Solving crime with linguistics

Forensic linguistics is a really fascinating area of language study, so this lecture by Dr Malcolm Coulthard, one of the daddies of the discipline, is well worth a look. Here he shows how linguistic analysis can be used to piece together the identity/ies of text message senders in criminal cases.

Slang rules, ya smell me?

The Sun seems to be having a love-in with slang at the moment, and they've got a piece in today's edition giving lots of examples of different types of slang from various occupational and lifestyle groups. I can't claim it to be a very linguistic take on slang, but there are some funny ones (and a few dodgy ones too, like the definition of bare, which is just wrong).

Five Go Mad on Mephedrone

The news that Enid Blyton's classics children's series, The Famous Five is to have its language updated has upset some and pleased others. The Famous Five books were originally published over 60 years ago and have been huge sellers since then (I even read them when I was a little boy back in the 1970s.) but have often come under fire for their old-fashioned representations of boys' and girls' social roles and for their apparently class-ridden stereotypes. So, will we see the stories themselves updated to meet the demands of a 21st Century audience: teenagers indulging in binge drinking, chopping out lines of miaow-miaow while updating their Facebook profiles, casual threesomes and the like? Not on your nelly.

While the stories will remain the same, Hodder Children, which is revamping them for publication next month, is planning to update the language. So gone will be "we shall have a gay old time", "he's a queer looking fellow" and "school tunic", and in will come "I is cotching at my yard innit" and "Man's gotta make money y'feel me". Well, not exactly... Apparently the changes are relatively minor ones such as explained by Anne McNeil in this extract from The Guardian's piece last week:

Other changes include "housemistress" becoming "teacher", "awful swotter" becoming "bookworm", "mother and father" becoming "mum and dad", "school tunic" becoming "uniform" and Dick's comment that "she must be jolly lonely all by herself" being changed to "she must get lonely all by herself". McNeil said references to a "tinker" have also been changed to "traveller". "Enid Blyton wouldn't have meant that ['tinker'] pejoratively. It's a description of a person, in order to place the character. So 'dirty tinker' has become traveller."

 For anyone looking at the A2 topic of Language Change, this would be a fertile area for investigation. Why are some expressions being changed and others left the same? Is there any kind of pattern to some of the words being changed? Are they (for instance) dated slang terms that no one will recognise these days, or words that have shifted in meaning? Later in the article, an opponent of changes to the original books makes an interesting point about the names of characters:

Tony Summerfield, who runs the Enid Blyton Society, said he was "thoroughly against unnecessary changes just for the sake of it, from adults who underestimate the intelligence of children". He added: "I am in approval of changing language which has perhaps become offensive or has different meanings, or any racist references," he said. "And certain words such as 'gay' or 'queer' obviously have different meanings nowadays and it's fair enough to change them. But changes for the sake of them, I disapprove of."

Summerfield had heard Hodder would change the name of the circus boy, Nobby, in Five Go Off in a Caravan, to Ned, which struck him "as very strange". "How can you change Nobby to Ned and yet leave Dick and Fanny? It doesn't make sense.

Elsewhere, Zoe Williams of The Guardian argues that we shouldn't change the books, claiming that "In expunging the dated words, you strip out their personality: and even if you don't particularly like that personality, it's better than none at all, a skeletal adventure without the flesh of authorial voice".

Street slang has no place in the classroom

That old bugbear, street slang, makes another appearance in the news and this time it's not all "let's all laugh at the white children speaking like they're black" it's like "street slang is really bad for kids". Frankly, as I type this I am kissing my bloodclart teeth.

A new pamphlet (actually a rather poorly researched and sketchy document) published by the Centre for Policy Studies makes the claim that teachers in primary schools are either a) too scared, or b) not allowed to "correct" children's slang use and are therefore hindering their literacy development. It's a typical right wing argument that PC has gone too far and that we are no longer allowed to speak our own language in our own country, and it's therefore no surprise that Boris Johnson writes the foreword to the pamphlet, right wing bozo that he is.

