Media Texts and Language Interventions updated

A year or two ago, I put up a list of links to articles that might be used as style models or sources of inspiration for the A2 writing coursework part of the AQA A (Language Intervention) and AQA B (Media Text) specifications. This has been updated a few times, thanks to links that colleagues and blog/Twitter people have sent me, but I thought it was probably time to add a few more, so here goes.

If you are a teacher reading this, you might also find this useful for the new AQA English Language A level that starts being taught in September 2015, where Paper 2 has a writing task similar to the media text and intervention.

Again, I'd be delighted to add any others if you want to suggest them, either as comments on this blog post or as tweets via @EngLangBlog.

Opinion pieces

English can absorb this assault from texting (Canadian article)

Isabelle Kerr on silly new words and why they shouldn't be in the dictionary

Fay Schopen complains about young people and language

John McWhorter on “Is Texting Killing English ?”(short answer: no)

Lynne Truss gets angry about grammar

Erin Brenner responds to Lynne Truss

Michael Rosen argues that there’s “no such thing as ‘correct’grammar”

Terence Blacker on why schools should clamp down on slang and ensure Standard English

Michael Rundell asks “What are the correct rules of English?”

David Marsh on arguments about language and The Pedants' Revolt

Harry Ritchie challenges "only one way to speak"

Kyle Chayka asks "Is the Innanet RUINING teh English Language??? ¯\(°_o)/¯"

Geoff Pullum asks "Are grammar nazis ruining the English language?"

Hannah Jane Parkinson on How We Are Judged On Our Accents

Cumberbatch Needs to be More Careful with Words ('coloured' actors and racist language)

Don't Crucify Cumberbatch (the 'coloured' controversy)

Robert Lane Greene on prejudice against accents

Feature articles

Rebecca Holman on ‘Menglish’ (gender and language)

‘Menglish’ in The Daily Mail

Girls are way ahead of the linguistic curve (gender and language innovation)

How 'like' has taken off as a quotative

Britt Peterson on Why We Love the Language Police (grammar and non-standard English)

Ben Zimmer on 'Salty', a "Word with a Promising Future".

Manterruption: the "Secret Plague" for women at work

Heart in the Right Place, Mouth Not...

Benedict Cumberbatch - a famous actor whose face has been likened to that of an otter  - has apologised for causing offence by his inadvertent use of the term 'coloured' to refer to Black people. In an interview (ironically) about opportunities in acting for non-white actors, he dropped the c-bomb (not that one...) when he said, "I think as far as coloured actors go, it gets really different in the UK, and a lot of my friends have had more opportunities here [in America] than in the UK, and that’s something that needs to change." (from The Guardian).

'Coloured' is a strange word and one that causes a degree of confusion to a lot of people. The Civil Rights movement in the USA was often supported by the organisation NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) but in South Africa 'coloured' was a term used to segregate anyone who wasn't white but who wasn't entirely black.  For a lot of older/middle-aged people in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s 'coloured' was often seen as a less stark term than 'black' . Perhaps 'black' was viewed as too dark? This link to a piece on this blog from 2005 might help contextualise it a little.

Interestingly, this piece by Robert Lane Greene on The Economist's language blog also looks at how attitudes to swearing and taboo language have changed over time, including how racial terms have become a more stigmatised form of language while religious and sexual terms now clause less offence. But what it also shows is that as language changes, not everyone can keep up. The language we are brought up with often gets embedded in our mental vocabularies and is harder to shift from even when we know it's probably less appropriate in the modern day.

So, while Benedict Cumberbatch was obviously talking sense about the representation of black people in acting, he may well have offended a few people through his terminology. Having said that, in a time when racist and xenophobic political organisations are talking up the threat of immigration and multiculturalism, is Cumberbatch's well-intentioned but clumsy phrasing as worth getting upset about as some of the vile online postings by various UKIP and Britain First knuckledraggers?

Help with research

If you are an A level English Language teacher, Ian Cushing & Marcello Giovanelli are interested in hearing about the factors that influence your choice of specification for a piece of research they are carrying out.

You can access the survey here.

Oh man!

While sitting at home, feeling sorry for myself with a bout of man-flu, this article about a curious phenomenon called manterrupting popped up on Twitter. Apparently, manterrupting is when males interrupt women in meetings and/or co-opt (or bropropriate*) their ideas as their own.


It's a man-word like these explained here by Stan Carey on the MacMillan Dictionaries blog and makes use of the man- prefix that has become so productive in recent years. So far we've had...

