Accent attitudes: lessons in discourses

As I posted a day or two back, accent attitudes have been back in the news. Following a report from The Sutton Trust, using research from the team behind Accent Bias Britain, various newspapers and online sources decided to cover the broad findings of the report and discuss attitudes to UK regional accents and those associated with people from working class and/or racially minoritised backgrounds.

Accent stories are pretty popular in the press and we’ve seen a lot of coverage of them in the last year or two. Whether it was the attacks on TV presenter and footballer Alex Scott for her pronunciation of -ing, BBC presenter Amol Rajan’s appeal for a wider variety of accents at the BBC or Artificial Intelligence being used to make call centre workers sound ‘whiter’, accents get you clicks. And in the (anti) social media hellscape (thanks Elon) that we’re heading into in 2022, a lot of those clicks are hateclicks.

While the stories and op-eds are pretty good sources for A Level students to analyse and evaluate and even use as style models, the replies and online comments are more visceral… and sometimes pretty vile. But having said that, they are useful short texts to pull apart in class, so here are a few ideas for what to do with them.

1. Assemble a cline of contempt: take each tweet/reply/comment and copy it onto a grid where you can cut them out and line them up. Rank them in order of their negativity to the linguistic position being discussed. Is this one more negative about certain accents than this one? How can we tell? Are they equally awful but just focusing on different things?

2. Group them into patterns of peevery: what are the themes behind their complaints? Are they annoyed at the absolute wokeness of a linguist even arguing that there such a thing as accent bias, or just annoyed that young people are being sensitive about accents? Group them into shared themes and discuss what these concerns might tell us about these language discourses.

3. Analyse them for discourses of doom: blow up each message onto a sheet of A4 and pull them apart linguistically, annotating them and using your three AOs for P2Q3 as a guide. AO3 for meanings and what is being represented, along with the discourses being tapped into and reproduced; AO1 for linguistic descriptions of the techniques and structures being used; AO4 for connections between these texts and the wider discourses you have identified in previous lessons, and perhaps even connections to the other texts as your analysis develops. Maybe you could even start to write comparative analytical paragraphs on two or more messages. 

4. Answer back: choose a couple of texts that you can respond to and use this as practice for your P2Q4 work (where you write an opinion piece in response to the issues raised in the texts from P2Q3). Write back to the message. Perhaps you could discipline yourself to just sticking to the length of a tweet or a couple of sentences; perhaps you could develop this into a couple of paragraphs. Think too of how you can show your AO2 knowledge to challenge uninformed and prescriptive views of language. If you see a message that you think is actually right about something but not very well-supported, think about how you can develop a more linguistically informed way of phrasing it, by referencing research, theory and examples from case studies.

5. Ask what they're on: "I'm not earth to bow to ridiculOus", I ask you....

Here are a few anonymised responses to the accent stories that you might want to use.

And of course, before social media existed, we had letters to the editor (ask your gran) and some of these were nicely crafted. You still find them in the wild occasionally, like here in The Guardian. So these could be mixed in too to spread the range and offer some more rhyme and reason.   

Accent bias in the media

It's been a while, sorry! Most of the posts I used to add here seemed simpler to do as tweets, linking to news stories, but I might start blogging more regularly again as Twitter seems to be taking a turn for the worse. 

Anyway, here's a load of stories and links connected to a recent report from The Sutton Trust and using research by Accent Bias Britain into... well, accent bias, as you might expect. The Sutton Trust tweeted about it here as well. 

BBC story

Sky News

Guardian

A Guardian comment piece on it

I might come back to the comments and replies another time and we'll probably address some of this in a future episode of Lexis. 

Nice YouTube explainer here from Devyani Sharma too.

And an unconnected accent piece from a day or two back: James Bond

Popular discourses around accents

Everyone has got an opinion about accents and that’s OK, but when those opinions and personal preferences start to influence how people are treated and made to feel, that becomes more of a problem. Part of the problem is that the language most people use to describe accents is often rather general and non-specialist, and tied to personal judgements about people’s characters. So, for example, even when we think we’re being nice by saying that one area’s accent is ‘warm’ or ‘friendly’ or that someone else’s accent is ‘charming’ and ‘educated’, it uses language that has a flipside. For each of these adjectives there’s a set of opposing qualities, which we’re implying might be used for other accents: cold, aloof, unfriendly, hostile, charmless, uneducated… stupid. 

You might shrug your shoulders and think ‘So what?’ and that’s probably a fairly common response, but when you’re studying English Language at A level, I’d argue that it matters. It matters, partly because we’re studying language and we need to do better than just use casual descriptions that might cause offence or hurt, but it also matters because we want you to be able to analyse discussions about language with a critical eye on Paper 2 and these terms are one of the ways in to doing that, so it pays to be alert to them.

Articles about accents have appeared quite frequently in actual exam papers for Paper 2 and in textbooks and teacher resources for the paper, because accents are always under discussion. Whether it’s attitudes to regional accents, discussions about social class and accent, people dropping their accents or being made to feel ashamed about them, or even accent prejudice being made illegal, there’s plenty of material out there that would make good Paper 2 Section B texts.

