"Thanks, no problem, pleasure, don't mention it, thanks"

I once heard that how someone treats a waiter can say a lot about their character. What about the way a waiter responds? Researcher Larssyn Rüegg thinks that there may be differences in how waiters respond to their customers’ thanks, based on the kind of restaurant they are in.

While previous research has looked into how various languages may differ in this pragmatic function of the thanks response, none so far has looked into how thanks response might vary within a single language. Rüegg's research is based in part on a previous work by Klaus Schneider who typified different forms of thanks responses. An example is the welcome type which include a spoken phrase such as 'you're welcome', or even just 'welcome'. Other types include okay, anytime, no problem, pleasure, don't mention it, thanks, yeah, sure, and don't worry about it. Rüegg extends this study by asking what influences these types of response. She identifies two potential factors: socio-economic setting and the type of favor.

It is strongly supported by research that service staff tend to select a style of speech deemed appropriate to their clientele, so their speech would therefore reflect social stratification. Based on this, Rüegg decided to use a corpus of naturally occurring talk in restaurants of different price ranges to exemplify different socio-economic settings. This corpus, the Los Angeles Restaurant Corpus (LARC) contains three categories, LARC-up, LARC-mid, and LARC-low, each reflecting their price range.

The first finding from this study is as we would expect: thanks responses in LARC-up and LARC-mid were 50% more frequent than that of LARC-low. Yet, even the frequency of thanks responses in LARC-up and LARC-mid are quite low, with expressions of thanks being responded to less than 25% of the time.

The form of thanks responses also differs across the socio-economic categories. For example, the most common response types in LARC-up and LARC-mid, such as welcome and thank you, are not found in LARC-low. Furthermore, customers in the LARC-low restaurants use thanks responses that are not present in both LARC-up and LARC-mid, such as yeah, and absolutely. Interestingly, LARC-mid display the most variation in types of thanks responses.

The type of act which waiters are thanked for shows distinctive patterns as well. A non-verbal service act elicits the most thanks responses in LARC-up and LARC-mid. Such acts include clearing or setting the table, or perhaps bringing the bill. Interestingly, such acts never elicit a thanks response in LARC-low. Enquiries by the service staff about the guests' well-being do not elicit a thanks response in LARC-low either. Serving food or drinks is correlated with socio-economic setting, with customers in LARC-up giving the most thanks responses, and those in LARC-low the least. On the other hand, verbal offers of service such as Do you need more wine? Anything else? more consistently generate thanks responses across all categories.

Through this research, we can see that thanks responses in English are not very frequent on the whole. This is in contrast to some other languages. In addition, the sensitivity of thanks responses to socio-economic setting suggest that they are a subtle form of cultural encoding, with common responses in LARC-up and LARC-mid restaurants possibly signalling formality. Furthermore, thanks responses do not appear to be very standardized, with a wide range of forms being used, especially in LARC-mid and LARC-low. The fact that the type of service performed elicits differing thanks responses across the different socio-economic settings reinforces the sense that these small linguistic acts are actually a rich form of interactional management and cultural signalling.

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Rüegg, Larssyn. 2014. Thanks responses in three socio-economiuc settings: A variational pragmatics approach. Journal of Pragmatics 71: 17-30

doi. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.07.005

This summary was written by Darren Hum Chong Kai 

‘Oh gurl, you Sassy’

‘Slay’, ‘yaas kween’, ‘squad’ – if you’re a keen social media, you might be familiar with some of these words. Originally from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) – a variety of English spoken by some Black Americans – these terms have quickly become part of the internet grammar. But, how and why have these terms entered our lexicon and what does the use of AAVE in internet communication mean? This and other questions are examined by Christian Ilbury in his recent paper.

