Accommodation for the world

And for fans of accommodation (which itself is a form of style-shifting), this piece - grandly titled How Code-Switching Explains the World - is an interesting look at how we all change the way we speak in terms of our accent, dialect, slang, register, you name it, depending on who we're talking to.

This clip from Comedy Central illustrates it nicely.

As the NPR blog honestly explains, their definition of code-switching is a tad looser than linguists might have it:

Linguists would probably quibble with our definition. (The term arose in linguistics specifically to refer to mixing languages and speech patterns in conversation.) But we're looking at code-switching a little more broadly: many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We're hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities — sometimes within a single interaction.

When you're attuned to the phenomenon of code-switching, you start to see it everywhere, and you begin to see the way race, ethnicity and culture plays out all over the place.

You see it in the political world. In January 2009, then-President-elect Obama went to Ben's Chili Bowl, a famous eatery in a historically black D.C. neighborhood. When the (black) cashier asks him if he needs change, Obama replies, "nah, we straight."

It's clear that we all do this to some extent; I know I do when I switch between talking to other teachers in the workroom and talking on the phone to an electrician. It's a natural part of language use: adapting what we say to fit in with our perceptions of how we might be perceived. You get me?

Accommodation for the nation

In a week when one (dead) Tory is making big news, another (living) Tory managed to make a speech that slips neatly into the post-Thatcher (but, sadly, not quite post-Thatcherite) landscape.

And while making his speech, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, Second Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer and heir to the Osborne Baronetcy, slipped into something more comfortable: Jamie Oliver's accent.

You can watch and listen in the clip below and also read about this particular type of accommodation in an article about it by Victoria Coren.

But it's not just Tory toffs who feel the need to switch from one accent to another. In this Daily Telegraph article from last week, Victoria Ward refers to recent by Michelle addison at Newcastle University which makes the point that many people deliberately change their natural voice to avoid prejudice. So, while Osborne shifts down (downwards convergence) to his working class Morrisons audience, according to Addison, university academics with regional accents shift up (upwards convergence) to fit in with the voices that they believe have power and status in their institutions and line of work.

A more detailed report on the study by Michelle Addison (including some critical responses) can be found here.

Apostrophe errors lead to feline feast?

Apostrophes are back in the news again. No, stay with me; it's actually quite interesting... don't go...please.

With the news that a council in Devon was set to formally ban apostrophes from its street signs, many custodians of the language were up in arms. According to The Daily Telegraph, the move "sparked fury". One person felt more than fury; Mary de Vere Taylor felt a mixture of confusion, patriotism and self-doubt all in the space of a few lines:

"It's almost as though somebody with a giant eraser is literally trying to erase punctuation from our consciousness," she said.
"To me there's something terribly British and terribly reassuring about well-written and well-punctuated writing.
"Some may say I should get a life and get out more but if I got out more and saw place names with no apostrophes where there should be I shudder to think how I'd react." 

The image of an actual, literal, giant eraser, replacing the gun barrel of a Chieftain tank, going around the highways and byways (but mostly byways) of Devon rubbing out apostrophes,  paid for by the council tax of honest residents, is one that will stay with me to the grave. Largely because I've just made it up in my own head and am now a bit scared. But that's beside the point. These things matter to lots of people and not all of them are mad.

A year ago, Lindsay Johns of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard (and writer of a few pieces I've had a go at before) bemoaned the disappearance of the apostrophe from the name of the bookshop  Waterstone's. In his article for the Mail he sounds like a man who's washed down his Weetabix with a few too many dictionaries, arguing "My stance here is not one of supercilious grammatical pedantry. For me, this is about something bigger. This is about the debt we owe both to the English language (as custodians of an ineffably rich, august and venerable tongue) and also to future generations".

This all sounds great and even quite touching, until you start to look at what he's so passionate about: a little squiggle. The apostrophe is actually - as David Crystal, the bearded lord of language, explains on Newsnight here and on his own blog here - a bit of a late arrival in the punctuation pantheon, only becoming standardised in the 19th Century.

Crystal goes on to explain the problem in a bit more detail on his blog:

It's impossible to say how long the apostrophe will last. For almost a thousand years of its history, English writing did very well without it. During the 19th century it came to be seen as obligatory, and the rules governing its use were formed. But during the 20th, its role became questioned. Was it really needed? It was sometimes useful in distinguishing meanings, but it seems it could be left out without causing ambiguity most of the time.