But generally speaking, they aren’t written by linguists, so many of them recycle rather dubious attitudes that some people don’t have accents, that some accents are intrinsically better than others, that we should encourage people to drop their home accents, or that we should discourage young people from using regional varieties in school. In other cases, they might be written by experts in one field – voice coaching, say – but not by experts in language study itself and those pose their own difficulties, because they can often appear pretty knowledgeable but still peddle some unhelpful and linguistically unsound concepts. They can also – like the article I linked to earlier today – get their geography a bit shonky…

And then we have discussions about accent on social media, where opinions about a person’s character, personality and political persuasion may well seep into comments about their accent or language style, comments that in any other case would probably be seen as disparaging and unfair. This has certainly been the case in recent comments about the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, whose accent includes a feature sometimes called -g dropping, but which is probably more accurately described as using the alveolar /n/ rather than the velar nasal /ŋ/ so words like singing, talking and moving are pronounced as singin, talkin and movin. Whatever your views on her politics (and mine are…umm… *quite* negative) it’s not really fair to attack her accent, because attacking that is likely to make others with that accent feel that their speech is being singled out. And they've done nothing wrong.

So, where does this lead for Paper 2 Language Discourses work? One thing you can do is to extract some key quotations from a few of the articles I’ve linked to in this blog, or some of the social media posts about accent features, and have a think about how accents are being represented through language. You might ask yourself a few of the following questions:

· Which adjectives are being used to describe different accents or ways of speaking?
· What connotations are attached to those descriptions?
· Are sounds being described in a figurative way (ie using metaphor or simile)?
· What wider discourses are being constructed or reproduced by these descriptions? Are we, for example, seeing a discourse of disability or obstruction associated with certain accents? A discourse of success attached to others? Accents being presented as ‘opening doors’ or ‘paving the way to success’?
· Are the speakers of these accents grouped together in any way that might be problematic? Could these representations be challenged from a linguistic standpoint?

Intersections and explorations

One of the key messages from the feedback on Language Change and Diversity on Paper 2 over the last few years has been that students who understand the interconnected nature of the language topics* often have a better chance of hitting the higher levels of the AO2 mark scheme than those who see them in separate boxes. And this makes a lot of sense when you look at the kinds of questions being set and - more broadly - the nature of language and its users.

To paraphrase and oversimplify decades of sociolinguistic thinking, the first wave of work in the 60s and 70s tended to look at the language associated with and used by different groups in society, the second wave looked at social networks and how connections and associations between people and groups impacted upon language use, before the third wave came along and looked at how language is used by people to perform different aspects of their identities by drawing on linguistic repertoires and pools of language features. You'll find many better worded and more developed explanations of these trends in sociolinguistics text books, but as a general picture of where thinking has been going, it's a start. 

What this feeds into for Paper 2 is that if you view language use in a kind of essentialist way (ie that working class people use x kind of language and middle class people use y kind of language because of the social classes they belong to) you're probably not going to appreciate the more complex nature of our identities as language users. After all, we are all more than just products of our environment and the categories we can be placed into. Aspects of our identities - gender, ethnicity, occupational and social groups, for example - all have an impact on how we use language and we perform these aspects of our identity in different ways depending on who's around us and what we want to achieve. I probably didn't think a great deal about 'performing my whiteness' when I was teaching in a largely white college, but I thought about it more - and about my students' performances of their own ethnicities in that college and later on, elsewhere - when I worked in a largely African-Caribbean college. Sometimes, we start to think about these things and realise that aspects of language we had perhaps taken for granted are part of a much bigger and more complex picture.

It's also why a lot of us teaching the course keep reminding students that while the topics* for Paper 2 - occupation, gender, world Englishes, region etc - have their own knowledge base and bodies of research, there are some key strands that link them all together. It's this overlap or intersection of different aspects of language that can be really interesting and the exploration of these overlaps can lead us into some of the higher reaches of the mark scheme when it comes to assessing work.

Let's take a couple of recent programmes about language as cases in point. Radio 4's Woman's Hour recently aired a segment about accents. You can find it here: From about 33 minutes in

In this programme, the contributors talked about how their accents had been commented upon, criticised, belittled and mocked by others. While it was sad to hear this and the emotional and professional impact it had had on these women, it wasn't new: we hear about this all the time and accent bias is something you're bound to look at on the course at some point. Where it became more interesting is where the prejudice about accent (usually - but not exclusively - seen as a feature of regional variation) started to intersect with issues such as class and gender. Were women particularly discriminated against because of their accents? There certainly seemed to be an aspect of all of this behaviour that suggested that women's voices were fair game for criticism in a way that men's voices often aren't. 

And what about social class? Is it worse for a woman to sound working class than a man? And what about working class women in certain occupations such as teaching and lecturing? This is where an understanding of wider ideas such as attitudes to standard and non-standard English, different attitudes to linguistic variants (how someone might say bottle, grass, or use different words for greetings - hi, hey, whassup, alright) across the world and a grasp of the shared patterns across different topics really comes into play.

A second programme on Radio 4, called Code-switching, also illustrates some of this. While code-switching and style-shifting are fairly common areas to study on the course, the different angles in this programme are particularly fascinating. The host, Lucrece Grehoua takes us through some of the ways in which the Black people she interviews view their use of language in relation to predominantly white and middle class workplaces, how they feel about adapting their language and the different tensions between between ethnicity, class, occupation and gender. For a lot of people of all ethnic and social backgrounds, converging and diverging are just things we do all the time, so it's really interesting to hear people dissecting their own language use in such fine detail and at such a meta-level.

Again, this is the kind of discussion that helps to illuminate a number of different areas of language study and allows you to see how so many of them link up. Have a listen and see what you make of it.

