The death of Cockney (part 175)

a cockney geezer, yesterday

Today's Daily Mail provides a feast for those of you who like a bit of doom and gloom in the shape of "English being destroyed by text language" headlines. This time round, texting is not making us stupider (d'oh) or turning us into a nation of chavs, but destroying that loveable old variety, Cockney Rhyming Slang.

The article looks at a recent survey of 2000 people by the Museum of London which suggests that most of them don't encounter much Cockney rhyming slang and would be baffled by terms such as apples and pears for stairs or brown bread for dead (although genuine Cockneys would never use the rhyming part of the term and stick to apples or brown, to confuse the casual listener yet further). It's not really that much of a surprise because, after all, Cockney speakers are and have probably always been a small group, although admittedly one whose influence was greater than their number.

What helps the Mail turn this into a sad tale of prescriptivist woe is not that the dialect is dying a natural death, with its users shuffling off to Romford or drinking too many Britneys and keeling over, but that the good old Cockney dialect is being destroyed by textisms like LOL and OMG. This is the Cockney variety which, if you look back through the decades, has often been damned - by the selfsame mainstream media that now bemoans its loss - for its coarseness, vulgarity and general untrustworthiness. They're having a bubble. A couple of years ago, texting wasn't the threat to Cockney: Multicultural London English was, apparently.

For Language Change students this makes for a great example of a declinism discourse, with some of the "bottom half" - the comments below the story from Daily Mail readers - adding to the sense that this is yet another symptom of a language, a nation, a proud island race in decline. There's not much that doesn't upset some of these commenters: one day it's pasties, the next it's patois. But it's fantastically fertile ground for a bit of Language Discourses analysis...Look there's a Crumbling Castle! And there's an Infectious Disease! OMG, I can even see a Damp Spoon!

Thankfully, the Daily Telegraph takes a slightly more restrained view, quoting the world's favourite linguist, David Crystal who says "Cockney slang was never very widely known as it started as a secret way for people to talk to each other. As soon as the slang became known the Cockney’s stopped using it".

The elevation of Cockney to its place in a theme park of English identity is an odd one. In 1909, S.K.Ratcliffe of the English Association described it as a "debased dialect, which is spreading from our schools and training colleges all over the country", and he added, "in ten years' time the English language will not be worth speaking". Its origins lie in East End criminals developing a language of inclusion among their own (in-group language) and exclusion of outsiders (the out-group), so it was always meant to fox and confuse outsiders and keep the business of the insiders to themselves.

So, why celebrate such a dubious dialect? Will the Daily Mail in thirty years' time be running a headline "Innit dies. Arks is on its last legs. A nation mourns."? I doubt it...

Cockney has become part of a heritage industry, a set of linguistic markers of a passing (or in some cases, passed on to the other side) English identity which some still cling on to. In times of uncertainty over identity - globalisation, mass immigration, economic downturn, social change -  people often hang on to those things that signal tradition. And while RP might be a more prestigious marker of Englishness, Cockney has also developed a place in this theme park because it's associated with more innocent, more certain times.

But, as anyone who has looked at language change knows, these certainties, these notions of a shared and communal language identity are a myth. Language has always had different varieties which have pretty much universally been looked down upon by the ruling classes and their media: Cockney is no exception. Working class varieties like Cockney might well signal higher solidarity than more overtly prestigious forms like RP, and therefore trigger feelings of warmth and nostalgia, but when Cockney was in its prime, the users of it probably wouldn't have been looked on as cuddly old-fashioned figures, but unpleasant and antisocial criminals.

So, perhaps Cockney is on its way out - maybe it's been on its way out for a long time already - but if we look at why it's being mourned we can see that so many other strands of concern about change - not just language change - are apparent.

Edited on 30.03.12 to add this link: Take the Cockney Rhyming Slang quiz here.

