The Language Barrier?

There's a series of three extracts from Deborah Cameron's new book The Myth of Mars and Venus in The Guardian this week, which should be essential reading for all AS and A2 students (and teachers!).

As she outlined in this piece last year, Cameron isn't really a fan of those linguists who argue that there are inbuilt differences between male and female language. For one - she argues - there are more language differences between different men or women within their own sex than there are between the sexes. For two - she argues - the myth of gendered differences is being used to make women feel that they need to adjust their speech to become more "assertive" and "direct". For three - she argues - an industry has sprung up around the whole myth, crystallising these rather dubious ideas as scientific "fact".

They're convincingly researched and persuasively argued points, and part of a much wider debate about gender and language which affects us all. As Cameron puts it in today's extract:

The idea that men and women metaphorically "speak different languages" - that they use language in different ways and for different reasons - is one of the great myths of our time. Research debunks the various smaller myths that contribute to it: for instance, that women talk more than men (research suggests the opposite); that women's talk is cooperative and men's competitive (research shows that both sexes engage in both kinds of talk); that men and women systematically misunderstand one another (research has produced no good evidence that they do).

The three pieces can be found here, here and here.

Recent research detailed here supports Cameron's findings and suggests that males and females actually talk about as much as each other on average. But as Cameron is quick to point out in her book, what is an "average" male or "average" female? We are all different and use language in many different ways in different contexts.
Useful for:
ENA3 Male and female conversation
ENA6 Language Debates

Information for teachers of English Language

The course blog for our programme of English Language teacher workshops is now up and running at http://englishlanguageworkshopssfx.blogspot.com/

We're still finalising the programme of speakers and presenters, but it's already looking like a really great line-up. If you're interested in attending please use the course blog to contact us.

Don't blame hip hop

Following on from what I thought was a rather good discussion this morning about the dreaded n-word, Asher D's Sticks and Stones programme, and the influence or otherwise of rap lyrics, I stumbled across this article in the New York Times. Given all the furore around the use of the n-word and the recent attempts by members of the black community in the USA to get the word taken out of circulation, the article points to the growth of more party-orientated lyrics in recent hip hop tracks and poses the interesting questions: "What if hip-hop’s lyrics shifted from tough talk and crude jokes to playful club exhortations — and it didn’t much matter? What if the controversial lyrics quieted down, but the problems didn’t? What if hip-hop didn’t matter that much, after all?" So, is hip hop really to blame for the growth in the n-word? Does it really matter? Will its recent resurgence die out naturally? Answers on the barrel of a Gloc 9mm... or posted as comments below might be nicer.

Say bye to the hyphen

Bye...hi...hyphen? Geddit? Oh, well.

The new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is out and instead of the usual media articles about all the funny new words included in it (WAGs, yummy mummies and size zero all make an appearance BTW, and there is at least one story about the new words here), the focus has this time been on a tiny little piece of punctuation: the hyphen ("-"). According to an analysis of the new dictionary, hyphens are dropping out of usage. So words that used to be hyphenated such as bumble-bee are now compounded into one single word, while others such as ice-cream and pot-belly are now written as noun phrases e.g. ice cream and pot belly.

As this interesting article on the BBC News Magazine site tells us, the blame is again being laid at the door of email and electronic communication. Others are arguing that the hyphen is not dying our but being re-purposed (or should that be repurposed) as part of emoticons like the smiley :-)

It's not the first time the decline of the hyphen has been noted, as this story in 2003 demonstrates in almost exactly the same terms. And for more detail on the whole story, have a look at The Language Log blog here.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates

Death to the emoticon ;-)

...the computer keyboard, especially for touch-typists, is an invisible piano on which we play instantly ... First musings race into fully-formed words and sentences with no pause for revision, let alone perfection. As soon as they are on screen they acquire validity. Over them hovers the dreaded send button, itching to be pressed and behind which lurk a hundred links, addresses and possible misdirections. Send is always pressed too soon.

So says Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins in a passionate attack on the language of emails. His comment piece begins by pointing out that emoticons (the little symbols which smile, frown, wink or glow with shame) are now 25 years old and that their use has spread with the growth of online communication. He then goes on to make the point that all mechanical or electronic forms of communication have used some form of abbreviation, but that emails are a blunt tool causing "unintentional pain and embarrassment" and that even emoticons can't make up for the lack of subtlety or nuance in email communication.

Jenkins' article is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, his argument that email is less subtle than the handwritten word is perhaps true, but then each serves a different purpose - for the time being anyway. The written word (pen on paper) is still given more credibility and status than the word processed or emailed word: take birthday cards, legal documents and contracts, for example. Perhaps all this will change as e-communications take over the world.

One of his other points, that email doesn't provide an interaction is a little more dubious. While it's true that email isn't the same as face to face talk in its potential to be shaped and re-shaped depending on cues like facial expression, body language and eye contact, it is still pretty quick. Replies can zip across the internet backwards and forwards as quickly as you can read them and type them.

Then again, unlike MSN where conversations can be tracked in real time, there is often a time lag in reading and responding to emails which means that it can lead to misunderstandings and lost threads.

The discussion about Jenkins' views is taken up in a debate at the end of his article, and the responses are well worth looking at for some different angles.

Useful for:
ENA3 - spoken and written language
ENA5 - Language Change
2008 AQA A spec - Language & Mode

Mind the gap

Two articles on the psychologist and language guru, Steven Pinker appear in this week's papers ahead of the publication of his new book The Stuff of Thought. In The Times the focus is on how and why new words are created in the English language and what this tells us about human nature. the second is a more detailed survey of Pinker's career that takes in his views on child language acquisition and language and thought.

In the first article, an extract from his book, Pinker looks at the processes of new word creation, giving a range of interesting examples of compounds, conversions, metonyms, affixes and borrowings, all of which should help a student of language change. But maybe more interestingly, he starts to look at some of the reasons why these new words stick - or more usually don't stick - in the language.

