In ur fridge eatin ur foodz

OK, this may or may not help you with your ENGA3 language change topic, but it's a great article nonetheless. In it, David Bamman writes about what the data Twitter produces tells us about language usage in the USA and some of the pros and pitfalls of analysing it. As he points out, while there's lots of information stored about each tweet and about each twitter user, some of it isn't easy to pin down:

The user-defined geographic information is noisy data: while "Boston, MA" can be automatically disambiguated relatively easily to a physical location on the earth (corresponding to coordinates 42.35843, -71.05977), others ("Springfield") are more difficult (there are many Springfields); others still are nearly impossible ("home of that boy Biggie," a reference to New York City quoted from Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind"), and some ("in ur fridge eatin ur foodz") don't map to any space in physical reality. The sheer volume of data, however, gives us the flexibility to focus more on precision than on overall accuracy - we can throw away all tweets where we aren't over 99% sure of the physical location.

What I like about the article and the research connected to it is that instead of talking about the technology (Is it bad for our language? Is it destroying our ability to talk to each other?) it just gets on and uses it to find out interesting things about the language around us.

It's linked to this site, The Lexicalist, which calls itself "a demographic dictionary of modern American English"

Top tips for ENGA1 - part 2

Part 2 Language Development (question 2b)

Again, here are some quick pointers gleaned from my marking experiences over the years about what to do and what not to do when answering essay questions on child language acquisition.

Do these:

• Answer the question! This is an obvious point, but one which about 20-30% of students don't do. You have to think about what the question is actually asking you and write your first paragraph in response to the question itself. Don't launch into a generalised "Children make their first sounds straight after birth and move through three different stages..." when the question is asking you about grammar, interaction or imitation.
• Make sure you use plenty of real examples of child language, either from your text book, your own research and experience, or from the data given to you in question 2a. Explain what the examples show and try to make sure you're linguistic in your approach (i.e. using technical terminology to describe the processes shown by your data).
• Link in research and theory to your arguments, but don't just wheel out the old Chomsky versus Skinner battle at every opportunity. Examiners get very bored of seeing the same old arguments in the same old words. Try to think of a clear way of explaining the problems different theoretical positions have when accounting for how children acquire language.
• Try to conceptualise your answer: think of the bigger picture. What is actually happening when children say things like "I runned" or "She falled over"? Yes, they're overgeneralising, but why?
• Think about your structure and guide your reader. Try to use paragraphs and discourse markers to make your answer fluent and easy to follow.

For a list of (nearly) all the past questions set on language development on the old spec (which is very similar to your spec) look here.

Top tips for ENGA1 - part 1

Part 1 Language & Mode

Here are some quick pointers as to what might work with Language & Mode answers (and what might not).

Do these:

• Make sure you talk about MODE: you should be explicit about where on the mode continuum you would place the 2 texts and explain your thinking. I marked loads of answers last year which didn't mention mode at all, or very much. 
• Make sure you give precise, contextualised examples of language. It's not very helpful to say "the 2nd person pronoun you is used in text A" unless you tell us where it's used and why it's important in that particular place.
• Always relate language to meaning. You can pick up lots of marks for identifying and labelling language feature, but you'll get even more if you explain the effect a language feature might have in its context, or how it links to the mode of the text. For example, "The text uses a number of minor sentences ("Why not?" and "True.") to imitate the structure of spoken language and achieve a more casual relationship with the ideal reader." is better than "Text A uses many minor sentences."
• Try to structure your answer in a way that helps you use your writing time effectively. You don't have to compare the texts, but it's sensible to point out key differences and similarities. Comparison might save you time.  Then again, if you don't feel confident, don't compare.
• Use linguistic terminology all the way through your answer and remember that the only way to get into the top band (13-15) is to discuss sentences, clauses and structures. Try to find at least one example of a simple , a complex and/or a compound sentence. And even better still, give an example that is accurate!
• Always think about the audience, the purpose(s) and the positioning of the author/s. Who are they and what relationship are they trying to create with their reader/listener/conversational partner?

OK that's enough top tips for ENGA1 for today. If you want to ask questions, or add your own ideas, please add comments and I'll try to respond.

ENGA1 Language & Mode revision help

If you're looking for practice papers for the Language and Mode part of the ENGA1 exam on May 27th, you could do a lot worse than visit this blog, where there are two questions:

Keira Knightley texts
Obama vs Guardian

I'll post some more stuff on ENGA1 in the next few days.

Throw another shrimp on ye olde campfire

The new Robin Hood film, starring Aussie actor Russell Crowe, is featured on this morning's Radio 4 Today programme. Crowe has tried to adopt a Northern - he reckons a Yorkshire - accent, but has been criticised by some for getting it wrong. The Today programme features an interesting interview with an expert on accent, Andrew Jack (I think that's his name) talking about the differences between various accents. If you click here (before the end of Friday 21st May) and move the slider to about 1:43:52 you'll get the interview.

Conrats? Condemnation? Tory Party?

The sickening sight of David Cameron's smug old-Etonian-never-had-a-proper-job-where's-my-duelling-sword-butler mug peering out of the doors of Number 10 is still upsetting me, so have a look at this piece in today's Guardian about what we should call the new Tory Lib-Dem coalition.

Are they the (very appropriate) blend, Conrat (Conservative + Liberal Democrat)?
Or should we call them the Daily Mirror's nice rastaman-reminiscent, Condemnation? Closing stations fi cause deprivation inna de nation.
Or how about the Guardian's own witty one, which reflects the true nature of the coalition: The Conservative Party (taking Conservative from the Conservative Party and Party from the Liberal Democratic Party)?

Global Englishes and the future of English

One of the big language debates currently raging around the world is about the ways in which English, as it spreads into new territories, changes to become something different from the English English we native speakers are used to.

Is this stripped down language actually English anymore? Should we be talking about Global Englishes instead - different varieties of English spoken around the world - or insisting that Standard British English be taught as an international language? And then, there's a more recent movement (ELF) which suggests that English is increasingly becoming a Lingua Franca, being used by speakers for whom English is not their first language, and that English as a Lingua Franca should be the umbrella term that covers this mode of communication, that basically (and I hope I get this right) anyone whose first language is not English and who is talking to someone else whose first language is also not English, will be using ELF, whatever variety they choose to speak in. In other words, while Global Englishes are specific varieties around the world (Singaporean English, Chinese English, Australian English etc.), ELF covers the broader function of the language being used.

Anyway, a recent book by Robert McCrum called Globish, takes a look at some of these arguments around English  and a lengthy extract appeared in last Sunday's Observer. Among some other interesting points, this one is probably worth a bit more consideration:

Today there is almost no limit to the scope of this subject. The world's varieties of English range from the "crazy English" taught to the Chinese-speaking officials of the Beijing Olympics, to the "voice and accent" manuals issued by Infosys and Microsoft at their Bangalore headquarters. Thus, English today embodies a paradox. To some, it seems to carry the seeds of its own decay. In the heartlands of the mother tongue, there are numerous anxieties about its future: in the United States, language conservatives agonise about the Hispanic threat to American English. But simultaneously, and more stealthily – almost unnoticed, in fact – the real challenge to the English of Shakespeare and the King James Bible comes less from alien speech than from the ceaseless amendments made to English in a myriad daily transactions across the known world. Here, global English, floating free from its troubled British and American past, has begun to take on a life of its own. My prediction is that the 21st-century expression of British and American English – the world's English – is about to make its own declaration of independence from the linguistic past, in both syntax and vocabulary.