Literally the last word on "literally"

For literally gazillions of years pedants have complained that people use language "incorrectly". That is to say they don't use it in quite the same way as the pedants like to use it. And that's fine, because if we didn't have pedants we wouldn't have the tension between progress and conservatism that characterises so much of the history of English language, and our language would literally spiral out of control and become a garbled mishmash of slang, ghetto-speak and missing apostrophes. Or something...

Literally is one of those words that pedants have complained about. Critics argue that the word means "to the letter", so shouldn't be used as a figure of speech. It's a kind of anti-metaphor, if you like. When someone says "When she left me, she literally took a piece of my heart with her" a pedant might jump out of the bushes wagging a finger, responding "But she didn't literally remove part of your heart did she? She didn't actually take a bleeding chunk from your left ventricle and take it away". And you might respond, "Who are you and where did you come from? Put that wagging finger away; it's not even yours".

This piece on the BBC News Magazine's pages offers an enlightening insight into how literally has been used over the years and how it fits into a pattern of semantic shift that we see with many other words. If reading the article itself is too hard and literally going to ruin your day, then have a listen to the interview from Radio 4's Today programme, which is here.

Edited on 19.03.12 to add: Good link here to Polly Curtis in The Guardian discussing this.

Taking a Look at Slang over Time

Professor Julie Coleman's new book, The Life of Slang sounds like a great read. In it (innit? LOL!), she traces the origins of different slang terms and looks at slang's uses in society.

As part of the publicity for the book, she was interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme and you can hear part of it through this link. As you might imagine, some slang terms have had a longer life than most people think, so we find that chav has been knocking around since 1886, to hang out since 1811, and dope has been used to describe illicit drugs since 1872.

One interesting part of the Radio 4 segment is that it relates to arguments about banning slang, so Kathy August (referred to in Playground Prescriptivism) is interviewed about her views on slang and young people's education. Coleman's response produces a nifty quotation that I'm sure ENGA3 students can use in Language Discourses: "It's impossible to stigmatise a style of language without stigmatising the people who use it."

For a quick look at some of the other slang terms Coleman features in her book, have a look at this piece in The Sun.

Multicultural Language Hybrids

It's not just English that absorbs linguistic influences from other cultures and languages. What's happening with German seems to reflect patterns that have been noted in English over the last 20-30 years, where German teens are picking up vocabulary items from Turkish in areas where there is a significant Turkish population and mixing goes on between different ethnic groups. In this report about a study from Pottsdam University, the suggestion is that it's mostly lexical features - a few words - that are picked up by German youths.

So is this similar to Multicultural London English, with a new hybrid language emerging? Or is it more like London (and maybe Birmingham and Liverpool too) in the 1980s when it was more a case of "crossing"? I suspect it's the latter, as there doesn't seem to be quite the same range of lexical, phonological and grammatical features that we see in the research of Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and Jenny Cheshire into MLE (as seen being explained by Paul Kerswill here in a TED lecture).

Click here

We've recently been covering children's acquisition of the sounds of English in AS classes, and I made a passing reference to how very young children can make any sound in any language (like the clicks of Xhosa in South Africa) but gradually tune in to their mother tongue as they grow older.

This fascinating post by Julie Sedivy in Discover magazine tells us a lot more about Xhosa and its clicks but also makes a number of interesting points about how we perceive sounds. Sedivy points out that to an outsider, the clicks of Xhosa sound "a bit like highly-skilled beatboxing, mixing recognizeable speech with what sounds like the clacking of objects striking each other". Of course, to a Xhosa speaker, the sounds are as familiar as t,s, and d are to English speakers.

In terms of children's acquisition of sounds, the article raises some good points to consider. We often treat the phonological part of a child's language development as mostly to do with the production of sounds and patterns of "errors" in those sounds (deletion, consonant cluster reduction, deletion of unstressed syllables, for example), at least I know I do when I teach it. But what about how we hear sounds as children and how we process those sounds and create a mental representation of what they mean?

