My Little Pony must die

The language used to target young consumers (or children as we used to call them) is often designed to appeal to their developing sense of gender identity, and some would argue that many ads manipulate that identity to encourage boys and girls into thinking that certain toys and games are only for the other gender. I've seen it happen with my own kids who've left the protective cocoon of CBeebies and CBBC and entered the commercial wasteland that is ITV2 and the Cartoon Network.

This brilliantly simple piece of corpus analysis using Wordle (and flagged up by an anonymous person on the English Language list today) takes the language of TV ads and represents them in word clouds. The results based on gender are really striking:

boys' toys

girls' toys

The effects of this kind of polarised language are harder to gauge perhaps, but it's pretty stunning that in the 21st Century kids are still being sold a line that fighting is what boys do and love is what girls do. This pressure group - Pink Stinks - has done some good work in challenging gender stereotypes around children's toys and clothes, and is well worth a look.

For A level Language Investigations (AS ENGA2 projects into representation for the AQA A spec or ENGB4 for the A2 investigation in AQA B) this sort of work is ideal.

Dictionary Flow

This is a neat little flowchart to explain how words enter dictionaries. Have a look here.

Anarchy in the UK

The 500,000-strong protests against the government's crippling cuts programme went ahead peacefully on Saturday, but to read the mainstream media you would have thought that the day was marked by an orgy of violence and destruction. Approximately 0.04% of those on the march were engaged in some sort of trouble, and even then 140 of the arrests have been for the outrageous crime of aggravated trespass, for sitting in a shop peacefully.

Chief among the media's targets are protesters whom they term "anarchists". In today's Evening Standard, the columnist Sam Leith takes issue with the label "anarchist" as a catch-all term of abuse for any violent protester. Radio 4's Today programme discussed the philosophy and political strands of anarchism earlier in the day too, from class war anarchism through to pacifist, pastoral anarchism.

One of Leith's more serious points is that the word "anarchist"  has become "an all-purpose boo-word for those who protest in ways we don't consider acceptable; and, cripplingly, a way of muddying and ignoring the actual political positions of the quarter of a million people who marched peacefully on Saturday" and it's a good one to make.

The word is being chucked around with little thought for what it really means and that's not very helpful. It seems to be an example of semantic broadening, where the label itself has expanded to cover an increasing range of connotations - thuggish behaviour, disorder, chaos - when the word's original denotation means none of those things.

Even more bizarre is the increasing obsession with what these "anarchists" will do when the royal wedding is on. Will they turn up and kick over old ladies' tables and upset tea urns at the street parties that literally...err... tens of people will be holding? Will they sip from tins of Special Brew and sneer as the happy couple tie the knot? What sick filth will these anarchists come up with next?

Whatever your views on violent protest and the need to oppose government cuts  - and personally I don't think smashing up shop windows and fighting with the police down side streets is a particularly clever or successful way of gaining support for the cause - the whole way in which language is used to represent protests and all those involved has got to be worthy of a bit of extra scrutiny, particularly when the media coverage of half a million marchers gets relegated to the inside pages while the actions of (at most) a couple of hundred people make the front page and set the news agenda.

TMI? New initialisms make it into dictionary

Can a dictionary ever have Too Much Information? Has the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gone too far in adding initialisms like LOL, OMG and FYI to its latest update?

Probably not, because even though these initialisms (initial letters sounded out as their letter names) and acronyms (initial letters sounded out as a complete word) aren't really words as such, they're increasingly frequent in their use and functionally very handy.

What's also interesting about them is that they often have a longer history than we might realise:

As is often the case, OED’s research has revealed some unexpected historical  perspectives: our first quotation for OMG is from a personal letter from 1917; the letters LOL had a previous life, starting in 1960, denoting an elderly woman (or ‘little old lady’; see LOL n./1); and the entry for FYI  [FYI phr., adj., and n.], for example, shows it originated in the language of memoranda in 1941.

Elsewhere in the same OED update, the use of the verb "to heart" is commented upon. We're no doubt all familiar with T-shirts bearing the I ♥ NY/LDN/your mum logo or something similar, but the expression "to heart" is now registering as a bona fide version of "to love":

From these beginnings, heart v. has gone on to live an existence in more traditional genres of literature as a colloquial synonym for ‘to love’

The number you are calling has been disconnected...

Mother? Can you hear me, mother?

This article in today's G2 by Jess Cartner-Morley looks at the way in which the landline phone is dying a death. It's more a piece of cultural commentary than a linguistic discussion, but raises some quite intriguing ideas about the ways in which we communicate these days.

Coming from the generation in which we did actually dial a number by putting our pinkies in the dial and turning it round, then telling the person at the other end who we were, I can just about cope with caller display and mobile phones which use different ringtones for different callers. I can even cope with texting, even though I was taught to text by my Colchester students back in 1998 and then taught how to use predictive text by the boyfriend of one of my ex-students, embarrassingly for me quite recently... down the pub in 2008. But to me a landline was always a given, especially for having a chat to parents or siblings.

As Cartner-Morley tells us, it's all different now, even for people in their 30s and 40s:

My landline rarely rings these days. And even when it does, I usually don't answer it. It seems like an increasingly alien concept, picking up a phone without knowing who is on the other end, so as often as not I let the answerphone pick up. Oh, and I never, ever listen to landline answerphone messages. My reasoning is that a message left at a house when someone's not even there must by definition be so non-urgent that it doesn't need listening to. I assume that if anyone actually needs me, they will reach me on my mobile, or by text or email. And this, at the grand old age of 37. For millions of today's twentysomethings, who have had a mobile number since their teens and for whom a landline makes no practical sense during the transient years before they settle down, the moment of opting into landline-owning may never come if it becomes an expensive extra. My sister and my closest colleague, for instance, both have grown-up jobs and mortgages, but no landlines.