Recent sociolinguistic work has often used social media data to examine patterns of written variation – such as whether you spell the word working as <working> or <workin> - in relation to the distribution of the spoken language feature. An example of this is Grieve’s recent paper which we discuss in detail in a previous post. In that paper he uses social media data to explore lexical (i.e., words) variation across different areas of the UK. This work demonstrates the enormous potential of using social media data to explore general patterns of accent variation. However, whilst these approaches appear promising, Ilbury suggests that these analyses often miss a fundamental quality of online interaction: That users often use elements of language that are not part of their own speech for certain purposes, such as to adopt a different identity or signal that the message is humorous.

To investigate this issue, Ilbury turns to tweets from gay men in the UK to examine the ways in which this community use elements of African American Vernacular English. He argues that the gay community in the UK are well suited to examining this phenomenon because aspects of AAVE feature prominently in mainstream gay culture and form much of contemporary gay slang. For instance, drag queens in the UK frequently use aspects of AAVE such as copula absence as in ‘she going’ for ‘she is going’ or the use of completive done as in ‘she done used all the good ones’ in their performance. Turning to Twitter, he extracted 15,804 tweets from the timelines of 10 self-identifying gay men who reside in the UK and trawled through their tweets to identify features that are typically associated with AAVE.

His analysis shows that several features characteristic of AAVE are widespread in the gay men’s tweets. This includes lexical features, including words such as ‘slay’, ‘yaas’, and ‘y’all’; the representation of sound features such as ‘dat’ for ‘that’, ‘ma’ for ‘my, as well as several grammatical features such as copula absence in ‘you nasty’ for ‘you are nasty’ and demonstrative them as in ‘working them boots’.

He argues that the appearance of these features can’t be accounted for by the men trying to represent their own dialect since they are likely to speak a variety of British English that is very different to AAVE. This is in contrast to Grieve’s analysis where the users appear to be representing aspects of their own dialect. This suggests that the men in Ilbury’s study are not attempting to represent their own voices but are rather using elements of AAVE to adopt or perform an altogether different identity.

To investigate what this identity may be, Ilbury looks to popular memes to see how African Americans and AAVE are represented in digital contexts. This includes exploring two memes that reference aspects of AAVE. The first refers to Kimberly ‘Sweet Brown’ Wilkins and the second is entitled the ‘strong independent Black woman who don't need no man’.

'I am a strong independent Black woman who don't need no man' meme (L) &
Kimberly 'Sweet Brown' Wilkins 'Ain't nobody got time for that meme' (R)

He argues that these memes feed into ideological and stereotypical representations of African American women as ‘sassy’. However, this imagery is not new. African American women have frequently been depicted as ‘fierce’ or ‘sassy’, even in very old media representations of this community. These representations are obviously very problematic since they are based on racialised and essentialised ideas about the personal qualities of African American women.

Returning to the Twitter data, Ilbury argues that these representations are helpful in explaining why the men are using features of AAVE. He suggests that it is exactly that this ‘sassy’ meaning that the men are ‘activating’ by using components of AAVE. In other words, the men appropriate aspects of AAVE to perform an identity that is non-local and to evoke the essentialised associations of that style to present themselves as ‘sassy’ – a quality that has become appreciated in mainstream UK gay culture. He argues that they are not attempting to present themselves as ‘Black women’ but are rather using features of AAVE to appropriate the associations of that variety and perform a gay identity that he refers to as the ‘Sassy Queen’ – where ‘Queen’ is a gay slang term that refers to an effeminate gay man.

Such types of language play, Ilbury argues, are particularly useful in contexts where there is some threat that the user may be read as rude or direct, such as disagreements. In these contexts, the use of this style allows the user to avoid the negative outcomes of the disagreement because the receiver is aware that the user is performing a style that is inauthentic. 

So, whilst social media can tell us a lot about dialectal variation (e.g., Grieve – previous post), it is important to acknowledge that some users will appropriate aspects of other linguistic varieties to perform other identities and utilise the meanings associated with that variety. What users do with that style depends on how it is used in interactions and may differ from community to community.