Sedivy tells us that "your brain cares as much about how sounds function in a language than about their actual physical properties, so the same acoustic input can be interpreted very differently by the brain depending on its role in a language", so when toddlers are listening to speech all around them, they're not just parroting or imitating it, but making sense of how sounds are used, where they appear and what they might mean. It's as much to do with fathoming out meanings as it is to do with trying to replicate the production of the sound.

Mandarin, language of the future?

Well, probably not, if this BBC article is anything to go by. We're moving on to look at World Englishes soon, so this is a timely reminder of some of the reasons why English is spoken so widely around the world and how it has achieved such success.

Toddler talk

Yesterday's Telegraph featured an article about recent research by Leslie Rescorla into children's acquisition of vocabulary in the early years. Rescorla may be familiar to some A level English Language students for her work on acquisition of lexis and semantics and the different categories of over-extension that some children make.

The article takes a look at some of the recent ideas about a child's language environment and how the language used around a child might influence their vocabulary and understanding. It also includes a checklist of some simple words that most children would be using by the time they're 2 years of age.

The 15-year project followed 40 children from privileged backgrounds who were diagnosed as late talkers but were otherwise developing normally.
While most of the children had caught up and developed an average range of vocabulary by four or five they remained slightly behind peers from the same background in vocabulary, grammar and reading throughout their school years, suggesting that their late development of speech had put them at a disadvantage.
The word test devised by Prof Rescorla can be completed in ten minutes and doctors can tell at a glance whether a child's speaking ability is poor for their age.

Personally, I think it discriminates against yokels from Norfolk who would not know many of these, but would probably be able to label several types of tractor.

"Sheffieldish" and more on slang bans

Here's a link to a Sheffield Telegraph article on the recent "slang ban". I would have added it to the last post, but my access to the blog is a bit limited from college.

"This is where moral relativism leads us."

Terence Blacker of The Independent wades unhelpfully into the slang ban row, blaming negative reactions to the proposed "ban" (which didn't really seem to be a ban in the first place) on "moral relativism".

The Sun says

Last night's 10 O'Clock Live show has a really excellent Charlie Brooker poem/polemic (poemic?) about The Sun newspaper, followed by discussion about the language the paper uses. So it's tragic tot, lewd sex act, troubled songbird, trousering the cash, claimed and boasted rather than said, and many others.

They don't do any linguistic analysis on the words themselves, but that's a job for A level students rather than comedians, and there's got to be a language investigation in there somewhere.

You can see it here via 4OD and The Sun section begins at about 5 minutes into the show.

Playground prescriptivism?

A story doing the rounds yesterday suggested that a school in Sheffield was attempting to prevent its students from using slang. It was covered in the local Sheffield Star here, with a reference to one of Sheffield's most famous exports, Sean Bean (aka Boromir , Ned Stark and Sharpe) and in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Guardian.

Like many other arguments about language use, this one has become a bit muddied. In this case, the original story about the school - Sheffield Springs Academy - seemed to focus on slang (which might de defined as a type of extremely informal language used by specific groups of people) and a desire on behalf of the school to show its students that different styles of language suit different situations (what linguists often call the notion of appropriacy). However, the reporting of the story also refers to dialect being banned and regional pronunciations being frowned upon, and that's before you chuck in text speak too.

So what is actually happening here and can schools really control what their students say? The story is very similar to one we featured on this blog a few years ago about a school in Manchester which had banned street slang from its classrooms (covered here and in the Radio 4 programme Mind Your Slanguage which featured interviews with some SFX students) so it's perhaps not a big surprise to find that the head of the academy sponsors behind the Sheffield Springs Academy is the woman who was head teacher at the Manchester Academy when it introduced its ban, none other than Kathy August.

Her argument makes some sort of sense and goes something like this, according to the Telegraph report:

What we want to make sure of is that they are confident in using standard English. Slang doesn't really give the right impression of the person.

Youngsters going to interviews for their first job need to make a good impression so that employers have confidence in them. It's not difficult to get youngster out of the habit of using slang.