 She finishes the article by suggesting that it's probably not healthy or helpful to rely on texts, tweets and emails to conduct our lives:

It would be sad if, having crammed our lives full of texting, tweeting and status updates, we no longer have the energy to speak to people who want to talk to us. There are repercussions of cutting ourselves in or out of the loop as we please, because real community doesn't work like that. Interestingly, relatively new forms of online interaction, such as Twitter and BBM instant-messaging, have returned to a more conversational, back-and-forth style, rather than the hit-and-run approach of sending an email. Horror films have moved on from the snipped landline to the dreaded out-of-battery/low-signal plot device. But in real life, we're all running scared from a ringing phone.

 This article from the NY Times offers a similar take on the same subject, but contains the great summary "You pretty much call people on the phone when you don’t understand their e-mail".

To verb like no one has verbed before

The English language is always adding new words to its lexicon and it's also quite partial to using existing words in new ways: we're all aware of lexical and semantic changes and can probably point to several new words or new meanings that we've spotted every month, whether it's a charming new (?) word for stabbing someone or a knife used to do it (nank), a word to describe an attractive member of the opposite sex (reem, choong or boom) or an old word like optics used in a strange new context (to describe public perception of a war event) .

But English is also pretty flexible in its adaptation of a word from one class to another, something that's generally called conversion or functional shift, but which has often been called verbing too. It's probably worth being clear here that we're not talking about derivational morphology where a word is altered so it functions in a new word class (like walk - walker, run - runner, smile - smiler) but a straightforward shift from (usually) a noun to a verb without any extra bits (morphemes) being added.

On Radio 4's Today Programme this morning, a housing expert talked about the process of staircasing and referred to shared ownership buyers who staircase their share of a property. The process is probably familiar to lots of public sector workers (including me) who have found that shared ownership is about the only way they could afford to buy a house of their own, but clearly sounded a bit odd to the presenter, John Humphrys, who needed an explanation of this term.

Jonathan Marks on the MacMillan Dictionary blog has looked at other examples of this process in a number of posts about the subject and he provides lots of good illustrations. Have a look here, here and here to see what kinds of examples he cites.

It's also interesting to look up some examples in the OED and see if you can see which usage came first. I was under the impression that to ramp was a fairly recent verb ("to ramp up prices") and it may be fairly recent in its use as a phrasal verb (with the up particle) but its use as a verb predates its appearance as a noun by about 300 years, although the various different meanings of the word may slightly complicate that.

RIP Smiley Culture

It was really sad to hear of the death of Smiley Culture, the genius behind Cockney Translation and Police Officer, in really strange and disturbing circumstances this week.

The lyrics of Cockney Translation were some of the first to really address the ways in which Caribbean slang and dialect and home-grown varieties like Cockney were starting to come together to create what most of would recognise as Multicultural London English/ Multi-ethnic youth dialect  these days. While the song is all about differences in slang, it's the shared subject matter and the celebration of different words that make this such a great song, especially considering the time when it first came out and the social unrest and race riots that had been part of the landscape around the early 1980s.

Musically and lyrically Smiley Culture led the way for people like The Streets, Lethal Bizzle, Dizzee Rascal and many other performers who've been happy to mix and match words from different strands of their ethnic and cultural backgrounds to create a new form of speech.

RIP David Emmanuel AKA Smiley Culture

Tweeting and blogging and everything in between

I've just been to a lecture on Twitter and digital identity, delivered by Dr Claire Warwick of the Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL and it was interesting to hear different angles on how we create identities online and through microblogging resources like Twitter. Some of it is clearly linguistic - the words we choose to use that reveal something about who we are or the identity we wish to present to others - but other parts of the talk touched on areas that were a bit more sociological: who uses these new media forms, differences between digital natives and newcomers, gender and identity performance.

Claire Warwick mentioned that gender and language was an area they were keen to explore, but it was perhaps a bit disappointing that having been enlightened by Deborah Cameron's brilliant lecture on the Myth of Mars and Venus at the emagazine conference yesterday, I heard the old stereotypes about men doing x and women doing y - even if it is updated for a new medium like Twitter - being repeated.

There may well be some significant gender differences in whether we use @replies, or if we "chat" and/or "tell", but it's probably not helpful to reduce it all to broad generalisations in this way, and maybe more revealing to look at language and identity within genders too.

Anyway, this is only a minor gripe and one I'm sure they'll address when they start their research into the whole area. The lecture was really interesting, particularly for a relatively new tweep (tweeting person? Twitter person?) like me. The lecture is (or soon will be) available from here.

Eleshere, this blog post about the word blog is a good read. We all know about the noun blog being a blend of web + log, but did you know it's being used as an intransitive verb to blog and as a transitive verb to blog something? Here, you can find out more.

Emagazine Language conference is tomorrow!

Just a reminder that the conference I've been working on with Barbara Bleiman and the English and Media Centre is happening tomorrow at the Institute of Education, London. You can see the details here and the full programme of speakers is here.

If you're coming along, please say hi. If you mention Haribo and perform a secret handshake you'll get mentioned on the blog next week.

Baby Gaga

a view from one of the cameras

Deb Roy's longitudinal study of his own son's acquisition of language is the focus of this TED lecture. It's a clear explanation of how he went about gathering many hundreds of thousands of hours of data and some observations about what the data tells us about how his child's language developed over three years, particularly the social dimensions of interaction and acquisition. The idea of feedback cycles - caregiver speech and child's speech working together in an ongoing process of acquisition and influence - is a key point from the lecture.

One particular case study is his son's movement from gaga to water (from about 5 minutes in). The "wordscapes" created from the data are pretty amazing to look at and the tagging of particular words is a particularly fascinating way of mapping language to events. So, for example, Roy and his team have mapped the child's use of words to where he and other family members were in the house and who they were talking with. Here's the wordscape for water:

"water" wordscape, with peaks in the kitchen

You can also read more about the study in this pdf.

