Fry up

Over the summer, you might have read about vocal fry; that’s the kind of deliberately croaky voice demonstrated here by my favourite sit-com teenager, Dalia in Suburgatory.  Recent coverage of vocal fry has all the features of typical media stories on language and gender, and is a great example of why we should be sceptical when reading mainstream media coverage of linguistic issues.   Reading and analysing mainstream media coverage of linguistic issues is, of course, something  A2 students will need to do in your exam; you’ll also need to create your own piece for your intervention coursework.

 

First, newspapers will pick up on a recent bit of linguistic research, or maybe something they've seen mentioned on Twitter or YouTube.  Journalists are particularly keen on using headlines which express a clear and simple difference between men and women, so they will either reduce complex, nuanced findings to simplistic ‘men do this/women do that’ headlines like this, or base an article around a flawed bit of research like this.   The wonderful Deborah Cameron outlines this process at length in her snappily titled blog post (which btw would make a great style model for your intervention) ‘How to Write a Bullshit Article About Women’s Language’.

In the case of vocal fry, it seems that reporters noticed a story in the academic publication ‘Journal of Voice’.    Enterprising journalists realised they could write a story that combined celebrity click-bait with a ‘men-and-women-are-different’ story and so produced headlines like this featuring tabloid darlings like Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears.   There was even more mileage in the story when media outlets realised they could use the story to lecture women about how they need to speak more like men, and to blame their failure to do this for inequalities in education and the workplace.  Even feminist writers in respected, ‘serious’ newspapers got in on the act, presenting the story as a rallying call to young women; stop talking like a weak and feeble girl!

Never mind the fact that the original research only looked at young women, and so provided no evidence that only young women use vocal fry.   Never mind the easily demonstrable fact that men use vocal fry too, as shown in this brilliant post.   Never mind the fact that the original research only looked at young women, and so provided no evidence that only young women use vocal fry.  Never mind the fact that vocal fry is only seen as a sign of weakness when women use it.

The lesson here is not to take media coverage of women’s language (or, indeed, any linguistic issue) at face value.    Instead, do a bit of digging and reading around.  And if you want a different perspective on women’s language, you can always rely on Professor Cameron.

Media Texts and Language Interventions updated

A year or two ago, I put up a list of links to articles that might be used as style models or sources of inspiration for the A2 writing coursework part of the AQA A (Language Intervention) and AQA B (Media Text) specifications. This has been updated a few times, thanks to links that colleagues and blog/Twitter people have sent me, but I thought it was probably time to add a few more, so here goes.

If you are a teacher reading this, you might also find this useful for the new AQA English Language A level that starts being taught in September 2015, where Paper 2 has a writing task similar to the media text and intervention.

Again, I'd be delighted to add any others if you want to suggest them, either as comments on this blog post or as tweets via @EngLangBlog.

Opinion pieces

English can absorb this assault from texting (Canadian article)

Isabelle Kerr on silly new words and why they shouldn't be in the dictionary

Fay Schopen complains about young people and language

John McWhorter on “Is Texting Killing English ?”(short answer: no)

Lynne Truss gets angry about grammar

Erin Brenner responds to Lynne Truss

Michael Rosen argues that there’s “no such thing as ‘correct’grammar”

Terence Blacker on why schools should clamp down on slang and ensure Standard English

Michael Rundell asks “What are the correct rules of English?”

David Marsh on arguments about language and The Pedants' Revolt

Harry Ritchie challenges "only one way to speak"

Kyle Chayka asks "Is the Innanet RUINING teh English Language??? ¯\(°_o)/¯"

Geoff Pullum asks "Are grammar nazis ruining the English language?"

Hannah Jane Parkinson on How We Are Judged On Our Accents

Cumberbatch Needs to be More Careful with Words ('coloured' actors and racist language)

Don't Crucify Cumberbatch (the 'coloured' controversy)

Robert Lane Greene on prejudice against accents

Feature articles

Rebecca Holman on ‘Menglish’ (gender and language)

‘Menglish’ in The Daily Mail

Girls are way ahead of the linguistic curve (gender and language innovation)

How 'like' has taken off as a quotative

Britt Peterson on Why We Love the Language Police (grammar and non-standard English)

Ben Zimmer on 'Salty', a "Word with a Promising Future".

