The University of Salford is hosting a workshop for English Language teachers in April. Organised by Sue Fox and Heike Pichler, it looks like covering a range of really interesting material for teachers who are keen to keep up with recent developments in spoken language analysis and digital corpora.
More details can be found here, and Jenny Cheshire and Sue Fox's Linguistics Research Digest, which runs regular updates about recent linguistic research, can be found here.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Knowing your leet from your pwned
This link has a look at some internet jargon and helps explain the origins of some of the language on the net. If you're studying Language Change or Language and Technology it should be handy.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Ace DC
Your English Language teacher may well be a snappy dresser, a master of wit, or a pedagogical dynamo who brings light to your otherwise darkened life (Business Studies, Accounting and PE A levels in other words), but does he or she have a beard like David Crystal? She does? Cripes...
Professor David Crystal is one of the biggest cheeses in the world of linguistics and he's speaking at March's emagazine English Language conference in London. To get a taste of the range of his knowledge (and frankly his bare skillage) have a look here on the emagazine conference blog where we've posted some links to some of his TV and lecture performances.
Professor David Crystal is one of the biggest cheeses in the world of linguistics and he's speaking at March's emagazine English Language conference in London. To get a taste of the range of his knowledge (and frankly his bare skillage) have a look here on the emagazine conference blog where we've posted some links to some of his TV and lecture performances.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Prescriptivists' piffle versus descriptivists' data
With Language Discourses at the heart of the ENGA3 paper, it's always useful to scour the media to find examples of writers getting themselves worked up about language change or what they see as declining standards. If you've done any work on this topic so far, you'll already know that prescriptivists have always bemoaned changes to the English language but have rarely been successful in stopping its evolution.
And you'll probably already know that most linguists - those who study language - are rarely of a prescriptive mindset. They tend to see their role as describing language, pointing out how it's used and by whom, rather than judging its use as good or bad. That's why we - your English Language teachers - generally tell you to talk about standard and non-standard instead of good or bad. Hark at us telling you what to do: how prescriptive...
This week there are two or three different pieces about changing language and attitudes towards it. Simon Kelner of The Independent writes not one but two articles about things he doesn't like in language: grocer's apostrophes (potatoe's, for example), split infinitives (to prissily prescriptivise, perhaps), Waterstone's dropping its possessive apostrophe, Americanisms, and all the usual suspects. It's a load of old gubbins really and reheats some frankly rather overcooked quibbles about language, most of which get dismissed by proper linguists.
A quick read of Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars or Robert Lane Greene's chapter A Brief History of Sticklers in You Are What You Speak (or better still, a long read of both) will tell you that nearly every prescriptive argument about declining standards can be successfully debunked. There's nothing wrong with splitting infinitives (it's a an old canard based on the misapplication of Latin grammar to English), most of the supposed "Americanisms" moaned about here (for example) are not really from America at all and apostrophes are a recent and rather inconsistent form of punctuation (as David Crystal explains here).
Elsewhere, Sali Tagliamonte, who is a leading light in the field of technology and language, talks some sense about how technologies such as texting create a repertoire for young people to draw upon, rather than necessarily restricting them or dumbing them down. In her interview with the St Catharine Standard, she talks about how young language users switch between language styles depending on their understanding of what's appropriate in a given situation, making the point that "They don't just adapt haphazardly. They adapt systemically".
This is clearly a much more descriptive standpoint and one that is supported by her detailed research in the field, more of which can be found here.You can also watch a clip of Sali Tagliamonte talking about her new book (complete with tinkly electric piano music) here.
The whole prescriptive versus descriptive debate is one that we have covered many times on this blog and one that always has some relevance to the A2 year of the English Language course (be it ENGA3 or ENGB3). If you click on the labels for language discourses and language debates after this post, you can find many of the relevant articles.
Edited on 20.01.12 to correct embarrassing apostrophe error. I blame my teecherz.
And you'll probably already know that most linguists - those who study language - are rarely of a prescriptive mindset. They tend to see their role as describing language, pointing out how it's used and by whom, rather than judging its use as good or bad. That's why we - your English Language teachers - generally tell you to talk about standard and non-standard instead of good or bad. Hark at us telling you what to do: how prescriptive...