In the second article, the focus is on Pinker's developing views on language acquisition, the connections between thought and language, and evolution. Pinker points to the central metaphors of language as evidence that we have an inborn structure to the way we think about the world:

There is an inborn structure to the way we think, he argues, and language offers us clues to it. Take metaphor: no matter what tongue we grow up speaking, we seem to come equipped with a large toolkit of ways to think about things in terms of other things. We talk about love as a journey, for example ("we've come a long way together"), and use space as a proxy for time ("let's push that meeting back an hour"). "Children will occasionally make errors like 'we better pack now, because tomorrow we won't have space to pack'," Pinker says. That sentence conforms to the basic rule - thinking of time in terms of space. But according to English convention, it's wrong; adults don't go around saying it, so children can't just be parroting their parents when they make that mistake. This, Pinker argues, points towards some kind of innate cognitive machinery, predisposing us to think of time as if it were space, and to make many similar transitions from the abstract to the more concrete.

So, are we all programmed to think the same way? Do we actually have any control over the way we perceive the world? Is language part of our cognitive machinery or a completely separate element of us? I'm confused and I need a man with big hair to explain it all.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition
ENA1 - Language and Representation

(thanks to Jason for tip on Times article)

Big brother is listening to you...

Can you tell that someone is lying to you from the way they talk? Birmingham City Council seem to think so and they're installing new Voice Risk Analysis software at their call centres dealing with unemployment benefits. According to this article on the BBC news website:

It works by measuring "micro-changes" to the frequency of the human voice and relaying to the operator, in real time, the level of risk that the speaker is being deceptive. At the start of the conversation, the software takes the caller's normal voice as the benchmark and accounts for the possibility that changes may be caused by nerves. If the caller is deemed by the operator to be low risk, using the test results to support their own judgement, they are fast-tracked and avoid more rigorous vetting. Those deemed to be at higher risk of lying must supply further evidence to support their claim.

So, is it a step forward in protecting honest tax payers' cash, or a decidedly dodgy attempt to jail the nervous?

Useful for:
ENA3 - spoken language

New year begins

Hello, and sorry for the long silence. It's been a busy time at my college in Cornwall, with many changes taking place, interviews and enrolments to complete...So this is just a quick check-in to renew my acquaintance. Walking the dog along a quiet country lane today I spotted this intriguingly ambiguous sign at the gated entrance to a meadow: 'Electric fence and bull in field'. That's a bull to avoid. And the other day I saw a van, presumably belonging to a company connected with diving; its name painted on the side was '2 Dive For'...

Exam results

Thursday - as you know - is A Level results day. Good luck to you all and I hope you get the result you deserve. I mean that in a nice way, obviously. If you don't get what you want, don't panic. There are plenty of helpful people at college to point you in the right direction, so just ask.

I won't be around on results day as I'm going on holiday. Good luck!

Some child language stuff

Not much time to blog at the moment, so here are some links to recent articles on child language, just to keep up to date:

Psychologist explains secret of children's word explosion
Language DVDs can slow down baby talk, parents warned

Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition

Say goodbye to the female brain. Say hi to the female mouth

If you're an avid blog-reader, you'll remember last year's Myths of Mars and Venus story in which top linguist Deborah Cameron tore into the American bestseller The Female Brain. To summarise it, the writer of The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine made a claim that women use some 6000 more words a day than men, while Cameron (who is writing her own Myths of Mars and Venus) makes the point that there can be no "average" man or woman, least of all an average number of words we speak, because we use language differently depending on who we are, what we do, where we go and why we're doing it, and while gender may have some part to play in our language, it's one of many many factors.

The latest take on this comes in last week's news stories on a piece of research in Science magazine, reported here and here. According to The Guardian's story on this, "Men and women talk as much as each other, suggests a study which says that, on average, both genders speak around 16,000 words a day - a fact challenging the traditional notion that girls are considerably more chatty than boys".

The research is covered in more detail in The Times article here:

The first rigorous study exploring the verbosity of men and women has found both sexes equally capable of irritating jabber. The typical woman speaks an average of 16,215 words a day, while an average of 15,669 words pass the lips of men, a difference so small it is not statistically significant.

The most loquacious people of all, indeed, tend to be men, but men are also the most taciturn. All three of the biggest talkers who took part in the research were male, the most prolific of whom yakked his way through 47,000 words in a day. The most effusive woman managed a mere 40,000.

At the other end of the spectrum, one man spoke an average of just over 500 words each day. There were nine men who spoke fewer than 2,000 a day, compared with only four women.

As an average of 16,000 words are spoken each day, people who talk at 120 words per minute — the speed at which the BBC’s Huw Edwards reads the news — would end up speaking for a little more than two hours of the 17 they typically spend awake.
The Little Britain character Vicky Pollard, by contrast, speaks at 330 words per minute, and would get through the average daily word allocation in just 49 minutes.

The findings, from a team at the University of Arizona, overturn a notion that is not only popular with the public, but which has also found its way into scientific research.

The debate about male and female talk is continued here in a Times editorial, here on the BBC website and here in an article from today's Guardian. But as many commentators point out, the stereotype of women being chatterboxes is such a deeply ingrained social myth, that whatever the research presented to counter it, many refuse to accept it.

Useful for:
ENA3 - Male female conversation

Ms - a missed opportunity?

The word Ms. - mostly used by women who don't see the need to reveal their marital status - gets extensive coverage in this Guardian article. The debate about Mr, Miss and Mrs goes to the heart of feminist linguistics.

Many (or should that be femy) argue that the titles given to women and men in English reflect a male dominated society in which women's status as married or unmarried is marked, while men have a single generic title. Some have argued that this shows that women's status in language is inferior. The article looks at the 40 year history of the word and attitudes towards it, commenting along the way that many young people have never heard of it, despite its prevalence in the 70s and 80s.

In my (obviously male) experience of attitudes to its use in English lessons, many students associate it stereotypically with either divorced women who wish to make a (possibly bitter) point about their new found single status, or more dismissively as referring to "those weird women" (probably feminists, possibly lesbians, maybe even wearing Nepalese yak-fur hoodies) who complain about everything and probably want to ban words like "history" and "human" for being too malecentric. But, this article explains exactly why Ms. is an important word and why it should be used. And it makes some much needed points about why language matters and how gender is often constructed through some of our language use.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA5 - Language Change

Ee bah gum is ee bah gone

Yorkshire dialect is disappearing, I tell thee. At least, that's according to a report in today's Independent which reports on a new exhibition in the Yorkshire Dales that includes results of a local survey on people's use and recognition of dialect terms.