Manterruption: the "Secret Plague" for women at work

Hadaway wi ye

The responses to the story last week about Sacred Heart Primary in Middlesbrough correcting their pupils' use of non-standard English are still coming thick and fast.

The most original is from the author, David Almond, who was born in the North East. In his phonetically written article for The Guardian, he argues that "the commin langwij cums from the hart an sole, and must neva be forgot". It takes a minute to tune in, but it's a good read once you're on his wavelength.

This article in yesterday's Independent on Sunday is great stuff too, because it's written by a genuine expert, a sociolinguist from King's College, London. Here, Julia Snell  shows that it's more than just a question of promoting "good English" - which is what all English teachers are trying to do in pretty much everything they teach - but also to recognise the close link between language and identity.

As Snell says, "Ultimately, it is not the presence or absence of non-standard forms in children's speech that raise educational issues; rather, picking on non-standard voices risks marginalising some children, and may make them less confident at school. Silencing pupils' voices, even with the best intentions, is just not acceptable".

Sadly, this article by a teacher called Pete Turner is less exciting, partly because it has no real style and partly because it's just a rather predictable moan about young people's language. Sorry Pete, but if you'd opened your ears a bit more to some of your students' language styles, it might have made a more engaging read. And as for northerners having large, extended families and southerners getting their slang from grime? Right...

The fact that two of the articles have over 600 responses shows what a live issue this is out there in the real world, not just in our English Language lessons. If you're looking at doing your Language Intervention for ENGA4 coursework in the next few weeks (and you probably should be) then this is exactly the kind of language debate that you should be getting stuck into.

(HT to Ellie Aslin, Jon Dolton and @backwellengdept and @UKLiteracy for first link, Paul Kerwsill via the EMC Facebook page for the second, and Alasdair Mackenzie for the last.)

Edited on Monday 11.02.13 to add 2nd article and restructure references.

Hiding the agent

Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary who is embroiled in a scandal about his relationship with an "adviser", has made some mistakes apparently, not that he would put it that way. He would say "I accept that it was a mistake to allow distinctions to be blurred between my professional responsibilities and my personal loyalties to a friend". And that, as Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian says, is a pretty rubbish way of saying sorry.

Freedland's article looks closely at Fox's slippery language, particularly his abuse of the passive voice, a grammatical technique that he describes as "grammar's way of telling you somebody is hiding something", which is a neat turn of phrase. It's a good bit of textual analysis and something that would make a sound starting point for a language investigation.

Heated debates

Now the new term has started and I'm back teaching again (huzzah, I think) I'll try to update the blog with relevant material for AQA Language A and B specs a bit more frequently.

The first thing I'd like to set up is a Debate of the Month, which I hope will help A2 students with Language Intervention coursework and the Language Discourses part of the ENGA3 paper. The plan is to highlight a particular topic each month and look at different arguments around the issue, flagging up various style models for written pieces and offering suggestions for different angles on each debate.

I'm hoping that any keen followers of the blog (and I know there are some out there...mother, can you hear me?) will also chip in and join the debate by adding comments and links. We can all dream, I suppose.

The first topic will be gender differences in conversation and I'll kick it off next week with a quick survey of the different positions and some of the recent debates about how men and women are supposedly hard-wired to use different conversational styles and why this is a controversial (and rather dubious) position.

If anyone would like to suggest links to articles, case studies or just offer a view, I'd be interested to hear.

Language investigation ideas: I am so liking "like"

Seeing as thousands of English Language students are currently being told to come up with great ideas for next year's investigation coursework, I thought I'd offer a series of occasional posts that might help kick start a few projects.

First of all, here's an interesting piece by Mark Liberman on Language Log about how he went about investigating the use of like in spoken language. He was inspired to look at like because of a post by Erin Gloria Ryan entitled My Love Affair With "Like" in which she speculated about how like is used differently depending on age and gender factors.