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Ilbury, Christian (Online First/2019) “Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE. Journal of Sociolinguistics.

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12366

Authenticity in the Hood

Whether it’s in friends, designer handbags, or website security, one quality people always want is authenticity. Their fake counterparts are shoddy at best and damaging at worst, whether that be for your emotional health, your belongings, or the contents of your bank account.

The music is real, even if the wool on the collar is not.

In a recent paper, Pia Pichler and Nathanael Williams look specifically at the way identity is authenticated by four young men from South London. Nathanael was one of these four men, and he recorded over five hours of conversation between him and the three others. The conversation covered a range of topics, including class, race, language, fatherhood, and the US; however, the focus of this research specifically covered their discussion of hip-hop.

In order to investigate the links between identity and authenticity, Pichler and Williams draw on Silverstein’s “cultural concepts”, which describe people’s use of linguistic elements that do not have a straightforward interpretation. In order to access the meaning of those elements, you need to be part of a shared cultural sphere with the person who is using them. One example they give is that of a wine connoisseur, who uses certain terms to describe wine which might otherwise mean something different. Using these terms to convey these cultural meanings is therefore a way to indicate your affiliation with that sphere, and make it a part of your identity.

In the conversation that Nathaniel analysed, the four men frequently positioned authentic aspects of hip-hop culture against inauthentic intruders. One example is during a discussion of World Star Hip Hop, a website which features regular content about the genre, from both contributors and users. One of the men, Les, was complaining about some girls fighting on the website, specifically referring to them as “white girls from The Hills”. “The Hills” was a series that focused on the lives of white, upper-middle class women in Los Angeles; by referencing them, Les positions them against the working class and non-white culture of the website. The men also reference cultural concepts within the UK to position things. For example, Les also complains about white kids from Oxford or Cambridge proffering extended opinions on hip-hop. Given the reputation of Oxford and Cambridge as wealthy university towns, this indexes the white person he is complaining about to a middle-class background that is at odds with his supposed knowledge about a predominantly black and working-class genre. This therefore renders the person and their opinions on the best hip-hop artists as inauthentic.

Pichler and Williams also note linguistic features used by the men that are just as important to the construction of their identities. For example, when discussing his brother’s membership in a South London gang, Les says dey and dem as opposed to they and them – a feature known as DH-stopping. He also uses yout and bruv; while the use of such lexical items is not specific to the Englishes typically spoken in hip-hop, they still index an authentic background, as they are features of MLE, or Multicultural London English. As a dialect usually spoken by working class people, often of colour, in inner-city London, it is not at odds with hip-hop culture, which often draws on local dialects.

These are just some of the ways in which the participants authenticated themselves. Now consider the conversations that you have – how do you position things against one another, and what features do you use if and when you do so? You may be doing the exact same thing.

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Pichler, P., & Williams, N. (2016). Hipsters in the hood: Authenticating indexicalities in young men's hip-hop talk. Language in Society 45(4): 557-581.

This summary was written by Marina Merryweather

A be’er way to analyse t-glottaling?

Most people are familiar with the concept of t-glottaling, that is to say the replacement of /t/ with a glottal stop in a word. Using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a word such as better may be represented as either [betə] if pronounced with an audible [t], or [beʔə] if pronounced with a glottal stop. Frequently, the glottal stop pronunciation is also represented as be’er. T-glottaling, once (and still by some) considered a stigmatized feature of speech, is now widespread in Britain and is generally perceived as being stereotypical of British urban speech (although it is by no means confined to urban areas).

