Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Kidulthood
A new film, Kidulthood is about to hit the cinemas and its subject matter and language are likely to create a fair old stir. It hasn't even been released yet and campaigners have called for its withdrawal on the grounds that it promotes violence, happy-slapping and glamorises anti-social bahaviour.
Set in west London and focusing on the lives of a group of urban teens, the film has also attracted interest because of its attempts to use the genuine language of the street, or as an article in The Sunday Times magazine puts it, a multi-ethnic dialect. The relevant section of the article is scanned below, while the whole article appears (scanned) on the SFX resources site here.
It looks like it could be an interesting film and I'd be interested to hear from any of you who see it...
Thanks to Peter at SFX & Juliet at Highams Park for the info on the article, and to Kevin at Lancaster for these further links to MEYD:
Sunday Times article
New Scientist extract
Official webpage of the MEYD project
Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties & Change
Saturday, February 25, 2006
"Unspeak" revisited
Just to remind you, the idea of "Unspeak" is, as Poole himself explains,
What is unspeak? It represents an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak - in the sense of erasing, or silencing - any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one way of looking at a problem.
Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
Friday, February 24, 2006
Barry White is alright, but James Blunt is a good example of Cockney rhyming slang
Apparently, deeper toned male voices "float the boat" of women at their most fertile times and it could be down to hormones. According to the research, women "like men with dominant voices as they are thought to indicate long-term health and higher reproductive success". So it's a shame that Barry White's dead really, and James Blunt isn't.
But in good news for James Blunt soundalikes everywhere, "the researchers found that when not fertile, women were more likely to be attracted to a more feminine voice signalling a more caring man, more likely to invest in a long-term relationship".
Phew! So at least if the old Berkshire Blunt does "get lucky" at least he won't be impregnating anyone and spreading his vile MOR seed.
Useful for:
ENA3 - Male/Female conversation
Thursday, February 23, 2006
The language of mothers and daughters
Rather excruciatingly titled, You're Wearing THAT? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation Tannen sets out to explore "another hotbed of miscommunication: the mother-daughter relationship".
While the article's rather folksy, twee style might put some people off, Tannen's work (in my opinion) has always managed to just about skirt the right side of the linguistic/populist divide, unlike the simplistic metaphors and sweeping generalisations of John Gray's Men Are From Mars and Women From Venus, and some of Tannen's observations quoted in the article look interesting.
"We talk to each other in better and worse ways than we would to anyone else," Tannen said by phone shortly before heading out on tour.
It's not that fathers and daughters, or mothers and sons, don't face some of the same conversational hurdles. But mothers and daughters tend to suffer more scorch marks because of the closeness and power struggles that often define the relationship.
"Someone said, 'Who else can I tell but my mother that I got a good deal on toilet paper?' " Tannen said. "There's just a level of interest in every detail of your life."
Of course, as Tannen herself admits above, gender is just one factor in a range of other factors, that influences conversational behaviour. And gender itself is a much more fluid and flexible identity than many people like to acknowledge when dealing with this topic.
Useful for:
ENA3 - Interacting Through Language
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Talk to your baby
But back to interaction (and not the interaction that went on back stage after the College Council auction last half term...allegedly...). We all know it's important to talk to babies, even before they can talk to us, but how important can it be? Most linguists are of the belief that at least part of language acquisition is innate (Chomsky's LAD may not be the holy grail it used to be, but his PPT and Steven Pinker's Language Instinct seem to be respected as the most likely answers to this conundrum), so if that's the case, what can interaction do to aid development?
This article from last month's Times, suggests that it can benefit children in many ways, not all of them linguistic. Read on, and if anyone mentions this article in class they get 2 (yes, that's two) packets of Skittles as a prize. And this time, that's a promise...
Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition
Smash Hits RIP
In this article on the BBC website, Smash Hits is described as
the bible for many teenagers discovering their musical tastes in the 1980s and 1990s. Every fortnight, Smash Hits thumped through the letterbox dishing out gossip, interviews, pull-out posters - and perhaps most importantly - lyrics to the top tunes of the day. The whole kit and caboodle was served up in a typically playful house style that would go on to set a new standard in magazines.