Yorkshire dialect: variation and social values

In this guest blog, Paul Cooper takes a look at Yorkshire dialect, how we identify whether someone 'sounds Yorkshire' and the variations that can be noticed within Yorkshire dialect. Dr Paul Cooper is a lecturer in English Language at the University of Liverpool. He's primarily interested in historical sociolinguistics and you can find more of his work here.

The idea that there is a Yorkshire dialect has been around for a very long time – since at least the seventeenth century, as evidenced by the anonymously-authored A Yorkshire Dialogue Between an Awd Wife, a Lass, and a Butcher (1673). Today, we can see examples of Yorkshire dialect in many different contexts including in dialect dictionaries, on commodities like t-shirts, tea towels, birthday cards, and coffee mugs, in media representations, as well as online in Facebook and Twitter posts, and people seem to have a reasonably good idea of what Yorkshire dialect is, where it is spoken, and what they think about it.

My research takes a language-ideological approach to analysing Yorkshire dialect which illustrates the specific language features people think of as being Yorkshire dialect, as well as the social values they associate with it. By doing this, I’ve been able to identify a repertoire of features that people broadly consider to be Yorkshire dialect, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Repertoire of Yorkshire dialect (see also Cooper 2019)

These features are most likely to make people think “Yorkshire” when they hear them, or if they wish to affect Yorkshire dialect they will employ these features. There is also wide awareness of these features – my research highlighted that people from all over the world could identify these features as Yorkshire dialect in some cases. This is because the repertoire has been enregistered, meaning that it has undergone ‘processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’ (Agha 2003: 231).

In the case of Yorkshire dialect, the linguistic repertoire is comprised of the features listed in Table 1. We can say that this repertoire has become differentiable and socially recognised by virtue of the fact that people identify it as Yorkshire, they can talk about it and they can provide commentary on it.

In order to investigate the kind of commentary we can see I conducted interviews with 19 speakers (10 female and 9 male) from across Yorkshire who had lived there all their lives and were highly familiar with the dialect. These interviews highlighted the social values linked to both Yorkshire dialect and Yorkshire speakers, which included ‘plain speaking’, ‘authenticity’, ‘independence’, ‘sense of humour’, ‘geniality’, ‘hospitable’, as well as the perception that the dialect is ‘unintelligible’ to outsiders, which is seen as a positive thing and adds to a sense of in-group membership for Yorkshire speakers. This came up in an interview (see Cooper 2019: 77) with Alfred (an older male speaker) who described the scenario in extract 1 where switching into ‘broad’ Yorkshire dialect meant that people who weren’t familiar with it couldn’t understand him:

1) Alfred: years and years ago me dad once went to Spain fishing sea fishing=
PC: =mhm=
Alfred: =and on this boat me dad and me brother there were two Spaniards on the boat and they were speaking Spanish
PC: yeah=
Alfred: =so me dad and me brother started talking Yorkshire broad Yorkshire they couldn’t understand they come up to ’em and said what language is that we don’t understand it and they’d no idea they said can you talk in English because we can’t understand

However, in addition to the social values listed above interviewees also perceived Yorkshire dialect to be internally varied, leading them to discuss features not included in the repertoire in Table 1. For instance, several speakers discussed notional differences between Sheffield and Barnsley (two urban areas in South Yorkshire that are roughly 16 miles apart), exemplified in extracts 2 and 3 where Nora (an older female speaker) and Esme (a young female speaker), both from South Yorkshire, highlight the distinctive nature of Barnsley dialect relative to Sheffield dialect:

2) Nora: yeah cos the Barnsley is the Barnsley accent’s totally different to t’ Sheffield
3) Esme: It’s true though innit because like from Barnsley and Barnsley’s still in Yorkshire but it’s still completely different to Sheffield

The main way in which they perceived Barnsley dialect to differ from other parts of Yorkshire was in the pronunciation of the name ‘Barnsley’ itself, which they demonstrated as having a different vowel to their own pronunciation, as illustrated in extracts 4 and 5:

4) Nora: if you ask somebody that comes from B[ɑː]nsley where they come from they’ll come from B[aː]nsley
5) Esme: We’d say B[ɑː]nsley they’d say B[aː]nsley

In the first instance the first syllable of B[ɑː]nsley would be pronounced the same as the word ‘barn’ in RP, whereas in the second, B[aː]nsley, features a more fronted vowel (which I call the ‘Barnsley vowel’), rendering it something more like ‘Baaarnsley’. This is a pronunciation that Barnsley speakers themselves appear to be aware of. For example, in the run up to the 2014 Tour de France, some of which passed through Barnsley, the Barnsley-based graphic design company Black Bee Creative posted a blog article which described how the word ‘Baaarnsley’ was written in large letters in a local field as ‘a pun on the local accent plus the noisy sheep in the field’ (Black Bee Creative 2014).

Ultimately, despite the long-standing nature of the dialect and the wide awareness of its enregistered repertoire, it seems that the term “Yorkshire dialect” only broadly applies to certain language features. When we look at the situation more closely we can see that there is more localised variation within Yorkshire that local speakers are aware of, and there are varieties within Yorkshire that are simultaneously associated with a particular town or city as well as Yorkshire itself, and may be distinguished from other areas by the pronunciation of a single vowel.


References
Agha, A. 2003. The Social Life of Cultural Value. Language and Communication 23, 231-273.