The Twitter police

New technology is often blamed for a general decline in literacy standards: we've all seen texts and message board posts which feature appalling spelling and grammar ("just wandering wot your doing") and some of us might even have made these horrendous mistakes, but an expanding group of Twitter users have been policing others' language usage, as revealed in this article from the New York Times.

Uptalk upsurge upsets

You've probably looked at High Rising Intonation, or what's often called uptalk, as part of your ENGA3 Language Variation work, so this brief article in yesterday's Guardian about its recent reported growth is quite timely. The article itself doesn't really tell us much new, but it contains some good links to previous, more detailed articles which should prove helpful. It's worth remembering that this accent has previously featured on an AQA A Language paper, so it's clearly fair game for the ENGA3 paper.

You might also find this link to the Word of Mouth Radio 4 message board interesting for different views people have on the accents and/or pronunciation of others. I can see an infectious disease and a damp spoon response in just the first 5 or 6 posts!

Getting MWI

The research of social psychology postgraduate, Lisa Whittaker, features in today's Telegraph in an article about adolescents' use of language on social networking sites. According to the article, teenagers are getting wise to how exposed social networking can leave them, and how a dodgy Facebook profile might look to a potential employer, and are trying to hide their indiscretions by using a "secret language", in which Getting MWI means "getting mad with it" or "intoxicated", and lots of others.

There's nothing earth-shatteringly new about this - slang has pretty much always been used to hide dubious activity from outsiders - but it's given a new spin here in the digital age.

It's PC-gone-mentally-challenged

Psychotic, autistic, paranoid, schizophrenic, bald. Just 5 of the words I have been called today by uncaring members of my own family. Thanks, mum. But 3 of these words feature in a comment piece in today's Guardian by Beatrice Bray. In it she argues that we should be more careful about our casual use of medical terms that describe mental illness. She argues that psychotic should only be used when referring to people who have the condition "psychosis", not as a more generalised term of abuse to describe someone who's a bit unstable.

The use of the word "psychotic" (is) offensive. You may think this political correctness gone mad, but if you are ill, or have been, you need words to describe your experience to yourself and to others. If for you these words are negative, you will hate yourself. Language can make or break your happiness.

So how far should we go to avoid causing offence to minority groups? Bray argues that we shouldn't be misusing the term bi-polar either. Katy Perry is going to be in big trouble for her "love bi-polar" in Hot'n'Cold. And the term schizophrenia? No longer should we even consider using it to mean "in two minds" or "experiencing mixed emotions".

And please allow individuals an identity apart from their illness, so always say "a person with schizophrenia" rather than "a schizophrenic".

Bray is not the only person to be concerned about the language of disability leaking into the mainstream lexicon. back in November of last year, the French politician Pierre Lellouche caused controversy by describing Gordon Brown as "autistic".

Is this PC-gone-mad (sorry, PC-gone-mentally-challenged) or a case of being sensitive to words that can cause a lot of distress? Let's have a heated debate: add your comments.

Election 2010

There's bound to be some good material for language and representation in the papers over the next few weeks with the General Election coverage, so keep an eye out for extracts you can use in class. One of the best places to go for a bit of entertainment is the excellent mydavidcameron site which has spoofed the Conservative Party's recent media campaigns with some genius parodies. If you want to be a language nerd about it (and that is a good thing to be...not like being a Tory) you could have a look at the language techniques employed in the parodies - grammatical cohesion, semantic wordplay, pragmatics, the whole lot - and think about which ones work best.

But, more importantly than all this language stuff, make sure that if you're 18 now or by the 6th of May you're registered to vote. Find out more here.

And remember: if you vote Tory, I can't help you with your exams. It's the law.

ENGA1 mode questions

This is just a quick post in response to a query from an AS student (yes that's you, Nourin) about possible questions for the Language and Mode part of ENGA1. Like I've said over the years before, I am an examiner for this but I don't have any inside information. If I did get hold of any inside information AQA would send out highly trained ninja gerbils to kill me. So, these suggestions are based on educated guesswork really (and might be totally wrong).

Looking back at the previous mode questions set (Jan 2009, May 2009, Jan 2010) they've had:

Jan 2009:

Online advert/webpage for dating tips

Phone conversation transcript between two secret lovers

May 2009:

Written version of Green Party speech

Printed guidance about avoiding wasteful use of photocopiers

Jan 2010:

Message board posts about graffiti

Online Guardian article about Banksy

So, for this year you might want to think about: 

·         written mode letters with blended mode emails (like the sample stuff in the AQA A text book)

·         spoken conversation between 3+ participants and MSN conversation

·         spoken commentary versus written match report (like the sample stuff we used in class back in January)

And remember, there's lots of extra test yourself style activities on this blog (just search using ENGA1 as a keyword in the search bar above) and loads of material on Kerboodle if you have access to it (and if you're at SFX, your Kerboodle log in details are Moodle). That's Kerboodle on Moodle-doodle. Like a poodle.

Beeb in bother about b-boy banter

A story (well, kind of a bit of a non-story) in the Daily Express suggests that BBC radio listeners are getting angry about the prevalence of American slang on the airwaves. According to the Express, listeners were outraged by a Radio 4 presenter's use of "fess up" instead of "admit to" and "face up" instead of "confront". And apparently, although the source isn't named, a Radio 1 presenter used "LA street slang". Fo shizzle?

The Express doesn't provide any links or further information, and you'd expect that as it's a rubbish, Tory-supporting newspaper run by a pornographer (or so I'm reliably informed by a man down the pub), but I've done a bit of homework on this and found some of these outraged listeners. Here's a couple of excerpts for you:

 (posted by "Ged")
I find this type of language to be offensive actually.
I detest street language, as it is often used as a form of violence.
I should imagine the person speaking was using to give themselves a deluded sense of street credibility.
As to why people need to project an affinity with people who can barely communicate is beyond me.
Any person attempting to use this language on national radio should be chased out of the studio with a very large stick! 

(posted by "Brian Duncan")
A language which has ceased to absorb neologisms is a dead language. A person who has ceased to countenance change might as well be dead.

A 42-year-old "trying" to behave like an eighteen-year-old is perfectly normal. What would be abnormal would be a 42-year-old doggedly clinging to the mores and manners of his eighteen-year-old self. What is ridiculous is any 42-year-old saying, "OOh! I'm 42. I must now cease from behaving like a 41-year-old, and start behaving as dictated by the age-police."

By what code of practice ought we to govern our dress or speech-habits, and where can I obtain a copy of that document?
For instance, I'm 64, and I play electric bass. Ought I switch to the 'cello - or maybe the harmonium?

Great stuff for a bit of discussion about Language Discourses on ENGA3, I'd have thought.

Exam revision - getting started on Language Variation

So, yesterday we looked at Language Change and some suggestions for links to look at and articles to read, and today we'll have a quick look at Language Variation. It's worth remembering that this is more than just accent and dialect (although they are a major part of this topic) and that gender, sexuality, age, workplace and communities of practice can also come into this, along with global English.

A good starting point is the BBC Voices website, which has some excellent resources on regional variation. The British Library has various archives and learning resources available online too, so have a listen to the Archival Sound Recordings here and a read of the Sounds Familiar material here.

For gender and variation, these notes on Teachit, written by the late Andrew Moore, are really helpful. Concentrate on the sections from Lakoff to Cameron for this exam. The best way to do well on a gender variation question is to read Deborah Cameron's Myth of Mars and Venus, but if you can't be arsed (that's CBA to you, you babylon yoot) then you can find good summaries and extracts from this link.

More soon...

