Accents hold the comedy key

In a piece of research carried out by linguists at Aberdeen University and reported here in The Guardian, it's been discovered that a person's regional accent can have a major influence on how funny they are perceived to be.

Rather like Howard Giles' famous matched guise experiment into accents, this research measures how "warm" or "cold" the speakers are perceived to be. As The Guardian reports, "After asking 4,000 people to listen to the same joke in 11 different regional accents, researchers from the University of Aberdeen concluded that the Brummie accent, as typified by the likes of Frank Skinner, Jasper Carrott and Lenny Henry, is Britain's funniest, appealing to more than a fifth of those questioned".

Received Pronunciation (R.P.) comes out at the bottom, below accents from Manchester and Glasgow. So it's not just the way you tell 'em, it's the voice you tell 'em in.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties

"PC gone mad" parts 301 & 302

Two stories in yesterday's papers re-hash that tired old phrase "Political Correctness gone mad". In one piece in the Daily Mirror, council workers in Newcastle have been "re-educated" about their use of terms such as "pet", "love" and "hinny" (Read the article for some more on this obscure northern lexeme! "This political correctness is getting ridiculous," claims one rent-a-quote Tory MP in response to the story. My normal reaction to stories like this is to see them as part of a right wing agenda which seeks to discredit any attempt to get people to look at the language they use and how it might offend others. "Common sense" ideas about "PC gone mad" are put forward, but really they're just reactionary ramblings that see any attempt to remove racist or sexist language as part of some weird communist plot. But is that all that's going on in this case? Another element to this story is the issue of dialect and identity. As one council worker puts it, "It's like they are trying to kill the Geordie language. It's totally bloody crackers". This point is developed later in the article:

But Peter Arnold, 62, chairman of the Northumbrian Language Society, said: "I am horrified that these words, which are part of the native language of people living in Northumbria, are to be banned. It is just part of the way ordinary people speak.

"Some think the Geordie dialect is sexist and male oriented. It then follows that people think Geordies are male chauvinist pigs. This is a mistake.

"People who use these words - hinny, which is a term of endearment whose origin is lost in time - are speaking what is to them the first language of many people from this part of the world. It is part of our heritage."

The connections between dialect and identity are riddled with issues of self-esteem, regional insecurities and perceptions of domination by metropolitan elites (in other words, that London's New Labour-supporting middle classes want to control the language we all speak).

So, should regional varieties of English be allowed to keep their old-fashioned and perhaps patronising terms? Is it even a good idea to try to regulate language use in this way? Can it even be done? And who is making these decisions anyway?

In another article, this time in The Guardian, an employee of Orange is being investigated for his remarks on a web discussion site in which he pokes fun at what he calls a "lefty lexicon" or what he sees as the abuse of language by "lefties" and especially the "rights industry", according to the article. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, you might say, but if you're the "community affairs manager" of a huge mobile phones company should you be able to vent your spleen about minority groups (many of whom are your customers)?

And in today's Mirror, there's a really great guide to the different terms of endearment used around the country. Click here for the online version (less impressive to look at than the print version which I'll try to scan and post up on the site in the next week or two).

Your views on this whole issue of patronising terms and language control would be welcome as comments (click below to add your points).

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

Hyperlexia

For those of you interested in Child Language, here's an extract from a piece of research reported in The British Psychological Society digest which gives some info about a boy of 4 with incredibly advanced reading skills yet a mental age of just one and a half.

If you remember the Cognitive theory as proposed by Piaget and his followers, language development occurs as part of a child's wider cognitive development. If that's the case then how does something like this occur?

Researchers at the University of London’s School of Languages have observed a four-year-old boy with autistic spectrum disorder who rarely speaks spontaneously and shows little evidence of verbal comprehension but who can read aloud precociously – a phenomenon that’s known as hyperlexia.

On psychological tests, the boy is found to have a mental age of just one and half years and yet he can correctly pronounce irregular words not normally encountered by children before the age of nine. Irregular words like ‘yacht’ don’t follow the usual letter-to-sound rules and his
correct pronunciation of them betrays a level of linguistic development far beyond that predicted by his mental age.