• mansplaining: patronising explanations delivered by men to women of things that women probably already know more about (Urban Dictionary definition here)
• manspreading: sitting on public transport and spreading one's sweaty flannels in order to secure more seat space (Collins Dictionary definition here)
• manscaping: removing unsightly body hair to make oneself more attractive (Oxford Dictionaries definition here)
• manslamming:aggressive pavement action involving a man barging into people (often women) who he believes to be in his way (explained and illustrated in The Daily Telegraph)

But what others can you can come up with? A couple of possible ones suggested on Twitter have been:

manterpreting: (a male way of interpreting a woman's words...although when @sooze8968 suggested this I perhaps did my own manterpretation of it).
manter: (pointless chat amongst men possibly making them both late for whatever)

Any more?


*And I'm also doing just that, because Sally Flower at Colchester was the first person to mention some of these this week. Anyway, I can't help it: I'm a man and it's in my genes. 

Slang archive

Following yesterday's post about other top tips for articles about language, Tony Thorne of King's College London sent this link to a whole range of articles he has gathered on the topic of slang. There's plenty there for anyone studying Language Change and Variation at A2 and lots of good stuff to read. Thanks very much, Tony.

2014 round-up

Just in case you missed them, here are some of my favourite links to articles and stories in the world of language from this year. I've grouped them by broad topic areas linked to the AQA A specification.

If you've got other suggestions or ones that I've obviously missed, please tweet me at @EngLangBlog

Words of the year: Language Change (ENGA3) 
From well jel to mahoosive: new words added to Oxford Dictionaries
Ben Zimmer's word vortex - new words of 2014

Language Change (ENGA3)
Everything is 'awesome' (in the Daily Mail) and done much better here by Lynne Murphy
25 years of LOL
10 slang phrases that sum up their era
War of words: how WW2 shaped language
Looking a bit UKIP: how UKIP has started to become a term of abuse.

Swearing and attitudes to it: Language Discourses (ENGA3)
The sweariest place in Britain?
Coprolalia (or potty mouth syndrome) is one of many excellent (but obviously rude) posts on a new blog dedicated to swearing, Strong Language

Technology and Language: Language and Mode (ENGA1); Language Change (ENGA3)
Why fears about texting are misplaced
Texting improves young people's spelling and grammar

Accents, dialects and varieties: Language Variation (ENGA3)
Dialects from Trinidad to Hawaii shaping the English language
Um or er? Why um is growing

Attitudes to 'good' and 'bad' English: Language Discourses (ENGA3)
Why our language prejudices don't make no sense
A plea for linguistic tolerance
What are the 'correct' rules of English grammar?

Gender and language: Language Variation (ENGA3)
Who interrupts whom in the workplace?
Why young women shouldn't have to talk like young men

Language and Representation (ENGA2)
Why the language of domestic violence matters
Sir and Miss: sexist and depressing

And my least favourite article was (of course) from the Daily Fail and its pathetic coverage of the English A levels (in this terrible article) which prompted this angry blog post.

Thanks for following in 2014

Thanks very much to all of you who have used the blog this year and especially if you've also followed via the @EngLangBlog twitter account or given me top tips for articles and links.

2014 has been a very busy year with work projects, so I've not had as much time to post stuff to the blog. Some of that work will become a bit more obvious in the next year with the new A level English Language specification from AQA starting to be taught in September 2015, something that I've been involved in (along with plenty of other people who actually know what they're doing). In the run-up to the new spec being taught, I'm planning a lot of new material (and to rework older material) to help students and teachers with the new topic areas and approaches, so this should start appearing in April and May.

In the meantime, I'll put together a few round-ups of recent tweets and links before doing a few more ENGA1 and ENGA3-related posts in the Spring and Summer terms. Anyway, all the best for Christmas and the New Year. Peace etc.

emagazine English Language conference 2015

In case you haven't already noticed, emagazine is organising its annual conference for students and teachers of English Language A level and some tickets are still available. It's been such a huge success in previous years that it's now taking place over two days in London. The speakers include some of the best and most knowledgeable experts on language (and a Max from Eastenders-lookalike on the Friday who must have bribed his way onto the bill).

For more details, visit this page and to get tickets go here. See you there (on the Friday, at least).