So, when Lindsay Johns and other punctuation police get so excited about the apostrophe as a symbol of our great language's mighty and rich history, they are probably overdoing it a little bit. Just as poor Mary de Vere Taylor said to the Telegraph, there's "something terribly British" about clinging on to outward symbols of a fading past.

So, can we do without the apostrophe? Yes and no. In this age of flashy-looking fonts and online search engines, the apostrophe tends to get in the way, either looking a bit incongruous or messing up an otherwise seamless stream of code. We can also, generally speaking, get by without it in most contexts, because it offers clarification about ownership on pretty rare occasions.

But, again pointed out by Crystal, it's currently part of what we consider to be standard English punctuation, so it has a status and value which can't be ignored:

The old order still rules, and has to be respected. Omitting an apostrophe may not cause a problem in a text message, but it can cause a huge problem in essays, job applications, and other kinds of formal writing. Not because it makes meaning unclear, but simply because it goes against what society considers to be acceptable English. Students have to be taught how to manage this situation, so that they know what's expected of them.  

I'm all in favour of ditching apostrophes altogether, but while they're part of the current system of punctuation, you can expect your work handed back with red rings around errant or missing apostrophes. Otherwise you could end up like this poor family, worrying about whether their teenage sons are really eating their pet cats...

The lack of an apostrophe has the potential to cause even more alarming misunderstandings (Letters, 21 March). While away on holiday I received a message from my teenage boys at home, declaring: "We have completely run out of food and are so desperate we are going to have to eat the cats."
Adrian Brodkin, London

from The Guardian letters page 22.03.13

Words of war

In a great article for today's Guardian, the lexicographer and language blogger, Kory Stamper looks at the language of war, and in this case the language that has emerged in the ten years since the invasion of Iraq.

As a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster in the USA, she is well-placed to offer an overview of this, because as well as helping provide definitions for words, the Merriam-Webster has taken to tracking the words that are looked up at given moments or across longer periods of time. To put it simply (and with a degree of exaggeration), they have an insight into what the American public is thinking about - or checking that they know about - as they think it.

You can see spikes in certain words around key moments in the US presidential campaign if you track back through the tweets of @PeterSokolowski, or the prominence of certain words around other major news events, but it's the overview of the ten years that follow the Iraq invasion that Stamper concentrates on. So, we can see early appearances for the famous (and non-existent) WMDs. Then, later on, we find waterboarding and roadmap, alongside the supposed reason for the whole affair, democracy. The article is a great read and really useful for those of you looking at how and why language changes for ENGA3.

Who cares?

Who cares about English? While this is a question I'm increasingly asking myself - especially when I get given A level essays two weeks late, written on Hello Kitty notepaper and handed in with a cheery "It's crap!" - this post isn't part of my usual moaning about students these days and the need to do lots of work for the exam. Well sort of...

Who cares about English? This time, the question isn't aimed at the heavens, but at a panel of experts and kind-of experts. And the answer of course should be, "We all do", or at the very least, "I don't really care, but I can do a very good impression of caring for the purposes of my exam".

Anyway, have a look here where you can watch (and read the answers from) a panel discussion between four language lovers, including one of my favourite people, Henry Hitchings, and the rather unfortunately named Prudence Raper, from the almost as unfortunate Queen's English Society.

The questions they're addressing in this discussion are:“What are the effects of social media, such as Facebook, on English?” and “What is English, given that it is spoken in so many different countries?”, which are exactly the kinds of things a soon-to-be-revising A2 student should be thinking about.

The language of love

There's a short and informative piece by David Shariatmadari in today's Guardian about the changing terminology used to label and describe people of different sexual orientation. In the comment piece, he talks about the terms that have developed over time and the arguments about such language.

Linking his points to a wider discussion of the role of language in shaping or reflecting people's attitudes to sexuality, he asks "Does language change politics, or is it the other way round? Or perhaps language is more like fashion, in having something to do with prevailing attitudes, but not, ultimately, being all that important".

It's a question we've looked at in A2 English language lessons recently, particularly around the language of race and discrimination. Shariatmadari goes on to raise this too.

Language certainly feels important if you've just been shouted at by a racist or a homophobe. But it's worth asking whether zero tolerance of the N-word, for instance, might be a precursor to, or an after-effect of, more enlightened thinking. Or whether in the US, where it is perhaps the biggest linguistic taboo of all, racism has, in fact, ceased to be a problem.