In the article, it's made clear that the Yorkshire accent is not under threat, but that the dialect (the lexis, semantics and grammar of the regional variety) is disappearing. The blame is placed squarely at the door of new technologies and the death of traditional farming industries, by the project's author Jo Cremins: old words associated with farming implements and practices have gone the way of the farms themselves, while the spread of new technology has speeded up the spread of standardised forms of the language, especially among younger people.

This story fits into the wider discourse around what's called dialect levelling, but as we have seen from the work of linguists such as Sue Fox and Paul Kerswill, dialects are also springing up as well as dying out. So, while some varieties of Yorkshire dialect may well be fading away, largely because their users no longer seem to need them or identify with them, others - often influenced by popular culture and Caribbean and American varieties of English - are growing and spreading.

And if you want more information about Yorkshire dialect try here and on the excellent BBC Voices website here (West Yorkshire) and here (North Yorkshire).

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties

Huzzah!

Congratulations to all A2 students for a) turning up at the right time to sit ENA6, and b) appearing relatively happy with the paper. It's all over now, apart from those of you doing the AEA paper tomorrow morning, so well done and thanks for all the hard work, good times and ... sob... good luck to you all in the future.

I won't be around for A Level results day as I've decided to leave the country on that day (not that I'm worried or anything), so stay in touch, add your comments to the blog from wherever you go, and if you come back to get your certificates in December, I'll buy you a half of shandy.

ENA5 and ENA6

Good luck with tomorrow's ENA5 exam, and ENA6 later in the week.

For tips on ENA5 exam technique and last minute revision on both units, have a look here: http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/2007/05/exams-exams-exams.html

and here:
http://www.change.bethkemp.co.uk/

and here:
http://www.cobcenglang.homestead.com/A2page.html

And now it's time to reclaim the p-word

Following hot on the heels of debate about the dreaded n-word, this article in the BBC news magazine, takes a look at debate in the Asian community (Is there really such a "community" or is that a dubious label itself?) about the p-word "p*ki". Here's a brief excerpt:

The origins of the P-word, as its known in polite society, are far more recent than its black equivalent, which dates back to the 16th Century.

Its first recorded use was in 1964, when hostility in Britain to immigration from its former colonies in the Asian sub-continent, was beginning to find a voice.

Despite being an abbreviation for "Pakistani", its proponents tended to be less discriminating about its application - directing it against anyone with brown skin, be they Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Sometimes even non-Asians who happened to have a dark complexion found themselves on the receiving end.

Forty years on, use of the word is still highly sensitive and has the potential to cause great offence. Earlier this year, it was alluded to in unbroadcast material from the Celebrity Big Brother house, when Indian housemate Shilpa Shetty became the target of racist abuse.

The whole issue of words being used by one group in an offensive way and by another group as a term of solidarity seems to be too much for some people's minds to cope with, and two responses to this article suggest that it's causing brain meltdown and hurrumphs about "political correctness gone too far" in sections of white society (Again, is there such a thing as white "society", or even a "white community"?):

I understand the sentiment, but surely it's mad to have a word thats "OK" for some groups to use, and highly offensive for everyone else? Either a word is offensive to some people, or it isn't. Andrew, Glasgow, Scotland It is racial discrimination for one race of people to be able to do something when others cannot. Either the terms are racist and should be condemned whenever used or everyone should be able to use them without fear of reproach. The current situation of supposed political correctness is illogical. Alex, Colchester, England

Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 - Language Change

Made up words and fruity phrases

Two interesting articles in The Independent last week take a look at how language changes and what we think of these changes. In the first article, Philip Hensher responds to the new words in the Collins Dictionary (as covered here) by asking if some of the new words featured actually exist in real usage, a question that students have asked every year when we’ve covered this topic in class. I mean, who uses bromance, manboobs and bobfoc?

Hensher’s article is worth a read for his wider take on the nature of language change:

Language is a living thing, not something to be entombed and frozen. One of the ways it changes most rapidly is through its vocabulary. It's not the only way novelty makes itself felt, but it's the easiest to grasp. A new term for an old thing emerges - "banging" for "excellent", taking over from "wicked". Or, occasionally, a new term for a new thing - no one knew any term for "carbon footprint" before that particular term, because nobody had the concept. The appeal of novelty demands to be recorded, however bogus the particular instance.

And he raises another possible take on new words when he says “You can't make up language as you go along; it would be truer to say that it invents you, the way you have of seeing the world as well as expressing it”

In a second article, Joan Bakewell looks at swearing and taboo language, especially the changing responses to “bad words” over time. This is made all the more relevant by the recent n-word and p-word scandals on Big Brother. And she links language change to the wider currents of change in society when she says,

Sexual words... now have a wider currency and acceptability. They crop up in the workplace, shops and offices, the school playground, and they litter the vocabularies of comedians and comic shows… With the loosening of sexual behaviour has gone the parallel freedom of language.

The rising taboo words are now concerned with race and discrimination. The BBC's survey found that "P*ki" was now rated the most offensive word of all, with the n-word a close second. And it was reportedly an untransmitted rhyme that used the P*ki word that invited Ofcom's most severe criticism of Big Brother. If swear words are those that have the most power to offend, then it appears we aren't really worried about religion and sex any more, but we do really care about racism.

So, if you use the New Words, New Woes post to mug up on processes of language change, these two articles give you a wider perspective and some useful material to look at the contexts to our language use.

Useful for:

ENA5 – Language Change

Thanks to Chas for these links

The Big Brother n-word fall-out continues

Predictably, the press are in uproar over Emily's use of the n-word on Big Brother and various articles have appeared about the history and use of the word itself. One is from today's Mirror, penned by DJ Spoony of Radio 1 fame. Others are easy to track down with the help of Google, even if you are unlucky enough to have the pitiful research skills of Tre from The Apprentice.

And for lots more on the dreaded n-word and its history, just type it in the search bar at the top of the page and Bob's your uncle.