What's also interesting, as the lecture goes on, is Roy's team's application of this model to patterns of language usage beyond his own son and house and into the wider world, where mapping of language is linked very closely to national media events.

You say tomato; I say potato

The British Library's research into accents in the UK has attracted media interest, with some of the first findings being made public. This report in the Daily Mail takes a look at some of the results and offers the view that we aren't adopting American pronunciation as rapidly as some had assumed. Of course, this being the Daily Mail, they have to build in some kind of reactionary nationalism, stating that "many British English speakers are refusing to use American pronunciations" (my italics) which suggests that it's a conscious decision, when change often doesn't work like that.

Jonnie Robinson, curator of the Evolving English exhibition at the British Library (and speaker at the Emagazine Language conference this Wednesday) is quoted in the story:

British English and American English continue to be very distinct entities and the way both sets of speakers pronounce words continues to differ. But that doesn’t mean that British English speakers are sticking with traditional pronunciations while American English speakers come up with their own alternatives. In fact, in some cases it is the other way around. British English, for whatever reason, is innovating and changing while American English remains very conservative and traditional in its speech patterns.

John Wells looks at The Guardian's coverage of the study here and is a bit more sceptical about what the results tell us.

On a similar theme, but this time focusing on dialect and spelling, the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan writes in the Daily Telegraph about the influence of  the internet on spreading American English (rather than English English) around the world.

More is more

intensive reading?

There's a really good response by Melody Dye on the Scientopia blog to the Robert Lane Greene article in the NY times (which I blogged about here) this week.

Dye, who is a cognitive science researcher at Stanford University, argues that Greene's article doesn't go far enough in its attack on prescriptivist thinking and she makes several interesting points about reading as well as writing. She argues - quoting Joshua Foer - that people's reading habits have changed from "intensive" reading of a very few texts to "extensive" reading,  valuing quantity over "quality".

Dye's argument is that as we get more choice over what we read - increasingly being able to pursue our own niche interests in music, film, literature, TV - a bottom-up model of language change is exerting its power more than ever. If standardisation is all about imposing a top-down model then, she argues, what's happening now is that more "writers" (if we're calling texting, tweeting and Facebooking "writing", and I'm happy to) are writing more stuff and it's less standardised than ever before.

extensive reading?

But that does rely on the assumption that standardisation is designed to (as Dye puts it)  "conventionalize, and even ‘crystalize,’ our language according to certain norms, and to make it more uniformly patterned ". Straight after that she adds "Education is one forcible means of (attempting to) root out non-standard ‘grammars’ (such as African American Vernacular English) and of homogenizing usage"...all of which tends to sound to me like she's arguing that education can be a big bad force for social control, a viewpoint that's problematic for me as an English teacher (who wants to see everyone get a good education in a standard form of English) and as a politically left-wing person (who values non-standard forms too and sees them as part of a wider picture of language use), but for two very different reasons.

Does education really have to be like this? Does the teaching of a standard form necessarily preclude an appreciation and study of non-standard varieties? You could argue that the very existence of  Standard English means that all other varieties - and remember, Standard English was chosen very deliberately out of existing varieties of English - are treated as inferior.

You could equally argue though, that if we don't have a standard we have no shared language, no means of communicating with each other on a level playing field and that the ones who will really suffer are not those at the top of society but those at the bottom. In this case, Standard English might be seen as a democratising force, giving linguistic power to everyone in a society.

I suppose what I'd like to see* (and what I think is partly delivered in the English Language A level, if not elsewhere in the English curriculum) is a model like this that opens up the history and development of English as a language, and lets us look at how it became what it is now and where it's going. It should be a model that allows us to interrogate the idea of a standard and see how it's become important over time, while helping students develop their own grasp of that standard, and their understanding of all the non-standard forms around us - many of which like texting and tweeting are in fact changing what might be the Standard English of years to come.

Melody Dye develops her argument by looking outside the natural homes of English - the UK and the USA - too:

In broadening our picture of the forces at work in language change, we might also consider how English is being influenced from the outside.  According to one statistic, there are now something like three times as many non-native speakers of English as there are native speakers.  English is thus being reappropriated by foreign speakers, both on our shores (in the tides of immigrants that come to this country) and off it (in English creoles and pidgins, and in widespread lexical borrowing), and these reformulations are, in turn, shifting the normative space of what is acceptable.

Where this fits in to the study of Language Change and Language Discourses at A level is interesting, I think, and should allow you plenty of scope for discussion and exploration in your work. The English Language is clearly changing - it always has - but is it now changing so quickly, thanks to technology creating so many new users of English all over the world and spreading non-standard forms  - that what we know as Standard English is rapidly disappearing?  Perhaps a new standard is being formed even now, a type of English that we can all understand but which doesn't much resemble the Standard English we've seen before. And maybe that new standard is actually being created away from the places previously considered to be the home of the English language.



Edited 11.46 11/03/11
I'd also like to see world peace and international socialism. Is that not too much to ask?

More is less?

This blog post on the New York Times opinion site offers a fairly convincing picture of increasing levels of literacy (in the USA, admittedly, but probably broadly comparable to the UK) between 1870 and the late 20th Century. It's a picture that backs up Robert Lane Greene's broader point that the people who say our language is in decline are basically just wrong.

His argument, one developed in his new book You Are What You Speak, is that the "sticklers" - those who say that we're less able to punctuate, construct "correct" grammatical structures and speak clearly - are missing the point that more and more people are actually writing than ever before. He explains: "We easily forget that this is something that farmhands and the urban poor almost never did in centuries past. They lacked the time and means even if they had the education".

It's a convincing argument in many ways and one that echoes much of what other descriptivists have said about the to hell in a handcart arguments of prescriptivists. But what's less certain is what is happening to the quality of the communication that many of us are now engaged in. Does more writing actually mean less quality?