Even when presented with novel Greek letters, he attempts to read them as English letters and numbers. “This behaviour is possibly indicative of the type of driven, compulsive, and indiscriminate reading behaviour associated with hyperlexia”, the researchers said. Indeed, the boy’s mother recalled that her son looked through newspapers with an unusual intensity before he was even two years old.

Because the boy doesn’t communicate it is difficult to gauge his actual comprehension of the words he can read. Nonetheless it remains remarkable that his reading ability “just happened”, as his mother put it, and the researchers concluded “Existing cognitive accounts are inadequate to account for the development of literacy in this child”.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition

"Your mum is a terrorist whore"...

...the words Marco Materazzi allegedly spoke to Zinedine Zidane, moments before getting butted in the chest by an international legend turned demented billygoat. Whatever happened to "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me"?

In a great article in today's Guardian, Stuart Jeffries looks at the background to "your mum" insults and asks why certain types of abuse are viewed as grossly offensive in certain cultures and societies. It's a well researched article with some good background from Deborah Cameron and discussion of "the dozens" and "yo momma" games in the USA. It even quotes from one of my favourite rap tracks of the 1990s, The Pharcyde's Yo Mama and one of my favourite comedy sketches, Newman and Baddiel's History Today professors ("You see your bike; it's a girl's bike. It's for girls.").

The article contains rude words, so don't let your mum catch you reading it. Oh I forgot, she can't catch you reading it: she's out buying crack/selling her body/eating food from bins (delete as inappropriate).

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
EA4C - Language Investigations

The Institute for Domestic Incarceration Survivors

What's wrong with being a housewife? I can think of plenty of things to do with the "job" itself, but The Women's Institute has been discussing the word instead. According to an article in The Guardian last month "Progressives argue that the word - meaning a woman who keeps house - is outdated and derogatory. Traditionalists are furious and adamant that even discussing the matter is the result of political correctness". Elsewhere, Jane Shilling in The Times suggests that women should reclaim the word: "It’s been done successfully for the n-word and “queer”, those terms of vile insult turned into triumphant badges of identity. Why not for housewife? Go on, ladies, say it aloud: I’m a housewife, and I’m proud". In a separate article from The Times, the connotations and marketabilty of the term are considered: "Barbara Littlewood, a lecturer in sociology at Glasgow University, feels the change is necessary if the organisation is to survive. “The use of the term housewife could well be putting off the younger generation and even those in their 40s,” she said, adding that it had connotations of being forced to stay at home darning socks and could be seen as harking back to the 1950s when men were the sole breadwinners". So what's wrong with the word and what might its alternatives be? Free Dictionary defines it as "A woman who manages her own household as her main occupation" while a search on Wikipedia redirects you straight away to an alternative term "homemaker" and describes it as "a person whose prime occupation is to care for their family and home. The term homemaker is used in preference to either housewife or househusband because it is inclusive, defines the role in terms of activities, rather than relation to another, and is independent of marital status. The terms stay-at-home mother and stay-at-home father are also used". Even looking at the standard defintions of the word as derived from "hus" + "wif" isn't the whole story, as the word "wif" has drifted in meaning over time from "woman" to "married woman". And a look at Etymology Online flags up an even more damning drift: the word "hussy", once a shortened version of housewife, now means something much more pejorative: "Gradually broadened to mean "any woman or girl," and by 1650 was being applied to "a woman or girl who shows casual or improper behavior," and a general derogatory sense had overtaken the word by 19c." It's a blooming minefield of semantic shifts and derogatory connotations. So, what are the alternatives if you're not married to the house? "Homemaker", as suggested by many feminists, just makes me think of sweaty-arsed builders waving England flags from their white vans. Maybe that's just me. Various spoof Political Correctness guides use the term "domestic incarceration survivor" to relate the experience of "keeping house" (uurgh) to a prison sentence. But what of the "progressives" in the W.I. themselves? "Homecraft" seems to be their favoured alternative, but quite how that switches from being an abstract noun to being a term that can be used as a title is unclear, and might lead to all sorts of clunky formulations such as "homecraft practioner", "homecraft engineer" and "homecraft bod". Anyone for "domestic goddess"? Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 - Language Change

5-times-a-night-Tony Blair & Margaret Thatcher in stockings

If either of the images in the title of this post make you feel queasy, you're not the only one. So imagine what it was like for poor David Cameron, fresh-faced new leader of the decidedly ancient Tory Party, when Jonathan Ross asked him a peresonal question about his sexual fantasies as a young lad.