Interaction satisfaction

Here's another way of using timelines to help you with the topic of Language Change. Ant Heald, who teaches English at McAuley Catholic High School, Doncaster, has got some of his students to create their own timeline and you can add key dates too, or contribute to the content of existing dates if you want to. To join, just go to the link above and sign up for an account, click on become an editor. You'll get a reply from Ant at some point and will then be able to add content.

Exam revision - getting started

It's getting near that time again, with exams looming ever closer. If you are starting to think about revising for your exams then here are some pointers as to where you can look and what you can do. This post is designed for A2 students and there'll be one for AS students to follow soon.

ENGA3 consists of three parts: Language Change, Language Variation and Language Discourses. Your paper is 2 hours and 30 minutes long, which is nice. You get a choice of question 1 or 2 (Qu 1 is on Language Change and Qu 2. is on Language Variation) and then just one question 3 which you have to do. The first bit of advice is don't just revise either Change or Variation. Because you don't get any choice with question 3, it's a very good idea to make sure you're rock solid on both Change and Variation, so that you're ready to answer a language Discourses question on whatever crops up, be it debates around Political Correctness (change), male female talk (variation) or attitudes to accent (variation).

The next bit of advice is to think about the different types of question you'll get. Language Change questions may have a focus on older texts, in which case you'll be asked to analyse them for what the writers are saying, how they are saying it and how the language of each text represents the time period it's from. So to revise this, try looking at plenty of older texts from different genres. Go to the British Library texts in context site and browse through texts from Early Modern English onwards. Mug up on your language frameworks too,  by checking Beth Kemp's A level site. Don't forget to use the emag site (with your SFX log in that can be obtained from the LRC) and Kerboodle (log ins are on Moodle).

Another type of Change question could presentyou with new words, or old words with new meanings, and use these to stimulate discussion about how and why language changes and where new words come from and how they are formed. There's masses of stuff out there about new words and you should have a look at the MacMillan Dictionaries Buzzword pages for lots of good examples of new words. Also, try this link to a page full of old blog posts about new words. Don't forget that you may also be presented with numerical data, perhaps in the form of charts and graphs showing you how frequently a word might have appeared over time and in different places. Make sure you mug up on wave theory and other processes of language change from your A2 textbook.

Next time, we'll look at ENGA3 Language Variation and then at Discourses. If you have any questions, please post them as comments and I'll try to answer them.

Augmented reality

Augmented reality is just one new expression covered in detail on Kerry Maxwell's Buzzwords page on the MacMillan Dictionaries site. It's a really excellent resource for Language Change at A level and has a very handy subject index which can show you the fields from where many of the new words have been derived: technology, business, health and leisure being particularly big areas of lexical innovation.

The Buzzwords archive is also very handy for looking at new words and phrases over the last few months, so have a look here for more. And remember, your examiners are human (at least for the time being) and like to see new examples of word formation rather than the same 10 examples from your text books and revision guides (apart from the brilliant examples in the fantastic Nelson Thornes book - ahem).

Kerry's powerpoint on new words, from her presentation to teachers at SFX in June 2008 is still available here if you're looking for some good revision material.

British Library interactive timeline

This new British Library interactive timeline is pretty spectacular. It needs a fairly high speed internet connection and good computer to run properly ( I think) but once it's going you'll see what a great resource it is: ideal for revising Language Change ENGA3.


British Library interactive timeline

And here's a link to some other timelines that might help too.

Audio and video clips

The BBC website has got some good material archived, including clips of audio and video about language. Here are some that might help:

David Crystal interviewed on Radio 4 about texting and language change
The Essex accent is dying out - Radio 4 feature about accent change
Changing East London accents
The Queen's changing accent

More teen slang

The BBC News School Report project included some interesting and funny clips of teen slang from around the British Isles. This one's excellent: just wait for the "proper English" translation at the end - it proper craiced me up.
Say What?

The house/arse interface

Regional variation in English is something that many people celebrate: diversity and slightly different cultural nuances are healthy after all. Others find variation unsettling and long for uniformity. Luckily, Ian McMillan is in the former camp and he's written a piece for today's Guardian about the ways in which accent and dialect can be radically different over just a small distance.

One distinction he makes is the difference in pronunciation you can encounter of the word house, pronounced as it's spelt in some areas (with a sounded "h" and diphthong "ou") and pronounced "arse" just down the road. If you've ever read Jim Shelley's TV column in the Daily Mirror you'll probably be aware of the potential for humour of this house/arse interface when referring to Eastenders ("You're never comin' round my arse again!"), but McMillan's more interested in the Yorkshire/Derbyshire divide.


It's a good read and the comments posted online after it, show the divide between those who celebrate diversity and variation and those who lament it. Just take a look at George Ball's nasty dig about regional accent for an idea about how discussions about accent quickly turn into something much more personal.

Have a look too at this November 2009 BBC Magazine story about Collins Dictionary's attempts to trace the meanings and usage of old dialect terms, if you want to see a bit more about where some terms are derived from and how they developed.

Scots: not slang but a dialect

A new initiative in Scotland to educate people in the history of the Scots dialect (or language if you're being nationalistic about it) is reported on in today's Herald. While Scots may seem a bit distant from south London, it's always good to look at  different varieties of English to build up a better understanding of the whole topic of Language Variation in ENGA3, plus many of the same issues crop up whatever variety you look at.

Is Scots just a broken, slang form of Standard English? No, and if you say that in Scotland you'll probably get a purple tin of Tenants Extra smacked in your face. Is it a dialect or a language? Well, that's trickier and it depends on what you define as a dialect. These questions and others are addressed on a new website from Learning and Teaching Scotland which looks at the history of Scots, attitudes to its use and examples of it being used. It's a very informative site and you can find it here.

Using the internet to research new words

Here's a very neat website called WebCorp that allows you to search for words across the internet to see where and when they have appeared. There are probably loads of language uses for this, but one that springs to mind is to see how long ago new words might have first appeared in print for work on ENGA3 Language Change.

So, you could try a search for recent faves such as staycation, frenemy, moobs, credit crunch and gas sipper....go on give it a go. Then do what everyone else does and search for your own name and some rude words.

Slang: the dark side of the force?

There are two quick snippets of articles here about slang which show how it's viewed on one hand as light, frothy and fun, and on the other hand seen as a darker marker of criminal behaviour and gang affiliation.

In the first article, on a BBC News School Report webpage, regional variation in slang usage is looked at and different words for "attractive" and "good" discussed. They quote the linguist Paul Kerswill, one of the key researchers into multi-ethnic youth dialect/ multicultural London English and mention a quick unscientific slang survey that they carried out.

In the second article, from The Daily Telegraph, slang use is one of many different behaviours flagged up as a sign that young people might be getting involved with gangs.

Shiver me timbre

It's a question that's on everyone's lips: are all pirates from Bristol? Oo- arr!

Here, The Guardian's Notes and Queries section sets out to look at this pressing question.

One reader, Nader Fekri makes an interesting observation about where pirates came from and how they spoke:

For many people, myself included, the archetypal pirates' accent was that popularised by Robert Newton, who appeared in more than 50 films, most notably as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, a role he reprised on TV in the mid-1950s.

Newton was born in Shaftesbury, Dorset, and spoke with a distinctive West Country accent. Aboard most English/British ships, there were significant numbers of Scots (William "Captain" Kidd), Irish (Walter Kennedy), and Welsh (Admiral Sir Henry Morgan) sailors. It seems, however, that the largest group of sailors came from the south-west of England (Edward Teach, AKA "Blackbeard" was a native of Bristol and Francis Drake was from Tavistock in Devon) than anywhere else, which is unsurprising, given the pre-eminence of Bristol as the main trading port with the West Indies. So Newton's accent may well have been historically accurate.