(Not that I would have admitted that in the 1980s, being as I was a devout NME reader, who considered Smash Hits too poppy and shallow, sniff.)
But it's not so much the music that made Smash Hits such an influential magazine - thank God, as they covered such dreadful rubbish as Brother Beyond, Bros and Sinitta - but their linguistically creative house style. As another article on Smash Hits tells us:
The true impact of such genius wordsmithery is hard to gauge, but the influence of Smash Hits' language is obvious in the style of the NME of 2006, Popbitch, and magazines as grown-up even as The Word. Good bye, Smash Hits... sob.As the 80s went on, so Smash Hits became bolder, eventually inventing its own argot, affectionately mocking the hyperbolic language of pop. Any pop star whose career was failing was held to be "down the dumper": by contrast, any pop star who returned after a period in the wilderness was invariably "back, back, BACK!!!!!" A female singer who overdid the sexiness was automatically a "foxtress", and a rock star who overplayed the social conscience bit - usually the luckless Weller again - was addressing "ver kidz". It may have been like punk never 'appened, but you caught a whiff of the movement's scorched earth puritanism in the mocking disdain with which Smash Hits addressed rock-star hedonism. Any ageing rocker who surrounded himself with nubile females was referred to as "Uncle Disgusting". Any remarks Uncle Disgusting made about the comeliness of said nubile females were countered in print either with an onomatopoeic representation of someone vomiting (which, if memory serves, went "SPEEEEEEEOOOOOW!") or with the phrase "pass the sickbag, Alice".
Alcohol was "rock'n'roll mouthwash" - Smash Hits themselves alleged toasted success with "a cup of milky tea and a cream horn". Pop stars had their names mangled beyond repair. Having noted both his resemblance to Britain's most famous missing aristocrat and his flexible attitude to sexuality, Freddie Mercury's name was altered by degrees to Dame Frederick Of Lucan. For reasons never fully explained, Stephen "Tin Tin" Duffy was always Stephen "Tea Towel" Duffy.
Useful for:
EA2C - Language Production
Olympic conversions
And it's not just the Olympics either. An expression like "to text" is now commonplace, and even terms like "to prank" someone (to play a prank on them) or "stop paranoying me!" (in the context of a girl being wound up about her ship sinking and avalanches falling on her during a year 7 skiing trip!) have been reported on the list too.
Language change in action! But why is it so often, noun to verb rather than the other way round?
Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
The tale of the gay horse and getting fined for sweet FA
Mr Brown, 21, a student at Oxford University, had said to an officer: "Excuse
me, do you realise your horse is gay?".
Police decided to take him to court when he refused to pay a fixed penalty £80 fine, arguing fairly rationally that a horse couldn't be insulted by the word "gay". The police countered by saying "He made homophobic comments that were deemed offensive to people passing by".
In today's Metro it's reported that a teenager was fined £80 for using the F-word while talking to a friend in a private conversation. With heavyhitters like Shami Chakrabati of civil liberties pressure group Liberty and the Rev. Ian Gregory of the Campaign for Courtesy stepping into the debate over the F-word, the whole incident has been blown out of all proportion.
But how much of our language is policed like this in reality? Most of us can swear with gay abandon and to our hearts' content if we so wish, and never get banged up by the police. How do we feel about swearing in public, homophobic abuse, offensive chants about supposedly gay footballers or even gloating chamts about injured footballers? Your comments are welcome...
Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA5 - Language Change
Monday, February 13, 2006
It's ruff oop north
Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties (although somehow I doubt it...)
Sunday, February 12, 2006
"Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic..."
Citing the rise of nazism as a counter-argument, and quoting Jewish writer Victor Klemperer, he argues that languages can get worse: they can in fact "coarsen" to the point where groups of people can be labelled, subjugated and slaughtered because words have convinced the general population that genocide is a necessary and justified action.