And according to a report a couple of weeks ago in The Guardian, Britain's political discourse took a further downward turn when it was revealed that during a cabinet reshuffle, Margaret Beckett's response to being offered a new post was one word - the f-word.

Two different articles in two different newspapers offer two very different takes on these stories. In The Times, Minette Marin argues that these incidents are part of a radical coarsening of political language, while in The Guardian, Mark Lawson argues that swearing is a means of expressing rebellion against the constraints of the dominant culture of political soundbites, that in a way it's a response to the shackles of New Labour speak.

But it's also interesting to look at Marin's wider argument. As she says,

In a few years culture has become so hyper-sexualised that in order to speak demotic you need to talk dirty — or at least politicians and celebrities think you do. They feel the way to appeal to the voter or the punter is to pepper what you say with sexy words and sexy allusions, because that’s what most voters and punters increasingly do themselves.

There was a time in this country when only the working classes and the upper classes went in for effing and blinding and swearing like troopers, and not all of them. The respectable middle classes didn’t swear or talk dirty at all. Something changed in the 1960s; would-be left-wing intellectuals felt that to show solidarity with the masses they should talk like them. Hence student mockney, hence a fashion for swearing and talking dirty. Middle-class guilt made students feel they shouldn’t talk in the mannerly tones of middle-class privilege. This has persisted and spread.

So, it would appear that Marin believes our politicians are increasingly accommodating their language: downwardly converging to the vernacular they believe their target voters speak.

A quick look at this post from last month - Voice of the people - should give you a bit more background on this too, but the whole topic looks like a pretty good Language Investigation to me...

Useful for:
EA4C - Language Investigation

ENA6 then it's all over...

I know it's late, but here are some last minute tips for the ENA6 exam. I wouldn't normally bother as it's so close to the exam but I know that people have been using this blog for their exams right up to the last minute: in fact there was someone searching for ENA5 stuff on Monday at 12.30 which was an hour before the exam started. Stop it! Sort your life out! Have some lunch!

Anyway, the secret of doing well in this exam is a bit like the secret of good comedy................... timing.

There are 5 very different questions and if you stick to giving the short, 5 mark questions the time they deserve, and use the rest of the time to plan and write detailed answers to the big two questions (1c and 2a) you'll probably do yourself a favour. If you have the right technique on 1a, 1b and 2b you should be able to have them out of the way in no time at all (15 minutes maximum).

So, looking at them how do you do that? Question 1a requires a 3 sentence answer. Use linguistic terminology to label the 3 features/processes you're asked to find and give a brief explanation. That's it...

Question 1b requires a 5 point approach. You have to have some sort of aim, a method of collecting data, a framework to analyse that data, an awareness of extra linguistic variables and issues of ethics and validity, and an idea of what you will find and what it means. There is more detail on this available on the AQA site here (aimed at teachers but useful for students if you know what you're doing).

Question 2b can almost be done as you do 2a. If you build in 3 linguistic features to comment upon, you'll be able to refer back to them in your 2b answer. Remember to quote specific egs and label them linguistically before explaining your intended effect.

Question 1c is a textual analysis but requires an added level of evaluation from what you did in ENA1. Try to respond to the ways in which the writer makes his/her material accessible and interesting to the non-specialist audience. There's more to this question, but it's too late to go over the frameworks now and you should already be secure on these.