When we've looked at Political Correctness (PC) and the movement to change language or highlight its potential problems, we've often speculated on the relationship between language and attitudes. Can removing bad words remove bad ideas from people's heads? Or does it just create a vacuum for another bad word to rush into?

Shariatmadari argues what is essentially a reflectionist perspective: "Language is the imprint of our culture. It encodes – though it does not determine – the character of the age". The language that is used to label people who are gay, bisexual, transgendered or questioning is changing to reflect the range of sexual identities that are now gaining prominence (but were probably always there) rather than necessarily shaping identities.

There was another article on this topic a few weeks ago, which you can find here. It's good to have a range of references when you're answering ENGA3 questions about Language Change and Language Discourses, so have a read and make a few notes...

Keep buzzing

MacMillan Dictionaries have had a really good web presence for a while now, with plenty of accessible articles for A level students (and normal, everyday people who are just interested in language).

One of the best and most useful features for A level English Language has been its Buzzwords section, a weekly feature in which the ace lexicographer Kerry Maxwell takes a look at a new word that's appeared and explores its origins, formations and uses.

It's exactly the kind of thing that feeds into the work we do on Language Change for ENGA3 (or ENGB3 if you follow the AQA B spec) and provides the kind of up to date and well-referenced examples of words and word formation processes that can make your essays on this topic a much better read, and keep you topped up with new and original illustrations.

Buzzwords is now ten years old, so Kerry has written an overview about what's happened in the world of new words, which you can find here. We'll be looking at this in class in the run-up to the exam in June, but it's definitely worth having a read now and looking back through the Buzzwords for 2012 here and the archive here.

Speak now, pay later

There's always been lively debate among linguists and non-linguists alike about the extent to which language might influence or even control the way we think. At its most extreme, we find the strong version of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (largely the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf) which argues that the way we interpret the world around us is heavily influenced by the language available to us:

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language...

Many have taken this to mean that he believed that language helped control and shape the way we think (a view originally put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt) but others suggest that Whorf was never really making such a bold claim.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of this, there has been a lot of interest in the idea that the languages we speak, the words we choose and the grammar we use might have an impact on how we view the world. This week's BBC news website carries an account of Professor Keith Chen's research into language and economic habits, wherein he suggests that speakers of languages that have a strong "future time reference" (i.e. use a separate tense to indicate future time) are less likely to plan ahead in terms of money and health. As the BBC story puts it, "... if you speak English you are likely to save less for your old age, smoke more and get less exercise than if you speak a language like Mandarin, Yoruba or Malay".

According to Chen, languages either have a strong or weak FTR (future time reference) and those with a strong FTR tend to separate present and future, making it less likely that the speakers connect present actions with future events. In other words, the stronger the difference between your language's representation of present and future, the weaker the speakers' ability to link present and future. He argues that this then leads to an inability to plan ahead.

Of course, this is a very difficult idea to prove, particularly if you're not actually a linguist (Professor Chen is primarily an economist), and Professor Geoff Pullum cautions against taking the research at face value in an interesting response on Language Log. One of his key points is that Chen is mistaken in claiming that English has strong FTR, given that we tend to use the present tense (I am going to play football to morrow) or modal verbs (I will play football tomorrow).

The story has been picked up elsewhere, including here, where other links between language and thought are discussed, and in this debate between Lera Boroditsky and Mark Liberman.

Hadaway wi ye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Driving up standards by driving out the non-standard

A school in Teesside has become the centre of an argument over acceptable English, with its headteacher's decision to send a letter home to parents asking parents to "correct" their children's language "errors".

According to the local paper, non-standard English such as 'I done it' (rather than 'I did it', or 'I have done it'), 'yous' (instead of 'you') and 'gizit here' (instead of 'give it to me, please') are all considered off-limits at the school, and risk making the children's employment prospects lower than those who use Standard English.

Standard English is what we're supposed to teach at school, and it's what we use to communicate in writing, most of the time - unless we're online or on our phones, in which case different rules apply - but the argument that's been stirred here is over whether it's acceptable to limit what young people say to just Standard English and whether we should be describing these usages as "incorrect".

Schools have tried similar things before,  with Sheffield Springs Academy having a "slang ban" (which is also how the Daily Mail headline about Sacred Heart School in Middlesbrough - mistakenly - puts it in their story), Manchester Academy doing the same a year or two before, and a school in Basildon allegedly trying to eliminate Essex accents through elocution lessons, a claim denied by the school itself.

