up by boys? Will it be like the pattern that many linguists have noted in conversation between males and females, where women introduce many more topics than men, only to have men reject nearly every topic they start?

The implications for research into changing slang and varieties of English could be pretty interesting...

Az you like it

Last week's BBC article about a survey of businesspeople responding to accents started people thinking again about prejudices that lurk under the surface of our society towards people who speak in non-standard ways or with a pronounced regional accent.

According to the article, covered by this blog here, strong regional accents suggest a variety of negative impressions from untrustworthiness (Cockney and Scouse) to failure (Brummie and West Midlands).

I followed up my initial interest in this and emailed the Aziz Corporation to find out more about their survey, so here's what the helpful Elspeth sent back - I think it makes interesting reading. Obviously, the Aziz Corporation have a vested interest in making us feel like we're likely to be disregarded if we don't speak RP or softened versions of regional accents (they earn a living by coaching speakers) , but equally that doesn't mean prejudices aren't there. The extra detail provided here adds a bit weight to the media coverage last week:

We are a company that specialises in helping senior executives become stunning communicators (not really a group of James Bond supervillains - honest!) and we regularly undertake surveys about business behaviour. The respondents are senior business people who receive our monthly newsletter, e-communique.

For the purposes of this survey, we used a company called "Survey Monkey" - respondents were asked a simple series of questions that asked them to rate different accents. They were not given the opportunity to add any further comments. I guess what we're trying to say is, that although it's not politically correct to believe that accents matter nowadays, it's apparent from our research that certain prejudices still exist.

When it comes to doing business, the majority of British bosses regard someone with an overseas accent, including American, Continental European and Indian or Asian, as more likely to succeed than someone with an accent from the English regions. Businessmen with Indian or Asian accents are also considered by their peers to be more hardworking and reliable than any of their colleagues from the UK or overseas.

The survey, carried out by the UK’s leading executive communications consultancy The Aziz Corporation, reveals a strong prejudice against regional accents, with 79 per cent of business men and women believing that a strong regional accent is a disadvantage in business. Business people with a Home Counties accent are considered to be generally successful by 77 per cent of those in business, followed by those with an American accent (73 per cent), a Scottish accent (63 per cent), a Continental European accent (52 per cent) or an Indian or Asian accent (25 per cent).

By contrast 64 per cent of business people regard those with a Liverpudlian tone as being generally unsuccessful, closely followed by those with a Birmingham or West Midlands accent (63 per cent), a cockney accent (52 per cent) and Geordie or West Country accents (48 per cent). Businessmen who speak with an Indian or Asian accent are considered to be hardworking and reliable by 69 per cent of their peers, a higher rating than those with any other accent.

Those with accents from America are considered to be diligent by 66 per cent of their peers, followed by those with a Scottish accent (61 per cent) and a Home Counties accent (50 per cent). By contrast, only 24 per cent of executives consider those with a Liverpudlian accent to be hardworking, with just 29 per cent viewing those with either a Welsh or West Country accent to be hardworking.

Khalid Aziz, Chairman of The Aziz Corporation, comments: “Although it may not be politically correct to believe that accents matter nowadays, it is very apparent from our research that popular prejudices still exist. If you want to get ahead in business and don’t speak the Queen’s English, it is better to sound as if you are from America, Europe, India or indeed Scotland than from any English region.

“Accents can speak louder than words. Even if you think like Albert Einstein, the reality is that if you sound like Vera Duckworth you will face prejudices in the business world.”

The research also found that businessmen with certain accents face particularly strong prejudices. 27 per cent believe those with a Liverpudlian accent to be generally dishonest and untrustworthy, while 25 per cent think the same of those with a cockney accent. By contrast those with a Scottish accent are highly regarded, with 63 per cent viewing them as successful, 61 per cent as hardworking and reliable and 63 per cent as honest and trustworthy.

Khalid Aziz comments: “In the light of these results we would advise individuals to consider softening rather than changing broad accents. Experience shows that the key is to avoid using localised vocabulary, which others may not recognise. Sloppy speech can also be a major obstacle to making yourself understood and people of all accents can be guilty of this.”

La meplu de ma tante est sous la bleta, innit?

With slang becoming a bit of an obsession on this blog, I'm grateful to Simon in Cornwall (off the excellent English Language List for A Level English Language teachers) for this link to articles about French street slang, and in particular the slang known as Verlan.