Here's an extract from the report:

In other European countries argot and slang are not allowed into the classroom; children know exactly what is “correct” usage in their main language, and what is not. In this country, by contrast, primary school teachers – dedicated as many of them are to “child-led” education – don’t feel that it’s their role to interfere with self expression in any shape or form. On the contrary, they encourage children to read poems and stories written in ethnic dialects – in Barbadian patois, for example – which is fine, but they omit to point out that there are linguistic discrepancies. Only later, when they get to secondary school, do these pupils discover that “Street” is not acceptable in their written work. Understandably, they find this both confusing and discouraging. 

Where to start? The conflation of dialect and slang is all too common, so that's maybe a first point to pick out. They're not the same thing at all. Slang is a type of language marked by its informality and its association with particular groups of people who share a common shared interest. It's often used to mark an affiliation or identification with a particular way of life. Dialect is often associated with particular regions and varieties of English. So, for the writer of the document, Miriam Gross, to say that children are taught dialect poetry and then to extend this to street slang is just plain wrong. Yes, students of all ages get to study a range of literature from all over the world, some of it in dialect, but that's not the language they recognise as slang. I suspect the fact that some of it is Caribbean dialect poetry and a lot of recent slang is heavily influenced by Caribbean terms has caused her brain to melt down and assume it's one and the same.

Secondly, Gross then claims that "child-led" education (which she seems to hate more than slang) is a philosophy that prevents teachers from "correcting" children's "misuse" of language. That's news to me. If we're going to get anecdotal (and let's face it, there are no references in Gross's report to actual research so I won't be the first to) my own kids came back from their caring sharing child-led primary school the other week to tell me "Daddy, innit is not a word". So much for not correcting speech in primary schools. Of course, I tell them innit is a perfectly acceptable use of an invariant tag question when used in the appropriate colloquial context, but then they've already gone back to FIFA on the X-box to compare their bare skillz and that.

Thirdly, young people do not find reactions to different language styles "confusing and discouraging". They deal with them, like we all do and adjust their language to suit the purposes and contexts of what they're doing. It's called code-switching and we all do it. Children are taught Standard English at school from a very early age and to claim that what they get is a diet of patois and slang is utter rubbish.

Finally, the whole report has a horrible whiff of Tory back-to-Victorian-values crustiness about it. English is great. Everything that's not proper English is bad. Children need facts not self-expression etc etc. 

The Lancaster University linguist Paul Kerswill, in the reader comments to a Guardian piece on this report puts a very convincing case against the report:

This is a big debate and we mustn't jump to conclusions. Four points: (1) The English language like all living languages is always in a state of change. There was no Golden Age. (2) London's English has always reflected the city's multiethnic, multilingual character, and today is no exception. We cannot suppress creativity in young Londoners’ use of language, written and spoken. See my short article(3) We empower children economically and socially by helping them achieve literacy, but with the huge technology-driven changes in the way we communicate we should recognise that ‘literacy’ nowadays needs to encompass much more than it did 20 years ago. It goes far beyond a question of apostrophes or whether we should say ‘fewer’ or ‘less’. (4) Teachers and the people who train them need to be absolutely clear about their objectives when teaching literacy skills, and to develop methods accordingly. The Guardian’s report about Miriam Gross’s work suggests this isn’t the case, regrettably.

Teh spread of t'intertube wordz

An article by Linton Weeks on the National Public Radio website makes a number of interesting points about the ways in which language spreads from the web and into popular spoken usage. Weeks argues that many words that once only appeared in print/ on screen  are now being spoken: LOL, noob and pwned being prime examples. He points out too that as with so many other forms of language change (and linked to the wave model of change), new words start with a core group and spread out to wider society like a ripple effect. So far so simple, but what he also points out is that while the internet is creating new language for us, its own technology is perhaps restricting its use in some ways.