This week there are two or three different pieces about changing language and attitudes towards it. Simon Kelner of The Independent writes not one but two articles about things he doesn't like in language: grocer's apostrophes (potatoe's, for example), split infinitives (to prissily prescriptivise, perhaps), Waterstone's dropping its possessive apostrophe, Americanisms, and all the usual suspects. It's a load of old gubbins really and reheats some frankly rather overcooked quibbles about language, most of which get dismissed by proper linguists.
A quick read of Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars or Robert Lane Greene's chapter A Brief History of Sticklers in You Are What You Speak (or better still, a long read of both) will tell you that nearly every prescriptive argument about declining standards can be successfully debunked. There's nothing wrong with splitting infinitives (it's a an old canard based on the misapplication of Latin grammar to English), most of the supposed "Americanisms" moaned about here (for example) are not really from America at all and apostrophes are a recent and rather inconsistent form of punctuation (as David Crystal explains here).
Elsewhere, Sali Tagliamonte, who is a leading light in the field of technology and language, talks some sense about how technologies such as texting create a repertoire for young people to draw upon, rather than necessarily restricting them or dumbing them down. In her interview with the St Catharine Standard, she talks about how young language users switch between language styles depending on their understanding of what's appropriate in a given situation, making the point that "They don't just adapt haphazardly. They adapt systemically".
This is clearly a much more descriptive standpoint and one that is supported by her detailed research in the field, more of which can be found here.You can also watch a clip of Sali Tagliamonte talking about her new book (complete with tinkly electric piano music) here.
The whole prescriptive versus descriptive debate is one that we have covered many times on this blog and one that always has some relevance to the A2 year of the English Language course (be it ENGA3 or ENGB3). If you click on the labels for language discourses and language debates after this post, you can find many of the relevant articles.
Edited on 20.01.12 to correct embarrassing apostrophe error. I blame my teecherz.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
#WOTY
2011 is over and 2012 has already been going for a couple of weeks, so I'm a bit slow in adding these links to 2011's Words of the Year.
The American Dialect Society hosts the biggest, and probably most linguistically-informed, end of year poll for new words, and they opted for Occupy as their Word of the Year. As Ben Zimmer explains in the ADS press release, “It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life
and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement.The movement itself was powered by the word”.
The event was live-tweeted throughout with the WOTY hashtag, and for me # has been the word of the year, even if it isn't really a word. So much of last year's political activism was fuelled by or commented upon as it happened by social media - the occupy movement, the summer riots in the UK, the Arab Spring - that it seems natural to have words and symbols from these fields creeping into our everyday language. It was an uncanny feeling to be sitting in the sunny south of France on holiday reading tweets about some of my favourite bits of London getting destroyed, so Twitter words loomed large in my new words of the year, even though I'm a bit late to catch onto it.
The ADS Word of the Year poll also included some less serious entries, such as assholocracy (rule by obnoxious millionaires, or for those of us in the UK, Tories), humblebrag (an expression of false humility) and amazeballs (a slang term for amazing which appears to be totally unnecessary).
Elsewhere,the ever excellent MacMillan Dictionary blog pulled together other contenders, the Evening Standard ran its own list of new or pimped up words and the OED had squeezed middle as its word of the year (despite it being two words).
And if you're looking to keep up to date with the new words of 2012 you can do no better than Kerry Maxwell's excellent Buzzwords column for MacMillan Dictionary, which is always full of proper linguistic analysis and up to date examples.
The American Dialect Society hosts the biggest, and probably most linguistically-informed, end of year poll for new words, and they opted for Occupy as their Word of the Year. As Ben Zimmer explains in the ADS press release, “It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life
and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement.The movement itself was powered by the word”.
The event was live-tweeted throughout with the WOTY hashtag, and for me # has been the word of the year, even if it isn't really a word. So much of last year's political activism was fuelled by or commented upon as it happened by social media - the occupy movement, the summer riots in the UK, the Arab Spring - that it seems natural to have words and symbols from these fields creeping into our everyday language. It was an uncanny feeling to be sitting in the sunny south of France on holiday reading tweets about some of my favourite bits of London getting destroyed, so Twitter words loomed large in my new words of the year, even though I'm a bit late to catch onto it.