For question 2a, all I can really advise is be engaging and creative. Examiners will read loads of scripts that re-hash the source material in various ways, but will be happy to come across scripts that take risks and make reference to other sources of information and language debates. It's a synoptic unit, so try to show your grasp of the links between the different topics you've studied and your engagement in the language debate that the paper is focused on.

Good luck!

Don't tupac your WAGs

With ENA5 coming up tomorrow (Monday) here are two new words for your delight and delectation: the verb "to tupac" and the acronym W.A.G.

The first is a conversion from proper noun to verb, of the rapper, Tupac's name. It was used ironically by hip hop supremo Rick Rubin to refer to flogging new versions of tracks on CDs long after the death of the artist, something that Rubin himself has been happy to do with the work of Johnny Cash recently. Cashing in, if you will. Ha ha. Not my joke, but one from today's Observer.

And then to the acronym. Never have more fake plastic cleavage, dodgy lip gloss and stupidly priced handbags been seen than among the Wives And Girlfriends (WAGs) of the England football squad. Well, maybe not since last night in various Romford nightclubs...

But what's our favourite word of the moment? Well according to the OED it's the noun "time".

Anyway, new words and old words aside, good luck tomorrow with your ENA5 exam.

Celibacy and gradable adjectives

So from one form of sexuality to another, or rather lack of any sexual activity... don't worry: it's not another autobiographical posting. A piece by Lucy Mangan in today's Guardian (That long Victoria line trip from Walthamstow to Stockwell is great for reading the papers!) looks at Robbie Williams' use of the adjective celibate, when he describes himself as almost celibate.

As Mangan puts it:

If we take the Shorter OED definition of celibacy as "the state of being unmarried", the man is clearly barking. He has, as many a recent interview attests, never found a woman with whom he could contemplate submitting to the bonds of holy matrimony and therefore cannot be almost unmarried. So one must conclude that the Robster is using the word in its more modern sense of sexual abstinence. Robbie, it seems, ain't gettin' any. Or rather, he almost ain't gettin' any.

One could phrase the pertinent question in the abstract: can one be almost celibate or is it an absolute state, an abstemious wasteland sharply delineated by the carnal woodlands abutting every border? Or one can put it more individually: is one man's "almost celibate" another man's "five-year period of being linked to some of the most desirable women in the world, including Kylie, Nicole Kidman and erm, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, but not having quite as much sex as you would like"?

Prurient interest in Tara Palmer-Tomkinson aside, it's perhaps interesting to look at the use of adjectives like celibate, certain and unique (but probably more interesting to look at posh Tara...sorry). Can we premodify these adjectives with adverbs - almost celibate, completely unique, virtually certain - when the adjectives themselves mean something in an absolute state? In other words, how can you be almost celibate when the word celibate means "completely free of sexual activity"? You either are or you aren't... or are you?

Traditionally these adjectives are referred to as non-gradable, as opposed to adjectives like lucky and happy which are gradable (really lucky, very happy etc.), but perhaps the point is that when we use adverbial modifers in front of non-gradable adjectives we're actually saying something about our own attitude to the thing being described.

An example in the recent ENA1 exam is the adjective British which you might think was an either/or description, except it's not that simple. A quick look at the press conference yesterday when the brothers arrrested for suspected terrorism offences in east London talked about their love of London and their country, might tell us that there are clearly different notions of Britishness (a clumsy abstract noun) depending on who you are and what you believe: some would say (wrongly) that you can't be British if you're a Muslim of Bangladeshi origin, while others claim a much broader definition that encompasses Owen Hargreaves, Greg Rusedski and anyone who is born here. So if we can't decide on what British means how can we say the adjective is non-gradable?

Perhaps it's not a case of being grammatically inaccurate, but of adding a subtle nuance to what we feel about the idea being described. So maybe when Robbie Williams talks of being almost celibate he perhaps means that he's only one (ahem) snog away from the barren wasteland of celibacy, close to the edge. Or maybe he just can't use grammar properly.But that isn't completely unique, is it?

Useful for:
ENA1 - Textual Analysis language frameworks

More gayness!