Linguists have long argued that non-standard varieties of English are not "wrong" at all. In fact, some of them might even be seen as more logical: yous is a perfectly reasonable way of differentiating between second person singular and plural, which Standard English doesn't have, for example. Studying the differences between standard and non-standard is something that Key Stage 2 children do as part of their Literacy curriculum, so it's not as if they don't understand the differences, but is it really OK to ban certain terms or suggest they're inferior.

Peter Stockwell, linguist and Teessider, thinks not and is featured in an interesting follow-up piece. York University's Paul Kerswill, an expert in sociolinguistics (and writer of a damn fine chapter in this book) was interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, alongside Simon Gibbons of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) and had some eminently sensible things to say about the whole furore.  You can listen to it here until next week and it's 1 hour 40 minutes into the programme.

Elsewhere, the Daily Mail has its take on it here, and you don't need to be a genius to work out that its online readership have plenty to say about it in the comments that follow, which range from the considered and quite descriptivist in outlook (see comment 1 below) to the dubious and rather poorly written (see comments 2&3).

If you've been studying Jean Aitchison's models of crumbling castle, infectious disease and damp spoon, you'll see nearly all of those appearing somewhere in the prescriptive comments put forward, with discourses of laziness, ugliness, infection and erosion, all making an appearance somewhere.

So, what do you think of the school's attempts to drive out non-standard English? Do they have good educational intentions, or are they misguided prescriptivists? Here are what some Mail Online readers thought: what about you?

Comment 1:

The school is just plain wrong. To call informal English wrong is to mess about with personal relationships: this is where you get some children looking down on others because they think they speak wrongly. What is more, it is actually a disadvantage to speak formally if you are in a service industry where you have to get on with ordinary people. You can always tell people who have been trained to talk formally all the time: they sound like daft, unconfident and untrustworthy pseuds. Besides the fact that there are historical reasons for dialect speech: North-eastern dialects use words which go back to the Vikings and put children in touch with a continuing culture which has existed for a thousand years. There is the formal English you need for interviews and work and there is the informal English that enables you to speak quickly with friends, family and locals. All children are capable of understanding that formal English is not right, it is simply for use in formal situations. - Dave , Wimbledon, 06/2/2013 17:24

Comment2:

Sadly, kids nowadays speak only one language and they use that single language in every social context. When I was a kid I spoke three types of English. One with my parents, another with my mates and a third in more formal circumstances such as education, police and other levels of authority. The component that has disappeared today is authority.

- André, Peckham, United Kingdom, 5/2/2013 20:13 

Comment 3:

Laziness from children and parents nowadays...and its shocking. Most kids seem to think talking in slang is cool, but its further from the truth. God help them with job prospects and further education ( if they're even attempting to better their lives! )

- flash25, glasgow, United Kingdom, 5/2/2013 19:41

Vive la resistance

Not for the first time, the French Academy has taken a stand to prevent more English words entering their language. This time, the word is hashtag, which as we have seen from the posts about 2012's Word of the Year, has become a nearly ubiquitous term in lots of online discourse, and even in spoken language too. According to the Academy, the term should, wherever possible, be replaced with the French term mot-diese.

In the Daily Mail, the story is reported with a degree of relish, but look at the comments below and you get an even better sense of how, for many people, ideas about the English language are linked inextricably to a sense of national identity and history.  But among all the celebration that the old enemy, Johnny French, is losing the language battle, there's a realisation even among some of the more rabidly nationalistic Mail readers that while English is spreading around the world, it's not necessarily the same English that's been used in the UK in the past.

As we've looked at here - and as David Crystal, key speaker at next month's emagazine English Language conference, has commented upon many times before - English is changing as it spreads, but also growing differently in different parts of the world. The model is not necessarily one of English getting weaker as it spreads, but separate poles of English varieties growing and evolving in their own distinct ways.

That's probably not much comfort to the French who won't really care if it's English English, American English or Indian English "threatening" their language, but it's part of a bigger global picture of change and variation that is evolving all the time.

The phono-morph war

A report about research from Portsmouth University in the Southern Daily Echo suggests that a new approach to literacy teaching, which involves teaching about the structures and meanings of words (morphology) is more effective than the sound system based teaching of phonics that has been promoted over the last decade.