The ADS Word of the Year poll also included some less serious entries, such as assholocracy (rule by obnoxious millionaires, or for those of us in the UK, Tories), humblebrag (an expression of false humility) and amazeballs (a slang term for amazing which appears to be totally unnecessary).
Elsewhere,the ever excellent MacMillan Dictionary blog pulled together other contenders, the Evening Standard ran its own list of new or pimped up words and the OED had squeezed middle as its word of the year (despite it being two words).
And if you're looking to keep up to date with the new words of 2012 you can do no better than Kerry Maxwell's excellent Buzzwords column for MacMillan Dictionary, which is always full of proper linguistic analysis and up to date examples.
Apostrophe disappears: world ends
Apostrophe-lovers are up in arms over Waterstones' ...Waterstone's's...the decision of Waterstone's bookshop to remove the apostrophe from its name. In a move that some punctuation purists have likened to the end of the world, Waterstone's (named so because it used to be the firm of one Tim Waterstone, therefore - like Sainsbury's and McDonald's - a possessive apostrophe) have decided to ditch the dinky little punctaution mark.
This article in the Daily Mail gives you more information and offers some hilariously unintentional punctuation errors in its readers' comments after the piece. One interesting angle is that the apostrophe is a useful shibboleth, allowing the (ahem) better-educated to look down upon their inferiors with wry disdain. But what use is the apostrophe? It's a relatively new invention, punctuation-wise, and doesn't conform to its own rules (it's ...its...see I'm confused now), but perhaps still serves a helpful disambiguating role in contractions like I'm and she'll, where the pronunciation of a word might be affected if there were no apostrophe.
We've looked at apostrophes before on this blog (here and here, for a start) and I'm increasingly of the view that they're dying and we should probably just get rid of them once and for all to save confusion. It's a good topic for ENGA3 Language Discourses questions (probably as part of Language Change) and would make a suitable topic for a Language Intervention on ENGA4 too.
This article in the Daily Mail gives you more information and offers some hilariously unintentional punctuation errors in its readers' comments after the piece. One interesting angle is that the apostrophe is a useful shibboleth, allowing the (ahem) better-educated to look down upon their inferiors with wry disdain. But what use is the apostrophe? It's a relatively new invention, punctuation-wise, and doesn't conform to its own rules (it's ...its...see I'm confused now), but perhaps still serves a helpful disambiguating role in contractions like I'm and she'll, where the pronunciation of a word might be affected if there were no apostrophe.
We've looked at apostrophes before on this blog (here and here, for a start) and I'm increasingly of the view that they're dying and we should probably just get rid of them once and for all to save confusion. It's a good topic for ENGA3 Language Discourses questions (probably as part of Language Change) and would make a suitable topic for a Language Intervention on ENGA4 too.
ENGA1 January 2012
Good luck to anyone taking the ENGA1 paper tomorrow (Friday 13th - yikes!).
You might find some of the previous posts on this unit helpful if you're doing last-minute revision. Have a look here.
You might find some of the previous posts on this unit helpful if you're doing last-minute revision. Have a look here.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Language Police
Just a quick link to a good piece in yesterday's Guardian Weekend by Oliver Burkeman about attitudes to language mistakes, grammatical errors and other abuses.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Unfriended for grammar fails
There's a good article here on ZDNet by Charlie Osborne about grammar, spelling and punctuation on social networking sites. She takes a look at how technology has been blamed for grammar failures, but how the fault might lie with how we teach English in schools.
While it's clearly important to teach grammar as part of secondary English, the problem lies in how we teach it. If it's just a dry naming of parts with little sense of what the effects of grammar choices are then we're probably doomed to the nightmare back to the future scenario that Simon Heffer (and his chum, Michael Gove) longs for.
One problem is that many of the gripes about grammar that are often brought up are either matters of taste, rather than "rules" which affect how we actually understand one another, so one person's error is another person's normal usage. That's not to excuse basic errors like you're/your, their/there (which bug me, even though I'm what Heffer would probably call a trendy-lefty linguist).