Technology traumas: language discourses for ENGA3

Just a quick post to flag up this nice clip from the excellent Ben Zimmer talking about technology, language and fears about language change. If you're doing your ENGA4 investigation at the moment (and you blinking well should be if I teach you) this is the sort of thing we'll be spending more time on after Christmas as we start to look in more depth at Language Discourses. Meanwhile, if you're an AQA B teacher, this is the sort of debate that will feature on the new AQA English Language spec that's coming in from September 2015.

F-Bombs for Feminism

With more f-bombs than an English teacher getting a paper cut from a late, U -grade essay, this video from FCKH8 comes with a Parental Advisory sticker as big as your mum. If we'd still been looking for an F in our A-Z of representation, this would have been there.

Fantastic stuff for representation of women, girls and little sparkly princesses in need of rescue...

Potty-Mouthed Princesses Drop F-Bombs for Feminism by FCKH8.com from FCKH8.com on Vimeo.

Representation alphabet

Are you planning your ENGA2 Investigating Representation coursework? Here's an A-Z of ideas for potential topics put together by various members of the English department at Colchester Sixth Form College.

·         A  Amal Alamuddin’s and George Clooney’s  wedding as an event, or Amal Alamuddin as an individual.

·         B  British Muslims: how are Britain’s Muslims represented in the media and how do they feel about it, especially with IS claiming to represent their faith?

·         C  Calypso. What the flip? You’ll be even more gobsmacked when you hear the UKIP Calypso. But have a look at the debate and responses created by this appalling song. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/mike-reads-calypso-car-crash-for-ukip-campaign-9807020.html

·         D  Disability: are some people with disabilities not worth the minimum wage? How are disabled people represented in the media?

·         E  Ebola: coverage of the spread of the disease around Africa, Europe and USA.

·         F  Ferguson (or #Ferguson). The shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer in the US state of Missouri sparked protests and violence. It raises questions about racism, policing and social cohesion http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/michael-brown-shooting

·         G  Gamer Gate: sexism and misogyny in the world of gaming. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/20/gamergate-internet-toughest-game-woman-enemies

·         H  Hong Kong: representation of pro-democracy protests and the government’s  response

·         I   Immigration: a political hot potato but often used to whip up prejudice and resentment to gain votes. How is it viewed by those who move to Britain, those already here and why do people think there are far more immigrants than there really are?

·         J   Jennifer Lawrence: how has JenLaw been represented around the great Fappening scandal?

·         K  Kobane: the Syrian town defended by Kurds against IS. How has the battle been represented? What about the Kurdish women soldiers at the forefront of the fight against IS or the Turkish anarchists who have joined them?

·         L  Linda Bellingham: coverage of the actor’s illness and death

·         M Marriage: gay marriage and equal marriage. An institution under threat or one being redefined for a new century?

·         N  Nigel Farage: how did a privately-educated, millionaire, ex-banker manage to cast himself as an outsider voice to the Westminster establishment?

·         Oscar Pistorius: coverage of the athlete’s rise to fame and the trial for shooting his partner, Reeva Steenkamp.

·         P  Kevin Pietersen: cricket scandals are over the newspapers again with Pietersen’s autobiography bowling googlies at his former team-mates.

·         Q Queer politics: how are gay people responding to discrimination against them? The recent kiss-in at a Sainsbury’s in Brighton and the homophobic abuse suffered by two men on a bus in London highlight different social attitudes towards LGBT people.

·         R  Reeva Steenkamp: how has the woman killed by Oscar Pistorius been represented?

·         S  Sex education: it’s being discussed again by MPs. When should young people get sex education and will it save their lives, protect their health or turn them into leering, sex-crazed perverts?

·         T  Trolls: sad, lonely people in need of a hug (https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/523909281448755200), or dangerous criminals in need of jail?

·         U  UKIP: their political rise and the different perceptions of them. Unprincipled Knuckledragging Incompetent Parasites or angry voice of the silent majority?

·         V  Videogamers: representation of them as a social group

·         W Weather events: storms, hurricanes, climate change and natural disasters

·         X  Xenophobia: with the rise of UKIP and online halfwits like Britain First, why is fear of foreigners fast becoming such a political issue? Does it reflect genuine hatred of different people around the world or a time of insecurity and confusion in British identity?

·         Y  Malala Yusafzai: Nobel Peace Prize winner, girls’ education campaigner and victim of a Taliban shooting

 Z  Z-list celebs: pick any recent vaguely famous non-entity from a reality show and see what’s happened to them in the press since their moment of glory.

What's proper?