The discussion about the word "gay" caused by Radio One presenter Chris Moyles' comment about a "gay ringtone", has been picked up more widely and caused some friction between those who see "gay" as a harmless example of language change in action, and those who still see it as a word loaded with negative connotations.

Here's a link to yesterday's Guardian which ran a front page G2 feature on the word "gay", while here's a link to three letters in today's Guardian responding to that article. Underneath, I've cut n pasted some comments from contributors to Urban 75, a Brixton-based discussion site ( I can't link to the actual posts as you have to be a registered user to access the boards). These responses give you some sense of the issues at stake and the range of viewpoints:

EquationGirl: You may think you're not using it as a homophobic statement, but you're linking a word used to describe homosexuals as a slur, a derogatory statement, to mean something bad. In time, the word 'gay' just means something bad.You should stop, you know. I personally find it offensive, whether or not it's meant. It sends out the message that it's ok to use 'gay' to mean something bad, when it isn't.

Xes: Can I just say,that as a gayer,I'm not offended by the term "that's gay" I even use it myself.cos some things,just,are.

Wookie: I went through a lot of pain in order to be able to say 'I am gay' and be proud of it. To hear the word used to mean something shit, lame and defunct is hurtful in the extreme. It has nothing to do with inverting the meaning of 'gay' from 'happy and carefree' to something which is bad. It has everything to do with equating gay people with disfunctionality, and it's utterly unasseptable from people wishing be in the same room as me.Say it if you want by all means. But please stop kidding yourself that you aren't replicating homophobic ideals, because you are. And don't do it within arm's reach of me unless you have a comprehensive dental plan.

JHE: I don't like this use of 'gay' as a term of disparagement, but I suppose my dislike is partly generational. It strikes me as a silly schoolchild's usage.However, it's also an interesting reminder of the limits of attempts to reform language. 'Gay' was deliberately adopted (by the GLF?) to mean homosexual, because the term 'homosexual' sounds very clinical or scientific and all the other terms ('queer', 'poof' etc) were pejorative. It worked to a large extent. It is rare nowadays to find anyone who moans about (what many used to claim was) the misappropriation of the word. Yet the 'positive' word is now also used in a pejorative way - and its meaning, insofar as I understand it, is often similar to 'poofy'.

Your views would be most welcome!

Is your ringtone gay?

Well mine certainly is, but what about yours? Obviously I don't mean homosexual, but "lame", "crap" and "sad". According to the BBC Board of Governors, these are the modern meanings of the word "gay" alongside its other more traditional ones of "happy" and "carefree", and of course "homosexual" (which has been one of the word's other meanings for longer than many might expect).

In articles, here in The Times and here in the Daily Mail (spit), the BBC explain their position on the word "gay" and their decision that Chris Moyles' use of it to describe a ringtone was acceptable and not homophobic (compared to rapper, The Game's use of the term "faggot" to describe gay men which was labelled unacceptable and led to a ban on further interviews).

All of this raises interesting issues about language change and the processes that drive it, but also the decisions that lead to the acceptability or otherwise of particular words. It's not as if any of this is set in stone either: changes in meaning aren't decided by committees and then imposed on us, but rather certain groups of people and organisations tend to have more power to influence opinion and usage.

So, can using "gay" really not be homophobic? Or is the fact that it's now broadened to mean "rubbish", "lame" and "crap" just a symptom of a homophobic society?

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

Voice of the people?

We all know that these days politicians strive for that common touch (and I don't mean John Prescott yearning for desk action with a secretary) but how far are they prepared to go to reach out to the masses in their own language?

A report in yesterday's Observer tells us that "David Cameron, the somewhat posh Old Etonian leader of the Tories, comes over as a more credible 'man of the people' than Gordon Brown, the 'down-to-earth' Labour Chancellor and probable next Prime Minister, according to a new study of top politicians' vocabulary".

The report goes on to explain that the criteria used to ascertain this "common touch" come from a programme called "Everyday English" which monitors sentence length, the use of core vocabulary and teh number of syllables used.