One explanation for such errors is that in a time of much higher basic literacy rates than ever before, we're seeing more and more people using forms of communication like Facebook, Twitter and texting than we would ever have known before, and while basic literacy is higher, not everyone is as highly educated as those who wrote for public consumption in the past.
So while the footballer, Joey Barton tweets about his interest in Noam Chomsky and Euroscepticism to about one million followers, you'd have needed decades of formal education and a university degree to communicate with that many people in 1870 or 1950.
Not surprising really, because a footballer like Joey Barton generally talks with an educated right foot (and in Barton's case, the occasional headbutt) rather than an educated lexicon. And as a follower of Barton on Twitter and admirer of his genuine interest in exploring the world of knowledge - not something footballers are well known for - I don't mean to criticise or patronise him in any way, but when you look at the history of language, working class men like Barton have rarely had such a public platform for their words.
It's an argument that also links with Joshua Foer's piece in the New York Times in which he looks at how our reading habits have changed from "intensive" knowledge of a limited range of books to "extensive" reading of many texts, including books, newspapers and text messages. And as more and more people write and text in English around the world, perhaps the centrifugal force that has previously bound English usage to the core values of Standard English begins to lose its power, with more and more mis-spellings and grammatical errors circulating, growing in influence and perhaps changing the language beyond recognition. A doomsday scenario for Standard English, or the natural evolution of a growing language?
While it's clearly important to teach grammar as part of secondary English, the problem lies in how we teach it. If it's just a dry naming of parts with little sense of what the effects of grammar choices are then we're probably doomed to the nightmare back to the future scenario that Simon Heffer (and his chum, Michael Gove) longs for.
One problem is that many of the gripes about grammar that are often brought up are either matters of taste, rather than "rules" which affect how we actually understand one another, so one person's error is another person's normal usage. That's not to excuse basic errors like you're/your, their/there (which bug me, even though I'm what Heffer would probably call a trendy-lefty linguist).
One explanation for such errors is that in a time of much higher basic literacy rates than ever before, we're seeing more and more people using forms of communication like Facebook, Twitter and texting than we would ever have known before, and while basic literacy is higher, not everyone is as highly educated as those who wrote for public consumption in the past.
So while the footballer, Joey Barton tweets about his interest in Noam Chomsky and Euroscepticism to about one million followers, you'd have needed decades of formal education and a university degree to communicate with that many people in 1870 or 1950.
Not surprising really, because a footballer like Joey Barton generally talks with an educated right foot (and in Barton's case, the occasional headbutt) rather than an educated lexicon. And as a follower of Barton on Twitter and admirer of his genuine interest in exploring the world of knowledge - not something footballers are well known for - I don't mean to criticise or patronise him in any way, but when you look at the history of language, working class men like Barton have rarely had such a public platform for their words.
It's an argument that also links with Joshua Foer's piece in the New York Times in which he looks at how our reading habits have changed from "intensive" knowledge of a limited range of books to "extensive" reading of many texts, including books, newspapers and text messages. And as more and more people write and text in English around the world, perhaps the centrifugal force that has previously bound English usage to the core values of Standard English begins to lose its power, with more and more mis-spellings and grammatical errors circulating, growing in influence and perhaps changing the language beyond recognition. A doomsday scenario for Standard English, or the natural evolution of a growing language?
Thursday, December 08, 2011
Small words that mean a lot
When we talk about controversial words on this blog, most of
them are “big words”: ones loaded with connotations and steeped in contentious
history, such as the dreaded n-word, housewife, slut
and mong. Fair enough, they can often be very controversial. But little words
are also important and a couple of those little words – so and thank you – have
come in for a bit of analysis of late.
Last week, Radio 4 took a look at how so is increasingly
being used as a discourse marker. It’s also been looked at here and here.
According to some suggestions, so is making the move from webpage to spoken
discourse in the kind of text to talk style that has given us LOL and OMG as
everyday spoken expressions.
Elsewhere, the changing face of British politeness was beingexplored by the Daily Mail, which – as you might imagine – saw a future of doom
and rudeness (not to mention nasty illegal immigrants, sponging single mums and
Americans) in the changing place of thank you in our popular politeness
lexicon.