All of this may seem silly, but it's got relevance to your study of Regional Variation on ENGA3, so read well me hearties and look out for the hidden treasure.

(Alternative titles to this post were:
Pieces of h-dropping
To err is human, to arrrrr is pirate
X marks the glottal stop)

Hip hop slang and the demise of Standard English

Here's just a quick follow up to last week's piece on Professor Maurice Martinez and his teaching of "black English" as a non-standard variety in his university classes. In an op-ed in The Bulletin ("Philapdelphia's Family Newspaper", apparently), Jane Gilvary (who styles herself as "a red, white, and blue American from the City of Brotherly Love (who) loves Jesus, Johnny Cash, and the U.S. Constitution"... oh well, I like Johnny Cash so 1 out of 3 aint bad) attacks anyone trying to teach ebonics or black slang as doing education a disservice.

As a long-time English teacher I would concur with Professor Williams’ assertion that teachers who endorse any kind of slang in their classrooms, including hip-hop lyrics, do their students a great disservice and only sustain illiteracy. There’s an undercurrent to hip-hop slang and Ebonics that oppresses the people who use them to communicate — black or white.

Again, this kind of argument is useful material for ENGA3 Language Discourses and offers you another good style model for op-eds, as well as a more conservative take on the debate than you'll get from your average commie/liberal/descriptivist English language teacher.Personally, I think she's talking cobblers, but there you go.

Having a bog shaker as you get decruited

Office slang is always an inventive source of new language and this piece in The Daily Telegraph gives some really good examples of new words and phrases.

Among my favourites are:

Cashanova (a blend of cash + Cassanova) : a person who brings in money to the business through using his charm
To be decruited (an application of a different prefix to recruit): to lose your job
Bog shaker (a compound of the slang word for toilet and shaker): an emotional breakdown in an office toilet cubicle.

For ENGA3 it's always helpful to have up to date examples of new words and an idea of the processes that lead to their creation. As Kerry Maxwell explains on the Kerboodle videos about new words and lexicography, lots of new words and phrases rely very heavily on existing patterns of word creation, as well as on existing words and phrases, so it's no surprise to see credit munch (a cheap meal) appearing as a response to credit crunch.

Revision help

Beth Kemp's site is a really good source of revision help for the ENGA1 exam and she has recently updated the frameworks pages, which can be found here.

ENGA1 Language & Mode quick revision task

Last year we put up some short extracts of texts from different modes for students to do a quick analysis of, and this year we'll do the same. If you need to refresh your memory of the Mode Continuum then click here.

So, with each extract what we're after are the following:

1. Where would you place this extract on the mode continuum?
2. Why?
3. What language evidence can you produce for your decision?

Please post your answers as comments to this blog post. There'll be feedback given, but sadly no Haribo anymore.


The first extract this year is taken from the ICE-GB corpus which I'm now working with as part of my new job, and it's an extract from a football commentary on the radio. Ignore any underlining as that's not important here, and it's worth adding that the micropauses are indicated using <,> in this extract. Also it's just one speaker:

Click on the image if you want to make it bigger (as Ashley Cole might have said to his sexting "victims". Not really...).

The dangers of descriptivism

Descriptivist linguists tend to do what the label on their tin says: they describe the language they see and hear around them. They don't make value judgements about correct or incorrect English, but talk about what's grammatical and ungrammatical, what's standard and non-standard. But from the abuse they sometimes get you'd have thought they were ramming dodgy grammar and youth slang down our throats every day and forcing us to speak non-standard.

So, spare a thought for Professor Maurice Martinez at UNCW who endeavoured to teach his students a thing or two about what he called "Black English". We all know that the people who post comments on newspaper websites don't tend to be a representative cross-section of society (unless that society genuinely is full of rabies-ridden reactionary mouth-frothers), but some of the comments about Martinez's lessons are an interesting insight into how the minds of knee-jerk prescriptivists function. But it's also good to see some of his students getting on the case and responding with some well-argued justifications for the kind of work their professor is doing.

Have a look here if you'd like to see more.

Plenty of words for your honk

A level English Language students often complain that they don't get as many trips out of college or school as Literature or Drama or Classical Civilisation or even lowly Geography students. And this is probably true. But you get so much more excitement in your lessons as payback. For example, who could not get excited about relative clauses and present perfect verb phrases? Exactly.

Anyway, now there is a chance for you to go on a proper English Language outing and it might even be fun. This man - Alex Horne - is doing a stand-up comedy show around the country all about his attempts to get a load of made-up words into the dictionary. His website explains a bit more about it as does this post by MacMillan Dictionaries lexicographer, Kerry Maxwell, but the basic idea is that he has decided to plant "linguistic seeds" and see if they'll grow into widely-used terms. The words and phrases are here, along with explanations of how he wants them to be used (which word class they are and what they mean in context), but some examples are honk for money, games as a term of derision a bit like some people use "jokes" ("that's proper games that is", or "you're games") or the one that seems to be catching several people's imagination below:

mental safari (to go on)
idiom (slang). When someone goes mad for a few moments or gets ridiculously tongue tied, or does a series of rash acts. Over the past year it seems, Harry Redknapp has been on a mental safari, prior to his return to Fratton Park. Original and rare invention.

 
He appears in London towards the end of April and you can get more info from his website.

H9 > H8

That lethal combination of text messaging and young people has aroused the attention of several newspapers who are running stories on what they see as the latest developments in text language/netspeak. And the latest development is - wait for it - that parents are now using lots of textspeak themselves and that the youngers are finding this horribly embarrassing and creating new ways to express themselves to keep what they're really saying under wraps. It's revolutionary stuff, err... not.

The Mirror has a story here explaining some of the new text slang and one excellent example, which I will use from now on to annoy my own children, is H9, a term that is stronger than the letter & number homophone blend H8 (Hate) because 9 is one more than 8. Gettit? It's great, just like the bit in Spinal Tap with the amp that goes up to 11:(which you can watch here if you want to) it's one louder than an amp that goes up to 10. There's a bit more here too on a web news story.

There's nothing really new about all of this: young people (and all sorts of other groups of people) will always develop new ways of talking to each other  in order to conceal their activities from those who want to listen in. Slang's history is often connected to criminality and concealment as much as it is connected with lexical innovation and fun.

The whole debate about text slang and young people's literacy skills is picked up again here on The Sun's web forums with some interesting points about celebrities and a dumb culture that doesn't appear to reward intelligence.

Language development - revision help

Here are some (hopefully) useful links to material on children's language development (AQA A ENGA1 or AQA B ENGB3).

• This is a clear and helpful summary of Roger Brown's 1973 research into children's stages of development.
• Here's a summary of Jerome Bruner's key ideas about interaction and language development
• Some very good stuff on Patricia Kuhl's work on language development (no, I hadn't heard of her either, but it's interesting stuff)
• And some good stuff on Piaget, Lenneberg and Theory of Mind

All of these are from this blog, which I wasn't aware of before, but is well worth a look at.

Let's get retarded...

...or rather, if you're the Black Eyed Peas and worried about not getting your single played "Let's get it started". The word "retard" has come under scrutiny in the USA with the debate about its offensiveness or otherwise gaining a political dimension recently. In this Washington Post article (a great style model for an AQA A Language Intervention or an AQA B Media Text) Christopher Fairman traces the word's history and the arguments about its use.