If we include Facebook, texting and tweets as writing, we must be - as a world population - producing billions and billions of words every day, far outstripping what people wrote even ten years ago, let alone fifty or a one hundred. So, what of this sort of writing? Are we seeing a language in decline even as it grows? Greene thinks not, adding towards the end of his post, "We may be just be seeing more of language’s real-world diversity – dialect, nonstandard grammar and all – in written form, whereas a 150 years ago those same people would never write. That’s something to celebrate, not to complain about".

In saying this, Greene echoes an observation made by Henry Hitchings in The Language Wars about the Eighteenth Century prescriptivists, many of whom felt that educating the masses - making them literate - was actually a threat to the language itself. Their thinking seemed to be that more users meant worse language. But this thinking seems to demonstrate an underlying fear that democracy leads to disintegration.

Another factor to throw into this debate (and I have to be honest, I'm not quite sure what I think about this in the end) is a suggestion made by someone commenting on Greene's post that if writing is increasing, perhaps reading, of anything other than texts and tweets, might actually be falling. From this perspective, while the output is growing, there's a kind of feedback loop of broken, abbreviated English creating more and more mashed up language. The argument, I suppose, is that if you put crap in you'll get crap out.

It would be interesting to see what figures we have for how much people read compared to previous decades, and what it is they read. The to hell in a handcart brigade usually argue that we're in a near-permanent state of idiocy, which gets worse day by day. Grown-ups read Harry Potter and Twilight...English GCSE students watch Romeo and Juliet on DVD and read three passages of the original...etc. etc. but they tend to ignore the rise of reading groups, the impact of popularising programmes like the Oprah Winfrey show and even Richard & Judy's Book Club that have made a big impact on the reading habits of many thousands of people.

So, what is really happening and what should we say? Should we, as Greene does, celebrate the rise of writing, or should we bemoan the state of the writing that is now produced?

Texting: too many LOLZ, not enough R&J

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

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

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

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

Pigeons and Creoles

Stephen Kelman's debut novel about life on an estate in Luton, Pigeon English, gets some good coverage in today's Independent. The novel, which plays on the word pidgin - a simplified language often used to communicate between people who don't share a common tongue - in its title, is praised for its authentic-sounding slang and its 1st person narrative perspective, which views the often brutal world around through the eyes of a child. I've not read it yet, but it's getting good reviews all over the place and a book with language like this at its core sounds like a good read to me.

The Independent article mentions Gautum Malkani's Londonstani as part of its survey of other slang-driven narratives, and ex-SFX student and onetime blogger on here, Charissa King did a post on the language of this book while she was at university. South London writer Alex Wheatle also gets a name check in the article (as should Courttia Newland!) and of course Irvine Welsh, who was arguably one of the first to really capture and popularise the vernacular in modern fiction with Trainspotting, is referred to as well.

edited on 14.03.11 to add: now I've got the book, it looks like it's set in South London and not Luton. I think Luton is where Kelman grew up, but I might be wrong...

ENGA3: some tips for success (part one)

Last year we posted some top tips for the ENGA3 exam to help you out with final revision work near exam time, so this year we're going to start a bit earlier and give you a chance to mull over approaches that might take a bit longer to develop. Of course, you'll get plenty of good advice from your own teachers and from the exam board and text book (especially if you're at SFX where your teachers were recently described by an Ofsted inspector as possessing "bare skillz... and that ain't even a lie").

Now the paper's been examined three times (January and June 2010 and January 2011) you can probably get a clearer picture of the types of question that might appear and the approaches that will help you do well on it.

The Principal Examiner for ENGA3 doesn't want you to "question spot" or try to second guess what's going to be on the paper, because:
a) if you get it wrong you'll come a cropper in the exam and have to answer a question on a topic you know nothing about  - like George Osborne taking an economics exam;
and
b) many of the topic areas actually overlap, so knowledge from (say) variation could also apply really well to change. It makes sense to know as much as you can about all the topics. And anyway, as the great philosopher Dappy from out of N-Dubz once said, "knowledge is power". He also said "In The Slum Put Ur Hands Up Brap", so I'm not sure we can entirely trust him.


The top tips from last year still hold true and you can find them here, but here are some extra ideas that should help you do well if you get on the case soon. There's quite a lot to say, so I'm going to drip feed it in different blog posts over the next few weeks. And remember, these are just my own take on the paper taken from teaching it and marking it, not any secret inside information. You can take them or leave them and I'm happy to argue the toss about any of these, refine them or add new ideas if you have any of your own.

Think about the mark weightings and prepare accordingly
On this paper the assessment objectives (AOs) are very important. They always are of course, but the balance of them in A2 is different from AS. On each question, the marks are allocated as follows:

• AO1 10 marks: linguistic labelling and application of language frameworks (plus some consideration of your written accuracy - spelling, grammar and structure)
• AO3 15 marks: engagement with meaning (what the texts are about and how they represent their subject matter); how contexts influence the texts (time, speaker identity, place, mode, genre); how writers and speakers address and engage their audiences (positioning, address, audience assumptions)
• AO2 20 marks: understanding of language concepts (your knowledge of change & variation overviews, your understanding of case studies, research, examples, theories and debates)

AO2 is the big one here and you can improve your mark on AO2 if you bear a few things in mind:

• Knowing lots of things is good, but use them to answer the question. Don't try to cram in everything you've read about Samuel Johnson, William Caxton and Robert Lowth. Synthesise the key patterns from the past and see how they relate to the texts you're presented with in the exam.
• Explain any case studies and research that you refer to. It's not helpful to an examiner for you to refer to something by the researchers' names only and then not to explain what their research showed or how it might be relevant.
• Be clear about wider debates about usage. Mugging up on Jean Aitchison's characterisation of prescriptive models is helpful, but look elsewhere too.
• Make sure you are aware of how language changes spread and the patterns of change that can be observed. The section in the A2 textbook about the wave model, s-curve, substratum and random fluctuation theories is important here. Think too about having a look at this post about the "heartbeat" model of change.
• Have clear examples to illustrate theories. Try to keep up to date with examples of (say) new words, semantic changes to existing words and different supra-regional varieties of English. Here's where your textbook is less use. Try to find examples from posts like this and this and sites like this.
• For question 3 on Language Discourses, it's a really good idea to get some wider reading done well before the exam. This well help you out a great deal. Try Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars, Deborah Cameron's The Myth of Mars and Venus and David Crystal's The Fight For English if you want to read accessible and interesting books about big debates in English Language. Use Emagazine too to supplement your reading. There are some articles in last year's editions aimed specifically at the Language Discourses question on ENGA3.