The Daily Mail story wasn’t entirely new, as it was covered
by The Daily Telegraph the year before, that time with a slightly different
(but still rather spurious) “survey” into changing habits.
Thursday, December 01, 2011
emagazine English Language conference 2012
The second emagazine English Language conference is now taking bookings and promises to be another really excellent event. We've booked a great line-up, with talks by David Crystal, Angela Goddard, Marcello Giovanelli and the head of Aston University's Centre for Forensic Linguistics, Tim Grant.
The conference blog is here and you can find out more about what we're putting on here on the English and Media Centre's conference page. Also, details of last year's fantastic conference can be found here if you're interested.
The conference blog is here and you can find out more about what we're putting on here on the English and Media Centre's conference page. Also, details of last year's fantastic conference can be found here if you're interested.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
On strike
This blog is officially on strike today in solidarity with striking public sector workers.
Do not cross the picket line by posting comments!
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Big and clever, but not insulting
Swearing is bad, right? We're always told it's not big or clever to swear, but I can't be the only person to find a well-chosen swearword hilariously funny.
Swearing has had a long and rich history in English, partly because of the changing social attitudes we've had to certain taboo terms and the ways in which swear words often reflect a changing world. Mark Lawson in today's Guardian* offers a look at this in the light of recent media worries over Strictly Come Dancing and the X Factor, but he raises other points about the history of swearing too.
Many words have, he points out with the help of Language God, David Crystal, changed from perfectly innocent usage to taboo terms over time (the c-word - the one that isn't Cameron - being a good example of this) but others have gone the other way and lessened in their impact (sod and bugger, for instance).
And it's changing social attitudes that are of interest to the High Court judge, Mister Justice Bean who has rules that police officers being told to "f**k off" are hardly likely to be insulted because they're so used to it, it's water of a f**k's back, sorry, duck's back.
This doesn't appeal to Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph who sees swearing as a form of abuse and disrespect that our public servants shouldn't be subjected to. For her it's the tip of the iceberg: today swearing tomorrow anarchy. And it's an argument that Mark Lawson alludes to in his piece as well. If swearing is so widespread that it's no longer insulting, or so ubiquitous that we don't even know we're doing it, what value does it actually have?
We've covered swearing on this blog many times previously, so just click on the label to see all the relevant posts about it.
* thanks to Jon D for the link
edited on 24.11.11 to add:
My legal adviser (the Mrs) tells me that the issue over Mister Justice Bean's pronouncement is not really that new and is less connected to "insult" than it is to the "alarm, harassment and distress" in the wording of public order charges.
She tells me that there is a big difference between swearing and swearing at someone in the eyes of the law, so if a suspect were to say "I've never seen that f**king flatscreen!", that would not generally considered to be something that would cause distress to an arresting officer (or imaginary bystander), while "F**k off you idiot; I've never seen that flatscreen before" might be perceived as causing distress as it is directed towards the officer.
This makes an interesting distinction between swearing in general and swearing at someone.
Swearing has had a long and rich history in English, partly because of the changing social attitudes we've had to certain taboo terms and the ways in which swear words often reflect a changing world. Mark Lawson in today's Guardian* offers a look at this in the light of recent media worries over Strictly Come Dancing and the X Factor, but he raises other points about the history of swearing too.
Many words have, he points out with the help of Language God, David Crystal, changed from perfectly innocent usage to taboo terms over time (the c-word - the one that isn't Cameron - being a good example of this) but others have gone the other way and lessened in their impact (sod and bugger, for instance).
And it's changing social attitudes that are of interest to the High Court judge, Mister Justice Bean who has rules that police officers being told to "f**k off" are hardly likely to be insulted because they're so used to it, it's water of a f**k's back, sorry, duck's back.
This doesn't appeal to Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph who sees swearing as a form of abuse and disrespect that our public servants shouldn't be subjected to. For her it's the tip of the iceberg: today swearing tomorrow anarchy. And it's an argument that Mark Lawson alludes to in his piece as well. If swearing is so widespread that it's no longer insulting, or so ubiquitous that we don't even know we're doing it, what value does it actually have?
We've covered swearing on this blog many times previously, so just click on the label to see all the relevant posts about it.