I don't know if this is something that the USA has been late to pick up on (a bit retarded, you could say) but retard has been pretty offensive in the UK for some time now. In much the same way that spastic was a term of playground abuse until we were all told off for using it, retard has always been a bit contentious. For example, I'd find it pretty hard to imagine a disability rights group in the UK calling itself the Association for Retarded Citizens. But then again, the expression spaz also hit the headlines a while ago in the USA, a good two decades after a school assembly from my old headteacher reminded us all that it was a bad word. 

In his article, Fairman makes some very good points about the cycles words go through and the euphemism treadmill that turns to generate new terms which - for a short time at least - avoid offence to different groups of people:

The irony is that the use of "mental retardation" and its variants was originally an attempt to convey greater dignity and respect than previous labels had. While the verb "retard" -- meaning to delay or hinder -- has roots in the 15th century, its use in reference to mental development didn't occur until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when medical texts began to describe children with "retarded mental development," "retarded children" and "mentally retarded patients." By the 1960s, "mental retardation" became the preferred medical term, gradually replacing previous diagnostic standards such as "idiot," "imbecile" and "moron" -- terms that had come to carry pejorative connotations. 

What's also interesting is the parallel Fairman draws with other potentially offensive words such as the n-word, queer and gay. And while Fairman is sensitive to retard's offensiveness, his point is that we are grown up enough to show discretion and judgement in how we choose to use terms:

The current public awareness campaign surrounding the use of the word "gay" offers better lessons and parallels for the R-word debate. Advocacy groups contend that the phrase "that's so gay" fosters homophobia and that anti-gay language is directly related to violence and harassment against homosexuals. At the same time, there is recognition that much anti-gay language is uttered carelessly and isn't necessarily intended as hurtful -- as is probably the case with uses of "retard." The Ad Council and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network have developed a Web site, ThinkB4YouSpeak.com, that, much like R-Word.org, encourages the public to sign a pledge to cease using the phrase. (The slogan: "Saying that's so gay is so yesterday.")

By increasing sensitivity and awareness, the campaign hopes to encourage people to think about the possible consequences of their word choices. Such reflection would presumably lead individuals to censor themselves once they understand that others can be hurt by their language.

Inherent in this idea is the realization that words have multiple meanings and that those meanings depend on the context and circumstances surrounding any particular statement. For example, "gay" is a term of identification for homosexuals, but it also can be used as an all-purpose put-down: "That's so gay." Those using it as an insult don't intend to say "that's so homosexual," nor do they necessarily make the conscious leap that homosexuality is bad. (Indeed, the success of the ThinkB4YouSpeak.com campaign depends on this distinction.)

The class divide

The language that children are exposed to has long been thought to have some kind of influence upon their own lexico-semantic and grammatical development. But more importantly perhaps, the verbal interaction that children have with carers has often been thought to have a huge impact on the pace of a child's language development. A report, commissioned by the educational charity, The Sutton Trust suggests that the impact can be as much as one year's language development on a child by the time he or she is 5 years old. In other words, a child from a poor background - poor in terms of their family's income but poor too in terms of amount of contact time, reading time and time spent interacting verbally - could lag as far behind as a whole year compared to children of wealthier parents who spend more time reading to, talking with and generally interacting with their children.

The results might need a bit of unpicking, but there are some quite stark findings that the researchers, Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook, come up with:

Just under half (45%) of children from the poorest fifth of families were read to daily at age 3, compared with 8 in 10 (78%) of children from the richest fifth of families. Comparing children with the same family income, parental characteristics and home environments, those who were read to every day at age 3 had a vocabulary at age 5 nearly 2 months more advanced than those who were not read to every day.

Similarly, a child taken to the library on a monthly basis from ages 3 to 5 is two and a half months ahead of an equivalent child at age 5 who did not visit the library so frequently.

 Regular bedtimes at 3 and 5 are associated with gains of two and a half months at age 5.

At the end of the summary of their findings, the researchers rate the factors that they have found as more or less responsible for contributing to the gap in test scores between children and decide that the most significant influence is in the category of "parenting and the home environment" (which includes reading to your child, the nature of the social interaction you have with your child etc.) while "material circumstances" (income, savings, pressure of bills etc.) is the second most significant factor.

The full report can be found here, a summary here and a BBC news story about it here. For anyone interested in other studies into the role of interaction and the development of children's language, have a look here at a 2009 blog post about gestures, here for a Polly Toynbee article about Hart and Risley's influential research into American children's language development, and here for a link to the Children of the Code site where Todd Risley is interviewed about his work

British Library resources

I went to a workshop at the British Library last week and have been pointed towards some good links for A level English Language, so here you go:
Old English inflections (and how word order has now become more important in modern English)
Words for Time Travellers (good activities to help you find out more about language change over time)
Sounds Familiar (really good stuff on regional varieties of English)
Archival Sound Recordings (a searchable database of audio clips with regional accents from all over Britain and across the years - a top resource for ENGA3 work)
Accent map (a really good resource from which you can access audio clips of all sorts of regional accents)

"I'll get da fiend to duppy her den"

Those are the words that led to two East Londoners getting sent down for lengthy prison sentences, and linguistics had a major part to play in getting them off the street and into a cell. An article in yesterday's Independent tells us more:

To give you the background: in December 2008, two months after the conversation above, the girl pregnant with Jolie's baby was lured by text to a spot close to the Regent's Canal in Islington, North London. There, Ogundele lay in wait to batter the girl over the head with an iron bar before throwing her in the waterway. Both the girl and the baby escaped alive, and the search turned to her assailant. After Ogundele and Jolie became prime suspects, their computers were seized. They had forgotten to delete their MSN history folders and police called in experts from the University of Aston's Centre for Forensic Linguistics. They helped decipher the boys' language, and the two rappers were sentenced for conspiracy to murder last month. Ogundele got 18 years in prison, Jolie, 14.

Forensic Linguistics is something we've looked at before (try here and here) and it's a fascinating area in which close study of people's language use can lead to the solving of some pretty unpleasant crimes. Last February, Krzysztof Kredens from the Centre for Forensic Linguistics did an excellent talk to SFX students about some of the cases in which forensic linguistics had been applied, and some of the techniques they have employed, and we're hoping to repeat this in the future. But in the meantime, the article itself is a good introduction to some of what they're up to. You can find out more about the work of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics here.

Promiscuous polysemy

There's a very good article on Language Log about how meaning change in language is a natural and positive thing. Using the word post as an example ("Fence posts, army posts, the New York Post, blog posts, ambassadorial posts, post offices..."), Geoff Pullum argues that the prescriptive point of view -  change is a bad thing that must be prevented or controlled at all costs - is cobblers, and that words change meanings all the time. As he says: 

Human languages do not strive to avoid ambiguity. They do not try to align words with meanings one to one. They are not in danger of anarchy when a new word sense evolves. People don't just tolerate languages with multiply polysemous words, they seem to love them; people thrive on multiplicity of meaning. There are thousands of examples that show this. It is only the prescriptivist thickheads who cannot see what it means.

So, he argues, polysemy - multiple meanings of the same word - is not inherently confusing. One major argument used by prescriptivists against semantic change is that it leads to misunderstanding and confusion (How can sick mean good when it also means ill, or wicked mean excellent when it also means evil?) but Pullum's take on this is a strong counterblast to all of this.