Big Brother is watching the racists

After the Shilpa Shetty and Jade Goody racism debacle earlier this year, it doesn't come as much of a surprise to see that Channel 4's Big Brother is feeling a bit sensitive about accusations of racism. And in response to the use of the n-word by Emily Parr to a black housemate Charley Uchea last night, they've removed her from the house, according to this BBC news article. What was the context of the word? What was meant by it? Was Emily trying to get down with her "homegirl"? Or is she an ignorant racist bigot? Is it all a stitch-up by Endemol and Channel 4 to regain themselves a bit of respectability after their recent hammering by the Standards Authority. The Guardian is offering a "provisional transcript" here so have a look. Watch this space... Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 - Language Change

New words, new woes

Just in time for ENA5 revision, here comes an article on the BBC news website all about new words that feature in the Collins Dictionary. Among the latest additions are WAGs, hoodies, man-bags, pro-ana and 7/7. Also making an appearance are carbon-offsetting, brainfood and Londonistan.

So, as a revision exercise (and this month’s Haribo prize-winning competition) how about finding 5 separate language change processes at work in the examples quoted in the BBC and newspaper articles and putting them as comments below. The first 3 correct responses will get a prize.

And for those of you interested in why these words are formed – the social and political background to language change – have a think about issues like the environment, celebrity culture and healthy eating, then try to group some of the new words into these categories.

These other articles in The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Independent feature the same story with some different examples, and might also offer you the chance to look at how the stories are handled by different broadsheets. If you remember that on ENA6 you may have to write a broadsheet article for question 2a, it's perhaps worth comparing these articles to see what kind of style devices are used and how the issue of language change is introduced to a non-specialist audience.

Useful for:

ENA5 – Language Change

ENA6 - Language Debates

When is a gang not a gang?

When it's a group, an anti-social gathering of hoodies, or a click/clique. That's what the Youth Justice Board are saying anyway, and they should know as they've been studying youth behaviour and crime and they think that labelling a gathering of youths as a "gang" actually makes the young people concerned more likely to see themselves as social outcasts and push them towards a genuine gang culture of organised crime, illegal cash and drug dealing.

And we all know where that leads, don't we? Rarely to the multi-million dollar incomes and uber-bling lifestyles of knuckleheaded gangstas like 50 Cent and The Game, but more often to Feltham, smelly stairwells in rundown towerblocks, crack pipes and the sharp end of another idiot's shank.

So, getting linguistic about this (and moving away from my pulpit) are the Youth Justice Board adopting a position of linguistic determinism? Is the label "gang" actually influencing young people's behaviour? Well, apparently it is. According to the BBC article about the YJB's report, they argue that "glamorising such offenders may encourage them to become involved in more serious criminal behaviour".

And it's a double-edged label too:

Young people themselves resent the way the word gang is used to describe any group behaving in an anti-social way. It suggests the term "group related" rather than "gang related" is a better way to describe their activities.

So, just a day after the ENA1 Language & Representation paper, why cover this? Well, I've always argued that English Language is for life not just for exams. Or was that dogs and Christmas... I get confused.

And if you want to read a genuinely well written account of London's gang/group-related culture then take a look at this article in today's Guardian.

And to find out more about the words "gang" and "clique", have a look at the OED online (if you use college computers, you'll be able to access it for free).

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA6 - Language Debates

Good luck!

Good luck to everyone taking ENA1 and ENA3 tomorrow morning. Remember to eat some breakfast (to feed your brain!), to get there early, and to read the question papers properly. Stick to your timings and remember that the first question on each paper is worth twice as much as the essay question, but that you should give yourself enough time to answer both fully and a bit of time at the end to check those pesky apostrophes, spellings and sentence boundaries.

Mental, bonkers, one sandwich short of a picnic

Just a quick link here to an article in last week's Guardian (that I was too buried in coursework marking to see at the time). It's about the language used to label people who might otherwise be known as "mad" or "crazy". As the writer Jo Brand explains:

The liberal consensus is that the careless and flippant use of words such as "fruitcake" and "wacko" reveals a disrespectful ignorance towards people with mental health problems. The Guardian's own in-house style guide counsels against using such "clearly offensive and unacceptable expressions as loony, maniac, nutter, psycho and schizo". But if you want to talk about mental incapacity in English you will not find yourself lost for words. This is one of the richest areas of our language, and we seem to revel in the joyful creativity of coining words that skip around, compartmentalise and poke fun at the serious issue of mental illness.

Another social group for your answers on ENA1, perhaps?

Useful for:

ENA1 - Language & Representation

Exams, exams, exams

The exams are approaching, but I’m not going to do loads of revision posts as in years before: not because I can’t be bothered, but because you can just click on the links to the other posts here and the advice remains the same.

Here are some little extra bits that might help you though, along with my top tips with what I think could appear (last year I was completely wrong about these, so whatever…):

ENA1

Remember that question 1 is all about a mix of engaging with what the text is all about and how it represents its subject (be that a person being described like the Shaun Wallace text last year, a person being interviewed like the Peter Fox text of 2005, or a job/idea/product) and labelling word classes. We’ve done nearly all we can on this in class, so what you can now do yourselves is practise past papers (available as hard copies in the LRC, or via the AQA website linked off the side bar) and make a point of reading a few broadsheet style articles. You can revise word classes by using the Internet Grammar of English site here. But remember, you mustn’t go too far with grammar on this unit: you don’t need to cover clauses or sentence types (simple, compound, complex), but you must look for sentence functions, tense & aspect, active/passive voice and those lovely word classes.

My top tip for the type of text this time is a piece of instructional or advice writing. If I’m right I will award myself a packet of Haribos.

The essay questions should be very familiar to you by now, but remember to use the feedback sheets I’ve done for you and which are available on the w drive in college or from Teachit as pdfs here and here. Also, there is loads of stuff about CLA available from the ENA1 revision tips post last year, while for Language & Representation, I like this site. I also like this site, but that’s another story…

ENA3

All the advice I can give on this comes from Beth Kemp’s rather splendid A Level site here so just go here and visit it.

All I’d add is that we’ve covered Deborah Cameron’s recent material on social constructionist theories of male female conversation for a reason, so make sure you use it, if you can find room for it in the gender essay question.

My top tip for the type of transcript this time is an extract of someone telling a story and the listeners’ interaction with the storyteller. If I’m right I will award myself another packet of Haribos. And a bottle of wine.