In the next post on ENGA3 exam preparation, I'll try to have a look at AO3 and how to pick up marks by actually talking about what the texts are about and how ideas are represented.

National Grammar Day

It's National Grammar Day in the USA on March 4th, and this webpage has lots more information about it is being celebrated. Among my favourites are the Correct the Celebrity classroom task in which you spot the grammatical errors in Justin Timberlake lyrics, Paris Hilton's blogs and various film titles, although I'm saddened by the fact that we can't just put a big red ring around Paris Hilton herself and fail her.

There are some good tips on writing clearly, some myths exploded about "bad" grammar, and overall it's good clean fun. It veers a little towards the prescriptive for my tastes (Why's there no discussion about dialect forms, for example?), but you can't win 'em all.

Learning the language/s

The ways in which children acquire language have been thoroughly researched for the best part of a century now, and even before people like Piaget, Vygotsky and Chomsky arrived on the scene, there were many observations about how children picked up (or didn't pick up) features of language, and the issue exercised the minds of great thinkers such as Kant and Plato.

More recently, studies have tended to become more intensive and involve masses more data than the earlier studies which often consisted of researchers tracking their own kids' development (or in my case publicly humiliating my children by showing clips of them to my classes or writing about them in the textbook) . The Deb Roy study at MIT which was featured in the BBC Horizon Programme Why Do We Talk (see here and here for links and further reading) showed how huge amounts of data could be collected by filming a child through CCTV for literally years, and then processing that data to see exactly what happened when.

This study shows how another large scale investigation is shedding light on the acquisition of Standard English and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in children. The findings, as reported in Science Daily, show that African-American children arrive at school with quite a high incidence of vernacular features in their speech. This then drops off as they go through the first four years of school before spiking again at the end of elementary school and dipping as the children enter high school.

The article suggests that there are implications in these findings for the teaching of Standard English in schools, which might well be the case, but it would also appear that the data tells us a bit more about how young people feel about themselves and their vernacular forms as they get older. Language is of course part of a wider system of social signification as well as a set of words and structures to be acquired, so it's quite likely that as children get older their relationship with their own language will change, and as the research seems to suggest this isn't a regular, smooth process but one that goes in peaks and troughs.

It's interesting to see how children start to pick up slang from their peer group at school as they get older and how this sits with the different varieties of English they hear around them - at school and at home -  so it's no surprise that a variety as well-established and widely used in the USA as AAVE will go through cycles as its users negotiate the complex territory of age, ethnicity, individual identity and mainstream, standard language forms.

One of the implications for English teaching might be that studying AAVE (or in the case of the UK, British Black English and other dialects or sociolects) alongside the Standard forms helps to develop a better understanding of both forms and their suitability for different situations. After all, what is being talked about here is quite a positive thing: being fluent in two languages/ codes rather than just one.

Other research into bilingualism in the early years of childhood would seem to suggest that having two or more languages around you is actually a very positive thing, leading to enhanced flexibility in thinking and even health benefits in later years:

Studies of children who grow up as bilingual speakers indicate they are often better at perspective-taking tasks, such as prioritizing, than monolingual children. Experiments with older bilingual speakers indicate that the enhanced mental skills may protect them from problems associated with ageing, such as Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

So, as the report puts it, "juggling" two languages helps in many ways, and that doesn't just apply to recognised languages but also varieties of languages.

(If you can get hold of Graeme Trousdale's chapter Variation and Education in Analysing Variation in English (eds.Maguire, Warren & McMahon, April) you can find a clear explanation of how studying non-standard varieties is actually very good for our understanding of grammar in general, and helps with our grasp of standard forms too.)

Word formation processes and language change

This piece by Stan Carey on the MacMillan Dictionary Blog is worth a look if you're trying to come up with examples of recently created new words. As he points out, with words like staycation and daycation, many of these new words are the result of similar processes, in this case the blending of  whole words or elements of existing words, so stay + vacation = staycation, while day + vacation = daycation.

You can also see some examples of new words that relate to specific events, such as flunami ("an extremely large increase in the number of people suffering from flu" formed by flu + tsunami) being linked to the recent spike in flu cases, while snowpocalypse (snow + apocalypse), snowmageddon (snow + armageddon) and blizzaster (blizzard + disaster) all relate to the USA's recent bad weather and increasingly inventive ways to describe its magnitude.

Of course, as we find ever more inventive ways to express the size of something massive, the original words that used to mean that something was impressive or big tend to get bleached, losing their power and forcing us to find an expression that's more powerful.

Don't be a mooncalf: learn some new (and old) words

If you're feeling a bit angry or irritated with someone, but are bored of using the same old words to describe them, why not flex your lexis and pick up a whole new vocabulary? It's fun and easy if you go to this link on the Merriam-Webster Dictionary site, and you'll be told a bit about each word too.

If you are interested in recent entries to various dictionaries, this link is helpful. Included among the latest entries are the blend Belieber (believer + Bieber), the intejection ew, which signifies disgust and should appear very close to Bieber's name every time it appears, and oneversation (a blend of one and conversation) which refers to a conversation where the other party doesn't listen to a word you say.