Texting: not the work of the dark lord himself & actually quite good for you

As if by magic, having posted yesterday on texting being linked to young people's illiteracy, a news article crops up saying that texting is actually good for you and can be shown to improve young people's communication and literacy skills. It's based on research by Clare Wood and Bev Plester and their team at Coventry University (the same people who brought you this and this) who say this about their work:

We began studying in this area initially to see if there was any evidence of association between text abbreviation use and literacy skills at all, after such a negative portrayal of the activity in the media. We were surprised to learn that not only was the association strong, but that textism use was actually driving the development of phonological awareness and reading skill in children. Texting also appears to be a valuable form of contact with written English for many children, which enables them to practise reading and spelling on a daily basis.

Emma Jackson and Lucy Hart, members of the Coventry team, did a talk for teachers at SFX last summer as part of our QIA Beacon Colleges workshops and their earlier research can be seen in this Powerpoint on the resources site, while this most recent research is available as a pdf here.

This is all good stuff for ENGA3 Language Discourses (A2 students) but equally it's excellent material for Language & Mode ENGA1, especially the material here on the British Academy's news release about the research.

• Shortenings: cutting the end off a word, losing more than one letter, e.g. bro = brother.
• Contractions: cutting letters, usually vowels, out of the middle of a word, e.g. txt, plz, hmwrk.
• G Clippings: cutting off only the final g in a word, e.g. goin, comin, workin, swimmin. 
• Other Clippings: cutting off other final letters, e.g. I’v, hav, wil, com.
• Symbols: using symbols, including emoticons, and x used symbolically, e.g. &, @, ;-), :-p, xxx. 
• Initialisms: a word or group of words is represented by its initial letter, e.g. tb = text back, lol = laughing out loud, gf = girlfriend. 
• Letter/Number Homophones: a letter or number is used to take the place of a phoneme, syllable, or word of the same sound, e.g. 4, 2, l8r, u, r, c. 
• Non-conventional Spellings: a word is spelled according to legitimate English phoneme-grapheme conversion rules, but not the conventional one used to spell the word, e.g. nite, cum, fone, skool. 
• Accent Stylisation: a word is spelled as it is pronounced in casual speech, e.g. gonna, wiv = with, av = have, wanna, elp = help, anuva = another.
• Missing Apostrophes: left out either in possessive or traditional contraction form, e.g. dads, Im, Ive, cant.

Texting: the work of Satan himself

According to an article in last week's Times, texting is not only making teens' vocabulary shrink to an almost caveman-like 800 words a day but it's also making them unemployable. The article quotes research commissioned by the government which states that teenagers "are avoiding using a broad vocabulary and complex words in favour of the abbreviated “teenspeak” of text messages, social networking sites and internet chat rooms". So, it's not just texting then , but all computer-mediated communication that's to blame.

It's another moral panic which stokes the public's fears about a new generation of illiterate imbeciles being spawned by feckless parents and incompetent teachers. And do u no wot? It's rubbish. But at least it's exactly the kind of article you can use in preparation for the Language Discourses part of ENGA3 and this article even manages to quote a proper linguist, the ubiquitous (look it up and improve your meagre vocabulary if you don't know what this word means) David Crystal:

David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University in Wales, said many experts underestimate the breadth and complexity of a teenager’s vocabulary. “The real issue here is that people object to kids having a good vocabulary for hip-hop and not for politics. They have an articulate vocabulary for the kind of things they want to talk about,” he said. “Few academics get anywhere near measuring that vocabulary.”

Go David, go David. We're gonna party, like it's your birthday. Etc.

An encouraging aspect of an otherwise scaremongering article is the mention of the government 's Communication Czar, Jean Gross, and her plan to get teenagers to record language being used in workplaces and for them to study what they record. Sounds to me like what we've been doing very successfully for the last 10 years with English Language A level...

Edited on 23rd Jan to add: David Crystal has a very good post on this on his own blog here.

This blog will go on...

I know this blog is primarily for our students at SFX (and a fine group of students you are) but it's always had other A level English Language students (and teachers) as part of its wider audience (and contributors). So, even though I'm leaving SFX in a week or two to do other things, I'm hoping to carry on blogging here at least until the A level exams are done this summer.

The plan is to keep posting relevant language stuff here even after that, but we'll see what happens. Anyway, for the time being it's business as usual and I'd really like to encourage a little bit more interaction and comment use on the blog in the run-up to the summer exams.

Loquacious locavore lays into lexis lovers

There have been loads of interesting articles about language appearing in the mainstream media recently and this one from today's Daily Telegraph is no exception. In it, Christopher Howse argues that what he calls vogue words - words that are briefly fashionable but then die out - shouldn't be selected to define the era they're from.

What I am hinting at is that it is very easy to concentrate on neologisms that reflect the wilder shores of modern life. It's harder to spot defining markers of the way we live now. At the moment the temptation is to identify too many trends from new media – web-surfing, blogging, twittering and unfriending. They don't often last.

He's referring to such end of year and end of decade word lists as this one from the American Dialect Society or this one from the Australian Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year poll in 2008.

Instead of these vogueish, trendy and ephemeral words, he reckons we should wait a while and look a bit deeper before choosing words which define our times, and opts for farmers' market (well, he would seeing as he's writing for the Telegraph and probably owns a few hundred acres of prime farming land in Monmouthshire) and chav (which is probably my choice for word of the noughties). But class hatred aside, it's a good read and another fine style model for broadsheet op-eds. Huzzah!

Avatards and twihards

Two new words related to film obsessives get a mention in today's Guardian: avatards & twihards. The former is a blend of the film title Avatar and retards and is being used to describe hardcore fans of the James Cameron movie who are going to see it again and again. Avatar itself is an old word which has undergone a shift in usage. Originally relating to the physical form a spirit would take in some religions, it now often relates to the virtual identity a player creates in an online game, or an image used to represent yourself on an online forum. Twihard is a blend of Twilight and diehard, and it's pretty easy to see where this comes from. In fact as I look at the sofa in our living room I see a Twihard sitting there, staring at me disapprovingly as my keyboard taps interfere with her "enjoyment" of Cedric Diggery, sorry I mean Robert Pattinson.

Edited to add: there's probably a link between the way Avatard has been formed and another word, celebutard, which appeared a couple of years ago (see here for more).

Language discourses

The excellent MacMillan Dictionary blog has a great post on it about the role of dictionaries in debates about language change. For any A2 students starting to look at ENGA3 Language Discourses it's a must read, so have a look here. And in the article Michael Rundell makes reference to a recent classic: Jean Aitchison's Reith Lecture on language change, which you can find here.

The rise of the regional super-accent

An article in this weekend's Sunday Times has some interesting stuff to say about how regional accents such as Scouse, Brummie and Geordie (what Cheryl Cole speaks...mmm Cheryl...Stop it. OK, I'll stop it) are apparently becoming stronger.

As the article points out, "Conventional wisdom was that accents would disappear and merge into a national way of speaking, albeit with some class and regional variations". But this is coming with a cost as "while big-city accents are surviving and even colonising surrounding areas, the nuances between districts within those cities are disappearing".

The article draws on expert opinion too: the eminent linguist Paul Kerswill of Lancaster University as well as Dominic Watt, a lecturer in forensic speech science of York University and Clive Upton at Leeds University.

So why is this happening? Well, it appears that while local accents are dying out, the strong regional accents seem to be spreading out from their traditional bases and into new territory. In a way it's like a localised form of dialect levelling and it's happening for many of the same reasons: movement of people, prestige and status in society and the power of the media. Certain regional accents appear to have gained a foothold in modern Britain as signifiers of authenticity and honesty, and perhaps a marker of working class tradition, and have therefore maintained their strength against what was ( a few years ago at least) thought to be the all-conquering power of London and Estuary English.