ENA5

Once again, we’ve done loads on this in class and you have a mini-text analysis along with a copy of the mark scheme to help you revise. You’ve done 5-6 textual analysis past papers since November (more if you’re Angelica, Sherelle or Romaine!) but there are a couple more in the LRC that you might not have done. My tips for revising this are to use the brilliant British Library Texts in Context site here to take a tour of writing 1600 – 1945 and sample various genres such as recipes and travel writing, before looking at this bit of the site for a wider view on language change and the BBC Voices site for more on varieties and change.

For the essay questions, Raj has given you powerpoints on how to write essays on Varieties and I’ve done the same for Change. Check the w drive next week and we’ll make sure we’ve saved them all there for you.

My top tip for the type of text in the texts from different times is an example of a recipe. If I’m right I will award myself another packet of Haribos. And another bottle of wine. Hic!

ENA6

The daddy of all exam papers and one that should suit the creative writers of you out there (hello Kwame) as well as the analysis heads too (bonjour Evelyn, Delphine and Joss).

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the individual questions but maybe not quite as much time as I would have liked on actually writing the 2a answers, so there’s your top tip – do some writing for different audiences. My advice to some of you has been to use the blog and particularly the links to broadsheet articles about language issues such as attitudes to change, punctuation and accents, and to get hold of e magazine from the LRC (or the e mag website – see me to get the password). Look at the ways in which sometimes rather dry language topics can be injected with a bit of humour and accessibility.

My top tip for the topic on this paper this year is a hedged bet: either it’ll be language change and attitudes to it (prescriptivist/descriptivist debates) or recent accents and dialects (MEYD/MLE etc.). If I’m right I will award myself yet another packet of Haribos. And another bottle of wine. And a spell in rehab.

Good luck, anyway. Please post comments to the blog if you want help. I’m happy to take emails but it might be more useful to all students if you post any ideas, worries or questions here so everyone can chip in.

Stop the cusswords in classrooms

Channel 4 on Monday night is featuring an episode of its Cutting Edge programme all about young people and swearing. Cunningly titled Mind Your F-ing Language, the programme will (according to the Channel 4 blurb) "reveal the rich and hidden world of the language that kids actually use, and look at one school's attempts to deal with swearing".

The programme is trailed by this article in today's Telegraph, which looks at the impact the swearing ban has had on the featured school.

A good idea or a load of bo****s - you decide.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA5 - Language Change

N-words with attitude

Following on from yesterday's post about Russell Simmons of Def Jam calling for an end to the use of the n-word in rap lyrics, and last year's article about New York City Council banning the word, comes a story taken from The Language Log blog about a school in Omaha, Nebraska. The publication of a student newsletter (link to the pdf file here) featuring an article about the n-word and the attitudes of young people towards it has caused a stir in the local community and led to the suspension of the college's principal (since reinstated). I think this is interesting on two fronts: firstly, the language issues - as ever - are pertinent to what we discuss in ENA1, ENA5 and ENA6 about racist language, changing words and debates about language; secondly, as a piece of writing aimed at young people, the newsletter feature is worth a read, particularly if you're looking for approaches to introducing a controversial topic to younger readers. And with ENA6, question 2a being all about doing just that, it would be a good idea to have a look to see what works and what doesn't. More of this in class next week... Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 - Language Change ENA6 - Language Debates

Stop the cusswords in hip hop. Y-O.

It's been an interesting week for all lovers – whoops, I mean students – of offensive language. CBS broadcaster Don Imus – who is white - was suspended earlier this month for referring to a mostly black women’s basketball team as “hardcore hos…nappy headed hos”. The BBC news website helpfully points out:

"Ho" is slang for prostitute and "nappy-headed" is a derogatory term for the hair of many black people.

Watch the clip here.

Meanwhile, Russell Simmons, the boss of the Def Jam record label, famous for its pioneering of early hip hop acts such as Public Enemy, Run DMC and The Beastie Boys (ask your dad…or me), has called on rappers to tone down the cusswords in their lyrics and stop using such terms as “bitch”, “ho” and “nigga”.

An article in The Independent reports:

"The words 'bitch' and 'ho' are utterly derogatory and disrespectful of the painful, hurtful, misogyny that, in particular, African American women have experienced in the United States," Simmons' organisation, the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, said in a statement.

"The n-word is a racially derogatory term that disrespects the pain, suffering, history of racial oppression and multiple forms of racism against African Americans and other people of colour," it added.

The article continues by talking about the origins of hip hop and how the money-driven genre of gangsta rap has fetishized some criminal aspects of the African American underclass, celebrating their anti-social lifestyles in their lyrics.

As language students, we know these words matter, but what is their impact on us and society? If we get rid of the words Simmons suggests do we tone down the most extreme and violent ideas within the lyrics? In other words, if we do away with some of the words will we also do away with some of the extreme feelings provoked by them? Is the use of such words in lyrics actually normalising them? Is it making people outside the group who originally used the terms start to adopt them: wiggas from Norfolk farming villages, 10 year old boys from Peckham, 60 year old radio DJs?

And there are wider issues too. Why has it become acceptable to refer to women as hos and bitches? Who let this happen?

For more on this debate, you could look at this blog and this article on Radio 1 Extra’s website.

And there’s a Haribo-related prize to the first person who can post the name of the rapper whose lyrics are misquoted in the title of this post.

Useful for: ENA1 – Language & Representation

Scrobbling Avril Lavigne

April 10: heard this on my car radio the other day. I'm so in touch with youth culture! My admin assistant Lindsay found the lyrics to Avril Lavigne’s catchy new number 'Girlfriend' for me, courtesy of Yahoo. Here's a typical specimen of the teenspeak the sk8r girl uses so compellingly (is this Valley Girl speak, or grunge-meets-pop?):

Hey! Hey! You! You! I don't like your girlfriend! No way! No way! I think you need a new one Hey! Hey! You! You! I could be your girlfriend …[etc]
I think about ya all the time You're so addictive ...(parental advisory bits censored)[Bridge] She's like SO WHATEVER You could do so much better I think we should get together now And that's what everyone's talking about! …She's so stupid What the hell were you thinking?! [repeat]
Inspired stuff. I posted this on my college VLE forum, when I researched Ms Lavigne’s ‘whatever’ usage:
Further to my posting yesterday : one site I tried is Last.fm, which introduced me to my new word of the day: 'scrobble'...Here's how UrbanDictionary defines it:
1. When Last.fm automatically sends the name of each song played by audio player, they call this “scrobbling.”
The application will scrobble your playlist.
2. Can replace most verbs to indicate that an action has been performed, and that it has been logged or recorded by a 'scrobbler', which is a system that records whatever you're scrobbling, although the scrobbler may not necessarily exist.
If you played 64 games of Fifa 98: Road To World Cup, you could say "I scrobbled Fifa 64 times today." Or if you were on the phone, you could say "I was updating my PhoneScrobbler".