The word itself gives you something of a clue as to its meaning: it's an inversion of the syllables of "l'envers" or for English speakers, "the opposite" or "back to front". So what you do is switch syllables round (a bit like the weird backspeak some people use at school or college): famille (family) becomes "mifa"; bizous (kisses) becomes "zibou" etc.

According to an article in USA Today, Verlan has achieved some prominence as the slang of dispossessed urban youth in the banlieus (see the La Haine posts earlier in the year) despite the fact it's been knocking around for hundreds of years and is hardly a new phenomenen.

So what's this got to do with English Language? Well, lots obviously. Just because it's French doesn't mean it has to be rubbish, despite what I might claim drunkenly about their wine producers. The patterns at work with French slang seem to be the very same in our own - and that shouldn't really be a surprise, as slang is driven by the same social tides and ripples, whatever country you're from.

Looking at what the author of the USA Today report tells us about middle class youths picking up Verlan as a badge of "ghetto credentials" is a bit like hearing about "homies" from Norfolk who talk about "gats", "bitches" and "whips" when the nearest thing they've got to a "whip" is a Massey Ferguson tractor and the nearest thing they've got to a "gat" is a glimpse of their father's shotgun as he blasted a pheasant in the arse (for the sake of tradition, obviously).

Two other articles - Do you speak verlan? and Parlez-vous verlan? - also suggested by Simon in Cornwall, give you more details about Verlan and its roots and potential future.

Is political correctness destroying our culture?

We've looked at this argument before on the blog, but today a report from a right wing "think tank" (whatever that might be - probably a bloke down the pub) claims that Political Correctness is destroying British life and denying us freedoms. Radio 5 Live have been covering the report and adding to the debate this morning: you can listen again through this link. 

So what's under discussion? What is political correctness and is it really the scourge of civil liberties that some commentators are claiming? Part of the problem is the definition: many people are talking at cross purposes, conflating arguments about removing offensive terms from the language with arguments about what are acceptable topics for discussion in a multicultural society. 

So while most people are probably fine with the idea that calling people with cerebral palsy "spastics" or black people the n-word is unacceptable, and that PC alternatives should be found, many others would feel uncomfortable if they were told that it was offensive to discuss the problems of integrating white, black and Asian communities in inner city areas, or issues like treatment of women in different religions. 

For more on political correctness check this link from Wikipedia and follow the links from there. 

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

Class & accent

Another follow-up, this time to last week's post about the Aziz Corporation and their survey on regional accents and how businesspeople respond to them. Again, in today's Observer, diarist Cristina Odone writes about the link between accent and class in Britain. Good ammunition for debate on language varieties!

The ram's testicles

Following on from Thursday's plug for the Balderdash & Piffle programme (tomorrow 9pm on BBC2), here's a link to an article in today's Observer in which Victoria Coren makes a number of interesting points about what the current upsurge of interest in all matters English Language might tell us about our national identity. Plus there's some good stuff on etymology and more about what's shaping up to be a good programme.

A brain like Albert Einstein and a voice like Vera Duckworth

A bizarre combination, but one introduced by Khalid Aziz whose Aziz Corporation has carried out a survey of businesspeople to explore attitudes to accents in the workplace.

"Even if you think like Albert Einstein, the reality is that if you sound like Vera Duckworth you will face prejudices in the business world," claims Aziz, before going on to say, "Experience shows that the key is to avoid using localised vocabulary, which others may not recognise".

So, do prejudices to accent and dialect exist in our society, and if so will they really hold you back? It's an interesting question and one that is probably not best answered by businesspeople themselves. Who are the Aziz Corporation? They sound a bit like a group of James Bond supervillains to me... And is the focus of their survey accent or dialect (the way we speak or what we say)? It seems a touch unclear.

Howard Giles once carried out a telling piece of research - the matched guise experiment - that has been replicated by students all over the country in coursework investigations. He found that while many respondents claimed to like regional accents for their warmth and friendliness (both rather vague judgements about the personality of the speakers who used them) they were much more likely to regard the speakers of RP as having more authority and expertise. (I've summarised this a little loosely, but that's the gist of it: a more detailed look at regional variations can be found in this extract from Peter Trudgill's book.)