Language debates are all over the media again and rarely seem to be too far aware, which is great news if you are an A level English Language student and looking for material to analyse, ideas to glean and references to add to your notes.

This article from Christian Rudder in The Huffington Post offers an analysis of Twitter language in response to the perception that social networking is degrading and/or destroying the English language. It's a common argument and one that has been knocking around for centuries. Ever since there has been technology to communicate - the pencil, the printing press, the mobile phone - there has been someone complaining about its disastrous effects on English.

This article challenges the declinist discourse and suggests that far from dumbing us down and forcing us to communicate very little in 140 characters, Twitter is not that different to other forms of communication:

A team at Arizona State was able to reach beyond word count and length, and into the sentiment and style of the writing, and they found several surprising things: first, Twitter does not change how a person writes. Among the many examples they tracked, if a writer uses “u” for the second person in e-mails or text messages, she will also use it on Twitter. But, likewise, if she generally spells out “you,” she does so every-where -- on Twitter, in texts, in e-mail, and so on. The decision to refer to the first-person singular as "I" or "i" follows the same pattern. That is, a person’s style doesn’t change from medium to medium; there is no “dumbing down.” You write how you write, wherever you write. The linguists also measured Twitter’s lexical density, its proportion of content-carrying words like verbs and nouns, and found it was not only higher than e-mail’s, but was comparable to the writing on Slate, the control used for magazine-level syntax. Everything points to the same conclusion: that Twitter hasn’t so much altered our writing as just gotten it to fit into a smaller place. 

Elsewhere, Ammon Shea, whose new book Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation looks well worth a read, has also written a piece for The Huffington Post, considering what's happened to the meanings of the words that were being worried about a hundred or so years ago. Shea finds that words like awful and talented rarely attract complaint these days, but were viewed by some as being totally unacceptable in the past. Meanings change: get over it, seems to be the key message here.

And if you want to help somebody who is actually researching attitudes to "proper" English for a PhD project, Carmen Ebner is collecting views through this link to her online questionnaire, so please take part and give your views. It's particularly good if you are an A2 English Language student and starting to look at language discourses and attitudes to change and variation as part of your second year work.

Welcome to EngLangBlog

With the new term underway, I thought I'd say welcome to the blog and introduce you to some of its main features.

First of all, the blog is designed to help you with your English Language A level. It's primarily aimed at the AQA A specification (as that's what I mostly teach and if you're a Colchester Sixth Form College student, that's the spec we do with you) but you'll find material here to help with AQA B, WJEC, EdExcel and OCR.

Most of the time, there will be posts on here about language in the news, so these will help you read around the subject and perhaps give you a few interesting angles and examples to get you thinking about different topics. At other times, there are longer posts which are tied to specific exam papers and questions. At exam time, I put up a lot of tips and hints about how to approach particular questions and topics for both AS and A2. There's already a big archive of these from previous years, so if you are looking for exam advice, try those. I'm an AQA examiner and moderator, but obviously I don't know what appears on the papers until you do, so none of this is inside information, just the ramblings of a sad language nerd.

If you've not used the blog before, you might find some of the following features helpful:

Labels

Labels can be found on each post and in a cloud on the right sidebar. If you are looking for all the posts on a particular exam paper, coursework topic or issue, just click on the label and you will be taken to all the posts with that label. So, if you're looking for Language Change, Child Language or Language Discourses, that's where you want to go.

Links

The links bars take you to some good sites for English Language study. Emagazine and Babel are aimed at A level students and are both excellent reads. If you're a Colchester student, get the log-in details from your teachers.

Tweets

The blog's Twitter account @EngLangBlog has lots of links and good ideas from linguists, students and other teachers, so it's a good idea to follow it. I've been posting short news items via Twitter more than the blog recently, so that's where to look for the latest news.

Finally, please contribute your own ideas, either through comments on blog posts or via Twitter. I'm always interested in hearing other points of view, finding out about language stories that I've missed or being shown links to interesting examples of language in use.

Feisty sluts being abrasive

There's been lots of good material in the papers recently about language and gender, so it's useful for anyone thinking of investigations at AS into representation of social groups & individuals.

The Telegraph looks at words which only seem to be used to label or describe women, while The Guardian has its own take on the issue. Fast Company also has a look at the ways in which language is used differently for men and women in their performance reviews, with abrasive being used to describe women much more than men.

Elsewhere, the discussion about what slut and sluttish mean - or has meant in the past - is picked up in The Guardian.