The replacement of /t/ with a glottal stop has been the subject of investigation by many sociolinguists in different parts of Britain and these studies have generally agreed that t-glottaling is most likely to occur in certain contexts. Within different social settings, speakers use t-glottaling more in informal styles of speech than when using a more formal style of speech and, generally speaking, you might expect to hear more t-glottaling from speakers lower down the social scale. T-glottaling is also associated more with younger speakers than with older speakers, an indication that this is a feature of language change which is still in progress. In addition to these social constraints on the use of t-glottaling, there are also linguistic contexts which are more likely to trigger its use.  For example, t-glottaling is more likely to occur word-finally, in a word such as bit, than in word-medial position, in a word such as bitter. In word-final position, t-glottaling also follows a pattern in that it occurs most frequently when it is followed by a consonant (put down), less so when it occurs before a pause (stay put) and least of all when it is followed by a vowel (put off).

Researcher Erik Schleef goes a step further in his analysis of t-glottaling. He focuses on t-glottaling among adolescents in London and Edinburgh and finds that although t-glottaling follows the patterns discussed above in both locations, his results show that the Edinburgh teenagers use more t-glottaling overall than the London teenagers. This may come as somewhat of a surprise as t-glottaling is often associated with London speech but, as Schleef points out, the phenomenon actually seems to have had a longer history in Scotland. Schleef also finds differences between the two locations in the teenagers’ use of word-medial /t/ when the /t/ occurs before a vowel (as in the word bitter), which is the context where t-glottaling is least likely to occur according to most studies. In London t-glottaling was most likely to occur before a consonant word-medially but in Edinburgh t-glottaling was just as likely to occur before either vowels or consonants.

Schleef also examines whether the use of t-glottaling is influenced by the grammatical category of words and finds that adjectives and nouns disfavour t-glottaling whereas function words (e.g. prepositions and pronouns), and both progressive and past participle forms of verbs (e.g. waiting, waited) tend to favour glottal replacement. On closer examination, Schleef suggests that progressives and past participles are likely to show high rates of t-glottaling because /t/ appears in word-final position of the root word (in this example, wait) which is a context that attracts high rates of glottal replacement.

Lexical frequency was also investigated and may also trigger the use of t-glottaling. Schleef found that in both locations more frequent words favoured glottal replacement when the /t/ occurred in word-medial position and in London this was also the case for word-final position. In Edinburgh, Schleef also found that words of four or five syllables favoured glottal replacement.

What this research indicates is that the use of glottal replacement may be affected by more than just phonological factors, as has been assumed in many previous studies. It provides a framework for the way forward for future studies of this phenomenon.

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Schleef, E. (2013). Glottal replacement of /t/ in two British capitals: Effects of word frequency and morphological compositionality. Language Variation and Change 25: 201-223.

Doi: 10.1017/S095439451000094

This summary was written by Sue Fox

R you an Arsenal supporter?

Ahsenal or Arsenal? 

Did you know that being a football fan can affect your pronunciation? This is what Jessica Love and Abby Walker discovered from their interviews with fans of English Premier League and American football.

They interviewed 20 male soccer fans at a pub in Columbus Ohio showing live screenings of English soccer matches. During the first part of the interview they asked open ended questions such as  ‘please share a happy memory about your favourite team’; in the second half of the interview they asked participants to read aloud and briefly comment on specific English and American football terms such as Arsenal or Blackburn Rovers, Pittsburgh Steelers or Chicago Bears. Nine of the participants spoke standard British English, had been born and raised in England and had been in the US for at least two years. The other eleven participants had been born and raised in the US and had all been exposed to British English either through having British friends or colleagues or by regularly watching broadcasts of English Premier League football. Most of the 20 participants were fans of both English and American football.

The researchers focused on one of the most striking differences between British and American standard English – the pronunciation of /r/ in words like cart or, more importantly here, in the first syllable of Arsenal or the last syllable of Pittsburgh. The interviews yielded 2369 words such as this, where speakers of standard American English, but not speakers of Standard British English, would be more likely to pronounce an /r/. Importantly, although we tend to think of ‘r’ as either present or absent, fine-grained phonetic analysis shows that the degree of constriction that produces /r/ is actually a continuous measure. This allowed the researchers to measure meaningful degrees of constriction resulting in pronunciations that were more or less /r/ like, even though listeners may not easily detect the differences.