Black Bee Creative. 2014. Putting baaarnsley on the map [Online]. Available at: http://www.blackbeecreative.com/putting-baaarnsley-map. [Accessed 12th October 2017].

Cooper, P. 2019. The enregisterment of ‘Barnsley’ dialect: Vowel fronting and being ‘broad’ in Yorkshire dialects. Language and Communication, 64, 68-80.

Kellett, A. 2007. Ee By Gum, Lord! The Gospels in Broad Yorkshire. Smith Settle, Skipton.

Could you recognise an East Midlands accent?

In this guest post, Natalie Braber (@NatalieBraber) takes a look at a variety of English that sits somewhere in the middle of the North/South divide and a little to the east of its better known Brummie cousin. Natalie is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University and an expert on the accents and dialects of the East Midlands.

When we think about accents in the UK, there are some which we all think of straight away, for example, Scottish and Irish but also more local places such as Newcastle, London or Liverpool. But not all varieties have the same media exposure and this can make them harder to recognise, even for people who live there.

Perceptual dialectology - perceptions of local accents and dialects

My research examines language variation in the East Midlands which I think is a really interesting area of study. When linguists (and other people too!) think about the way people speak in the UK, they often think about the North/South divide and how that is reflected in language. For example, do you pronounce ‘bath’ with a long or short /a/? And do you pronounce ‘up’ as /ʌp/ or /ʊp/? But this divide is not straightforward – how do areas like the East Midlands fit into this picture? Although the East Midlands is the geographical centre of England, it certainly isn’t perceived as being a central part of England. It has been referred to as ‘neither here nor there’ and as a ‘no-man’s land’. Even the use of the term ‘East Midlands’ can be problematic – different researchers use terms such as ‘south Midlands’, 'North-west Midlands’, ‘Central Midlands’, ‘East-Central Midlands’ or just ‘Midlands’ but without explaining exactly what areas they are discussing.

Until I started work on them over the last few years, there hadn’t been a regional survey of the region since the Survey of English Dialects in the 1950s. However, I think these linguistic varieties are interesting. From its geographical position in England, we can see that these varieties share features with ‘northern’ speakers but there are also some features which are more typically found in ‘southern’ varieties. I wanted to find out more about what young people thought about language variation in the UK and whether they could recognise local accents. So I invited secondary schools from across the East Midlands to take part in my study. I asked permission to attend an hour-long class with students in year 13 in order to engage with their opinions on language variation in the UK and listen to some recorded voices to try to place particular accents.

In all, 327 students were involved in this study (of which 191 in Nottinghamshire, 85 in Derbyshire and 51 in Leicestershire). The first task was to ask these students about the North/South divide in the UK – where they thought it was and whether they felt they belonged to either region. Students used a map of the UK to draw a line where they felt this divide was and wrote next to this whether they thought they were northern, southern or neither. This task showed me that most students (99%) agree that there is such a divide but many did not have an expressed affiliation to either region. Almost a third of all participants left this blank and ‘neither’ was the second choice. Geographical location could play a role, because students from the most southern county in these samples, Leicestershire, were more likely to label themselves as ‘southern’, while those from Nottinghamshire were most likely to label themselves as ‘northern’ and for those who used the term ‘Midlander’ most were from Derbyshire.

In the second task, students were asked to circle areas on the map where they thought distinct linguistic varieties were to be found, to label them with names if possible and to give any opinions they had about these varieties (what it sounded like, typical words or pronunciations, famous people who spoke with such an accent). The responses given by these students were very variable. Some included just one or two circles (e.g. Scottish, Geordie) whereas others drew very detailed analysis of different words used in areas and included many circles covering larger areas of the UK. The top five regions/cities labelled by the participants were Liverpool (by 90% of students); Birmingham (83%); Newcastle (81%), London (77%) and Scotland (62%).

Ringing & labelling UK dialects

Opinions & views about UK dialects

I was also interested in the way students labelled their own areas, and which areas they left blank. Nottingham was recognised in 10th position as a distinctive accent by students in all three counties (although it is important to remember that Nottinghamshire students made up a larger group in this sample). But even the students from Derbyshire and Leicestershire very rarely included their own areas as having an accent. Only eight participants labelled Leicester/Leicestershire as having a distinctive accent (and all of these students were from the schools in Leicestershire) and a further three had labelled Derby/Derbyshire (again all from schools in that county).

So it seems from this task that the East Midlands accent is not seen as being an obvious candidate for showing regional variation. This may be due to the age of the students as they may not be aware of having an accent themselves or it could be to do with the fact that East Midlands voices are not often heard in the media.

In the third task students were asked to listen to 14 different voices and to put a cross on the map where they thought the speaker was from – this included locations from around the UK (including Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh accents, as well Plymouth, Ashford (Kent), London, Newcastle, Birmingham, Burnley, Withernsea (East Yorkshire) and Liverpool and three ‘local’ dialects (Nottingham, Leicester and Derby). I was particularly interested in how well the students were able to recognise the ‘local’ voices. The results show that it seems that the dialects commonly named in the previous task were also accurately labelled in this task (particularly Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham and Wales). London, Glasgow and Northern Ireland as well as the local dialects were generally labelled less accurately. Previous research suggests that people tend to be better at recognising local accents. However, our participants were not very accurate at recognising the voices which were from the East Midlands and placed them all around the country, with locations being placed as far north as Manchester and Leeds, and as far south as Plymouth and London.