The ways in which search engines operate is being used by headline writers, he argues, to simplify headlines into more straightforward and descriptive summaries of what's in an article, rather than (like with the stupid title of this post) to play around with words and meanings for fun. As Weeks puts it:

One important way that websites lure traffic is through search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. When someone types in a search term, he is led to a ranked series of websites. Needless to say, websites are extremely competitive when it comes to those search engine rankings. Every website wants to be #1... As search engines have gotten more sophisticated, their crawlers and scrapers have learned to also sort through all the text on the site. So many websites, trying to enhance their SEO, now pepper headlines and stories with nuts-and-bolts, no-nonsense words that pigeonhole the story. The overuse of this tactic is called keyword stuffing. Purists frown on the practice, but it works.

So what the internet gives us with one hand - hilarious misspellings like teh and pwn, new blends such as blegging and vlogging, leet words such as n00b, and initialisms like FTW and WTF - it takes away with the other. So, what I should have called this posting is "A posting about how the internet affects language change".

Everyone's descriptive nowadays

Sarah Palin's recent use of the made up word "refudiate" (an apparent blend of refute and repudiate, neither of which would have been accurate in the context she was speaking) has sparked a discussion about our attitudes towards new words and slips of the tongue.

George W Bush was famous for his mistakes (misunderestimate being one notable example) and Palin was quick to make light of her error by referring to Bush, but also by referring to an apparent slip by Barack Obama (wee-wee'd up) and, more surprisingly, William Shakespeare.

In a tweet a day or two back she stated in her folksy way that "English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words. Got to celebrate it!". And yes the bard did coin plenty of expressions (whether or not he made them up himself or was the first to put them in print and into wider circulation isn't really clear) as you can see from this link. But is Palin in the same category?

Some have argued not, while others have argued that it's just snobbery to pick out faults in other people's language. You could go further and argue that attacking Palin's language use actually adds to her credibility as an outsider and maverick, by making her look like she's being picked on by an intellectual, liberal elite. So where do we draw the line? Are we all descriptivists now, embracing every change to our language however weird...or wrong? Does anything go? And is it rude to point out mistakes in usage?

For more look here on the OUP blog and here in today's Guardian.So is Sarah Palin really a desriptivist (someone who believes in the natural evolution of language) or just a numbskull (someone who doesn't believe in evolution)?

Cockney's done a runner

Here's a link to Ant Heald's blog where he covers the recent story about the Cockney accent dying out. Well, it's not really a recent story, more the latest instalment in a much longer narrative of dialect levelling and accent change, but it's interesting stuff none the less. And as Ant's covered it I don't have to.

ENGA3 exam - good luck

ENGA3 is coming up as you already know, so good luck with it. It's a tough paper and it's really important to know exactly which skills to use on which part of it, so think carefully about how you plan your answers.

The January paper had the following questions:

A quick look at Question 1 should tell you that it's a language change question , but not one of the "old texts" ones that could crop up on Thursday. Here you're being asked to do different things in different bullet points. The first bullet point is about analysing the texts linguistically (identifying and discussing the effects of  language features such as nouns, verbs, tense, sentence types, functions, clause structures etc.) and the second bullet point is much more to do with explaining what you know about language change and how the examples in the texts given to you are part of this (or not). The second bullet point is much more like an essay on language change where you can show your understanding of key theories, major processes of change and what you think of it all.

Question 2 is a language variation one, and you have to be really careful to read the question! On question 1 you were asked to analyse both texts in the first bullet point but on this question you were only asked to analyse the first text. It might not be the same this summer, so read the question carefully. For this question you were being asked to do much the same as you were in question 1 but with a focus on language variation (dialect etc.) rather than change. The other key thing is to think not just about the features of the extract (its non-standard grammar, lexis etc.) but also the views the guy is putting forward - what he means and how he conveys his ideas. The second bullet point is then asking you to do a more essay based answer on the different attitudes towards regional dialects and accents.

Question 3 is very different and you need to have a clear sense of how it's different. Whereas you had a choice of answering either 1 or 2, you get no choice here and anything from A2 could turn up - regional variety, language change, male female variation, age-related variation, social groups and language use, even world Englishes. You have to have covered all the bases just in case (or be very lucky).