What could you do with like for an ENGA4/ENGB4 investigation? Well, it's worth thinking about what you'd like to achieve with an investigation like this. Liberman uses a corpus (basically, a database of language) to test out the hypothesis that young women use the discourse-particle like more than men, and he makes this clear from the outset. What he also establishes is that he's not looking at any old mention of like -  but a specific function of the word, and this is good advice for anyone about to set up an investigation. So, he's set a research question/ hypothesis and established a clear focus for his investigation.

Another key piece of advice is to approach the investigation with an open mind, and this is what he does: not trying to make his findings fit any preconceived pattern but to see if his original hypothesis was actually right. He says:

... there's no evidence that women insert non-traditional like into their conversation more often than men do. There may be specific syntactic or pragmatic contexts where this is true; there may be effects in some registers and not others. But so far, I'm inclined to think that this is one of those cases where congruence with pre-existing stereotypes (here that women are less assertive) leads to post-hoc rationalization and confirmation bias.

Interestingly, he puts forward suggestions here about why there might be a perception that women use like more, and that in turn opens up other areas of investigation. Are women generally seen as more tentative and therefore assumed to use markers of tentativeness more frequently? Are women less assertive in some conversational situations? Are women using a "double voice discourse" (as Judith Baxter suggests) and shying away from confrontational language because of how they will be perceived by men? There are loads of other questions linked to this that would be really fascinating to pursue.

But bringing this back to A level projects, what could you do with something like this?

Perhaps there's a feature of language that you've noticed being used by one group of people and not another. Maybe it's like, innit, awesome, gay, standard or mans and you want to find out more about its usage. You could go to a database of language as Liberman does, set your search terms and get looking, or you could gather your own data and see if there is a pattern.

Recording your own data creates its own issues - most of them easily addressed, if you plan ahead well enough - but it is a great way of getting hold of new material and adding to the store of language data that we can all learn from.

So, over to you: what areas would be potentially interesting to explore?

Media Texts and Language Interventions: helpful article

It's probably too late for this year's A2 students to get much out of this link, because you really should have handed in your coursework by now, but this article (which I've nabbed from a suggestion by Julie Blake on the Teachit Language Sputnik) offers a very readable explanation of what's needed in good science journalism.

As Julie points out over on her site, a Media Text (B spec) or Language Intervention (A spec) is often concerned with making a difficult, quite specialist idea accessible for a mainstream, non-specialist audience, very much like science journalism has to do. The article gives some helpful pointers as to what you can do.

Texting: too many LOLZ, not enough R&J

As mentioned on here many times before, the USA has caught onto texting a bit later than us in the UK, so the moral panics about texting and literacy, texting and repetitive thumb injuries and texting and attention spans have hit their media fairly recently. I'm only saying this again to cling on to a deeply pathetic sense of superiority over this one tiny achievement when, in all other fields, the USA beats our increasingly rubbish country.

This article in the Seattle Times takes a look at the ways in which the language of texting is leaking into some students' written work and the concerns that have been raised about this. It's a good article because there's some attention given to less hysterical viewpoints, and even the students quoted are honest when they admit that sometimes they're just lazy and CBA 2 switch styles.

It's also quite a good style model for an ENGA4 Language Intervention or an ENGB4 Media Text, I think.

If you are looking for more articles about texting, click on the texting label at the end of this post and you'll find loads more.

Media texts and Language interventions

As loads of A level Language students (and teachers) are currently looking for style models to use for the A and B spec A2 coursework, I thought I'd try to make the search a bit easier by pulling together links to articles and stories that might be good to use.

I'll try to group these into broad areas that have been helpful for me in the past, but if you'd like to suggest other categories or argue about how I've grouped or defined these, just say.