Mrs August said it was preferable for pupils to say "thank you" instead of the more colloquial "ta", and "goodbye" rather than "see ya".

The trust said its policy on slang was part of its "street stops at the gate" ethos.

It also asks sixth formers to dress in suits rather than school uniform to encourage professionalism.

Mrs August added: "It is about knowing what language is acceptable between friends and what is required in more formal situations.

We want to give each of our students the best start possible; understanding when it is and is not acceptable to use slang or colloquial language is just one part of this. 

So, according to August, it's all about reinforcing the students' grasp of Standard English and code-switching. The problem is - as several of the reports show - who defines what slang and regional dialect are? The references from parents in the Sheffield Star to teachers disliking regional accents and local dialect terms, and the strange notion brought up by August in the Mail's version of the story that "...when youngsters are talking together they use text speak..."(like B4,H8 and BTW? I doubt it...) suggest that there's much confusion over what actually constitutes slang.

This isn't a new confusion, and it's one that the linguist, Paul Kerswill noted in his response to a report on non-standard English in schools.The problem is that if all non-standard forms of English are lumped together there's a risk that the debate itself loses its focus. Are we talking about text speak in spoken conversations? Really? Or are we talking about the ways in which people from Sheffield might say about and right differently to those in the south? If it's slang then there might be a good argument for explaining how it is viewed or understood (or not) outside particular social groups, but there's also a decent argument put forward by Christopher Howse in today's Telegraph (albeit in his usual verbose style) that language play should be encouraged at school and that slang can be part of that.

No one is really going to argue that students don't need Standard English, but is their grasp of it so shaky that they should be encouraged not to use any other varieties of English that might interfere with the standard form? Is it really that bad? Obviously, the Daily Mail might want us to think it is, because that supports their reactionary, declinist agenda - English is in tatters thanks to immigrants, teachers who don't wear ties and Brussels bureaucrats - a classic "crumbling castle" argument. But are young people so vulnerable to the pernicious influence of non-standard forms that they should be protected from them at school?

What do you think? Comments (in Standard English, please - no text speak or ghetto grammar) are welcome.

New approaches to child language acquisition

http://www.instablogsimages.com

This probably isn't a link to follow if you're still struggling with the basics of child language on your A level course, but it's a really fascinating way of looking at how languages are acquired that offers a challenge to the Chomskyan model of a language acquisition device that's specifically designed to process the rules of grammar.

Construction grammar is a relatively new field of linguistics to me and one I can't claim to fully grasp as yet, but in this blog post, the expert grammarian and ELT specialist, Scott Thornbury takes a look at how construction grammar might be applied to language acquisition.

Instead of looking at language as words and rules (lexis and grammar) as we often do when looking at stages of acquisition and how children move from one word to two words to telegraphic talk, and the rest of it, construction grammar offers a model in which children pick up chunks of language from those they hear around them. It's not a simple parroting of input, as per Skinner's behaviourist model, but a more subtle processing of meaningful units of language that they hear around them.

As Thornbury explains here, language learners are not just picking up words from around them like leaves and sticking them back onto a pre-programmed grammar tree:

Rather than mapping individual words on to a pre-specified grammatical ‘architecture’ (as in a Chomskyan, generative grammar view), speakers construct utterances out of these routinised sequences – the operative word being construct.

It's therefore an active process, one which involves putting together chunks of meaning rather than piecing together individual units and linking them by grammar rules to other bits.  Where this differs markedly from Chomsky's model is that he sees a child's language environment as linguistically impoverished: this is the poverty of the stimulus argument in which a child can't be simply taking in language data from around them and regurgitating it because what they hear is so fragmented and often apparently ungrammatical. Construction grammar offers a different approach which seems to be arguing that a child can make much more sense of this language input and that by hearing enough language they tune in to the patterns that emerge and can start to spot the most frequent structures, using them in their own language soon after.