The texts you are given for question 3 will be aimed at a non-specialist audience: they're not written for linguistic experts but the general public, so they will often over-simplify, misrepresent or just rant about a language issue. You're being asked on question 3 for your expert opinions as A level Language students (OK...I know...) on what these writers have said. You must pull what they say apart linguistically (breaking down word choices, sentence choices, clause structures just like you did on the first part of the paper) and then evaluate what they have said in the light of what you and others know about the issue. It's supposed to encourage you to put your own ideas forward and take part in a debate about language, so don't be afraid to offer your own views or those of other relevant experts. The topics are usually chosen to give you something to talk about, not to catch you out.

So, in the case of the January paper, the two texts present men and women as homogenous groups. Men pretty much always do this and women pretty much always do that. But that's not right, is it? Most linguistic research (and especially the most recent work by people like Deborah Cameron) suggests that while differences may occur between men and women, there are also huge differences between men and men and women and women. Gender is only one factor in a range of other ones and to claim it's all biologically determined is a load of cobblers. There are many other approaches to take too and these will depend on the topic you're given:

Texting is destroying language! No it isn't.
Political correctness is changing language for the worse! Err, no...
English is the language of the world! Kind of...but think about this too

Anyway, if you have any questions, add them as comments and I'll try to help you (unless it's between 3pm and 5pm tomorrow in which case I will probably be weeping into a can of Stella).

 My top tips for Thursday (blind guesswork only, it has to be said):
Question 1: two texts from different times to compare and a discussion about language change over time
Question 2: gender related variation with some data
Question 3: texting and how it's destroying our language.

Swear down

Swearing on TV and radio is the subject of a new report by OFCOM, which takes a very detailed look (300 pages) at the attitdues of different sections of British society to a range of potentially offensive words. It's not just traditional swearwords like f***, sh*t and b*llocks that they focus on (beeped out here to avoid school and college nanny-filters banning the blog) but racial epithets and terms for disability.

The report itself (although I haven't read all 300 pages of it) seems very interesting, with some quite subtle distinctions made between audiences, based on age, ethnicity, gender, whether or not they're parents, etc. and it shows that attitudes are generally softening to some swear words, while for some age groups certain swear words no longer carry much sense of taboo.

The Guardian covered it here yesterday and The Daily Mail got really p*ssed off here, starting  a heated debate here too. While swearing is clearly neither big nor clever, it's often lots of good fun and educational too. Looking at changing attitudes to swearing is a good way of looking at language change and thinking about the main reasons for why social changes are reflected in language usage.

Texting and literacy - radio debate

This was broadcast a few months ago, but I've only just come across it through this rather splendid blog.
If you click on this link and scroll down to 8.43 you'll get an interview between Dr Clare Wood from Coventry University and the so-called Communications Tsar, Jean Gross all about the impact of texting on young people's literacy.

We've covered lots of this here before (and you can do a quick search through the tags for this post or in the search bar at the top to find them) but it's a good one to listen to if you're revising ENGA3 Language Discourses or Language Change, or even if you're an AS B spec person doing Language and Technology for ENGB1.

I could care less

Thought I'd better post this very funny David Mitchell rant about American English here rather than leave it as a link on a comment squirreled away under a post. Thanks to the anonymous A level student who recommended it.

L'Academie Anglaise

The Queen's English Society - an organisation that prides itself on its prescriptivist stance over language change - has set up what it calls an "Academy" in order to regulate our language, and it's hoping to gain some form of official status if this report is anything to go by. Their belief is that English is going to the dogs, and even worse, to the damn yankees. Martin Estinel of the QES is quoted in The Times as saying “At the moment, anything goes. Let’s set down a clear standard of what is good, correct, proper English. Let’s have a body to sit in judgment”.

