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.

Challenging Linguistic Determinism

I've never been a great believer in Linguistic Determinism. That said, too many philosophers - all much smarter than me - have argued their points persuasively: "Whereof one cannot speak; thereof, one must say nothing!" And as for those who say that language cannot be trusted because it allows us to describe things that don't exist, or which are untrue... Don't get me started!

But I feel like the past year (and a bit) has reinforced my view that we can, in fact, extend our knowledge and understanding independently of language and that we don't need our passions or impressions to have been previously distilled or crystallised into absolute words or phrases which nail them down for us. I propose that language is determined by us, its creators; it is not some primordial AI which has developed the capacity to control us. 

Language is running harder and faster just to keep up with us. My suspicions were first aroused last year when the OED appealed to Mumsnet to contribute some words from its online community sociolect for inclusion in future editions of the dictionary. Since when did we have to go soliciting for new words? After some quiet reflection, I considered that the rising popularity of Identity Politics might be the cause. 

In recent years, we have refused to be pigeonholed according to our social status, sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, creed, politics, and so on. For decades before, these aspects of ourselves seemed reductive when used by others to define us or our beliefs in any way. Now it feels different. As individuals we suddenly want to assert our individuality with confidence again. Who can say what has reanimated the ghost in the machine? Strength in numbers accumulated in the virtual world moving into the real? An evolutionary or biological imperative to be seen, heard and understood? Some commentators even suggest that it is a subversive, anarchic and masochistic action: "Here I am, Establishment! This is me! I dare you to offend me or to be offended by me!"

There's no doubting that identity politics seems to be developing contemporaneously against the backdrop of changing economic and political landscapes around the world, though this is, perhaps, better left to another writer! It can only be a good thing that people now feel able to show their hand. Maybe they have simply looked around and decided that there is nothing more to lose and everything to gain.

Fittingly, in this 50th year since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, we have seen the LGBT movement grow into LGBTQIAPK. (No, I'm not going to do all the work for you, dear reader! Get out and research the other letters yourself!) This is a fabulous expansion of language in the form of an initialism which seeks to be as inclusive as possible. 

And to remind us where we started, we imposed this development on language because it was necessary; the lack of adequate terminology and the absence of an a priori knowledge that such an initialism would one day be required to fight against man-made prejudices did not hamper our ability to extend our knowledge or understanding of the issue, bending language to our will. So much for linguistic determinism!

Of course, things are far more nuanced than they appear. While it is now considered a positive step for most people to identify themselves as transitioning, bi-curious, Marxist, a single parent, pro-Brexit or anything else in the free spirit of identity politics, it is much more of a challenge to find language capable of embracing more subtle differences without being too sweeping or even dismissive of the finer points of issues such as race and cultural heritage.

In a recent article on pay inequality between particular social groups, tennis superstar, Serena Williams made reference to 'women of colour'. Using '... of colour' to refer to the unspecified and diverse cross section of society who identify with an ethic group other than that termed 'White', or who identify as mixed race or mixed heritage, is nothing new; but it did remind me of the historical problems associated with finding language to embrace ethnic and cultural diversity which is neither offensive, patronising, tokenistic, nor which (by its nature) excludes. 

The traditional paradigms of Black and White never really held up in linguistic terms due to their inability to make any further distinctions. Even the great John Lennon didn't contribute anything especially helpful when he included 'the Yellow or Red ones...' in 'Happy Christmas (War is Over)'! One of the more recent attempts has been to cluster everyone together in the BME category (Black and Minority Ethnic), but even this seems like a feeble attempt to recognise and celebrate diversity. Mere lip service.

On balance, '...of colour' is far more inclusive and (I think) represents the best compromise language has delivered so far. But it's not perfect. Just as no one is Black (in terms of its denotation rather than its connotation), no one is White. As such, we are all 'of colour', QED.

So what are we to do? Settle on uneasy compromise on this one issue? No. We should not be defined by language any more than we should be defined by our colour or any other part of our internal or external selves. We have already seen that the perceived constraints of linguistic determinism have been proved to be a fiction. If we can conceive of absolute equality; if we can conceive of absolute representation; if we can conceive of identity politics as being part of the body politic, then we will harness language and find the path to resolution.

Urban tweetz

As we saw last week, Twitter is proving to be a great way of tracking language change and variation, admittedly with a few limitations about tweeters' real identities and the like. This week, New Scientist reports on research by Jacob Eisenstein and his team at Georgia Institute of Technology which seems to indicate that new word formations and abbreviations of older ones are more likely to spread via Twitter from US urban areas with large African-American populations.

Slang - and some of these formations like CTFU (Cracking The F*** Up) and bruh (brother) probably fit under that umbrella term - has long had deep links with the black community. Julie Coleman's excellent book, The Life of Slang looks at how some forms of slang have been created and kept alive in African-American culture, so it's not a great surprise to find that this ethnic group is still leading the way in lexical innovation where a new technology is concerned.

There's more here too. 

 

Multicultural Language Hybrids

It's not just English that absorbs linguistic influences from other cultures and languages. What's happening with German seems to reflect patterns that have been noted in English over the last 20-30 years, where German teens are picking up vocabulary items from Turkish in areas where there is a significant Turkish population and mixing goes on between different ethnic groups. In this report about a study from Pottsdam University, the suggestion is that it's mostly lexical features - a few words - that are picked up by German youths.

So is this similar to Multicultural London English, with a new hybrid language emerging? Or is it more like London (and maybe Birmingham and Liverpool too) in the 1980s when it was more a case of "crossing"? I suspect it's the latter, as there doesn't seem to be quite the same range of lexical, phonological and grammatical features that we see in the research of Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and Jenny Cheshire into MLE (as seen being explained by Paul Kerswill here in a TED lecture).