(Updated with new links on Monday 17th October 2011)

Op-eds (opinion/comment pieces by named writers)

• Zoe Williams on slang that demeans women
• Zoe Williams attacks the word "chav" and all it stands for
• Paul Flynn on the word "chav"
• Beatrice Bray on words to define mental illnesses
• David Mitchell on language change
• Richard Littlejohn on "gollywog"
• Mad Melanie Phillips on "gollywog"
• Hannah Pool on "gollywog"
• Ziauddin Sardar on the place of political correctness in language
• David Gelernter on the perils of PC
• Anti-ebonics op-ed
• Max Davidson on slang 
• Christopher Howse on new words and dictionaries
• SFX blog post which links to several pieces by Simon Heffer about language
• Dr Bernard Lamb of the Queen's English Society bemoans low standards in English
• Henry Hitchings (author of Language Wars) on changing London dialect
• Charles Moore of The Daily Telegraph on why change is bad
• I h8 text messages: John Humphrys gets mad in the Daily Fail
• Cn u txt?: John Sutherland savages texting in The Guardian (2002)
• 2b or not 2b: David Crystal argues that texting isn't all bad
• The end of handwriting: Boris Johnson on the rise of technology and the end of writing

News stories

• "Man on the Street" offensive to women
•  The Sun on "youth"
• Texting is good for you
• Texting is bad for you
• Texting is edumacational
• Studying texting is dumbing down 
• More on texting and literacy (readers' comments range from hysterical to offensive)
• The Sun on slang (image file) 
• A strangely popular article about the rise of "regional super-accents". With pictures of Cheryl Cole.
• Twitter and regional dialect in the USA (thanks to Ant's blog)

Feature articles

• "Gang slang" in The Evening Standard (nothing to do with gangs really, but there you go...) and an op-ed response in The Voice
• Lucy Tobin on "student slang" (again, not really about "student" slang per se, but worth a look...)
• Anna Leach on geekspeak and the language l33t (really good article!)
• Seattle Times piece on worries over text language

• General advice from Tim Radford on writing about science for a non-specialist audience: useful tips

OK, that's a start for now, and I'll add more over the coming days. You can also look for the blog posts where these articles were first mentioned by putting various keywords and phrases such as language intervention, media text, style models, texting, slang, new words, political correctness in the search bar on the top left of the screen, or by clicking on the labels below.

You might also find this link helpful as it gives more info about what an op-ed is. I've always told my students it's an opinion editorial, but this link says that's not the case. Ho hum.

This is quite interesting on different types of feature article too.

Hard-wired or softly spoken

The debate about gender and language use is one that has been a hot topic in linguistics for the best part of 40 years. From Robin Lakoff's "Women's Language Hypothesis", through to the staunchly feminist dominance model, into the difference model of Maltz & Borker popularised by Deborah Tannen and then John Gray, before recently heading into a discourse and diversity approach championed by Deborah Cameron, the debate has developed apace.

Today's Guardian features a strong comment piece by Madeleine Bunting that focuses on the recent clashes between followers of a "hard-wired" approach to gender differences, and those who suggest that context and individual differences are more important. Deborah Cameron is a key reference point in the article and it's exactly the kind of debate about language (and other things) that underpins the ENGA3 unit on the AQA A spec, and the ENGA4 Language Intervention. It's also an interesting read for anyone who wants to mug up on some of the latest arguments about biological determinism and the influence of culture and upbringing.

More on slang and correcting dodgy grammar

Here's a couple of follow-ups to recent stories featured on this blog.

For starters, this is a comment piece by Bob Nicholson in The Guardian which looks at how Victorian English took in American slang, and how the Americanisation of English is hardly a recent phenomenon.

Then there's this piece by Belinda Webb, also from The Guardian, that takes a look at reactions to slang. It's not a particularly brilliant article as the writer appears to confuse dialect and slang, but it's an intervention in the debate about language, so worth a look.

Finally, there's this article about Queen's English Society arch-pedant, Bernard Lamb in last month's Times Higher.

English RIP

If you're looking for style models to help you with media texts for ENGB4 or language interventions for ENGA4, this fake obituary for the English language is a nice example. While the content is pretty standard prescriptivist fare (The language is doomed! People make spelling errors! Newspapers print bad English!) the style in which it's written is quite interesting. Here's the first paragraph:

The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.

Reflecting on new words

After all the posts on new words of 2009, and new words of the last decade, and all the other posts about new words on this blog (probably about 50 of them over the last 5 years), here's a really excellent feature article from the Sydney Morning Herald that takes a more reflective look on which words last and why certain words become popular.