Oh dear. It's clear that they don't really know much about language or language change if they seriously think they can regulate English. More arguments are put forward in this Times article, and the issue was also debated on yesterday's Radio 4 PM programme, which you can find 53 minutes into this link (or if you're an SFX A2 student, it'll be in a link on Moodle) and my (ahem, namedrop alert) esteemed UCL colleague Professor John Mullan has penned a suitably descriptive response in today's Guardian, which you can find here.

Elsewhere, Gerald Warner of the Telegraph blames "trendy educationalists" and "illiterate teachers" (wot's he chattin abaht, bruv?) for promoting a laissez-faire attitude towards "spelling, grammar and syntax".

D'oh! Not only does Warner lapse into French to discuss English, but even this illiterate teacher knows that syntax is part of grammar. Nil points to you, Gerald for your silly error. With a spectacular and possibly frothing-at-the-mouth flourish, Warner then concludes by telling us this:

In this climate of anti-aestheticism it is unsurprising that even an attempt to preserve the beauty and coherence of the English language should meet with opposition by those who claim that it needs to “evolve” unimpeded. There is nothing wrong with a language evolving – English has always done so; but what is happening now is not evolution but nihilism. It must be resisted and the Queen’s English Society is to be congratulated on its initiative. All champions of literacy will wish the society success in establishing a much-needed Academy of English.

Luckily, not all Daily Telegraph readers are as narrow-minded as Mr Warner, and if you scroll down to the comments below his article, you'll see some interesting defences of language change.

The good thing for all A2 English Language students is that whatever your views on this issue, it's all excellent material for your Language Discourses section on the ENGA3 paper. This is exactly the kind of debate that will be appearing on the exam paper, so get reading and analysing!

Cameron on Globish

No not that Cameron, the good one, Deborah Cameron, who starts her review of Robert McCrum's Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language with some nice scene setting:

Last month, as volcanic ash drifted across the skies of Europe, I found myself in a van travelling from Dubrovnik to Antwerp with a Belgian, a German, a Turkish couple living in Holland, a Russian studying in Dublin, a Chinese woman heading to Beijing via Amsterdam, and two Croatian drivers whose services we had hired. How did we communicate? In English, of course. That "of course" is the starting point for Robert McCrum's book, an account of how English achieved its present status, framed by an argument about the present and future consequences.

She goes on to discuss whether McCrum's book is just another addition to the flag-waving and patriotism that appears in some other accounts of English's rise to international power and decides that it probably is. More important to Cameron  is what McCrum doesn't talk about: the unequal access to English around the world and the different values placed upon different varieties of the language. This last point chimes in with many other arguments about English as a Lingua Franca and/or English as a World Language, and it's an area that's worth a look if you're an A2 student thinking of Language Discourses around this topic for your ENGA3 exam in a few weeks.

ENGA1 - good luck for Thursday

Good luck for ENGA1 on Thursday. Any last minute queries can be posted as comments here and I'll try to answer them as best I can (if I can tear myself away from my Sookie Stackhouse novel).

Glad to be gay

Polari - the slang used by a subculture of gay men for much of the twentieth century - is the focus of a really excellent article by top linguist and author, Paul Baker.

The A2 textbook mentions both Polari and Baker's work on this slang variety, but there's more good stuff to have a look at here, including the ways in which the slang evolved in different ways through its widespread but unstandardised usage. Baker also makes the point that the conditions that gave rise to Polari - draconian legislation against gay people, disapproving public attitudes and widespread prejudice and violence (just like Uganda, Zimbabwe and several other African states these days) - no longer exist in the same way in this country these days. And while that's got to be something to celebrate, the language (or anti-language) spawned by the repressive social climate is now nearly extinct, which is sad.

The glamour of grammar

This is just a quick plug for a course we're putting on at UCL for teachers of English (primarily...others would be welcome too). It's called the Glamour of Grammar and it's all about grammar, obviously.

More details can be found here on the workshop's webpage.

The Glamour of Grammar - Thursday 8th July 2010

Grammar is seen by some as a set of dreary rules, by others as hoops to jump through on the way to assessing pupils’ progress in English and by many others as something that is joyless and difficult. We hope to show you that while describing it as “glamorous” might be pushing it a bit, grammar can open up different ways of thinking about language, give you new approaches to teaching and equip your students with analytical and problem-solving tools that can help in all sorts of ways.