There are more usages and an etymology, but like parts of ‘Girlfriend’, these are parental advisory. Here’s some of my students’ responses…
'My brother has an account with last.fm, which is so annoying cos it makes my computer at home so damn slow, seeming he downloaded the software to go with it, but still! He always uses the word scrobble now, like he uses it for everything! [Note the teen-usage of ‘like’ there!]
It's a very good site mind, there is absolutely everything on there music-wise! You can even have your own top ten, depending on what you have listened to the most.
As has already been said, when you listen to music using a comouter (sic) music player such as iTunes, the music will be recorded as listened onto your account, thus being scrobbled, then put into the chart.
But me being me, listened to some songs [which I am not even going to explain as they are bad] and was accidentally logged into his account. He then had random music which is so not cool to have showing on his profile and got told off by him! Well if he was clever enough he would have logged out! Sorry, having a rant.'
And this from another: 'I personally hate this song and wish Avril Lavigne would hurry up and decide if she's a goth, a sk8r or a Paris Hilton wannabe! Oh yeah, and addictive doesn't rhyme with delicious!' (If she can rhyme ‘whatever’ with ‘better’, why not? Look at Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ if you really want to see some deliberately off-beat rhymes!!)
Sorry if all this sounds too trivial as we approach exams, but I do think this could be useful for language and representation (the grungy girl subverts gender stereotypes…or does she?); language change (following on from Dan’s recent fascinating post about the history of ‘whatever’; then there's all that usage of 'like', number homophones, shared cultural references, etc.). So academic rigour is sustained, and teacher’s cool credentials … probably shot. Ms Lavigne, sk8r or Paris Hilton, does seem to be going down the ‘Hey Mickey’ pop stream (or is that ‘drain’??)

Top tips for AS and A2

It's about that time of year when students ask for revision help, so here's a list of all the top tips we've put together for both AS and A2 exams. Some of these we've put together ourselves, while others are links to other people's sites and blogs, but the toppest tip of all though, is do some revision now and keep doing it consistently up until the exam: don't leave it all 'til the last minute.

ENA1
Top tips for textual analysis
Child Language advice and revision tips
Child Language other sites to help you revise
Language & Representation advice and revision tips

ENA3
Top tips for the whole paper

ENA5
Top tips for textual analysis and managing your time on the paper
Top tips for language change and varieties

ENA6
Top tips for whole paper

A good tip for revision of basic (and not so basic) grammar is this brilliant, teach & test yourself site at UCL. It takes you from the basics of word classes like nouns and verbs into more complicated areas such as clauses, tense and aspect, and the passive voice. It's great.

And remember, for lots of other wider reading and different angles on the main topics, try typing in phrases like "powerless language", "racist language", "male female conversation" & "CLA" to get links to other articles and posts. Referring to some of the ideas and researchers in these posts, or building their approaches into your own angle on the topic could mean all the difference between an A and a B. Or a B and a C, or a ... you get get the general idea.

Please post any revision questions here as comments.

The changing face of "whatever"

We all know what it means now; even our parents use it and a man older than me (!) used it – apparently unironically - to his young son in the Ikea queue this morning. It's whatever and it's making teachers angry. At least, it’s making teachers in the ATL union angry at their Easter conference.

A survey of 400 teachers found that the "Wha'ever" and "Am I bovvered?" phrases, from the Catherine Tate Show, were the most used in the classroom - ahead of catchphrases from the Simpsons and Little Britain. The sulky adolescent retort of "Am I bovvered?" was recently demonstrated by the Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a comedy sketch recorded for Comic Relief. Teachers were concerned that copying the language and attitude of television characters could have a damaging impact on classroom behaviour.

Like so many slang expressions - greazy, moist, shank or even that old classic brap brap - whatever has morphed its meanings during its 30 (ish) year existence. This article on the BBC website's magazine traces its meanings from 1960 counter culture slang, through the valley girls of 70s and 80s America, Jerry Springer's working class audiences and into British streets and the mouth of the delightful Vicky Pollard.

1973: Meaning "that's what I meant", US Secretary of Defense briefing paper for returning POWs

1982: Meaning "you decide", San Francisco Examiner

1980s: Used regularly by California "valley girls"

1986: "Whatever man, whatever", in film Platoon

1990s: Used by the Jerry Springer crowd

Late 1990s: Reaches UK's rich female teenagers

Early 2000s: UK street language

2003: Little Britain's first TV series

Sources: OED, linguist Tony Thorne

But like lots of other expressions that move from the streets to mainstream usage, whatever is probably doomed to go the same way as bling, losing its cutting edge in the mouths of old folks, Trinny and Susannah yuppie clones, and wannabe trendy English teachers. But then again, cool has always been cool, and some other slang terms remain in circulation for a long time. It all depends on what it sounds like, how it's used and who uses it. And so long as it winds teachers up, it's probably still got currency for a while.

"It's used as a punctuating term, the answer to everything," says Ralph Surman, a deputy head teacher at a primary school in Nottingham and a member of a government task force on school behaviour. "It's like a toddler saying 'no'. They don't mean 'no' but say it to everything because it feels nice. The syntax feels nice on the teeth and the tongue."

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

Accent change revisited

More coverage of accent change in the UK linked to the excellent British Library website - worth looking here and here.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties

Accent change? You're having a laff.

Today’s Telegraph has a front page feature on research into accent change in the UK, which focuses on the spread of vowel sounds and trends in dialect (or rather, accent) levelling. The article takes a historical overview of trends in accent and looks at how the words bath and laugh are pronounced these days and how they were spoken 200 years ago. As with many pieces of research into this , there seems to be a trend away from distinct local accents towards regional ones, so as Jonnie Robinson, curator of English Dialects and Accents at the British Library explains:

Huddersfield, for instance, is becoming more like Leeds, while towns nearer Hull that once had their own sound were becoming absorbed into the Humberside accent. "Really large towns stand firm, but the rest can lose their distinctiveness. And in the South, accents in places such as Reading and Oxford have become more like London." There are power accent bastions, with Liverpool being the most obvious. A combination of Irish and Welsh immigrants in the second half of the 19th century gave the city its distinctive voice, but association with what was then not a very healthy or law-abiding urban centre did not appeal to folk within easy reach.