The American Dialect Society voted app as its word of the year for 2010. Which would be great if I had an i-Phone but I don't.

Language change - a crash course

If you're struggling to work out what happened when in the history of English language change go no further than this handy webpage by Philip Durkin at the OED. It's called Five Events That Shaped the History of English and it's very good.

Rastamouse: rewind

This is just a quick post as I know we've covered Rastamouse a lot recently, and I don't want you to think I am obsessed.

This article on The Voice's website is worth a look if you want to see how its (mostly) black readership have responded to the appearance of the reggae-loving rodent.

Language wars: some reviews

Henry Hitchings' new book on debates about "proper English", Language Wars, is a must-read for any A level Language student doing the AQA A spec. It's full of excellent material for the ENGA3 Language Discourses question, and you'll get a good sense of the overall history of the language from reading it.

These reviews from The Independent, The Observer and from Deborah Cameron in The Guardian should give you a good idea of why it's essential reading.

Rastamouse: the bloodclart blacklash begins

It's only been a couple of days since we covered the mighty Rastamouse on this blog and, frankly, that is too long. As predicted here, there have been accusations that the programme encourages young children to use grievous grammar and patchy patois (admittedly, it was the Daily Telegraph that reported this, not the Daily Mail, but just wait...I wouldn't be too surprised if the Daily Star linked Rastamouse to an alleged plot to kill the EDL leader next week).

The other accusation seems to be that the programme stereotypes Jamaicans and the Jamaican English variety - some claiming that it will lead to racism because (wait for it) white kids will start talking in Rastamouse patois and get beaten up by actual Rastafarians. No, really.

While that argument strikes me as almost completely deranged (and full of stereotypes of its own e.g. that black people have such gigantic chips on their shoulder that they will respond aggressively to any perceived slight) the argument about stereotypes and mockery is more serious and probably needs to be looked at a bit more closely than just dismissing it out of hand.

So, what do you think? If you've seen Rastamouse, do you think the programme mocks Jamaican patois? Or instead is it celebrating the language? Vote now in the poll on the right.

What's really depressing is to see some of the comments added by readers of the Telegraph piece, some of whom seem to genuinely feel that by having Rastamouse on TV British values (whatever those might be) are being undermined. Some of them honestly believe that Rastamouse is part of a liberal conspiracy to impose multiculturalism on an unwilling population. I've got to stop reading and responding to these loons!

ILY. WTF?

You may well be asking WTF? is this blog post about? But when you ask WTF?, do you actually say it out loud, or do you only think it? Is there ever an occasion when you would use it away from a keyboard? And if you do say the letters WTF out loud, do they mean the same thing as the words they stand for (which we all know is What The Flip?) or something a bit less rude? And furthermore, if we type or text these letters should it be WTF? (always with a question mark) or WTF (sometimes without)?

It seems odd to me that anyone would even say double-yew tee eff when they could say whatdaf**k so much more quickly - especially as speed and ease are usually the drivers of change with expressions like this - but if WTF? and what the f**k are actually quite different in meaning, then it makes a bit more sense.

These are important questions because we're increasingly hearing people using initialisms like ILY, OMG (thank you, Usher) and LOL (sometimes pronounced as L-O-L and sometimes as a word that sounds a bit like laaaaawwwwwllllll) and it's got linguists quite excited.

What we often see is the appropriation of words from spoken English into a written vocabulary - and some would argue, a casualisation or colloquialisation of the written word - but it's a bit rarer for words or groups of letters to go from a largely written or blended form into spoken usage. We've seen it on a smaller scale with pwn and n00b, but the more recent examples seem to have taken off among a much bigger part of the population.

In this article by Jocelyn Noveck, several linguists and commentators take a look at what's happening and consider the influence of age on this language use, as well as looking back at the history of acronyms and initialisms in language. It's an interesting read and offers some examples of usage that I'd not heard before (ILY = I love you, for example. Sob.).

Edited on 17.11.11 to change broken link to Noveck piece

Make a bad ting good

Popular culture has a great way of feeding new words into our vocabularies, or helping resurrect older ones that have dropped out of use, so the mighty Rastamouse who is righteously rocking the airwaves on CBeebies is the latest to do this.

Among the Jamaican English terms he uses, irie has apparently been a big hit, according to this story. I remember it from my 80s youth as a term of approval, expressing happiness and calm. Some have claimed that it is a state of extreme relaxation brought about by medicinal herbs, but I think that might just be a step too far.


Urban Dictionary defines it in several ways, the most voted for being "to be at total peace with your current state of being. The way you feel when you have no worries" which sounds fine to me. Wordnik has it defined as:

Positive emotions or feelings, or anything that is good. To be at total peace with one's current state of being. Phonetical representation of "all right".

This link about Rastafarian vocabulary on Wikipedia makes interesting reading too. And reading the bit about Armagideon/Gideon times makes me wonder if that is why George Osborne changed his name from Gideon (It's true: check the peerage website.). Is it all a conspiracy to hide the fact that with all his cuts we are really entering Gideon Times?

Can Rastamouse save us and make a bad ting good?

Edited to add: I've done a bit more about the grammar of Rastamouse over on the Teaching English Grammar in Schools blog.

p.s. thanks to Martina (aka Miss Osbourne - no relation to Gideon - for this top viewing tip) 
p.p.s and apologies to my good friend Gideon "Gid" Calder for mocking a fine name. 

Neither Hippy nor Hitler but intelligent descriptivism

While the title of this blog post is strange and obscure (unless you're a fan of 1980s anti-fascist skinhead socialist band, The Redskins and get the album title it refers to) it's kind of appropriate, because it's about extremes and finding a middle ground. The Redskins borrowed the "Neither Washington Nor Moscow but International Socialism" slogan from the Socialist Workers Party and I always thought that it was something to do with finding a position between the rampant capitalism espoused by the USA and the totalitarian state-socialism of the old Soviet Union. To be fair, the SWP were (and remain) much closer to Moscow than Washington, whichever way you look at them. And I try not to look at them for too long or they try to sell me a paper.