* thanks to Jon D for the link
edited on 24.11.11 to add:
My legal adviser (the Mrs) tells me that the issue over Mister Justice Bean's pronouncement is not really that new and is less connected to "insult" than it is to the "alarm, harassment and distress" in the wording of public order charges.
She tells me that there is a big difference between swearing and swearing at someone in the eyes of the law, so if a suspect were to say "I've never seen that f**king flatscreen!", that would not generally considered to be something that would cause distress to an arresting officer (or imaginary bystander), while "F**k off you idiot; I've never seen that flatscreen before" might be perceived as causing distress as it is directed towards the officer.
This makes an interesting distinction between swearing in general and swearing at someone.
Technology and language change
There's an good article from Natasha Lomas of Silicon.com here which takes a look at how technology has influenced recent language change. It includes contributions from God of language, David Crystal and the OED's John Simpson, so it's got proper linguistics stuff there, plus it gives us some good techy insight into different fields such as text messaging, social networking and Lolcats.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Tweet to speech
Ben Trawick-Smith's Dialect Blog has got a good range of posts on it about spoken language, often material on accents and dialects, but here he looks at how online language abbreviations such as OMG, LOL and WTF have worked their way into some people's spoken language.
We've had a look at this phenomenon on this blog before, here in a piece by Emma Bertouche on hashtag creeping into spoken forms, and here back in February this year.
We've had a look at this phenomenon on this blog before, here in a piece by Emma Bertouche on hashtag creeping into spoken forms, and here back in February this year.
Discussing disgusting
There's a good piece here on the BBC News magazine site about the word disgust and its changing meanings and usage in English. As well as being a good case study of semantic change, it offers an interesting angle on how new analytical methods can be used to track language change, in this case Google n-grams and digital corpus searches.
Convergence in action in Australia
There's a neat example here of how accommodation theory can work. When Barack Obama visited Australia he used a few Australianisms to help strike up a rapport with prime minister, Julia Gillard.
Accommodation theory, as theorised by Howard Giles, consists of convergence and divergence, the former involving speakers moving closer to each other in speech style (for example, a teacher downwardly converging with a younger student to speak more on their level), the latter showing the opposite (for example, a speaker deliberately altering their speech style to be more noticeably different from those around her).
Accommodation theory, as theorised by Howard Giles, consists of convergence and divergence, the former involving speakers moving closer to each other in speech style (for example, a teacher downwardly converging with a younger student to speak more on their level), the latter showing the opposite (for example, a speaker deliberately altering their speech style to be more noticeably different from those around her).
Friday, November 04, 2011
English for the English; Englishes for the rest?
Does England have any control of what is called "English" or will, as one Telegraph reader wittily claims, "The English ... have as much control over English as the Italians have
over pizza and Indians over chicken korma"?
It might seem like a strange question, given that the general consensus is that English (the language) derives from England (the nation), but it's one that is increasingly being asked as new varieties of English spring up all over the world, each with its own distinct character and linguistic identity.
We've already seen that many English speakers get very worked up about "their" language being taken over by Americanisms, but what about when their language is picked up by Malaysians, Indians, Nigerians, and Chinese? For many, these varieties of English are judged as inferior, broken, stripped down and poorly learnt versions of the original and best form, but that's a view that was never popular among linguists and has been the subject of some fairly strongly-worded arguments in English teaching circles over the last twenty or so years.
For a long time, this neo-colonialist view - that a world English (singular) should be taught and that English English was the gold standard - seemed to be the mindset of many English educators (and perhaps their students too) where the focus was very much on teaching Johnny Foreigner the right sort of English.
But then came along Braj Kachru with his circle model of World Englishes (Note the plural!):
The model has the "traditional bases" of English at its centre - the inner circle - and then widens to include countries in the outer circle where English has had an historical or political role, before moving into the expanding circle where English is generally used as a "lingua franca", a language of convenience to communicate between people who do not have English as their first language.
The model is not without its critics though, and some have argued that it neglects the "norms" of English and lets the Englishes at the fringes drift too far away from the core linguistic values of a standard Global English. In fact, Kachru debated this with Randolph (now Lord) Quirk (founder of the Survey of English Usage at UCL, where I work, so I must be careful what I say!).