Thornbury points to the fact that so many of English's phrase and clause structures are repeated patterns, where if you know the first part you can have an educated guess at what the second part will consist of. He points to structures such as:

• take the [noun] for a [noun] (e.g. take the dog for a walk, take the cure for an illness, etc.)
• [prep] the [sing N] of the [sing N] (e.g. on the top of the mountain, in the middle of the night, on the tip of the tongue)

So, perhaps what young children acquiring language hear around them isn't quite the jumbled mess of  random noises and unfinished structures that the poverty of the stimulus argument posits, but a rather regular system that can be picked up more quickly than previously thought.

People first and PC

This link on the excellent Linguistics Research Digest blog takes a look at the "people first" movement in Politically Correct (PC) language reform, which (as Jenny Amos explains) involved a switch in the type of noun phrase being used to label social groups, from pre-modified noun phrases to post-modified noun phrases. Pre-to-the-what-now?

It's quite a simple idea. If you look at a noun phrase such as disabled people, the adjective disabled premodifies the noun people. The people first approach would be to shift the noun to the front and add the modification afterwards in the form of a prepositional phrase, so it becomes people with disabilities. The argument here was that the former version placed emphasis on the condition - and by extension defined the people by their disability - while the latter foregrounded the people themselves, with the disability coming after.Jenny Amos's blog post then looks at some interesting research by Helena Halmari into the use of such terms in news reporting.

PC is clearly about more than just rearranging words; it's primarily about rearranging ways of thinking about different groups in society, and specifically it's about removing offensive and derogatory words from the language. The arguments about PC were recently surveyed in an interesting Observer article by Miranda Sawyer, where she looked at some of the background to the PC movement and its more modern manifestations: Twitter spats, rape "jokes" and the bandying around of terms like mong and sket "for a laugh". If you're looking for material to bolster your ENGA3 Language Discourses understanding, go no further.

Last few tickets...

There are a few more tickets available today for the excellent emagazine English Language conference in March. If you haven't already booked , then phone (020 7359 8080) or email the EMC today to get some reserved.

Click here for more details of the conference.

Child Language research updates and summaries

We've started Language Development in my AS classes and - snow permitting - will carry on with it this week and up to Easter.

Here are some useful links to clips of TV programmes, You Tube presentations and research  papers that should complement your class work on the topic.

One of the most handy links is this You Tube presentation (powerpoint plus handy voiceover) outlining the key arguments about child language.

Then you'll find the impressively-mustachioed Robert Winston presenting this short extract from his series, The Human Body a good intro to the main developmental stages of child language acquisition. 

The Horizon documentary Why Do We Talk which we watched in class a week or two back is split into five separate You Tube clips which can be found here.

Did you shed a little tear at the plight of the lickle baby Zebra Finches? I did, but I weep when I hear Black Eyed Peas lyrics, so ignore me. If you want to find out more about the impressively-consonanted OferTchernichovski and his work on the fluffy birds, have a look here. Or here.

If you're ready for some hard stuff, then go to these clips from the big daddy of language acquisition, the living man-god that is Noam Chomsky. In this clip he talks about his theories of language acqusition (Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device) while in this one (only for the hardcore ravers, it has to be said) he talks in more detail about how his ideas on UG have changed.

I've just found this Patricia Kuhl lecture about the critical period hypothesis on TED, which is a very clear explanation about what goes on in the first year of a child's language development.

If all of that is too much for you (or you are from Ipswich and struggle with anything beyond grunts) then check out this clip of cute twins talking to each other.

Edited to add Kuhl lecture link on 09.02.12

Not loving "love"

There's a piece in The Sun from last week taking a look at Brighton and Hove Council's decision to "ban" sexist terms of address on public transport. Given that Brighton has a Green Party-led council whose politics are progressive and anti-sexist, I'd be a bit sceptical of The Sun's position on this - its track record for inventing tales of "loony left" attacks on free speech  in the 1980s was pretty disgraceful - so I'd advise a bit of research into this before assuming it's all true.