So, is this what's happening with attitudes to regional and national accents in Aziz's survey? It seems to be, but we'd need to know more about the way the survey was conducted and the nature of the responses. I might just follow this up with him...

Meanwhile, for all the talk of multi-ethnic youth dialect and growing tolerance towards non-standard varieties, are we maybe kidding ourselves that the people who make the big decisions that really affect us (like giving us a job, a mortgage or a payrise) are as fair as we might want them to be? Perhaps there's still a huge reservoir of prejudice towards accents that aren't seen as "normal" - whatever that might be.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties

Balderdash & Piffle

Just a quick plug, for a new programme called Balderdash & Piffle on BBC2 next week (Monday 9pm) about origins of words and phrases in English, produced in association with the Oxford English Dictionary. Could be very handy for studying Language Change units.

Festive language round-up

I hope everyone who reads this blog has had a good Christmas break (so far). I'll keep this post brief as there are lots of other things to do.

A couple of articles which have appeared over the last week or so are worth a look at: first off is the list of most popular baby names for the year. According to the Guardian and Independent, it's back to the future with these: old-fashioned names top the list, while those influenced by celebrity births and popular TV characters show a rise as well (although I should add that we called our daughter Ruby well before we realised she was a character in Eastenders, and she's named after our favourite food, in cockney rhyming slang, or something like that...).

'New old-fashioned' Jack is most popular name for 11th year
Jessica and Jack are top baby names

Second up is the news that predictive text dictionaries are being updated to include new words and phrases. Like traditional lexicographers, the firms who create dictionaries for new technologies are having to keep pace with lexical change in English. But what's driving these changes and is new technology causing some of these changes? Someone told me recently of an appearance of the word "book" as a new slang term for "cool" because it's what appears in predictive text when you type the latter. We're all aware of processes like blending, conversion, compounding and borrowing in language change, but what do we call it when it's just a technological blip?

At a stroke: Asbo, smlirt, podcast enter predictive text dictionary

And finally (as Trevor McDonald used to say), to the word "Christmas" itself. Has political correctness "gone crazy" (copyright Daily Mail mentalist posse) again? The Sun - always a bastion of accurate reporting and fairmindedness - has been crusading against "loony" councils who have allegedly banned the word "Christmas" so as not to offend religious minorities. Except, they're struggling to find that many examples of it happening and not quite getting it right even when they do find examples. There is a similar trend in the USA media, but perhaps with a slightly different slant. Have a look at the selection of articles here and make up your own mind! And have a Happy New Year.

Pupils in 'c'-word ban
Nativity scenes are out, carols are banned, and don't dare wish anyone merry Christmas: the festive season, US-style
Don't mention the C-word
Christmas under threat from political correctness

Multi-ethnic youth dialect - thanks!

Thanks for all the completed questionnaires already posted or emailed. This is going to be a much bigger project than I'd originally envisaged but it should prove very interesting as a result.

Thanks!

Pryor Convictions

It was really sad to hear that the comedian Richard Pryor had died earlier this week. He was one of the most influential stand-up comedians of his generation and creator of some hilarious sketches and characters.

I can't really add anything to what's appeared in various obituaries and tributes, but it's maybe worth thinking about looking at some of his - and other stand-ups' - sketches as a source of data for linguistic analysis on research investigations.

For a study of laughter and what it does to us, check this Telegraph online article. Meanwhile have a look at some of the links to Richard Pryor websites for more info about this comic genius.

Multi-ethnic youth dialect (rewind)

Following on from yesterday's post about the rise of "multi-ethnic youth dialect" it would be good to have some responses to a little bit of data collection we've initiated. If you go to the SFX resources site, you can download a grid that asks you to fill in your colloquial version of various common expressions or phrases, such as greetings or words for things that are good or bad.

If you fill it in and return it to me at either the college email address or the address on the website. we'll crunch up the data and share the findings.

Multi-ethnic youth dialect

I don't know how many of you read this blog from beyond south London, where our college is based, but it would be handy to have as many of you contribute to this debate as possible, wherever you're from.

Various pieces of research and comment from linguists such as Roger Hewitt in the late 80s/early 90s, Roxy Harris in the 90s and Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and David Britain this year, seem to be suggesting that there is a new youth dialect emerging in the UK. This dialect is not regionally based, as many have been in the past, but linked to a whole range of other factors: ethnicity, age, identification with a particular way of life or subculture (or "communities of practice" as linguists seem to be calling it now).