The article goes on to add some other interesting points:

Accents are more varied in northern England because they have not been subjected to the mass levelling of speech caused by London and its commuting hinterland. In the southeast, Kent, Essex and East and West Sussex are all losing their distinctive accents while the capital’s own cockney is also under threat.

I'd definitely recommended having a look at the whole article and following up some of the wider issues about language, region and identity for your work on ENGA3. And I'd also recommend a look at the Kerboodle video clips for this unit where Kevin Watson of Lancaster University gives an excellent introduction to the main ideas concerned with the study of accent and dialect.

(edited on 21.04.16 to remove salacious references and rather eye-popping picture)

First word hurdles

There's quite a bit of coverage in the media of a recent survey on children's early language development, with the main focus being on the story that (according to The Times) some children are "reaching the age of 3 without being able to say a word" and that "boys are almost twice as likely to struggle to learn to speak as girls".

The average age for a baby to speak their first word is 10 to 11 months. However, a significant minority (4 per cent) of parents reported that their child said nothing until they were 3. Toddlers between the ages of 2 and 3 should be able to use up to 300 words, including adjectives, and be able to link words together, according to I CAN, the children’s communication charity. Late speech development can lead to problems, such as low achievement at school or mental health problems.

The BBC reported it yesterday in this news story, but in a slightly less alarmist way.

What makes me feel a bit sceptical about the alarmist tone of The Times article is that the whole piece is based on a YouGov survey, which would seem to indicate that parents are self-reporting what they claim to have heard or not heard. This is problematic for a couple of reasons: a) self-reporting is not a particularly accurate methodology for assessing what actually happens, just someone's perception of events ("I'm sure my son said daddy just then" or "I don't really see much of my kids because I work all week, but I reckon they can say 50 words..."); and b) it can be heavily influenced by demand characteristics ("If I don't say that my daughter can say 50 words, people will think I'm a bad parent.").

So the truth might well be that things are just as they always were: some kids speak very early and others relatively late, but it's only a very small minority who have genuine difficulties (sometimes those on the autistic spectrum).

We'll come back to looking at the whole issue of children's first words and the role of environment and interaction in the next few weeks, and I'm sure we'll return to this story and some of the arguments around it.

The dialectics of language change

In an article from today's Observer, David Mitchell argues a witty and persuasive case for not celebrating language change. It's partly a response to other articles which revel in new words and the linguistic innovations English seems to be spawning at such a rapid rate, but it's also a personal take on why learning rules can be important. As Mitchell says "...when language changes, slang becomes correct, mispunctuation is overlooked and American spellings adopted, I feel that I'm a mug for having learnt all the old rules to start with. If those who misuse the apostrophe are not adversely judged for it, then why did I waste so much time listening in class?".

...which is honest, I suppose, if nothing else. Elsewhere, he argues that the whole debate itself - for and against language change - is vital to the health of the language.

In the end, though, the rules do matter - it's just that obeying them doesn't. They need to be there to create a tension between conservatism and innovation. If the innovation continued unchecked, unmonitored by Susie Dent, then the language would fragment into thousands of mutually incomprehensible dialects. The stickler-advocated rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation slow the speed of change and allow the language to remain united.

This is a really crucial point and one that I've tried to articulate in class (with little success of late). The argument - the dialectic, is how you might put it - is part of what helps shape the language's development. The fact that people argue over whether or not new words should enter the language, be accepted and entered into a dictionary is perhaps as important as the new words themselves, the processes that form them or the people that use them.

Given that the ENGA3 exam is at least partly based around Language Discourses (debates about language), it's probably a good idea to read this article and have a good think about the opposing arguments on a range of discourses: gender and conversation, political correctness, new words and slang.

Manchester United 0 Leeds United 1

Sorry, no language reason for this post, just a need to express my happiness.

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.

English: refreshing the lexical gaps that other languages cannot reach

“If a language is not capable of creating new words to describe new advances, it will die.” These are the words of Alfred Gilder, terminology chief at the French finance ministry, speaking at a recent Swiss conference about the spread of English around Europe and the state of the continent's native languages. "Modernise or die!" was his message. There is a growing concern in many countries about the seemingly unstoppable rise of English as a global language and the effect that this is having on the health and integrity of other languages. So, when words like laptop and roaming, and a phrase like last but not least make it into another language - be it Swiss, German, French or Turkish - the native language takes another step towards losing part of its identity and global English takes another step into another nation's territory.

But why are speakers of other languages using these English words? Why don't they come up with their own new expressions in their own mother tongues? Well that's what Alfred Gilder would like to see, but it's hard to imagine it happening when English has become so ubiquitous and so, well...global. With English being spread through technology, commerce and culture around the world, it's hard to resist its influence. But perhaps there's something about the language itself that makes it attractive - something internal, rather than external - such as its adaptability and tendency to innovate. In short, the fact that English is constantly adding new words and phrases to its vocabulary could be the reason why it's spreading so quickly: it's refreshing the lexical gaps that other languages cannot reach, to nick Heineken's old advertising slogan. In effect, language change - so often derided by prescriptivists as leading to the degradation of our language - has helped push English to the forefront of world languages.

And returning to the article in The Journal of Turkish Weekly, where this conference was covered (linked from Macmillan Dictionary's language in the news roundup), there is recognition that this isn't a new thing, but it's something that is happening at a much swifter pace than ever before:

Of course borrowing words and expressions from other languages is a natural function of language development and English itself has absorbed countless influences in its history – from Latin, French and Hindi, to name but a few. What is different about the current dominance of English is that it is the first truly global language and it is spewing out words at a pace that other languages have no chance to compete with. This rapid evolution favours those who can ride the English wave but creates a language divide, akin to the digital divide, for those who are poor in English.

Where will this lead? At worst, it could lead to the deaths of certain languages around the world, some of which are nearly on their last legs, if this report is anything to go by.

10 years of new words

Top lexicographer (and frequent visitor to SFX) Kerry Maxwell, has put together a list of the most interesting words of the decade on the excellent Macmillan Dictionary blog. So in the spirit of Christmas and all that, the first three people to identify the word formation/language change processes (blending, compounding, borrowing, affixation etc.) behind these new words will get a bag of Haribo/alternative organic foodstuff when term begins.

Here they are:

1. Staycation
2. WAG
3. blog
4. slow food
5. sudoku

Add your attempt as a comment with your name and class, and the best 3 answers will win. If you enter and you're not an SFX student, you win eternal pride and a few bluetooth high fives.

Weapons of mass distraction?

The USA is a few years behind Britain with texting and the moral panics around it, but there has been a recent upsurge in reports of texting damaging literacy skills, textisms working their evil way into students' written work and suchlike. So, this article from Science Daily is a nice counter to those stories and a very helpful one to have a look at for the Language Discourses part of the A2 exam. Phones, therefore, aren't really weapons of mass distraction, more like tools of mass engagement. Or something like that...

Here's a quick snippet of what Carol L. Tilley, professor of library and information science at Illinois says about using texts and tweets in lessons:

"There's always that danger when embracing something in a school setting that you kill it for the students," Tilley said. "But helping kids understand the social and contextual role that texting plays in their lives I think is one possible justification. If there are ways educators can incorporate it in providing homework support or building dialogue out of school hours, then I think it could be a useful communications tool."

Slanguage reviewed

Not that I'm obsessed, but here's another link to something about the Radio 4 programme that SFX students took part in. This time it's a positive review of the programme from today's Guardian.