From this task we can see that some accents may be harder to recognise for these participants and local varieties are included in this. I did include discussion about local language with the participants and they were able to think of lots of different features to do with pronunciation, grammar and local words which they thought were ‘typical’ of the East Midlands. When we talked about local language, much of the discussion focused on its perceived ugliness. Students mentioned that it was lazy, slurred, chavvy, boring, rough, not proper, nothing unique, and some said that they did not like it or were trying to get rid of it. Only one or two students said that it was relatively easy to understand and one student that it was friendly. This raises questions about why there should be so much negativity surrounding local language. Even so, these participants were still not accurate in recognising these accents. It could be that the East Midlands is not immediately thought of as having a distinctive accent because there are no strong links with local famous people. For many of the other accents we could see that celebrities from a region may help with recognition.

I think more work is still needed – would older participants hold the same views? How good would people outside the East Midlands be at recognising or describing East Midlands voices? There are plenty of other varieties in the UK where this still needs to be done – why don’t you collect some data where you live and examine how it differs from other varieties? You could include pronunciation, morpho-syntactic structures or lexical variation. I think it is important to celebrate our own local accents and dialects – they are an important part of our identity and we should be proud to use them!

You can read more about Natalie Braber's work on East Midlands English, including 'pit talk', the language of East Midlands miners, here and East Midlands Voices here. 

‘Topics’, topic areas and overlap

Following on from the last blog about AO2 on Paper 2, another aspect that I think it is important to address, for hitting Levels 4 and 5 in particular, but more generally in terms of an understanding of language across the board is that of the overlapping nature of the ‘topics’ on Paper 2. I use ‘topics’ in slightly wanky quote-marks because I think there’s often an issue around the word that I hadn’t really twigged until the new spec appeared. For some, ‘topics’ are just blocks of content, often optional ones from a wider list, so if you used to teach the old AQA B spec, you could choose from 3 topics on ENGB1: language and technology, language and power and/or language and gender. A few centres taught all three, most seemed to do two of the three and I think some might have just done one and crossed their fingers and hoped that it was a nice question.

This is clearly very different with the new spec; the topic areas (if I can call them that without falling into the ‘topic’ trap) are all related in various ways. We have areas such as occupation, class, gender, ethnicity and world Englishes all floating around in various forms and there’s a lot of overlap between them. For example, where does social class and language fit in? Is that part of social groups or is it more related to region? And what about language & occupation? Is that part of social groups or a different area entirely? I think the simplest thing is to actually go back to the spec and see how it’s laid out there.

The specification outlines the following: sociolect (specifically mentioning social and occupational groups, gender and ethnicity), dialect (including regional, national and international variation) and change.

To me, it makes sense to use this as the starting point and to think about the overlapping nature of all these areas before really going into detail into all of them and considering the most relevant examples, studies and theories to explore. By that I mean – a bit like I mentioned in the last post – to think about the core concepts to begin with and then map the detailed knowledge back from there.

Before we even look at the areas that we might cover for language diversity, let’s step back and look at the bigger picture for Section A of Paper 2. If we look at the nature of language variation and change to begin with, we can see that the two big areas (which get divided into a choice of two questions in Section A of Paper 2) themselves overlap.

An example of this is UK dialects and the ways in which they have changed over time. If you look at work carried out by the Universities of Cambridge, Zurich and Bern in 2016, they have traced dialect change using an app and compared the findings of their survey to the Survey of English Dialects gathered between 1950 and 1961. While there are differences in their methodologies and some variables that might have altered, what’s really clear to see is that in some areas, dialect terms have almost completely disappeared. What’s also interesting is that accents have changed too but not always as obviously. So, with this dialect levelling we are actually seeing a change taking place over time in the way that English varies. There appears to be less variation now than there was in the mid-20^th Century.

'Backend' and 'Autumn'

Pronunciation of 'arm' with rolled /r/

Another example is that of word meanings. Again, this is ostensibly a change issue – word meanings changing over time – and therefore a change ‘topic’. But how do word meanings change? They don’t just change overnight and in fact at any given point, lots of people will have a very different understanding in their own minds about what words might mean.

Take recent examples like ‘gay’ and ‘awesome’ (both looked at by Justyna Robinson in 2010). At any time, there will be multiple – often age-differentiated - meanings for the same word. 

There are other contentious terms that have different meanings for different age groups. I remember having a heated debate with a bloke at football last year because he’d used the word ‘mong’ to describe a player on the home team. I objected and told him that it was a disgusting word to use, because it was an offensive term for people with Down's Syndrome. He couldn’t see the issue and claimed it meant nothing like that and I heard him grumbling later to someone he was with that “You can’t say anything now”. Who was right? Maybe we both were. I was brought up in a time when the word ‘mong’ was tossed around as a casual slur and it was linked to the word ‘mongoloid’ which had been used to describe the facial appearance of those with Down's. He was younger than me (and bigger, so I’m glad it didn’t come to blows) and denied point blank that it meant anything like that to him. I’ve had similar discussions (although usually less sweary and heated) with students who have used the term and been oblivious to its older meanings.