The day is designed to offer teachers of key stages 3-5:

·         sessions which will consolidate your own knowledge of grammar

·         resources that can be used with classes from year 9 to A level

·         ideas and practical approaches to teaching spoken language

·         examples of investigative approaches to language study

·         illustrations of actual language usage, drawn from the ICE-GB corpus

Instant death...MSN RIP

Instant Messaging is on the wane, if this article in the BBC News magazine is anything to by. Apparently, sitting at a computer screen using MSN and the like has been ditched, with a move towards social networking via Facebook and Twitter and messaging via the the phone.

The article is a good read if you're revising for ENGA1 this week (and you blinking well should be) as it will remind you of some of the key aspects of language and mode: synchronous vs. asynchronous communication, formality, distance and one to one conversations vs social networking conversations that go out to many more conversational participants.

Talk (seriously) to me, baby

There's a nice bitesize piece of research here for anyone who wants to impress their ENGA1 examiner this summer with an up to date reference. According to Lotte Henrichs, a Dutch researcher, verbal interaction with young children (3-6 year olds) can have a positive impact on their language skills, especially if they are approached as intelligent conversational partners. According to her research, if we talk to children in a way that is similar to the "academic discourse" they hear at nursery and school, their language development will be helped.

In ur fridge eatin ur foodz

OK, this may or may not help you with your ENGA3 language change topic, but it's a great article nonetheless. In it, David Bamman writes about what the data Twitter produces tells us about language usage in the USA and some of the pros and pitfalls of analysing it. As he points out, while there's lots of information stored about each tweet and about each twitter user, some of it isn't easy to pin down:

The user-defined geographic information is noisy data: while "Boston, MA" can be automatically disambiguated relatively easily to a physical location on the earth (corresponding to coordinates 42.35843, -71.05977), others ("Springfield") are more difficult (there are many Springfields); others still are nearly impossible ("home of that boy Biggie," a reference to New York City quoted from Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind"), and some ("in ur fridge eatin ur foodz") don't map to any space in physical reality. The sheer volume of data, however, gives us the flexibility to focus more on precision than on overall accuracy - we can throw away all tweets where we aren't over 99% sure of the physical location.

What I like about the article and the research connected to it is that instead of talking about the technology (Is it bad for our language? Is it destroying our ability to talk to each other?) it just gets on and uses it to find out interesting things about the language around us.

It's linked to this site, The Lexicalist, which calls itself "a demographic dictionary of modern American English"

Top tips for ENGA1 - part 2

Part 2 Language Development (question 2b)

Again, here are some quick pointers gleaned from my marking experiences over the years about what to do and what not to do when answering essay questions on child language acquisition.

Do these:

• Answer the question! This is an obvious point, but one which about 20-30% of students don't do. You have to think about what the question is actually asking you and write your first paragraph in response to the question itself. Don't launch into a generalised "Children make their first sounds straight after birth and move through three different stages..." when the question is asking you about grammar, interaction or imitation.
• Make sure you use plenty of real examples of child language, either from your text book, your own research and experience, or from the data given to you in question 2a. Explain what the examples show and try to make sure you're linguistic in your approach (i.e. using technical terminology to describe the processes shown by your data).
• Link in research and theory to your arguments, but don't just wheel out the old Chomsky versus Skinner battle at every opportunity. Examiners get very bored of seeing the same old arguments in the same old words. Try to think of a clear way of explaining the problems different theoretical positions have when accounting for how children acquire language.
• Try to conceptualise your answer: think of the bigger picture. What is actually happening when children say things like "I runned" or "She falled over"? Yes, they're overgeneralising, but why?
• Think about your structure and guide your reader. Try to use paragraphs and discourse markers to make your answer fluent and easy to follow.

For a list of (nearly) all the past questions set on language development on the old spec (which is very similar to your spec) look here.