Slagging slang

The Mind Your Slanguage programme on Radio 4 today, which SFX students and staff contributed to, has kicked off an interesting debate about slang on the BBC news site today. We've got the usual prescriptive arguments: things were better in my day...these young people are just using broken English...it's all the fault of those black people with their ghetto talk...slang is "contaminating" Standard English...it's lazy and ugly talk... you know the kind of thing. But there are also some more sensible and well-formulated positions, which might also be termed prescriptive too.

Perhaps there is some truth in the argument that language is changing so rapidly now - faster than ever before - that it's too much to cope with for many people. Perhaps too, there's some truth in the claim that young people don't recognise that they're using slang some of the time, and that it's inappropriate in formal settings. But isn't that also the case for older people too and their own slang and idiomatic expressions?

Have a look and see what you make of it all. But remember, this is a great opportunity to be part of a language debate and even intervene in it yourselves. Many of you have already, by being part of the programme, so big up yourselves and that, bang bang etc.

Noughty words

With 2009 drawing to a close, nearly every newspaper and magazine in existence is currently filling its pages with end of decade lists: films, albums, influential political figures, artists, you know the sort of list. But BBC news magazine also offers us some good language discussion as it looks for the most important words of the noughties.

The language expert and author, Susie Dent (who has written some really good books on language change, the annual Language Report) offers a few suggestions - chav, green, tweet and poking among others - but the BBC also wants your suggestions. Have a look here for more. And my personal favourite has to be (drum roll)... celebutard: a blend of (I think) celebrity + débutante + retard, a nice and catty term of abuse for a recently semi-famous nonentity.

Elsewhere, if you're interested in new words and where they come from - and you should be 'cos you're an English Language student, innit - then you can do much much worse than Buzzword on the excellent Macmillan Dictionary pages here.

Mind your slanguage

Tuesday 8th December, 11am on Radio 4 is when Mind Your Slanguage is broadcast. It features lots of good stuff about how people use and feel about slang, including interviews with Tony Thorne and Paul Kerswill. But most importantly it features lots of SFX students talking about the slang they use, don't use and how they feel about it. Huzzah!

The unseemly stalkers of youth slang

In this comment piece in The Guardian, Shirley Dent takes a swipe at "the rush to relevance" that she argues is reducing classic literature to a series of empty gestures, designed to attract fickle youth audiences who can't cope with proper English. Swear down.

Dent, in particular, doesn't like the idea of Julius Caesar being adapted to include street slang:

Not only is it patronising to those it hopes to welcome, but it entirely
misses the literary purpose and value of slang, usually utilising the lamest,
least challenging has-been manifestations of "cutting-edge,
fresh-from-the-street" talk. Take a line from the street slang Julius Caesar: "I
come to bury Caesar, not big him up." Are you kidding me? Even to an old fogey
such as myself, this sounds dated. When well-meaning literary professionals seek
to get down with the kids in this way, the world really is turned upside down.
On one side, those who should know better abdicate their duty to introduce the
next generation – wherever they come from – to the very best of literature; on
the other, you have a misplaced scramble to latch on to and leech off the
knowing cool of youth.

I've got mixed feelings about this view. On one hand, the students involved in the Wasted production, deserve to be applauded for their hard work and dynamism ( I've got to say that as well because I teach some of them and I don't want to get slapped up by an angry gangsta-thespian at registration), and you can see that the use of language that they are familiar with from the colloquial discourse around them is one way of opening up the text to different audiences. But, on the other hand, is it just a cheesy, patronising and craven attempt to bring a hint of ghetto colour to a pedestrian adaptation of a great play? Is slang being used because the actors don't actually understand the original words and meanings?

The Sun comments on 'silliness that is attempt to change the way we think'

Bold print stating BAN ON WORD 'YOUTH' could be seen on the front cover of The Sun on Saturday Nov 28th. The article on p4 expanded on the 'potty language changes' in the code of practice issued by the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Children, Schools and Families on how to give out conditional cautions. According to the Sun, it reads: 'A number of responses suggested the term 'youth' had negative connotations and should be replaced by 'young person'. Therefore throughout the code (with the exception of the term 'Youth Conditional Caution') 'youth' has been replaced.'
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2749902/The-word-youths-banned-by-Ministry-of-Justice-and-Dept-for-Children-Schools-and-Families-code-of-practice.html
Interestingly, the article itself refers to the young people as 'yobs' and shows a picture of a 'hoodie!' The writer states: 'Politically-correct penpushers have banned calling yobs 'youths' - so as not to hurt their feelings.'
What terms are acceptable when referring to teenage criminals? How is the Sun reader being encouraged to think about young people? Is there any difference implied or stated between young people and young offenders (or are you all the same?)
The topic is expanded upon in the Sun's editorial exploring other aspects of extreme political correctness such as 'winterval' which 'is making a mockery of Christmas.' It goes on to say that 'This stupidity is no joke. It prevents us dealing with real problems in society because people feel nervous talking bluntly about their causes.' After quoting extreme PC examples such as 'Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep' it states:' but behind all this silliness is an attempt to change the way we think.' A familiar theory?
After 'banging on about this' in class today (quote from Ben -thanks!) there was some discussion about whether I should have written 'youth language' on the board as a cause of language change or whether I should have reworded it! What do you think?

Words of warning

Two rappers have apparently been jailed for issuing blood-curdling death threats to potential witnesses in a murder case, according to the BBC news website.

"Its connection to this case and its chilling message were immediately obvious to the officers," Mr Glasgow told the court. The video had but one purpose - to threaten any witness to this incident to frighten them to such an extent that they would refuse to co-operate with the police. They made it clear exactly what it was they wanted to do to them.

"Namely, kill them or to use their own words, 'I can't wait for the snitch to drop, I still show up at his wake just to see him off'."

Old Bailey Judge Richard Hone said the lyrics meant: "Those who went chitter-chattering to police were themselves in danger of being shot."

It's a strange story and one that might be of use to anyone working on material for political correctness and language on ENGA3/4. How far does freedom of speech extend? Should we be able to say whatever we want, or can certain pronouncements put us at risk of a prison sentence?

Crippled by language

G.P. Doctor Crippen, a Guardian columnist, makes some good points about how language can be used to define people by their illnesses in yesterday's G2 section. In his column he points out that adjectives used to describe medical conditions (e.g. "schizophrenic") can be problematic when applied as nouns to the people who have these conditions (e.g. "he is a schizophrenic").

He points out:

the thoughtless use of words may indicate an underlying iceberg of prejudice and
misunderstanding. I was taken to task a few days ago by a psychiatrist colleague
for using the word "schizophrenic" as a noun. "It is not a noun, and
schizophrenics are people," he said. Technically the psychiatrist is wrong. Like
"diabetic" and "asthmatic", schizophrenic was always meant to be an adjective,
but common usage has made it a noun.

It's the same with other adjectives as nouns too. We've discussed in class how people feel about adjectives used to label ethnic and other social groups (the blacks, the Asians, the disabled) and this seems to be part of the same issue. So, now we know that David Beckham has asthma, is he an asthmatic (noun)? Or should we say David Beckham is asthmatic (adjective)? Or perhaps, an excellent footballer and fashion icon who happens to excel despite his asthma?

Acting like a bardboy

This article in today's Evening Standard tells us about a new version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar which is being performed by a cast of young actors in London. Not exactly much news there you might think, but what's piqued the interest of the Standard is the fact that part of the script adapts the words of the bard (Shakespeare to you and me) and renders them in "street slang". Oh and the play is being rebranded as the "ultimate knife crime". D'ya get me?

Cue righteous indignation from some Evening Standard readers and probably a couple of letters in tomorrow's edition.

+++stop press+++ SFX students are actually involved in this play, so if I may "big you up" that would be splendid+++stop press+++