But what has this got to with language? This 2005 post on Language Log which I was alerted to by a tweet from Stan Carey of this excellent blog, makes a number of telling points about the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists over what is "correct" English.

The normal model seems to be to say that a person is either one or the other. If you're a prescriptivist, you're telling other people how they should write and speak and telling them what's correct. If you're a descriptivist, you're happy to let it all hang out and just go with the flow...all change is good...whatever man...just allow it.

But that's a bit of a lazy caricature and it's probably better to see views distributed along a continuum line, where different shades of prescriptivism or descriptivism can be seen. For example, you might have very strong views on the use of the apostrophe in academic writing but be happy not to use it in your text messages or Facebook updates. That doesn't make you either a crazy hippy or a grammar nazi.

Geoff Pullum puts it more precisely than me - as he always does - when he talks about correctness conditions: the norms for your own language usage in your own variety of English:

If you typically say I ain't got no hammer to explain that you don't have a hammer, then the correctness conditions for your dialect probably include a condition classifying ain't as a negative auxiliary, and a condition specifying that indefinite noun phrases in negated clauses take negative determiners, and a condition specifying that the subject precedes the predicate, and so on.

He goes on to explain:

Descriptive linguists try to lay out a statement of what the conditions are for particular languages. And it is very important to note that the linguist can go wrong. A linguist can make a mistake in formulating correctness conditions. How would anyone know? Through a back and forth comparison between what the condition statements entail and what patterns are regularly observed in the use of the language by qualified speakers under conditions when they can be taken to be using their language without many errors (e.g., when they are sober, not too tired, not suffering from brain damage, have had a chance to review and edit what they said or wrote, etc.).

So, what linguists are not doing is just saying that whatever anyone says is right because they said it and therefore that's the way we talk. They're looking at specific situations and patterns and describing them grammatically. As Pullum goes on to say, sometimes people just make mistakes that, if they were to look back over, they'd probably choose to put in a clearer way. These could be features of grammar, punctuation, spelling or lexical choice. I'm sure many of us have looked back at things we've written and gone "Urgh". Linguists themselves might make mistakes by incorporating these errors into their sense of what the correctness conditions for a particular variety might be, so in turn build up an unrepresentative picture of that variety. So, as Pullum is at pains to point out, linguists can be wrong.

But equally, prescriptivists are often wrong (and more wrong!) when they claim that such-and-such a structure (a conjunction at the start of a sentence, preposition at the end, double negative etc.) is always wrong just because them's the rules.

So, to cut a long story short, the debate between what's correct or incorrect is actually much more to with context than it is to do with hard and fast rules. And for A level English Language, which is what this comes back to, finding a more nuanced position between the extremes of labelling a language commentator as either prescriptive or descriptive, is likely to get you a lot of credit in the ENGA3 exam. While it's not for everybody, this sort of discussion could be the difference between a top B and an A grade, or even that elusive A*.

Lexical innovation

If you are studying Language Change for either ENGA3 (A spec) or ENGB3 (B spec) one of your most useful points of reference should be the Macmillan Dictionaries Buzzword pages. Every week, lexicographer and linguist Kerry Maxwell posts a new word or phrase that's recently appeared on the radar and talks about its origins and formation process. The words are logged in a very useful archive too, so you can see way back to the dawn of time (17th February 2003, to be precise) when textual harassment was all the rage or look at them alphabetically where you'll find at the top of the list a handy guide to the top 12 new words of 2010.

Kerry has done sessions at SFX for teachers and students in the last few years and her stuff is always clear, interesting and accessible for A level, so don't be scared. And remember that if you are doing anything on new words for your exam (or even your coursework intervention/media text) examiners and moderators get bored of the same old examples (Smog and motel are blends? Well I never!) and would much rather see some funky* new words that will really float their boats, and stuff.




*I know it's an old world. I'm sorry. I'm getting old.

"We Are All in This Together": analysing coalition cobblers

Today's Guardian features a great bit of polemic from George Monbiot that would make a nice bit of textual analysis for ENGA2. He starts with a reference to something David Cameron said about a tax cuts being off the agenda for the time being before looking at how a change in tax law means that some of the richest companies (the ones who got us in this mess) will now get exactly that. The whole piece is good (and pretty shocking) but it's the last two paragraphs that strike me as particularly effective:

Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, in effect stolen from poorer countries, and poorer citizens of their own countries. Ours is a semi-criminal money-laundering economy, legitimised by the pomp of the lord mayor's show and multiple layers of defence in government. Politically irrelevant, economically invisible, the rest of us inhabit the margins of the system. Governments ensure that we are thrown enough scraps to keep us quiet, while the ultra-rich get on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account.

And this government? It has learned the lesson that Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go to hell, you don't declare war on society, you don't lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then you shaft us.

The use of pronouns, positioning of author, reader and government, the mixture of sentence lengths and syntactical patterns within them, all strike me as pretty effective and worth a closer look.

It's clear what Monbiot's agenda is here, so it's hardly what you'd call biased: he makes no attempt to hide his political colours, so it's not as if he's trying to trick us. Anyway, I think it's a neat example of how a writer deploys a whole range of linguistic techniques to make a convincing and passionate argument.

Below, I've put together a fairly simple list of bullet points for the kinds of language techniques you might want to look for in a text like this. If you're interested in finding out more about developing these approaches then have a look at emagazine 42 from December 2008 in which David Hyatt outlines a framework for critical literacy. Or go straight to the daddy of it all, Norman Fairclough, and his excellent book Language and Power.

A suggested framework for representation and language analysis

Pronoun use – which pronouns are used and how is the reader addressed? Are pronouns used to include and/or exclude? Is synthetic personalisation used to create a “faked” relationship with an imagined “ideal” reader?