"All of which, it turns out, favours Cameron over Brown. The Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, lags behind them both. Tony Blair finishes slightly in front of Cameron, though John Major registers more convincingly as 'one of us' than any of them. And none can hold a candle to an EastEnders script that was fed through the computer filter."

So, does this mean that Blair and Cameron genuinely speak the language of the streets ("Wahgwan Gordon, dat rave was heavy, blood") or just that they have mastered the art of accommodating towards what they see as their target audience? And what does this tell us about their perception of the language and identity of their target audience - i.e. the swing voters who might switch allegiances before the next election - that they are aiming their language at?

The danger (as we've seen with Labour moving into political ground once occupied by the Conservatives and the Conservatives desperately trying to recapture that ground) is that the politicians speak a language they think we want to hear but in the process have no distinct voice of their own. The upshot of this is often to give us smooth soundbites in easily digestible language, which mean absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, those with an identifiable voice (however objectionable) become more attractive as they appear to be speaking from the heart (witness the growth of nazi nutters, the BNP in Barking & Dagenham and other areas across the country).

You can find out more about the programme used to analyse the language and its uses here.

Useful for:
EA4C - Language Investigation

Top tips for ENA5

Following on from the top tips for ENA 1, here are some suggestions for what you can do to mug up on ENA5 Language Varieties and Change: today, the textual analysis and contemporary language change questions, later in the week, the varieties question...

ENA5 can be a tricky paper as you’re expected to have a decent knowledge of language change over time & attitudes towards change, as well as a sound grasp of more advanced elements of grammar. You can revise the change aspects using a range of online resources, but the grammar bit needs plenty of practice. There are some resources you can have a look at to help you test your own knowledge of grammar, and then you can try to apply this knowledge to some older texts. Try the Internet Grammar of English and English in Use sites and then take a look at the History of Prose Style and British Library online sites for examples of older texts.

I’d suggest looking at really short extracts of a range of forms and genres and see what you could usefully say about particular lexical and grammatical features in each text. So if you’re looking at one of the selection of recipes available on the British Library site, you could think about pronoun use, modal auxiliaries, sentence function and uses of subordinate clauses of condition in the context of what the recipe’s main purpose is.

Alternatively, with a piece of philosophical or political writing, you might get mileage out of looking for particular noun types, semantic fields and sentence types: you might find that there are more complex sentences featuring relative or dependent clauses, because that type of text requires more complex logical relationships as part of its subject matter.

For the contemporary language change essay question, it’s important you have a range of examples of new words that have come into the language over the past 50 years as well as the linguistic terms used to label the processes that have created them (clipping, compounding, blending etc.). It’s also useful to look at semantic change and have the same set of terms at your disposal to describe changes in meaning (pejoration, amelioration, semantic reclamation, broadening etc.). One of the best places I've come across for discussion of new words is the MacMillan English Dictionary site.

Try to get a sense of the reasons for change too: new technology and the influence of the media are two such factors but there are many wider ones to do with social and political change (gender, sexuality and race issues and the language associated with them) and education.

With attitudes towards language change, I think it’s important to know your history and realise that people have always moaned about how language changes, while others have embraced the changes as part of a natural organic process: progress, if you like!

So, look at the background to things like Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 and Jonathan Swift’s calls to introduce an academy for language. The best places I’ve found to mug up on these have been Melvyn Bragg’s Adventure of English and the BBC series, the Routes of English .

For a critical look at attitudes to language change, your best bet is to read the chapter at the back of your ENA5 resource pack (if you haven't already) which covers Jean Aitchison's approach to others' attitudes (from her book The Language Web). These links created by the late Andrew Moore are very helpful in looking at language change and Aitchison’s views.

If you can get hold of it, David Crystal's new book How Language Works has a good section in it about change and the whole prescriptivist/descriptivist debate called "How Not to Protect Languages".

For more variety you could have a look at Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss and Adrian Beard's Language Change (check chapter list for the one on attitudes).