The Daily Mail covers it here in a slightly different, PC Gone Mad, way here.

Whatever the whys and wherefores of this though, it at least gives The Sun a chance to look at regional dialect and how terms of endearment vary from place to place, which has got to be of use to A2 AQA A spec students looking at Language Variation.

Workshop for teachers

The University of Salford is hosting a workshop for English Language teachers in April. Organised by Sue Fox and Heike Pichler, it looks like covering a range of really interesting material for teachers who are keen to keep up with recent developments in spoken language analysis and digital corpora.

More details can be found here, and Jenny Cheshire and Sue Fox's Linguistics Research Digest, which runs regular updates about recent linguistic research, can be found here.

Knowing your leet from your pwned

This link has a look at some internet jargon and helps explain the origins of some of the language on the net. If you're studying Language Change or Language and Technology it should be handy.

Ace DC

Your English Language teacher may well be a snappy dresser, a master of wit, or a pedagogical dynamo who brings light to your otherwise darkened life (Business Studies, Accounting and PE A levels in other words), but does he or she have a beard like David Crystal? She does? Cripes...

Professor David Crystal is one of the biggest cheeses in the world of linguistics and he's speaking at March's emagazine English Language conference in London. To get a taste of the range of his knowledge (and frankly his bare skillage) have a look here on the emagazine conference blog where we've posted some links to some of his TV and lecture performances.

Prescriptivists' piffle versus descriptivists' data

With Language Discourses at the heart of the ENGA3 paper, it's always useful to scour the media to find examples of writers getting themselves worked up about language change or what they see as declining standards. If you've done any work on this topic so far, you'll already know that prescriptivists have always bemoaned changes to the English language but have rarely been successful in stopping its evolution.

And you'll probably already know that most linguists - those who study language - are rarely of a prescriptive mindset. They tend to see their role as describing language, pointing out how it's used and by whom, rather than judging its use as good or bad. That's why we - your English Language teachers - generally tell you to talk about standard and non-standard instead of good or bad. Hark at us telling you what to do: how prescriptive...

This week there are two or three different pieces about changing language and attitudes towards it. Simon Kelner of The Independent writes not one but two articles about things he doesn't like in language: grocer's apostrophes (potatoe's, for example), split infinitives (to prissily prescriptivise, perhaps), Waterstone's dropping its possessive apostrophe, Americanisms, and all the usual suspects. It's a load of old gubbins really and reheats some frankly rather overcooked quibbles about language, most of which get dismissed by proper linguists.

A quick read of Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars or Robert Lane Greene's chapter A Brief History of Sticklers in You Are What You Speak (or better still, a long read of both) will tell you that nearly every prescriptive argument about declining standards can be successfully debunked. There's nothing wrong with splitting infinitives (it's a an old canard based on the misapplication of Latin grammar to English), most of the supposed "Americanisms" moaned about here (for example) are not really from America at all and apostrophes are a recent and rather inconsistent form of punctuation (as David Crystal explains here).

Elsewhere, Sali Tagliamonte, who is a leading light in the field of technology and language, talks some sense about how technologies such as texting create a repertoire for young people to draw upon, rather than necessarily restricting them or dumbing them down. In her interview with the St Catharine Standard, she talks about how young language users switch between language styles depending on their understanding of what's appropriate in a given situation, making the point that "They don't just adapt haphazardly. They adapt systemically".

This is clearly a much more descriptive standpoint and one that is supported by her detailed research in the field, more of which can be found here.You can also watch a clip of Sali Tagliamonte talking about her new book (complete with tinkly electric piano music) here.

The whole prescriptive versus descriptive debate is one that we have covered many times on this blog and one that always has some relevance to the A2 year of the English Language course (be it ENGA3 or ENGB3). If you click on the labels for language discourses and language debates after this post, you can find many of the relevant articles.

Edited on 20.01.12 to correct embarrassing apostrophe error. I blame my teecherz.