As you might expect, the biggest effect on whether an /r/ was pronounced was nationality: the American speakers produced more /r/ like pronunciations overall. However, all speakers, whether or not they were American, produced more /r/ like pronunciations when they were talking about American football than when they were talking about English Premier League. In other words, they

shifted towards the dialect they associated with the sport.

More detailed statistical analysis showed that American speakers shifted only in the second part of the interview, when they were reading aloud and briefly commenting on a specific sports-related term. The English speakers shifted more systematically, in both parts of the interview. Perhaps this simply reflects exposure to the dialects: the English speakers were currently living in the US, and it was American speakers with the most exposure to British English who had the largest shift when talking about English football.

However, Love and Walker argue that identity may be a further relevant factor. They claim that their participants were emotionally invested in the sports teams they follow: being an Arsenal Gunner or an Ohio State Buckeye, they say, is part of a sports’ fan’s identity, just like gender, ethnicity or nationality. Perhaps this accounts for the finding that the British speakers who were fans of both American and English football produced more /r/like pronunciations overall and had the largest shifts between less/r/like and more /r/like pronunciations: in other words, they were changing identities when they talked about American football or English football, along with changing their pronunciation of /r/. One speaker who was a staunch fan of the Gunners but not of any American football team did not shift his pronunciation of /r/ at all.

The researchers point out that to test whether identity as a sports fan is really relevant, we would need to interview people about a different topic. Would a conversation about the British Monarchy, they ask, be as effective in eliciting a shift towards British English as a conversation about a favourite Premier League soccer team?

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Love, Jessica and Walker, Abby (2012) Football versus football: Effect of topic on /r/ realization in American and English sports fans. Language and Speech. Prepublished 11 September 2012.

doi 10.1177/0023830912453132

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

‘Throve’ and ‘dove’ or ‘thrived’ and ‘dived’? Let’s call the whole thing off!

At first, trying to explain the formation of the past tense in English may seem simple – you just add –-ed, don’t you? So that walk becomes walked and help becomes helped, right?  Correct! ... for ‘regular’ verbs.  Unfortunately, there are also many ‘irregular’ verbs like eat (ate) and stand (stood) that do not easily fit into this pattern.  In a logical world, we would expect language to regularize over time and this is true of some verbs – helped was hulpon in Old English. However, some regular past tense forms have actually become irregular – for example, mean > meant.

Lieselotte Anderwald investigated this phenomenon in British and American English.  These two varieties have developed their own national features and peculiarities over time and Anderwald was curious to see if this had happened with irregular past tense forms.  She concentrated on three verbs which have been recorded in both regular and irregular forms.  These are throve vs. thrived, dove vs. dived and plead vs. pled.  She searched a digital database or ‘corpus’ of 400 million American English words called Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) to find occurrences of these irregular past tense forms from as far back as 1810. She also searched the British National Corpus (BNC), containing over 100 million words from British English so that she could compare her findings. Then, she consulted her own Collection of Nineteenth-Century Grammars (CNG), containing 258 British and North American Grammar Books published during the 19^th century, to see if linguists were recommending a particular usage of these verb forms.

Although throve was the main past tense form used during the nineteeth century, it declined rapidly in use from 1910 onwards and seems to have regularized so that American users now only use thrived.  However, British English still uses throve at times.  American English appears to be leading British English by several decades in this regularization process.  In a completely opposite way, the irregular form dove is becoming more irregular in American English.  In fact, dove is used as much as dived in modern American usage today (50% of the time), unlike in British English where it is used just 1% of the time. The irregular form pled also seems to be a new form which has emerged during the twentieth century in American English, although in both varieties it is used very infrequently and mainly in legal contexts.