From the other side of the linguistic divide, the model has been criticised for not being radical enough. It still places England and the USA at its heart and therefore creates the impression that the English language of the expanding circle orbits around them, that England is still at the centre of the universe.
Now, while Jeremy Clarkson and most of the Conservative Party would probably agree with that notion, sitting in the snug bar of a Tunbridge Wells gentleman's club and polishing their miniature soldier figurines, it's hard to see how England can really claim any ownership over the Englishes spoken beyond its own borders. Even within those borders the language is in a state of constant flux and has a rich history of regional, social and ethnic variation, and that's before you even set foot on an ocean liner to cross the Atlantic or a prison ship to reach Australia.
The most recent debate has been over just this issue, with Dr. Mario Saraceni, a linguist from Portsmouth University, arguing in the September 2011 edition of Changing English (as reported here) that it's time to get away from the mindset that English is "spreading" and that "the psychological umbilical chord linking English in the world to its arbitrarily identified spatio-temporal and cultural centre be decidedly and conclusively severed". It's a bit of a mouthful, as you can see, but he's essentially calling for a clean break to be made between England and English.
To support his case, he quotes Henry Widdowson who said "How English develops in the world is no business whatever of native speakers in England, or the United States, or anywhere else. They have no say in the matter, no right to intervene or pass judgement. They are irrelevant."
In the interview below, Saraceni talks about a student of his, from Malaysia who says he feels like English is a "borrowed language", an idea that Saraceni develops in his paper, arguing that "Language is intimately connected to one's intellect and one's perception of Self and the idea of using a borrowed language, especially when this language is one's main language, has significant implications for the way one sees him/herself in relation to those considered to be the legitimate owners of that language".
In a sense (and I hope I'm getting this right) we shouldn't really be talking about anyone owning the language, that we should grow up and be less sentimental about what is essentially a tool for billions of people.
That's all well and good, but we know from previous language debates that arguments over language are rarely contained to the words, the sounds and the grammar of a language, but are much more often about our views of other people, their habits, their cultures and our own prejudices. So, in that context and to many linguistic nationalists on the comment pages of the Mail or the opinion pages of the Telegraph, what Saraceni says here is incendiary stuff.
Dr Mario Saraceni from University of Portsmouth on Vimeo.
(source: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-queen-english.html)
It might seem like a strange question, given that the general consensus is that English (the language) derives from England (the nation), but it's one that is increasingly being asked as new varieties of English spring up all over the world, each with its own distinct character and linguistic identity.
We've already seen that many English speakers get very worked up about "their" language being taken over by Americanisms, but what about when their language is picked up by Malaysians, Indians, Nigerians, and Chinese? For many, these varieties of English are judged as inferior, broken, stripped down and poorly learnt versions of the original and best form, but that's a view that was never popular among linguists and has been the subject of some fairly strongly-worded arguments in English teaching circles over the last twenty or so years.
For a long time, this neo-colonialist view - that a world English (singular) should be taught and that English English was the gold standard - seemed to be the mindset of many English educators (and perhaps their students too) where the focus was very much on teaching Johnny Foreigner the right sort of English.
But then came along Braj Kachru with his circle model of World Englishes (Note the plural!):
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| from http://metee-translation.blogspot.com/2010/06/you-are-now-officially-welcomed-to.html |
The model is not without its critics though, and some have argued that it neglects the "norms" of English and lets the Englishes at the fringes drift too far away from the core linguistic values of a standard Global English. In fact, Kachru debated this with Randolph (now Lord) Quirk (founder of the Survey of English Usage at UCL, where I work, so I must be careful what I say!).
From the other side of the linguistic divide, the model has been criticised for not being radical enough. It still places England and the USA at its heart and therefore creates the impression that the English language of the expanding circle orbits around them, that England is still at the centre of the universe.
Now, while Jeremy Clarkson and most of the Conservative Party would probably agree with that notion, sitting in the snug bar of a Tunbridge Wells gentleman's club and polishing their miniature soldier figurines, it's hard to see how England can really claim any ownership over the Englishes spoken beyond its own borders. Even within those borders the language is in a state of constant flux and has a rich history of regional, social and ethnic variation, and that's before you even set foot on an ocean liner to cross the Atlantic or a prison ship to reach Australia.