According to an article in today's Sunday Times (which, it has to be said, is a pretty badly cobbled together piece) this dialect is spreading far and wide. Read the article and let us know what you think. And more usefully, in weeks to come we'll be running our own research to see how well known certain slang terms are and what they mean to you around the country.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change and Varieties

Motherese, Parentese, Gesturese?

We all know that interaction with children is believed to help them with their language acquisition - Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner and loads of others tell us so - but did we know that our body language could affect this too?

An article in today's Scotsman newspaper, citing research from Maria O'Neill at Portsmouth University, suggests that simple non-verbal communication like "Pointing at objects such as a dog while repeating the name; Tapping when counting items; Nodding and head shaking when saying yes or no" can rapidly improve a child's understanding of language.

This may not sound like such a revolutionary concept (and maybe it isn't, but you can never rely on a newspaper to tell you the full story!) and it's fairly clear that you can't really help children label things around them without some body language to identify the things they're labelling, but the real success of this approach seems to be with kids who haven't developed as quickly as others. Maybe it means that certain "learning styles" (a trendy area of teaching at the moment) can be applied to one year olds as well as 14 year olds and the rest of us.

Or perhaps it just means that we should be careful about slapping our heads and miming "d'oh" when our children can't identify their names on a Christmas card and open their brother's instead...

Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition

Boy George Savaged by Beast

Politics - and the language of political rhetoric - is back on the front pages of the national press (which makes a change from I’m A Celebrity and Robbie Williams in Not Gay Shocker), with David Cameron being elected to lead the Tory party and facing his first exchanges with Tony Blair in Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday.

But it’s an older fighter, rather than a new pretender, who hit the headlines yesterday: Dennis Skinner aka The Beast of Bolsover, a Labour MP known for his fierce socialism and hatred of the pampered rich, got himself excluded from The House of Commons for goading the new Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, over his alleged use of cocaine.

In an exchange over rates of growth in the economy in the 1980s, Skinner commented "The only thing that was growing then was the lines of coke in front of Boy George and the rest of the Tories." Skinner wouldn’t retract his statement, so was excluded for the day.

Marginally higher up the scale of subtlety (but not much) was the playwright, Harold Pinter’s blistering attack on the USA and its foreign policy in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In The Guardian, Michael Billington, the newspaper's theatre critic, analyses the content and delivery of Pinter’s speech, commenting:

Warming to his theme, Pinter argued that while language is, for the dramatist, an ambiguous transaction, it is something that politicians distort for the sake of power. And, in making his point, Pinter deployed a variety of tactics: the charged pause, the tug at the glasses, the unremitting stare at the camera. I am told by Michael Kustow, who co-produced the lecture, that after a time he stopped giving Pinter any instructions. He simply allowed him to rely on his actor's instinct for knowing how to reinforce a line or heighten suspense.

Although the content of the speech was highly political, especially in its clinical dissection of post-war US foreign policy, it relied on Pinter's theatrical sense, in particular his ability to use irony, rhetoric and humour, to make its point. This was the speech of a man who knows what he wants to say but who also realises that the message is more effective if rabbinical fervour is combined with oratorical panache.

The full text of Pinter's speech can be read here.

A more – apparently – conciliatory approach was taken by David Cameron towards Tony Blair in PMQ on Wednesday, but an article in The Independent takes a look at the pragmatics and hidden implicature present in the first bout between the two leaders. Reading between the lines they can see that Cameron's ostensibly affable style hides a sharper, steelier core:

David Cameron: "I want schools to control their own admissions. That's what's in the White Paper and let's see it turns into the Bill."

What he meant: I am going to do all that I can to drive a wedge between the Prime Minister and Labour backbenchers on the sensitive issue of admissions

Tony Blair: "It's obvious that we disagree on the issue of admissions. I think if schools are free to bring back selection at the age of 11 that would be regressive for our country. So I'm afraid in this grand new consensus we have to disagree on that point."

What he meant: Phew! Thank goodness I've found something to disagree with him on. Hopefully this will reassure some of the Labour doubters.

Useful for:
ENA1 – Language & Representation
ENA3 – Spoken Language