Perhaps of more interest than the article itself – which is fairly good but doesn’t really offer much more insight than you’ll have from your lessons anyway – is a set of sound files you can listen to, of accents recorded around the country in 1950, and a link to what looks like an amazing British Library project which is creating a voicemap of the whole country.

And if the spread of Estuary/London tones isn't enough to cause palpitations for our northern brothers and sisters, have a look at this article (recommended by blog contributor, Simon Lavery) which suggests that children brought up by parents with different regional accents may end up falling behind at school. Or so they say...

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change & Varieties

We’re not loving it

It’s a job that is “poorly paid and menial” according to the Collins Dictionary and by the Oxford English Dictionary as an "unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector", so no wonder McDonalds wants to change the definition of the word McJob. But how do you go about changing a dictionary definition if you don’t like it? Well, not by pressurising the lexicographers, if this quote from The Language Log is anything to go by:

Sydney Landau, in his book, Dictionaries: the Art and Craft of Lexicography (Cambridge U Press, 2001) says that the lexicographer "cannot allow any special-interest group to determine what gets in his dictionary or how it is represented" (page 407). That would seem to discourage McDonald's from being too pushy with lexicographers, who have their own methods of determining meaning and who don't much cater to external pressures from industry.

So, how are dictionaries compiled and what do lexicographers do? The latest update to the OED has just come out, and some of their experts talk about the new words and how they collect them here:
http://www.oed.com/news/newwords.html
http://www.oed.com/news/revisions.html

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

Haribo crisis

Due to a recent fire at the Haribo factory in Luxemburg, supplies of this delicious confectionery have been scarce. So winners of last week’s quiz – Evelyn and Whitney – and winners of the language change bingo lessons – err, lots of you – will have to wait until next week for supplies.

Either that, or email the college principal with a demand for me to receive a well-earned pay rise, and I'll be down Walthamstow Asda/Poundland like a shot.

English accent = bad teeth and booze problem

On first hearing an English accent 50 years ago, Americans might have thought: stately home, private school, good manners. Nowadays, they think: low income, poor diet, alcohol problem.

So says Toby Young in this article from The Guardian. Accents and different ways of pronouncing particular words and sounds, have long stirred up animosity and disquiet. Some people only have to hear a Scouse accent before they’re clutching their handbag and hubcaps to their chest and muttering “smackheads”, while others hear a Jamaican accent and run for cover. Many harbour prejudices about Caribbean or American accents (as this post from last year shows) and some just hate it when we drop our t’s (as in the glottalised bottle and water).

Stephen Fry commented earlier in the week – some say rather bitterly – that an English accent, rather than acting talent, will open doors for you in Hollywood (that story is featured here and developed in the BBC website's magazine) and Toby Young’s article is a response to this. Meanwhile, David McKie looks at the ways in which the letter “h” is pronounced and the extreme reactions such an ‘umble little word can produce.

All this can tie in to work on ENA5 and attitudes towards different accents and dialects, and links to previous posts on the blog about Howard Giles’ matched guise experiment and the Aziz corporation’s survey of attitudes to accents back in 2005. And like so many of these articles, it’s not just what the columnist says that’s interesting but the responses from readers at the end of the article. Just quoting a few examples of extreme prescriptivism from these articles would be a useful way of injecting some contemporary discussion into essays about attitudes to accent and dialect.

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Varieties

Nasty names

Black bastards... gingers... monkeys... it must be another post about offensive language and race.

There’s been another flurry of media interest in racist language over the last week with a senior Conservative Party MP resigning over his use of the term “black bastard” while talking about racism in the army, the current Miss Scotland receiving criticism for calling Samantha Mumba (remember her?) a monkey, and lots of ginger people complaining to Metro about the abuse they receive (no link – check the tube train floor).

There’s not much more to say about this sort of thing, apart from how it’s always useful to see what media commentators have to add to the debate, and in this instance Nirpal Dhaliwal talks about how his own dad served in the British Army and was subjected to racist abuse, but how he coped, dealt with it and eventually thrived. Worth a read, and the comments posted afterwards have sparked heated debates too.

My dad came to Britain, from India, as a nine-year-old. Aged 17, he joined the Gloucestershire Regiment in 1967. Having left school at 15 with no qualifications, the army was his only way to escape the factory work that everyone else he grew up with was destined for. Only 5ft 6ins tall, he was a slightly built Asian lad who wanted to see something of the world. He'd been the only Asian child at his school and had suffered racial abuse and beatings. He now entered the hyper-macho arena of the army in which his colour made him stick out like a sore thumb. Coming from London made him even more of an oddity. When he first joined the West Country regiment, other soldiers would appear at his billet to gawp at the brown-skinned boy who spoke with a cockney accent. But people's responses weren't always so benign. The word 'P*ki' wasn't then a common part of racist parlance, so the bullies used the words 'wog', the n-word and 'coon' to his face instead. He shared a room with one who habitually called him a 'black enamelled bastard'. He was also attacked. One long-serving soldier, a heavyweight boxer several years older than him, picked a fight with him in a pub, spuriously accusing my dad of badmouthing him behind his back. He took my father outside, shouted the routine insult of 'You black bastard!' and butted him.

Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 - Language Change

New acronyms: FIDS and FUDS

Last year we had HEIDIS (Highly Educated Independent, Degree-carrying Individuals) and now we have FIDS (Fully Involved Dads) and FUDS (Fully Uninvolved Dads). The trend to label different or changing groups in society with increasingly strange acronyms seems to be on the increase, as advertisers, and now government, try to put us all into categories and box us up.

A BBC4 programme called Are We Having Fun Yet is running at the moment and according to this link on the BBC website (posted by blog contributor Simon Lavery to the English Language List), part of the series considers new words used to label the changing demographics of the 60s through to noughties.