Londonstani

With all the recent media coverage of Sue Fox's research focusing on the made-up term "Jafaikan" and the Caribbean influence on English slang and youth dialect, it's easy to forget that most of her research started off looking at the Asian influence on Cockney in Tower Hamlets. A recent book by Gautam Malkani called Londonstani is written in what sounds like a form of the Multi Ethnic Youth Dialect that Sue has researched, and it's been widely talked about (a bit like the film Kidulthood) not just for its violent and disturbing plot, but for its grasp of the "real" sounds of speech from the street.

So how does it sound? Here's an extract as quoted in The Guardian's review of the book: "your glasses r so smashed up u can't count? Shud've gone 2 Specsavers, innit. How many a us bredren b here?".

So, does it sound genuine or not? Depends what you hear around you and how successfully you think Malkani has translated this into prose on the page. He's certainly not the first to attempt to convey dialect and accent on the page; as an article by Pete Bunten in the latest E Magazine explains, writers like Charles Dickens and D.H. Lawrence have used regional varieties to flesh out their characters' voices and identities, while more recently Scottish writers Irvine Welsh and James Kelman have used the voices of working class Scots to tell their complicated tales of drug addiction, alcoholism and dead-end lives.

A couple of reviews in The Guardian and Telegraph take differing positions on the novel and are linked here for you to look at. In terms of the usefulness of this for A Level study, ENA5 asks you to look at both change and varieties, so anything on emerging new dialects covers both topic areas, while ENA6 is all about language debates - issues around language that cause discussion or argument - so this could easily be part of that debate. For Lang and Lit students, it's perhaps helpful too to study the ways in which writers try to mimic spoken language in their prose style and the various technique sthey employ to capture the spoken voice.

Gangsta rap is "offensive and horrible"

A report in today's Guardian tells us that "a headteacher in charge of the government's taskforce on school discipline has urged parents and schools to ban children from listening to "offensive and horrible" sexist and racist rap music lyrics".

Whatever you think of the practicalities of stopping people listening to gangsta rap (Do teachers have to enforce a "no hoodies, no hats , no pimpin my hoes" rule in the classroom?), what do you think about the lyrical content of such beautiful gems as "Nothing left to do, but buy some shells for my glock/Why? So I can rob every known dope spot ... Gotta unlock it, and take me up a hostage" or "And what's between your legs is the product/Use it properly/And you'll make dollars, bitch"?

Many argue that the lyrics of this type of rap glorify violence, criminal lifestyles, abuse towards women and minority groups, and generally perpetuate a worldview that is negative and self-defeating. And I tend to agree, to an extent. Much as I liked the rap of my own era (and I'm showing my age here with names like Public Enemy, De La Soul, Paris, The Goats, Hijack and Ice Cube) a lot of the more recent lyrical output of 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg and many others seems to me to celebrate being an idiot. Maybe it's just my age...

But my opinions aside, is there a linguistic focus for all of this? Could we really argue that the words of these songs affect people - especially vulnerable, disadvantaged young boys - into behaving in more extreme and violent ways? The Sapir Whorf hypothesis (or at least the strong version of it, linguistic determinism) would propose that language can change the way we think, while reflectionists might argue that it simply tells us about a society that's going down the plughole.

Many A2 students have looked at the representation of women in rap lyrics as part of their Language Investigation coursework, and others have explored the different styles of language used in lyrics, but how about exploring the themes of violence and abuse, or looking at the connections between language and attitudes/ language and lifestyle choices?

I know the AS exams have only just finished but now's a good time to start thinking about coursework for next year...

You can join the Guardian debate on this story here too.

Good luck!

Good luck to all of you taking ENA1 and ENA3 today. Make sure you have some lunch before you start and don't revise up to the last minute!

Two cheers for PC

For those of you revising for ENA1 Language & Representation, this article by "Teacher of the Year" Philip Beadle has some good stuff to say about PC and attitudes towards it. (And on top of that, I like Phil Beadle - he's got a sound educational philosophy and his teaching is inventive and fun.)