With this data in mind, Anderwald consulted the CNG.  In the case of thrived vs. throve the American  nineteenth century grammars permitted a lot of variation in usage and started to endorse thrived from the middle of the century, whereas the British Grammars appeared to strongly favour the use of throve. It is hard to know whether these American Grammars were just describing what they observed happening to this verb form or whether their recommendations were in some way influential in the change actually taking place.  Dove was rarely acknowledged as an irregular verb in any of the grammars consulted and dived was the only form accepted.  This is interesting considering how widely used it now is in American English and its lack of acknowledgment in grammars does not seem to have influenced the emergence of this irregular form.  Pled was only mentioned in twelve grammar books, ten of them from America and just two from Britain.  There was a rise in its inclusion in verb tables in  grammars of the 1860s, so that children would have learnt plead-pled-pled by heart.  Looking at her data from COHA, Anderwald noticed that there was a small rise in usage of pled in the 1870s which may have been caused by the generation of 1860 using it in their adult writing: a very small example of prescriptive influence maybe?  If this is so, it is probably because plead was (and is) so infrequent that users needed to consult a grammar book, whereas a more frequently used word is much better entrenched in the memory and therefore perhaps less influenced by grammarians. 

The differences Anderwald found between these changing irregular forms shows how two varieties of the same language can grow, develop and change in different ways. This is what makes language an integral part of a national character and grammarians may only minimally affect this.  Language will develop in its own way and won’t be restrained by rules…in fact sometimes it will even break them – obviously what throve throve to do!

Anderwald, Lieselotte (2013) Natural language change or prescriptive influence? Throve, dove, pled, drug and snuck in 19th-century American English. English World-Wide 34:2 (2013), 146–176.

doi 10.1075/eww.34.2.02

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

To Split or to Not Split?: The Split Infinitive Past and Present

To be or not to be?
OR
To be or to not be?

There are so many opinions about how to ‘properly’ use language (just think of the debate that the word scone can incite!).  One grammatical structure that has caused a lot of controversy over time is the split infinitive.  The infinitive is the root part of a verb and in English this is written as to + verb (e.g. to walk, to run, to understand, to think, etc.).  More prescriptive grammarians feel that it is not acceptable to split the to and the verb, for example with an adverb, such as to fully understand or with the word not, as in to not allow; in fact many prescriptive grammarians have gone as far as to forbid this practice entirely (as opposed to to entirely forbid this practice’, notice!).

The first recorded instance of a strong aversion to the structure appeared in an anonymous letter to the editor of the New England Magazine in 1834, signed by ‘P.’ P explains that s/he doesn’t know of any rules against the split infinitive but dislikes it because it is only used by ‘uneducated persons’ and in ‘newspapers where the editors have not had the advantage of a good education.’  This idea that infinitives should not be split continues to the present day with The Cambridge Guide to English Usage stating ‘Don’t split an infinitive if the result is an inelegant sentence’ as recently as 2004.

Moises D. Perales-Escudero decided to research how the split infinitive was actually being used in modern American English, as opposed to how grammarians feel it should be used.  To do this he used the Corpus of American English or ‘COCA’ which is an online bank of 385 million words.  He investigated the use of the structure in both spoken and written language situations (=registers) and the texts he studied covered the years from 1990 to 2008. 

When he studied the to not vs. not to structure it very quickly became clear that to not is almost never the preferred form, with not to being used much more frequently in all registers.  Although to not is gradually increasing in use, speakers still prefer the not to combination, which adheres to traditional prescriptive views.

When he began to focus on the to + adverb + verb structure, nevertheless, some more interesting patterns emerged, particularly with regards to how split infinitives are used in certain registers.  We might assume that split infinitives would most often be used in spoken language, due to its more informal and less rigid nature and Escudero-Perales did indeed find that some examples, such as to just + verb’, to really + verb and to actually + verb are much more common in spoken registers.  On the other hand, he also found that other examples, such as to effectively + verb and to better + verb, showed strong associations with written academic registers.  In fact, the split infinitive that was used with most frequency in the COCA was to better understand and it was mainly used in the written academic register, which we would probably perceive as the most rigid with regards to language rules.  However, it seems that it is this particular register which has given rise to its own split infinitive forms, especially those made with to better and to effectively. Perales-Escudero suggests that this could be because academics naturally try to achieve better understandings of phenomena or situations and this is reflected in their language – In other words, it makes clearer sense to keep these words together!  