So this week's Haribo competition for A2 students is, what do the acronyms MOS and PAW mean? Post your answers as comments below and the first 2 answers will get a prize each.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

Today's cliché is tomorrow's proverb

A hundred years from now, period dramas set in 2007 will feature pretty girls with antique rings through their noses informing their parents that they are going upstairs for a, like, chill-out, y'know, and Telegraph readers will coo and purr at this comforting reminder of a more civilised era.

In an excellent response to last week’s Daily Telegraph article (and subsequent 8 million replies) about words and phrases that annoy us, Craig Brown traces the origins of certain “newfangled” expressions and finds that they’re older than they appear. While prescriptivists moan about new words and phrases entering the language, Brown points out that words and phrases like “undies” (as short for underwear), “trouble shooter” and “beat it” (like in Michael Jackson’s classic, pre-scandal, tune) have been around for about 100 years already.

And he makes the point – like all good descriptivists – that attitudes to language change are more to do with attitudes to the users of these new expressions than the words themselves.

Anyhoo, check it out, like. Innit. And other expressions that annoy...

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

Language change - a mehness to society?

With new words and the reasons for their existence high on the agenda for A2 students (and presentations taking place tomorrow and Wednesday – hint hint), this article in The Guardian and this post on The Language Log blog look at the word “meh” and its spread across the internet and into print.

I’m not sure I’d even registered that the word really existed, although it sounds familiar, but apparently it’s an expression of indifference or vague disapproval that’s made its first notable appearance (although this is hotly debated) in The Simpsons and then spread through the power of the constantly hilarious little yellow 4-fingerered fellows to wider society. Nowadays, it seems to occupy the same semantic space as the much more British (and therefore better) “whatever”.

As with so many words that seem to have come about in the last decade or so, it’s not so much the etymology of the word that’s interesting but its rapid spread and the reasons for this. Technology is part of it: the internet, and its massive influence on the speed of change, has to be a significant factor in the spread of new words and new meanings. When you consider that the telephone has only been around for about 130 years and personal computers for 20, you realise that in centuries past, language change could only be as quick as the quickest mode of transport: an airplane, a train, a donkey delivering the mail from one person to another.

So now, with virtually instant communication across continents, new words and new meanings spread like bird flu in a Bernard Matthews slaughterhouse. And words morph into new forms as they are transmitted: “meh” has now moved from its original function as an interjection ( a bit like “ha” or “heh”) and into an adjective (“that’s just so meh”) and now into a noun (“the very meh-ness of it”).

And a special, Haribo-based prize goes to any student who mentions this meh post in their presentation tomorrow or Wednesday.

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

NYPD Black?

A brief article on the BBC website today and a longer one in The Guardian tell how the City Council in New York has banned the use of the n-word although the ban is more symbolic than legal as you can’t be punished for using the word. Apparently the move is a response to a growing use of the word, beyond the young African Americans who have supposedly “reclaimed” it from its negative connotations, into other ethnic groups. It is, according to The Guardian article, “the latest move in an argument raging across the US over the common use of the word, especially in the black community, where it has morphed into a slang word similar to "mate". This “semantic reclamation” has been a topic for discussion in many English Language lessons, and if the comments from SFX students are anything to go by, there seems to be a growing trend on this side of the Atlantic towards the word being used in a similar way, maybe due to the influence of American rap music on British youth culture. But it’s not universally accepted by any means, and lots of older people from Caribbean backgrounds strongly object to its use in this way, maybe because they were the ones who were subjected to its worst sting when they arrived in this predominantly white country back in the 1950s and 1960s. As the American lawyer Roy Miller, a campaigner against the n-word, puts it "At its worst, the N-word is the ultimate form of disrespect against black people. It is a dangerous snake which is liable to bite". In terms of its etymology (the word’s origins and development) The Guardian describes it as coming from “the Latin "niger", Spanish "negro", and middle French "negre" meaning black. One of the earliest uses of the written word was in 1786 by slave masters to label their Africans. It is through its application in slavery that it has come to be seen by many as the most offensive racial slur in English”. The website Ban the N-word, says on its home page “If it’s not acceptable, ok or cool to use kike, hooknose, wetback, spic, honky, cracker, paleface, peckerwood, blue-eyed devil, dago, wop, greaseball, guinea, chink, slant-eyes, gook, then, remember, it is not acceptable, ok or cool to use the N-word”. So, a pointless campaign, doomed to failure, or a reasonable attempt to get people to address their potentially offensive language use - you decide. The debate about the n-word has been taken up here on the BBC website, with journalist Kari Browne offering her perspective on the word's history and current usage:

Words are multidimensional. And they mean different things to different people. But how can a word used to categorically dehumanise an entire race of people ever be flipped around to be used as a term of endearment? Some African-Americans argue that by reclaiming the word, by owning it for themselves, the word can take on whatever meaning they ascribe to it.

In other words, they argue it is possible to re-invent the n-word and change its connotation. Words can be painful and incredibly emotional. The n-word was born in the context of American slavery. The first written documentation of it in print form was in 1786. It was used by white slave masters to label their black slaves.

Centuries later, it has enjoyed a rebirth among mostly young folks who have never known the context in which it was once spoken. And this is the problem. We do not hear our elders saying: "Hello my n..., how are you today?" My grandfather, raised in part by his grandmother - a freed slave - doesn't greet his friends with the word.

In fact I have never heard him, or anyone else in my family use it. So why did I?

Meanwhile, Gary Younge in The Guardian today talks about the issues around other labels for black people in the USA - African-American and Black - arguing that the rise of US Democrat and presidential hopeful, Barack Obama has led people to question what the difference is and what "blackness" actually means:

"African-American" and "black" have been used interchangeably in the US to such an extent that they are regarded as synonymous. They are not. African-American, a term which entered regular usage in the late 80s, refers to a particular ethnic experience of black Americans of African descent. Black refers simply to Americans of African descent, which includes black immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa and Latin and South America. All African-Americans are black; but not all black Americans are African-American.

The political relationship between the two has always been close. Two of the greatest icons of black nationalism in the US - Stokely Carmichael and Marcus Garvey - were from Trinidad and Jamaica respectively. Malcolm X's mother was from Grenada; Louis Farrakhan's mother was from St Kitts and Nevis and his father from Jamaica.

These connections make sense. In their daily lives, all black Americans face racism. But there is more to the black American experience than racism and more to African-American identity than race.

Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 - Language Change