ENGA3 - making your examiner happy

It's just one day until ENGA3, so here's a quick post to wish you luck and to offer a few suggestions to make your examiner look upon you favourably.

Quote helpfully 
You should be using quotations from the texts you're analysing in your answers, but make sure they're helpful quotations. What's the difference between 1 and 2 below?

1. The writer uses the noun phrase "the foul degradation of our language continues apace" to support his prescriptive view of language change.
2. The writer uses the noun phrase "the foul degradation of our language continues apace" to support his prescriptive view of language change.

In short, 1 is wrong and 2 is right. That's because the quote used in 1 isn't actually a noun phrase, but a whole simple sentence/independent clause, while the quote in 2 actually specifies which bit is the noun phrase. I don't doubt that the person answering in the first one knows what they mean, but they're not making it easy for the examiner to give them marks.

Use examples

It's good to know stuff, but it's even better to show you know stuff. While that's a good bit of advice for the exam tomorrow, it might not be great life advice: no one likes a know-it-all, so forget this after tomorrow. Right? Examples are important to developing arguments and showing a grasp of a topic. If a question on language change asks you about how and why language changes, the big picture is obviously very important, but the examples can be really significant too. Think about going off the beaten track to find a few examples of neologisms (try here for starters), or here for some discussion of South African English or here for Australian English. If everyone uses the same revision guides and textbook (however brilliant the latter might be, ahem) then the examiners will get used to them. Surprise them with a few exciting and original gems.

Keep up with the times, daddio

As with the advice on examples, try to find some recent news stories about language to help you offer a bit of originality and range. This may reflect poorly on my sad and empty life, but I was excited and delighted to read an answer a couple of years ago in which the student made reference to a recent news report on the apparent demise of the Queen's English Society. This was particularly good as the question on Language Discourses that year used extracts from the QES website. So, what news stories have there been recently? Maybe you could have a look at a few of these and see if you can find some interesting angles.

Selfie

Slang and dialect bans

Rising intonation and career prospects

Young people and texting

Menglish?

Anyway, that's it for revision tips for ENGA3 for this year. Good luck in the exam.

ENGA3 June 2014 - revision tips part 5

Today's tediously titled top tips will focus on analytical frameworks for ENGA3, in particular the Section B Language Discourses question.

As I was saying in yesterday's post about Section B, the key difference between the two sections on the paper is that Section A deals with language as it's actually used - in different times, different places and by different people - while Section B deals with language as something to be discussed, argued about and debated. So, in terms of analysis, you can apply many of the same frameworks - word, phrase, clause and discourse analysis - to texts in both sections, but Section B really lends itself to a Critical Discourse Analysis approach.


In effect, this means that you're using language analysis to work out the ideological position a text producer is taking in discussing a language issue. So, this could mean you're using language analysis to work out how a writer is using the following:

• pronouns to address the reader and position him/herself in relation to the ideal reader (direct 2nd person address, inclusive 1st person plural, maybe some synthetic personalisation)
• lexical formality to suggest closeness to the ideal reader/distance and expertise
• modality to suggest elements of certainty or doubt, sometimes in the form of modal verbs, but also modal adverbs

Norman Fairclough: the daddy of Critical Discourse Analysis

For example - and I've shamelessly nicked this from an article I did for emagazine last year - with last January's question on the supposed Americanisation of English, Matthew Engel positioned himself in particular ways:

...in an article for The Daily Mail on Americanisms entering English, the columnist Matthew Engel, seems to humbly and self-mockingly position himself as out of touch by saying “Old buffers like me have always complained about the process, and we have always been defeated”. Should we take such a move at face value? Perhaps not. Engel goes on in the article to stridently berate the UK for adopting what he calls “ugly Americanisms”: “Nowadays, people have no idea where American ends and English begins. And that's a disaster for our national self-esteem. We are in danger of subordinating our language to someone else's - and with it large aspects of British life”. That doesn’t sound too much like the stance of a man who’s labelled himself an “old buffer”, but the words of a man who feels he’s still got battles to fight and wars to win (if not, home-runs to hit). His self-effacing positioning earlier on helps him appeal to his reader as a gentle, even rather defeated and pessimistic, sort of character, which his subsequent warnings and call to arms belie.

If you're still working on revision for this exam, you could do worse than look back through a few of the texts we've flagged up as being of Language Discourses interest and think about how you could analyse short chunks of them to see how the writers are positioning themselves through their language choices and how they're representing the particular language topic.