With a morphological approach, children are taught about the units that make up words (like we've been doing in Child Language recently with morphemes like -s, -ed, -ing , -er, -ist and -est):

Dr Victoria Devonshire, of the Department of Psychology, trialled a new method of teaching reading and writing with 120 children aged five to seven and found the average reading age increased by 14 months after just six months. She said: ''We were surprised at how compelling the results were.
''When children were taught to understand why English works the way it does, we saw a leap in their ability to learn to read and write.

''The written word is about conveying meaning, not the sound of speech. Expecting children to just figure out the rules of our language is worryingly common and it isn't helping them become as proficient and confident as young children in many other languages.'' 

Phonics has been promoted by successive governments as a  means of rapidly improving children's ability to decode the sounds of English, but it's come in for some stick because - as we can all see with words like plough, through and cough - the spelling system in English isn't regular or even very logical. The introduction of phonics testing at Key Stage 1, where nonsense words like wib or vog (or even our old favourite, wug) are given to children to read has provoked yet more concern among many literacy experts, because - they argue - it's articifial and pointless to give children made-up words out of context when readign is not just about individual sounds or words, but about making sense of words and sounds in their specific contexts.

The fact that some people who are quite close to government advisors are set to make a few quid out of phonics schemes is also a cause for scepticism among critics of the phonics-or-bust approach, but plenty of research suggests that phonics can help some children; the argument is not really about if it does but how and why and also in which contexts.

So, what about teaching morphology as this research suggests? It's not necessarily a new approach; back in 2006, Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant published Improving Literacy by Teaching Morphemes, which looked at work done in schools to promote the study of morphology as a means of improving spelling and reading. What Victoria Devonshire is doing sounds really interesting and it sounds like it will add another dimension to literacy teaching. Hopefully, there'll be more information about this approach to come out.

Are you a QUILTBAG?

Labels for different social groups are a shorthand way of defining people and we use a lot of them in our language. Recently, we've looked at terms like handicapped, the handicapped, disabled, people with disabilities and wheelchair users as part of our work on ENGA3 Language Change, but on the Johnson blog they take a look at some of the rapidly evolving acronyms and initialisms for groups defined by their sexuality.

So, we have LGB (Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual) and LGBT (Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual and Transgendered) but in the past the labels weren't quite so neutral. Gay has had a fascinating history as a word, and queer has been reclaimed to some extent, but read more of the piece in Johnson to see where we're going now and what a QUILTBAG is...

For a full set of LGBTQIA (and more) terms, have a look here. A term that's fairly new to me, but seems to have been knocking around for a while, is cisgender (explained, I think, here). The recent media firestorm about Julie Burchill's 'transphobic' article in the Observer (removed from the Observer site but reprinted here) brought this term to my attention and it's another example of how language and identity are closely linked, and the ways in which language can be used to hurt others.

More child language

This week's The Life Scientific on Radio 4 featured an interview with Annette Karmiloff-Smith, who is an expert in children's development. There's some good content here for anyone wanting to look at interaction and language development, as she talks about how exposure to different kinds of language - speech from parents, TV, internet language - shapes children's early development.

The podcast can be found here.

Child Language resources

As we're now well under way with the Language Development topic for ENGA1, this link from Jill on the English language List is well timed.

It's the Talking Point website which has masses of material for parents and teachers about children's language development, including a handy set of ages and stages, where you can check what is normally happening in a child's language development at various ages. There's also some useful material on language impairments and the communicative development of children with learning difficulties, which can be really useful for A2 language investigations.

This week's Word of Mouth on Radio 4 had a really good segment on autism and language, which focused not just on the language development of young people with autism but the language used by carers towards people with autism.

Skivers and strivers, workers and shirkers: why words matter

In a cracking Guardian article today, Zoe Williams takes a critical look at the new language used to split the haves and the have-nots. With this week's vote on limiting benefit increases affecting millions of people - many of them/us actually in work - it's clear that to successfully turn one part of society against the other, you need to win the language war first.

As Williams explains, the false dichotomy created by labelling one group as strivers - working hard, supporting themselves, not relying on benefits - and another group as skivers - not working, sponging benefit taxpayers' money to pay for a feckless lifestyle on a council estate - has rapidly been established and spread into our own language and thinking. But why?

Don't tell me it is because it rhymes. It will destroy my faith in humanity, and that's exactly what they want. But the point is not that politicians spout it, nor that people who haven't given it any thought believe it. The point is that it has seeped so far, so fast, into the national consciousness as a meaningful idea that the very people vilified by it – the people who know they are unemployed by circumstance and not by choice – feel their lives judged against its fictional benchmarks.