It doesn’t just have to be slurs and slang under discussion though. Even this week, there has been debate about the meaning of the word ‘sausage’ in relation to Greggs’ new vegan sausage roll. “How can a sausage roll be vegan when a sausage has to contain meat?!” shouted some angry gammons. “Sausage is all about the shape, fam. Allow it!” responded some millennial snowflakes. This is how change often takes place: meanings gradually shift, are contested, complained about and often take a while to bed in. (If you’re interested in this, John McWhorter’s ‘Words of the Move’ is a brilliant book about how and why change happens and a recommended read for everyone studying this course.)

So, there’s overlap between change and diversity, but what about within diversity? The key point for me here is to make sure that before diving into the study of areas like gender and occupation, all students are completely clear about the bigger picture. Most sociolinguists these days don’t subscribe to a ‘pigeonhole’ view of language – that the ‘categories’ you are born into, be they your class, region, sex, race, or whatever, dictates your language use. That’s far too deterministic and doesn’t really reflect the nature of language as we use it in the real world and the variation within groups.

The thinking now tends to be that while these factors might all contribute to your language identity in some way (and perhaps some more significantly or obviously than others), we can draw on different linguistic strands from this pool or repertoire to perform different identities with different people in different situations.

We can perform a friendly and competent co-worker identity with Person X at work, perform a more casual and relaxed identity with Person X and Person Y after work and then perform a parental role with young children at home. All of these will draw on different linguistic resources available to us through our individual backgrounds and the contexts we are using language in.

Rob Drummond and I have talked about this idea about performing identity quite a lot in the CUP Topics in English Language book, ‘Language Diversity’, that we collaborated on but you can also find more about it in sources such as Penny Eckert’s ‘Jocks and Burnouts’ Detroit study, Jenny Cheshire’s Reading study, Kevin Watson’s work on the Liverpool accent and performing a Scouse identity, Carmen Llamas’ work in Middlesbrough and Emma Moore’s Bolton study. There’s a lot of new work going on around it too and it’s a very productive and interesting area for students to explore.

That understanding of language as something that we can choose to use to construct a version of ourselves in different contexts is one that underlies a lot of the ‘interplay’ alluded to in the indicative content on the mark scheme for Level 4 of AO2 in the June 2017 paper and the “different views, approaches and interpretations” in the Level 4 performance characteristics each year.

So, how could you approach this in practical terms?

Case studies are a way to introduce this. By looking at some real (or made up) examples of people’s language backgrounds, you can explore the language they use in different contexts and where that comes from. We included one such case study of a former A level English Language student from south London, Shahnaz, in the OUP textbook and this might give you a flavour of the kind of approach you could take. You could also ask students to start building up a picture of their own influences, but a problem with doing this with A level students is that while there may be a degree of social, ethnic and perhaps even regional and international variation among them, they are all of a similar age and you might be teaching in a single sex school. While you can get somewhere with this and start to help students unpick the different influences on their own linguistic behaviour, it might be more useful to start with a few case studies that allow you to show different features and factors at work. Just off the top of my head, I might look at David Lammy, Maxine Peake, Stormzy, Danny Dyer and Scarlet Moffatt, but there are plenty of others who could be interesting case studies to examine.

The next step might be to gather language from these people used in different settings and to think about what it is specifically and linguistically that’s interesting to talk about. Does David Lammy use the same kind of language in parliament as he does on Twitter? Has Scarlet Moffatt’s language changed in different settings since she first appeared on Gogglebox and I’m A Celebrity? You’d need to be careful to avoid scripted performances, but there’s plenty to look at.

What’s also important with each case study is to really show what you mean by language variation – in other words, the characteristics of language that can vary on a lexical, semantic, grammatical, phonological and pragmatic level and how these can be illustrated.

Once you have looked at these case studies, you’ll be able to think a bit more about the different topic areas and how to approach them, because you’ll no longer be looking at them in isolation, but as part of a much bigger picture of language variation and diversity.

I hope that gives a few ideas about how to deal with the overlapping nature of parts of Paper 2. In the next blog, I’ll have a look at how to encourage students to use case studies, research and examples and to write linguistically about the issues at the heart of Paper 2. It might take a little while, but there will be other blogs along soon from other writers. Huzzah.

NEA: investigation ideas part 1

In this, the 1000th post on EngLangBlog (OMG), I'll run through a couple of quick ideas for language investigations based on recent stories in the news or language posts elsewhere.

1. Changing UK accents and dialects. 
The stories in the press and on the radio last week about the Sound of 2066 report were fascinating and worrying in equal measure. The report itself can be downloaded here and is a really good read (and very useful for anyone studying Change and Diversity for the new A level course). It looks at what English might look and sound like in 50 years and traces some patterns that have already been established - abbreviations, borrowing and simplification of sounds - to see what is likely to occur as time goes on.
Here's a nice clip of the report's authors talking about their predictions.
There are several language investigations in there, I think. One might be to consider one or two variables in your own family and the ways in which these might have changed across generations. Another might be to look at these changes in written texts over time: abbreviations cold be a good one as we have used them for a long time (e.g. etc. et al. & err... etc.) but many see them as a recent development.

Another set of investigations (which crosses over with Paper 2 Language Discourses work) would be to examine the coverage of the report. As I (no doubt, tediously) complained about on Twitter last week, the angles taken by various right wing news outlets, were worryingly xenophobic and played on anti-immigration themes. You can make your own mind up about these by looking at the headlines and main thrust of each of the following. Notice a pattern?