Active/passive constructions – which voice is used within the text and how is agency handled? Can we see who is doing what to whom?

Modification – are adjectives used to evoke evaluation? How are adverbs used to present ideas? Are we being pushed in a particular direction by the ways in which nouns are modified?

Metaphor – are metaphors used in the text to present one idea in another’s terms?

Nominalisation – are processes and actions turned into nouns? Does this obscure agency (i.e. who carried out a process, or even that a process happened)?

Register and lexical choice – does technical, specialist or academic language create an impression of an educated and knowledgeable writer? Does a colloquial register seem to “bridge the gap” between reader and writer, creating a more believable tone?

Graphology – does the text present information in a graphical or pictorial form which might anchor particular meanings? Does the use of bullet points or headings “close down” other possibilities for discussion?

Rhetorical devices – does the author structure an argument and use language in such a way as to create a persuasive and convincing effect?

Sentence and clause linking – does the use of particular grammatical structures signal dependent relationships between elements in a sentence?

Sentence and clause structure – does the use or variation of particular sentence lengths and structures help create emphasis?

Tense and aspect – how does the use of past, present or future tense affect the meanings of the text? Does the use of aspect – progressive or perfective – affect meanings?

Subject positioning – from which perspective are events or issues perceived and recounted? Is one position given particular prominence and credibility?

Keeping it old school

Most of the links I put up here are to fairly recent news stories about language, but this one is nearly 16 years old. That means it's possibly older than some of you who use this blog for your AS levels. Wow.

Anyway, I stumbled across this Miles Kington article from The Independent of December 1993 while doing some research on attitudes to grammatical errors (which more often than not, aren't really "errors" at all) and it's a good read.

It's about people's language peeves and how they are often not really very well rooted in linguistic reality. My favourite bit concerns the guidance that we're often given about the adjective unique. In Strictly English, Simon Heffer pompously tells us that phrases like almost unique or nearly unique are "vacuous" because "something is either unique or it is not". Kington sees it differently:

Now, this to me is the kind of pedantic rule-of-iron that a third- rate schoolteacher falls back on. Not only that, but it is demonstrably untrue. For example, if there were two unicorns left in the world, and one was very ill, then the other one would be nearly unique . . .

A timely reminder about the Emagazine English Language conference

Apologies if you've already booked a place, or if you've had enough of the self-promotion, but our conference for A level students and teachers is still recruiting and we're heading towards capacity. Well over 600 students have signed up to attend - which is brilliant - and more are booking each day, so if you want to be sure of a place, get onto the English and Media Centre's site here and get your places booked!

We are also very keen to collect language data from those attending for use in Jonnie Robinson's session, so please add your data to the Survey Monkey questionnaire. You don't even have to attend to add your data: the more the merrier.

Hopefully, see you there.

Get a room

The language of lovers is often pretty sickening. It's even worse when you hear it murmured into a hands free mobile by the lovestruck man sitting next to you on a train, like I had to put up with this morning. But it's not just the babytalk-style phonology, or the wrinkling of the nose, or even the giggles of love, it's the vocabulary as well: snugglebunny, lickle lovebucket, poo poo poppet and agreeable bitch, being some examples. Actually the last two aren't his (and neither are the first two, to be fair) but Jonathan Swift's.

Now, some research  from psychologists in the USA suggests that people are attracted to those who have similar speech patterns. That may not be particularly surprising (unless you're Paula Abdul) but what's quite interesting about this is that the patterns seems to apply to online style as well as as spoken.

Research by the same team at the University of Texas has also indicated that language style matching (LSM) is apparent between couples when they're at their happiest in a relationship.

This is related to accommodation theory in sociolinguistics, where people change their speech style to either converge towards or diverge from other speakers around them. The extremes of divergence are noticeable in teenagers when they sometimes make deliberate efforts to avoid the speech styles of their parents, or in students with strong regional dialects who make a conscious effort not to blend in when they live in a different area, but it's not really much of a surprise to find that the closer we are emotionally, the closer we get linguistically.

This could make an interesting Language Investigation at A2: recording conversations between people who have been together for different lengths of time and identifying specific linguistic features that match or don't match.

"Crappy patois"

Yesterday's Evening Standard carried an op-ed by Henry Hitchings on the nature of changing London English. It's partly a response to Charles Moore's attack on changing English in the Telegraph and partly an advertisement for Hitchings' new book, which we mentioned on here yesterday.

Interestingly, Hitchings makes much of what linguists have called Multicultural London English, Multi-ethnic Youth Dialect, or what some journalists have called "Jafaican", which, as Hitchings points out, tends to cast it as an affectation or a fake dialect, rather than " an authentic, organic variety of English and it looks likely to become more prevalent". We've featured MEYD and MLE here on many occasions and if you click on the tabs at the bottom of this post you'll get some links to the research done by Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill, Jenny Cheshire (and others) into this fascinating area of sociolinguistics.

Sadly, anything about language change tends to aggravate those who see all change as a foul corruption of our beautiful tongue, or even (in the case of the Evening Standard article), deranged anti-Jamaican troglodytes who argue (or sneer, perhaps more accurately) that it's a "crappy patois" "derived from some of the most pointless countries in the world", and speaking it is likely to limit young people's life chances. Well, yes, but only if they speak it as their only variety, which is generally not the case, as Hitchings is at pains to point out. But why let a bit of reasoned argument get in the way of a good dose of prejudice?

Language Wars

Henry Hitchings' new book, Language Wars is definitely worth a look for any AQA A spec students planning ahead for the ENGA3 exam in June. The whole book is about what constitutes "proper English", so should be ripe territory for the Language Discourses part of the paper.

It's been reviewed and commented upon here, and you can see Henry Hitchings debate the subject with Simon Heffer (author of the dreadful Strictly English) at the British Library next Monday (7th Feb 2011).