So, while Iain Duncan-Smith (a man who recently claimed that £70 a week was too much for Job Seekers' Allowance but allegedly put in a £39 bill for a single breakfast, charged to the taxpayer) is busy chipping away at what already impoverished people can get in support, he must be happy that there are massive misconceptions among the public about how much of the government's budget goes into social security payments or how much those payments actually amount to and that people are so easily convinced that they are shirkers while we are workers. Williams goes on to argue that the shift in language - especially the move from the positive connotations of social security to welfare - has coincided with a shift in attitudes:

People sometimes ascribe this adoption of "welfare" as an Americanism, designed to convey some of the US's sneering synecdoche where the name of the government support becomes shorthand for the person being supported. I think it's also an attempt to dehumanise people on state benefits – we never used to talk about welfare in terms of humans, but the word has been in everyday UK usage, for as long as I can remember, to describe animals. To be in receipt of state benefits thus tacitly becomes a passive, piteous, dumb thing to do. You don't necessarily begrudge the animals their welfare, but you wouldn't mistake yourself for one of them.

It's exactly the kind of language technique we've looked at on the AS level course, using animalistic imagery to describe young people as feral or hunting in packs. Once you demonise the group you're attacking through language, it makes it easier, not only for the dominant group to carry out more attacks, but for others to sympathise with the attacks and align themselves with the persecutors rather than the victims, even if they themselves are probably next in the government's firing line.

This is the kind of language that the linguist Norman Fairclough highlights in his Critical Discourse Analysis approach to language study. If we don't analyse and challenge language choices, we get sucked in by them and end up accepting such false dichotomies, such intrinsically unfair outlooks, and even end up recycling it ourselves. With critical language analysis, however, we can start to pull apart those choices, highlight the ideologies that lie behind them and make our own educated choices about what we think or feel.

That's how language matters and why we need to analyse it.

#BiffyClyro

#Jahmazing

Sorry for taking such a long break from blogging over Christmas and New Year; this was partly down to lots of work and partly down to a bad case of man flu (not wine flu, which is one of the Australian Macquarie Dictionary's nominations for Word of the Year 2012).

Many recent language stories have picked up on the end of year new word round-ups and votes, so you can find a summary of recently fashionable English words in this Observer piece by Rafael Behr (HT to Jon Dolton for the link) which includes some from popular culture and some from wider social changes. So, we get X Factor's Nicole's shamazing (jahmazing, more likely, given it was invented for Jahmene), the song that had uncles dancing badly everywhere, Gangnam Style, Tory incompetence (rather than their usual malevolence) with Omnishambles, and the big winner this year, Hashtag, becoming not just a ubiquitous octothorpe (#) but a real, spoken expression (just like guest blogger Emma Bertouche said on this blog back in 2011). Fearne Cotton off of that there Radio 1 even slotted "Hashtag Biffy Clyro" into one of her pre-Christmas shows, as a reference to the angular-haired Scottish riff-makers. While it's clearly become accepted as a new way of making reference to something in speech, it still made me choke on my cornflakes and SCOMK (Spit Coffee on My Keyboard).

Hashtag was the winner in the American Dialect Society WOTY 2012 poll. You can read more about the nominations and winners in this pdf, but their choice of hashtag has been celebrated and discussed further here and questioned here.

Meanwhile, the Australian Macquarie Dictionary has its poll still running and there are some crackers on there, including the aforementioned wine flu, and  dramality.

What were your winning words of 2012 and which bugged you the most? Personally amazeballs tickled my fancy, but reem irritated me in ways that I can't really explain. Also, what are your predictions for 2013?

Grammar for teachers (and students)

Michael Rosen - poet, socialist, writer of the mighty Bear Hunt and all-round good guy - has been adding some new material to his blog recently, posting material aimed at Key Stage 2 teachers who are worried about their own grammar knowledge, in the run-up to the new KS2 grammar tests. This is something I'm particularly interested in , both as a father of twin boys who are going to sit the test in May this year and a sad grammar nerd, but I think it has relevance to A level students too.

Grammar teaching has had a pretty vexed history, with arguments raging for decades about its use and effects. I  won't go into all of that here, because I've tried to cover it in a previous incarnation as a language researcher at the Survey of English Usage at UCL and posted a lot about it on this other blog, but it is well worth taking a look at Michael Rosen's stuff to get a sense of the bigger picture where grammar is concerned.