Telegraph
Mail (original headline published for this was "Is immigration killing off the Queen's English?"
The Sun
The Guardian

The local media coverage of stories like this is also good to consider. Here's what three regional publications made of it all:

Newcastle
Birmingham
Liverpool

2. Changing attitudes to taboo language
This one has always been a favourite  because it allows you to look at really bad swear words in an academic and mature way ("Ha, that says boobies!"). Every few years, Ofcom publishes a survey of social attitudes to swearing and their latest report can be found here. Looking back at their previous reports (check this blog), you can see some shifting social attitudes towards certain words.

Is this something you could do for your own investigation? An apparent time study (using an age-stratified sample of respondents) might allow you to test how people feel about different swear words and explore some of their reasons for finding them offensive or otherwise. There's plenty of scope for discussion about taboos around various bodily functions, sex and social behaviour, but also a lot of scope for discussion of religion, gender, race and sexuality, all of which feed into other parts of this course.

This article and this one are helpful for providing other angles.

More ideas next week, but if you have any of your own, please tweet them to @EngLangBlog.

Attitudes to accents

If you're revising Paper 2 of the new AS level, there have been some really helpful articles about some of the topics covered, over the last few days.

This piece from The Guardian on Friday (thanks to @ENSFCEnglish) looks at research carried out by Dr Alexander Baratta into accent prejudice in education and quotes some staggeringly ill-informed views about how trainee teachers should speak. The story is also covered in The Sun (thanks to @paulkerswill).

A couple of years ago, this story about a teacher made news when it was suggested she had been told to 'tone down' her northern accent while working in a soft, southern, shandy-drinking school (thanks to @Lisa7Pettifer for that link).

Elsewhere, Rob Drummond at MMU kindly posted the results of a short survey he had carried out into attitudes towards young people's language and you can find them here.

All of this material is useful for both sections of the new Paper 2 (AS and A level) where you might see examples of texts that represent regional and social varieties, along with debates and arguments about the same topics. The sample paper has a Directed Writing task on issues around people changing their accents and these texts give you some handy, up to date reference points for questions like that.

We've covered lots of pieces about accent prejudice on this blog in the past and you can find plenty of links through this page.

#TwitterTwang

One of the big topic areas on the new AQA English Language AS level (and the A level) is Language Diversity, in which we look at how language varies from person to person and place to place. Much of the work done on this topic has focused on spoken language - accents and dialects, for example - but language can vary in written and electronic forms too.

Twitter has proved a really useful way of both producing and collecting this kind of data and more is explained in an article looking at the work of Brice Russ at Ohio University, who examined the language in some 400,000 tweets, looking initially for how people in different parts of the USA used either soda or pop to describe fizzy drinks.

Gabriel Doyle explains some of the ways in which Twitter can be used to chart change in language and how changes in language spread in this lecture clip.

Rachael Tatman, blogging from the Northwest Linguistics Conference in April of 2015, also noted how Twitter cold be used to identify not just lexical but phonological differences in how people used Twitter: in other words, the ways in which people used different spellings on Twitter to represent the ways they spoke with an accent:

Ok, so people will sometimes spell things differently on Twitter based on their spoken language dialect. What’s the big deal? Well, for linguists this is pretty exciting. There’s a lot of language data available on Twitter and my research suggests that we can use it to look at variation in sound patterns.

So, how is this relevant to those us doing English Language at A level? Here's the plan...

With #TwitterTwang we'll try to gather data from UK A level students using Twitter and a few helpful teachers. Over a 3-4 week period before the end of the Spring term, we'll identify a handful of ways in which data can be elicited in similar ways from students in different places and ask each group of students to hashtag their tweets with #TwitterTwang and a number to indicate where they're from (Essex as 1, Leicester as 2, Hackney as 3, Southport as 4, East Norfolk as 5 etc.). We can then make use of the data collected to see if there are patterns in regional dialect and/or accent apparent in the tweets.

I'm still thinking about different elicitation techniques and open to ideas (so please tweet me @EngLangBlog) if you have good ideas or think mine are rubbish, but here's the tentative plan:

• a post-lunch tweet to describe what each student has had for lunch
• a Gogglebox-style tweet/series of tweets about a programme that everyone agrees to either watch at a given time or on catch-up (e.g. Britain's Got Talent, The Voice, Take Me Out etc.)
• a tweet about a picture/photo that we can all agree on an share

If we can agree on exactly which of these (or all?) to use, we'll have something to start with. We then need to identify a time to get this started. One of the best things about using Twitter for this is that we don't necessarily have to deal with the data as it comes in but can catalogue it using the different hashtags and save it for later. We could even use it for different things (language change, gender, individual tweeting styles) as the course goes on, or use it to compare with data in future years to see if language styles change.

Anyway, that's a start, I hope. If we could work out a plan in more detail through @EngLangBlog that would be great.

Rising intonation lowers career prospects

Rising intonation is a feature of phonology that has been discussed for a couple of decades now, often inciting strong feelings, most of them negative. Also referred to as HRT (High Rising Terminals) and AQI (Australian Question Intonation), but sometimes just labelled uptalk, rising intonation occurs when the normal descending cadence of a statement (dropping off towards the end) is replaced with a rising tone (like when you lift your voice to ask a question). We looked at it in this post back in December.