The most recent debate has been over just this issue, with Dr. Mario Saraceni, a linguist from Portsmouth University, arguing in the September 2011 edition of Changing English (as reported here) that it's time to get away from the mindset that English is "spreading" and that "the psychological umbilical chord linking English in the world to its arbitrarily identified spatio-temporal and cultural centre be decidedly and conclusively severed". It's a bit of a mouthful, as you can see, but he's essentially calling for a clean break to be made between England and English.
To support his case, he quotes Henry Widdowson who said "How English develops in the world is no business whatever of native speakers in England, or the United States, or anywhere else. They have no say in the matter, no right to intervene or pass judgement. They are irrelevant."
In the interview below, Saraceni talks about a student of his, from Malaysia who says he feels like English is a "borrowed language", an idea that Saraceni develops in his paper, arguing that "Language is intimately connected to one's intellect and one's perception of Self and the idea of using a borrowed language, especially when this language is one's main language, has significant implications for the way one sees him/herself in relation to those considered to be the legitimate owners of that language".
In a sense (and I hope I'm getting this right) we shouldn't really be talking about anyone owning the language, that we should grow up and be less sentimental about what is essentially a tool for billions of people.
That's all well and good, but we know from previous language debates that arguments over language are rarely contained to the words, the sounds and the grammar of a language, but are much more often about our views of other people, their habits, their cultures and our own prejudices. So, in that context and to many linguistic nationalists on the comment pages of the Mail or the opinion pages of the Telegraph, what Saraceni says here is incendiary stuff.
Dr Mario Saraceni from University of Portsmouth on Vimeo.
(source: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-queen-english.html)
Monday, October 31, 2011
Twitterology
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| don't kill the spares |
Thursday, October 27, 2011
"Twitter generation loses love of lexis"
...or so this story in today's Daily Mail would have you believe. According to the article, words like cripes, shenanigans and cad are
all dying out because younger generations simply don't know what they
bally mean (And it's perhaps not just the fault of the younger
generation but technology as well because my spell-checker has just
red-lined both cripes and bally.).
The story seems to be linked to the publication of a survey for the book Planet Word (presumably a tie-in to Stephen Fry's BBC series of the same name) and to be fair, the expert they quote, the author of the book JP Davidson, doesn't bemoan the alleged decline, but has this to say:
This sounds like good sense and isn't in any way as prescriptive as the rest of the Mail's tone (managing of course to tie in some aspect of British identity being eroded as it always does), but the comments from Mail readers start to pour scorn on such descriptive views, arguing (among other things) that the once proud language of Shakespeare is now degenerating into a series of txt-grunts (a kind of Crumbling Castle model for the text generation) and that young people are doing it because they "are even allowed to use text speech in exams now", conveniently (or stupidly) misunderstanding the difference between studying and using. D'oh!
Ultimately,
will this lead us into a reduced set of lexical and grammatical
choices, fulfilling the Mail's to hell in a handcart predictions in the
article above?
The story seems to be linked to the publication of a survey for the book Planet Word (presumably a tie-in to Stephen Fry's BBC series of the same name) and to be fair, the expert they quote, the author of the book JP Davidson, doesn't bemoan the alleged decline, but has this to say:
This could be viewed as regrettable, as there are some great descriptive words that are being lost and these words would make our everyday language much more colourful and fun if we were to use them.
'But it's only natural that with people trying to fit as much information in 140 characters that words are getting shortened and are even becoming redundant as a result.
'The folly is to try and stem the tide of the new whether they emerge from rap, technology, teenspeak, or the multitude of jargons that we invent to make shortcuts and communication more efficient between groups.
This sounds like good sense and isn't in any way as prescriptive as the rest of the Mail's tone (managing of course to tie in some aspect of British identity being eroded as it always does), but the comments from Mail readers start to pour scorn on such descriptive views, arguing (among other things) that the once proud language of Shakespeare is now degenerating into a series of txt-grunts (a kind of Crumbling Castle model for the text generation) and that young people are doing it because they "are even allowed to use text speech in exams now", conveniently (or stupidly) misunderstanding the difference between studying and using. D'oh!
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