Among the many good observations Jacqueline Maley makes in her article is the point that "technology, along with American English, is by far the biggest force for change in the English language today". And she goes on to ask "How can we determine which neologisms are passing fads and which should be included in dictionaries, our lexicological gift to the next generation? How to decide which words are worthy of being anointed official representatives of our language? Or is it our dictionaries that must change, moving from stolid documents of rusted-on record to more dynamic, changeable texts?".

What I really like about this article is that it takes a wider view. Rather than just list loads of new words (like many recent broadsheet news articles on the same theme) it considers what's going on in the longer term, and asks some interesting questions about where language is heading. Plus - to be totally reductive and make it all about A level English - it's a brilliant style model for feature articles in ENGA4 Language Interventions.

Happy new words

For this first post of 2010 there's an op-ed from Liz Hoggard from The Independent all about popular culture and new words. It's a good, pro-language change piece that celebrates the "energy and rhythm" of new language, and it doubles as a neat style model for anyone doing an ENGA4 Language Intervention in this form.

And here's an article from The Guardian a few days ago about the best new words of 2009 and the Oxford English Dictionary's latest additions. Plus, here's a Guardian blog post of readers' favourite words and phrases of the noughties.

Weasel words

Today's Independent features an article by columnist Johann Hari on the euphemisms he would expunge from the English Language. As he puts it, "The English language needs periodically to be given a spring-clean, where we scrape off the phrases that have become stuck to the floor and toss out the rotting metaphors that have fallen down the back of the settee".

Among the expressions are "fair trade", of which he says:

This phrase suggests that paying desperately poor people a decent wage is a nice
ethical add-on, and a gratifying departure from the norm. In fact, it should be
taken for granted – the default position of civilised human beings. If we
believed that, the labelling would be reversed: it's all the other food that
should be labelled as "Unfair Trade", "Rapacious Trade", or
"Let's-Pay-a-Pittance Trade." The terrific comedian Andy Zaltzman suggests a sign
that could be on the packets: it is a silhouette of an obese businessman pissing
on an African child.

Fair enough. But several comments in response to the article accuse Hari of doing exactly the same thing that he's complaining about: giving a political spin to the language he uses and the meanings he creates. So, is any language genuinely neutral? Can we open our mouths and speak without allowing our language choices to inadvertently reflect our views and political/ philosophical outlooks?

Again, this is an interesting article not only for the language issues addressed but for its potential use as a style model for the text you'll be writing about a language issue in your ENGA4 coursework and the Language Discourses part of the ENGA3 exam paper.

For more on euphemisms - what they are, how they're often used and why they annoy people - try this 2007 post on the blog.

Texting is retarding our teens

It's true! It must be, because a neuroscientist is saying it's true. In this article by Michael Deacon from The Daily Telegraph, Baroness Greenfield is reported as blaming young people's alleged short attention spans on the brevity of text messaging. Deacon himself has strong views about texting, telling us that "If everyone in the world keeps texting, we'll all become as mentally stunted as each other, and so nobody will even notice that there's been a narrowing of the human attention span."

And in this piece from The Daily Mail, Greenfield offers more detail about her opinions. In one interesting part of it she says:

I believe that if the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of instant action and reaction with the press of a key, such rapid interchanges might accustom the brain to operate over the same timescales.
The young brain, particularly until the age of ten, is incredibly impressionable. It is without the yardsticks we gain on our way to adulthood and against which we measure information. The young brain simply absorbs information and is shaped by it.
That's why, if a child learns to express themselves through text messaging - and at the same time reads less, writes less and communicates face-to-face less often - there is a case for questioning how it will impact not only on the way they communicate in later life, but also on the way their brain matures.