Recent research reported in the Mail Online suggests that HRT doesn't just rub people up the wrong way but can actually affect career prospects. According to Pearson who surveyed 700 men and women in managerial and ownership roles, a striking picture emerges:

The majority (71 per cent) agreed that AQI is a 'particularly annoying trait', with 85 per cent adding the use of the trait is a ‘clear indicator of a person's insecurity or emotional weakness.’ More than half said AQI would hinder the prospects of promotion and a better pay grade in their own organisation. While 57 per cent believed AQI has the potential to damage a person's professional credibility by revealing an inability or reluctance to speak their mind. Of the respondents responsible for interviewing job applicants for senior roles, only 16 per cent said they would be willing to gloss over AQI and focus purely on an applicant's strengths and aptitude.

The same picture of irritation and annoyance emerges in the gripes of various language commentators, including this piece in The Daily Telegraph.

(Edited on 09.03.14 to fix Daily Mail link)

Put up or shut up

We're all aware that people from the different regions around the UK tend to use certain words and meanings, pronunciation and even grammatical structures in different ways: that's a basic principle of geographical variation and has its roots in the history of Britain. But a new study at the University of Manchester has identified some interesting trends which suggest that some regional variations - particularly in word choice (lexis) - might be disappearing as southern terms spread north.

I'd call them Vans, myself

The research is reported on in the Daily Telegraph and the Mail Online, but if you want the real detail and a full look at the language maps that have been created by Laurel Mackenzie and her team at Manchester, go straight to the Multilingual Manchester website. Here you can look at the questions that were asked of the 1400 respondents throughout the UK: questions such as "What word would you use to describe the footwear featured in this picture?". The most popular answer for this question is pumps, followed in descending order of popularity by plimsolls, trainers, daps and shoes. With many of the other questions, the results can be compared with previous research findings, allowing a diachronic study (i.e. a study over time) to be made.

Interestingly, some of the questions also assess attitudes to what is standard and non-standard, asking respondents to say whether they think expressions such as "Give it me" or "I done it" are acceptable.

We'll be looking at this whole area in more detail when we go back to ENGA3 and Language Variation and Discourses after Christmas.

Teacher told to "lose her northern accent"

Following on from Friday's post about another attempt to 'ban' students from using dialect and non-standard terms (and/or slang, depending on your definition of the term), another story - this time about accent - has appeared.

According to The Cumberland News and Star, a Cumbrian teacher has been told to ditch her regional accent and make it more 'southern' to suit her Berkshire pupils. Now it appears that it's not just students who are having their language policed, but teachers are also being told what to say and how to say it. Where will the language police strike next?

Back in 2010, Ofsted raised a similar issue at a school in Portsmouth which prompted this blog post and this response in the TES, among other things.

Dialect dissing

First it was slang getting slagged off and now it's dialect being dissed. Is this a slippery slope towards linguistic fascism?

We've reported several examples of so-called slang bans on this blog over the last few years - a few are listed below - but in many cases, the definition of what constitutes 'slang' has been pretty broad, and more often than not, just plain wrong. And that's before you even start to look at the whys and wherefores of imposing 'zero-tolerance' policies towards forms of non-standard English.

In The Daily Mirror yesterday, Martin Fricker reported on a school in Halesowen, part of the West Midlands' Black Country, where such a zero-tolerance approach to local dialect had been introduced.

The Daily Telegraph reported it as well, but what is striking in so many of the responses quoted from parents of children at the school is how insulted many of them feel at being told that their variety of English is sub-standard.

Take for example, what parent Alana Willetts was reported as saying: "I got a double A in my English GCSE and I have a Black Country accent. I think it is patronising and insulting to say that people with a Black Country accent are disadvantaged. All the parents are outraged, English is a living language, we can't all talk the same, we don't all speak in ye olde English and new words are being added to the dictionary every day".

Compare that with the language being used to describe the local dialect: language such as "top ten most damaging phrases" and "zero-tolerance", which taps into discourses of punishment and destruction.

Even worse than what the school itself says, are the ways in which the comments below the line pick up the intolerant attitude towards non-standard forms and rapidly extend to damning whole groups of people, areas of the country and even races.

The delightful 'Stew' on The Daily Telegraph site comments "When so many childrens dialect is polluted with west indian slang!.", while 'Coley170'  from the Daily Mirror site gets their geography a tad confused and states "fair I think....they should speak proper English, they won't get anywhere in life speaking Cornish slang" and potential UN ambassador Chris Marshall decides that West Midlanders should be sent home to err....the West Midlands: "If you can not speak the English language then you should be deported".

Me, I'm with Alana Willetts on this, rather than the wrong-headed headteacher of Colley Lane or the backward bigots quoted above.

Edited on Monday 18th November 2013 to add Guardian link

Other links to "slang bans" and dialect discrimination:

Croydon
http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/another-slang-ban-attempted.html

Middlesbrough

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.ie/2013/02/driving-up-standards-by-driving-out-non.html

http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/local-news/debate-over-teesside-dialect-accent-3666223

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2273821/Middlesbrough-parents-clamp-local-expressions-home-children-learn-standard-English.html#axzz2KEG69Psp

http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/2013/02/05/anger-as-middlesbrough-school-tells-parents-to-stop-children-speaking-teesside-84229-32748896/

http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/theres-nowt-wrong-with-childrens-dialects/

Sheffield

http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/playground-prescriptivism.html

Manchester

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2435923/School-bans-youth-slang-and-sees-exam-results-soar.html

Basildon

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9044053/Essex-school-gives-pupils-elocution-lessons-to-lose-their-accents.html