For example, this article by Lindsay Johns is fantastic for a bit of analysis, not only for the way he presents and positions himself but in the way he presents language to us as "an incredibly rich inheritance": a noun phrase that casts language as like a solid object passed unchanging from generation to generation. Is that the reality? Well, you might argue that it changes all the time and isn't something that is the gift of one person to give to another but something we should all share and contribute to.

In the simple sentence containing this phrase ("The English language is an incredibly rich inheritance.") there's no modality to suggest doubt, only certainty. This is the kind of analysis that can really help you in the first bullet point for Section B, because it links the AO1 language detail (words, phrases & sentences in this case) to the AO3 interpretation of meaning and discussion of representation.

There are plenty of good articles to practise this approach on, so have a look through the links here for a few examples.

Despicable Minecraft Minions in the Nether

And another quick link to a BBC Radio 4 Today clip about the changing language of children. Here, the OUP language expert Sam Armstrong and comedian & writer Charlie Higson discuss the influence of popular culture and video gaming on young people's language.

While the presenter is keen to get them moaning about young children using terms like minion, nether, LOL and OMG, the experts are good at seeing the benefits to young people of new forms of language and their ability to code-switch. Take that, Radio 4 curmudgeons!

Nice stuff on lexis, morphology, word formation processes and the joys of technology, too.

Beyond literally

Just a quick link to a potential Language Discourses argument about the use of literally and beyond (as in "It was beyond awful") from Radio 4's Today programme.

Warning! For listeners of a sensitive disposition and sound mind, Simon Heffer is featured.

ENGA3 June 2014 - revision tips part 4

To carry on the boring naming convention established earlier this week, this is part 4 of your ENGA3 June 2014 revision tips. So far we have looked at a bit of Section A Change and a bit of Section A variation, so now it's time for Section B Discourses.

One of the first things to remember is that Section B is different from Section A. In Section A the texts are based on language in use (language being used in different times and in different varieties) but in Section B the texts are about language. They will raise questions around how people feel about language and the way it changes and varies from time to time and person to person.

Last year's question was on Language and Gender, setting two extracts from a text which gave a very simplistic, difference model-style, interpretation of how women and men talk. It was there as a starting point for discussion, a springboard for offering a critique of such reductive models. If you 'd read Deborah Cameron's Myth of Mars and Venus, you'd have been laughing...

Back in January it was a question about American English and attitudes towards it. Again, the main text was provocative in its prescriptive outlook, giving students who knew their stuff a chance to argue against the author's anti-American views.

This time, it could be anything. All Change and Variation topics are fair game for this question, so make sure you have revised areas such as the following:

• political correctness and language change: how "change from above" is implemented, theorised about and (sometimes) resisted
• attitudes to different accents and dialects: the views people often have about different regional, social and national varieties
• views about technology and language change: how people feel about social media and texting's influences upon language use
• arguments about standard and non-standard English: what people say about slang, non-standard grammar and the social consequences of using non-standard forms

Of course, there could be plenty of others and we've covered a lot on this blog. Click here for all posts tagged as being to do with Language Discourses and you'll find plenty to mug up on.

The next post will offer a bit more focus on analytical frameworks for this question.

ENGA3 June 2014 - revision tips part 3

So... here's a post to help you revise for ENGA3 Section A Language Variation. And if you're wondering why I'm starting this post with so, starting everything with so is apparently undergoing a boom. Just look here for something on this from 2010 and here for something even more recent.

And how is this relevant to your ENGA3 exam? Well, the questions on Language Variation don't have to be about regional or national variation - or even variation according to class, ethnicity or gender - as they have been in the last few years; they can also be about the ways in which language varies in other ways, like rising intonation (uptalk or HRT), the use of vocal fry or even something like so, or innit, or this is me. All of these are recent variations in the ways people use language to communicate and what's interesting about them is that they represent the intersection between so many different factors.

We're no longer in a world of language study where we say that x speaks y because she's z, but that x speaks y in one situation because she's sometimes like z, but often like a, b or c, but might also want to sound a bit like d, e or f. But never u, k, i  or p. So...in many ways, with Language Variation, what makes a good answer is an awareness that people don't just use language because of some accident of birth (born male/female, white/black/Asian, to poor/rich parents in Birmingham/Bermondsey/Jaywick) but that language identity is so much more fluid. Good answers to questions on Language Variation will always acknowledge this.

There'll be more on Language Variation tomorrow, including the topic as a Language Discourses question for Section B.