So, what do you think? Can you think at all? Have you been exposed to so much text messaging and such short, undeveloped fragments of language that you can't express yourself in complex sentences any more? Have you even read this far?
I'd be interested what readers of this blog have to say on this issue, partly because blogs are about sharing ideas and learning collaboratively, but also because at the end of next year many of you will be taking ENGA3 in which you'll have to think about, analyse and critique language debates such as this one.
 Greenfield, in the Daily Mail, uses the metaphor of language being "eroded" by texting, eaten away, reduced in some way. It's a metaphor that will soon be familiar to A2 students as we look at models of language change and arguments about such change - prescriptive and descriptive - and how we can explore where English is heading.
Along with ENGA3, you'll also be doing ENGA4 in which you'll need to write a creative piece about one of the topics you've studied for ENGA3. So, the Michael Deacon article in the Telegraph or the Baroness Greenfield one in the Mail can be really helpful style models for how critics of language change structure and express their ideas and arguments.

Investigating Language

Here are the suggestions for language investigations that we've come up with in our intro pack. If you've got any adaptations to these, or ideas of your own, please add them here. But remember, that on the new AQA A spec the focus has to be spoken language.


An investigation into the ways in which two children of different ages use spoken language in similar situations.

A study of the use of metaphor in a political speech

An investigation into how three different teenagers use language while involved in a puzzle solving task.

A study of the language used by gym instructors or football coaches

An investigation into how males and females use similar or different language when describing a picture.

An investigation into the language used by teachers in 2 different classes of similarly aged students/pupils.

An investigation into how candidates on The Apprentice use language in the boardroom.

A study of attitudes towards different regional or national accents.

An investigation into how different ethnic groups use particular slang expressions in conversation.

A study of how Creole is used in three different generations of the same family.

An investigation into the differences between how the same person tells a story in spoken English compared to in a written form.

A study of the language of cinema trailers

An investigation into the language used by a range of radio DJs to introduce songs

Language development under the microscope

This article on the BBC news website offers an insight into one approach to researching children's language development at the moment. As part of the "speechome project", Professor Deb Roy and his colleagues are collecting a quarter of a million hours of data. And the other figures are equally staggering:

"The first task we set for ourselves was to transcribe everything my son heard
or said from nine to 24 months," he says. He estimates that there is somewhere
between 10 to 12 million words of speech to transcribe. "For anyone that has
transcribed speech, they will know that is a laborious and slow process," he
says, with a degree of understatement.

And some initial observations that Roy has made seem to offer support to social interactive theories of language development. The BBC site explains:

By analysing the length, and hence complexity, of sentences spoken by caregivers
to his son, he believes that he has shown that adults subconsciously simplify
sentences until the child understands the word. Once it has been understood, the
adults then build up the complexity of the sentences containing the word. "We
essentially meet him at this point of the birth of the word and gently pull him
into language," he says.

Elsewhere, there's more support for interactive models of language acquisition. A report from UCLA suggests that adult-child conversations can potentially offer six times as much language development improvement as talking at a child (parent monologues/reading) or the child watching TV.

"Talk is powerful, but what's even more powerful is engaging a child in
meaningful interactions — the 'give and take' that is so important to the
social, emotional and cognitive development of infants and toddlers," says Dr.
Jill Gilkerson, language research director at LENA Foundation and a study
co-author.

"It is not enough to speak to children," Zimmerman adds.
"Parents should also engage them in conversation. Kids love to hear you speak,
but they thrive on trying speech out for themselves. Give them a chance to say
what's on their minds, even if it's 'goo goo gah.'"

And finally, in a piece of investigation that could win the No Sh*t Sherlock award for 2009, researchers at Seattle Children's Research Institute have discovered that when the TV is on people talk less and use fewer vocalisations, potentially harming the language development of children who are in the same environment. What is interesting about this is the observation that it's not so much the TV programmes that could damage the children's language (although In the Night Garden is the work of Satan as far as I'm concerned) but the effect watching TV has on the family's spoken interaction.

The study found that each hour of audible television was associated with
significant reductions in child vocalizations, vocalization duration, and
conversational turns. On average, each additional hour of television exposure
was also associated with a decrease of 770 words the child heard from an adult
during the recording session. This represented a seven percent decrease in words
heard, on average. There were significant reductions in both adult female and
male word counts. From 500 to 1,000 fewer adult words were spoken per hour of
audible television.