There's no doubting that we can abuse language in this way, but it all seems a bit dramatic to invoke the atrocities of the holocaust in an attempt to attack descriptivist linguistics. Have a read and make up your own minds...
In the second article, Alistair Campbell - Tony Blair's sultan of spin - lays into a book on the language of politics, Unspeak by Stephen Poole, arguing that it glibly criticises politicians' language use and provides no sensible alternatives of its own. It's a decent article, if only for the ironic spectacle of Campbell - a master of weasel words - savaging an opponent for being economical with the truth. But then, that's exactly the kind of wooly-minded lefty outlook that Campbell loves to attack.
Elsewhere, in a Times article from a couple of weeks ago, Vaclav Havel's play The Memorandum is discussed and its focus on politcal language explored. As the reviewer explains:
Set in an anonymous communist-era office, the play follows the torments of the managing director, Josef Gross (played by Gerry Mulgrew), as he tries to get to grips with a new language, introduced in an effort to bring order to workplace communications.
Known as Ptydepe — pronounced in Stevenson’s production as “pet-id-ipy” — the language has been mathematically constructed to avoid sound-alike words, thereby ensuring maximum precision.
Free from ambiguity though it is, Ptydepe is also impossible to learn. That doesn’t stop its zealous advocates snatching power from Gross and forcing the gobbledygook onto their colleagues.
All three articles provide good subject matter for topics around language change and attitudes to it, or language and representation, so happy reading...
Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA5 - Language Change
Friday, February 10, 2006
The language of love
You can subscribe to the MED Magazine on their main site, and it's well worth it to keep up to date with new words and a whole host of language issues, from explanations of tricky grammar through to lesson plans for tough year 9 groups.
Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
Thursday, February 09, 2006
You're not singing anymore...
It can't have escaped any tabloid reader's attention that Arsenal and England footballer, Sol Campbell is currently getting a lot of publicity for his off-field problems, which are affecting his on-field performances. But according to Simon Hattenstone of The Guardian, the chants directed at Sol Campbell sung by Tottenham fans have reached a new low (despite the fact he or his team weren't even playing).
According to Hattenstone, the chants reflect not only homophobia (claims that Sol Campbell is gay and has HIV - a claim that led to his brother getting into a fight and being sent down for assault, last year), but sexism (for their use of the c-word) and racism (for their use of the image "hanging from a tree", which supposedly links to lynchings of black men in America).
Hattenstone's version of events has been rubbished by some Tottenham fans in today's papers, but it does at least raise a few interesting questions about what's fair game for abuse at a football match and what's considered appropriate material for chants.
So, what do you reckon: racist, homphobic and generally unpleasant, or just part of the everyday culture of football matches and lots of blokes together? Comments welcome...
Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA6 - Language Debates (Political Correctness)
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Wor lass's moongin she's fallen wrang
Why? Because, quite a few studies suggest that it's older people who cling onto the local and regional dialect forms of their areas, rather than the younger generation (who're moving towards multi-ethnic youth dialect/s, apparently). And as new doctors move into areas where regional dialects are still strong, they'll need all the help they can get to understand what the old codgers are chatting about (fast forward to me in 50 years, moaning about the price of Rich Tea biscuits and how Dizzee Rascal's fifteenth album is just waste, man...or something).
Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change & Varieties
Friday, February 03, 2006
Linguistic profiling
Do we make the same assumptions here too, or are so many "urban" accents converging that we can't tell who's black and white, Bangladeshi or Turkish anymore?
Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change & Varieties
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Learning languages
Follow EngLangBlog on Bluesky
The old Twitter account has been deleted (because of both the ennazification and enshittification of that site) so is now running on Bluesk...
-
As part of the Original Writing section of the NEA, students will be required to produce a commentary on their piece. This blog post will pr...
-
As lots of students are embarking on the Language Investigation part of the Non-Exam Assessment, I thought it might be handy to pick up a fe...
-
When Dan asked what he should post about next on this blog, one of the most common responses was this, the World Englishes topic. Maybe ...