In particular, this paragraph hits on issues around language and disability which some of you have asked for advice about:

Take, for instance, the phrase "Aids victim". During the early 90s, there
was a drive to tag people as "living with HIV", as opposed to being "victims" of
it. There are few, outside the most militant political group, who would argue
with this drive. The word "victim" implies defencelessness and defeat, whereas
"living with" suggests the fat lady hasn't even begun tuning up yet, and that
the person in question is vital, active, getting on with the task of living, and
not the passive recipient of an immediate death sentence.

If you need more advice on ENA1 work, try looking here and here, and do a search using the blog search toolbar at the top of the page using keywords like "political correctness" & "racist language".

Going grrrr can be grrrreat in some conversations

Most of us know that if we're angry it isn't always easy to make our point in a discussion (and research seems to support this), but what about if we're only pretending to be angry?

If we put on an angry face and behave in an angry fashion (without actually losing control) can we get better results in some conversational situations? Research from the British Psychological Society's research digest seems to suggest that such an angry act can get us results.

“Whereas feeling angry has been shown to lead to bad negotiation outcomes, we showed that expressing anger can lead to good negotiation outcomes” said researchers Marwan Sinaceur and Larissa Tiedens.

First they asked 157 students to imagine they were a salesman for a technology company, and to read a fictional account of a negation between themselves and a buyer. Afterwards, the students who read a version in which the buyer got angry agreed to more concessions than the students who read a version in which he stayed calm, but only if they were told beforehand that their business was struggling at the moment.

Could we apply some of these findings to conversation analysis ourselves, or perhaps link it to what we've seen with The Apprentice and the boardroom showdowns at the end of each episode?

Useful for:
ENA3 - Interacting through language

What do we mean by 'words'?

There was an item a few weeks ago about how many separate words there are in English. David Crystal has various suggestions in his Cambridge encyclopedias - and elsewhere - and you can easily find other figures bandied about by other linguists.

But it's not as easy as it might seem to calculate a precise figure. What do we mean by 'words'? Do we include every morphological variant of a root word, with every possible permutation of affixes? Do we just mean 'headword', as lexicographers term them? Some scientific and other specialist glossaries contain thousands, maybe even millions of entries that never make their way into 'English' dictionaries. So beware of easily swallowing stories like: 'English nears its millionth word'; the picture is more complex and multi-faceted than it appears. Here are two links for more nuanced discussion of this fascinating topic:

http://www.slate.com/id/2139611/
Merriam-Webster site on this (a very useful site for exploring in general, btw)
http://www.m-w.com/help/faq/total_words.htm

Simon

Internet gives language change free reign

Discussions about language change often seem to focus on new words and the ways in which words change meaning over time, but what about spelling (or orthography, as we tend to call it with A Level Language)?

A brief look at older texts - from Old English through to Middle English, and even up to Late Modern English - should reveal that spellings have undergone significant changes over time. Some are due to fairly simple typographical conventions of the time - how will smilies like this appear to readers in 20, 50 or 100 years? ;-) - while others seem to change for other reasons, such as particular foreign influences. How about French/Norman "querunto", American "color" or Jamaican "sekkle"?

An article in today's Guardian points the finger at one of the media for spreading changes in orthography: the internet. According to Patrick Barkham, dubious spellings of common expressions and cliches, whose meanings and original forms have become lost in time, are increasingly being disseminated through the internet. Take for example some of these:

"slight of hand" instead of "sleight", "phased by" when it should be "fazed by", "butt naked" instead of the correct "buck naked" and "vocal chords" for "vocal cords."

Many of these are quite baffling and rely on words that have either dropped out of usage or have changed meaning over time, but with the increased speed of communication that the internet offers, the "wrong" spellings seem to spread like wildfire.

But as Catherine Soanes, of Oxford Dictionaries goes on to explain in a pleasingly descriptivist way, "We have to accept spelling is not fixed and can change over the years. You only have to look back 100 years, when the word rhyme was spelled rime. But since then we adopted rhyme as the correct spelling because this is more like the Greek word from which it originally came".

And for this week's Haribo prize, what's the deliberate spelling mistake in this post's title, and what should it be? The first two answers posted as comments below get the prize...

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change