More research in this area is needed but Escudero-Perales’ study has clearly helped us to better understand the modern use of split infinitives…or has it helped us to understand better…?!

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Perales-Escudero, Moises D. (2011) To split or to not split: The split infinitive past and present. Journal of English Linguistics 39: 313-334.

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

All the lads and lasses!

There are still lots of lads and lasses in the northeast of England

In data collected in the 1950s for the Survey of English Dialects (SED) it was found that there was a ‘north-south’ divide in the use of the terms lad and lass, with lad being the main term used in the north to mean BOY whereas boy itself was the main variant in the south. Lass competed with other terms (such as girl, wench, maiden, missy) but it was still mainly confined to the north. When words for SON or DAUGHTER were elicited, the term lad competed with son in the north and, to a lesser degree, the term lass competed with daughter, but also only in the north. Research in the 1980s predicted that because lass was more variable than lad then it was likely that the term lass would be lost before lad.

Researchers Joan Beal and Lourdes Burbano-Elizondo set out to investigate patterns of variation and change in the use of these terms by comparing the 1950s data to data collected between 1994 and 2005 for two sociolinguistic studies in the northeast of England, the first in Newcastle and the second in Sunderland.

The Newcastle data revealed that both lad and lass is still used by all age groups and among all social classes, although lad is more widespread than lass. The results also showed (with the exception of middle class males) that males use both lad and lass more than females, so there appears to be variation according to gender. Like the SED data, the Newcastle data revealed that lad could be used to mean BOY or SON (though the latter was rare) but, unlike the SED data, it could also be used to mean SEXUAL PARTNER (in this case more often than boyfriend but less often than husband). Overall, though, lad was used in the vast majority of cases to mean YOUNG MAN. In the case of lass, girl was a much stronger rival than boy was for lad and the most frequent meaning for lass was YOUNG WOMAN. The use of lass to mean DAUGHTER was as rare as lad was to mean SON. However, lass could also be used to mean SEXUAL PARTNER, both in the sense of GIRLFRIEND and WIFE (whereas lad to mean HUSBAND was rare). Although there was a tendency for lower social groups to use more lad and lass, there was no firm correlation between social class and variable use of the terms; the researchers suggest that style or stance may be a greater predictor of their use but further research would be needed to shed light on this.

In the Sunderland data the results revealed that, in line with Newcastle, there was variation according to gender, with males using both lad and lass a lot more than females, especially in the sense of CHILD (male/female). Lad and lass could also be used to mean BROTHER/SISTER (although these were rare variants). When the meaning was CHILD or BROTHER/SISTER, lad and lass appeared at equal levels but lass was used much more frequently than lad (both by males and females) when used to mean SEXUAL PARTNER.   

Taking the results from both studies, the researchers state that both words are still used in the northeast of England but that their use may be declining. Generally speaking, both terms are more likely to be used by males than females but lass is used less often than lad. The exception is that lass is used more often than lad in the sense of SEXUAL PARTNER, with lass being the most commonly-used term for FEMALE SEXUAL PARTNER, especially by males. This leads the researchers to conclude that lass may not be dying out (as predicted in the 1980s research) but that it is undergoing semantic shift (a change in meaning) in northeast dialects whereby its primary meaning is SEXUAL PARTNER.

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Beal, J. and Burbano-Elizondo, L. (2012). ‘All the Lads and Lasses’: lexical variation in Tyne and Wear. English Today 28 (4): 10-22.

doi: 10.1017/S0266078412000351

This summary was written by Sue Fox