Wi’ a guid Scots tongue

Can we still feel Scottish if we lose our accent?

  

This was the question Inès Brulard and Philip Carr wanted to investigate when looking at the changing speech patterns of Scottish politicians in Westminster. They argue that it is important to distinguish between conscious changes people make to their pronunciation, which may be connected to their sense of identity, and unconscious changes, which are different.

Looking, in particular, at the speech of Scottish politicians in the House of Commons in Westminster and in BBC interviews, Brulard and Carr investigated phonetic features including rhoticity (whether a person pronounces the ‘r’ in a word like first, as in Standard Scottish English but not in RP) and several vowel pronunciations. They found that Scottish politicians varied widely in their use of SSE and adopted RP features. For example, the Scottish National Party leader, Alex Salmond, exhibited no RP-like features in his analysed speech, leading a spokesperson for the party to describe him as “the authentic voice of Scotland, wi’ a guid Scots tongue in his heid’.  On the other hand, fellow Scotsman, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a member of the Conservative Party, exhibited stronger RP influences, but he stated later ‘I have never been conscious of having changed my accent’.  So, how important is our sense of identity in this type of personal language change?

Brulard and Carr note that there are times when we can consciously change how we speak. One way of doing this would be through elocution lessons, when people might consciously try to move away from a perceived lower class manner of speaking to one that is viewed as being more upper class.  However, this type of conscious act can’t explain all types of change. Frequently, people unconsciously accommodate to the speech of others, making their own pronunciation more similar to theirs without realising that they are doing so.

Considering research relating to the neurological investigation of language, Brulard and Carr note the distinction between procedural learning and memory (‘knowing how’) and declarative learning and memory (‘knowing that’). Procedural learning would be the establishment of particular habits associated with Scottish speech (such as how to make a particular vowel sound, or pronouncing the ‘r’ in words like first). Our feelings of identity, they suggest, rely on declarative memory or learning. This is the sense of consciously learning, for example, that one is Scottish or remembering certain events which relate to one’s Scottish childhood. Thus, when a child realises that they are speaking with a Scottish accent, they are putting a label of identity to a particular procedure (e.g. “I say it like this because I am Scottish”). It is this kind of conscious knowledge, they argue, that can feed into our sense of identity.  

Following this, they tentatively propose that linguistic accommodation which is consciously driven (such as through elocution lessons or linguistic training) is done without activating a person’s sense of identity, whether this is national, regional, social or personal identity. Unconscious accommodation, on the other hand, does not necessarily affect our sense of identity.

This has implications for our general understanding of unconscious linguistic knowledge though, as Brulard and Carr show, this is a complex phenomenon to analyse.

It is not clear why some speakers should accommodate their linguistic behaviour more than others. This research suggests, though, that politicians like Sir Malcolm Rifkind who seem to have accommodated to RP without being aware that they have done so have not necessarily compromised their sense of being Scottish. 

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Brulard, Inès and Carr, Philip (2013) Variability, unconscious accent adaption and sense of identity: the case of RP influences on speakers of Standard Scottish English; Language Sciences 39: 151-155

doi: 10.1016/j.langsci.2013.02.017

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Is the use of racial slurs really just black and white?

Slurs are terms, such as slut, nigger or bitch, that are typically used to offend members of certain groups.  They are largely considered as the most taboo and offensive of all linguistic expressions. 

In his article exploring their use, Adam Croom firstly distinguishes between three types of terms:  those that are descriptive, those that are expressive and lastly, those that are slurring. A descriptive term is used to objectively identify some feature of an individual or group.  For example, in the utterance ‘S is an African American’ the term is neutral and shows no opinion on the speaker’s part.  Expressive terms, on the other hand, express the speaker’s own heightened emotional state.  So, a speaker may say ‘S is a fucker’ and express anger towards S for some reason but not by targeting a particular descriptive feature.  However, if a speaker says ‘S is a nigger’ this is a slurring term as a certain descriptive feature has been picked out and the individual put down on that basis, in this case on their race.

Croom refers to the concept of ‘face’, which is the desire for respect from other speakers within your linguistic community.  ‘Face’ is a type of social currency as, just like money, you can get more things done with the more positive ‘face’ or respect you have.  Offending people threatens their ‘face’ and complimenting people adds to their ‘face’, with slurring terms often used in this bargaining process.  In fact, the use of racial slurs can be extremely destructive to the actual character of their targets and speakers who use them are contributing to a history of derogation that harms their social identities. 

Croom quotes the example of how slaves were treated like domestic animals by their masters.  Although it is clear that humans and livestock are in no way alike, the easiest way for the slave owners to deal with their own behaviour was to dehumanize the slaves in their minds and think of them as animals.  The slave owners’ language closely reflected this way of thinking, hence the term ‘nigger’ which for them encompassed the meaning of ‘emotionally shallow, simple-minded, sexually licentious and prone to laziness’ and is clearly a negative and derogatory term for an African American. Interestingly slurs are also sometimes used to belittle targets who are not typically associated with the original slur.  Croom quotes research carried out by M. MacDonald* in 2000 amongst African American communities where he reported that the term ‘white nigger’ was sometimes used by black speakers to refer to white people who were thought of as being beneath the speaker socially. 

Intriguingly, slurs may sometimes be used by the very members of the group they were originally aimed at.  In this case, groups of speakers seem to have adopted slurs that were historically used against them and somehow claimed them for their own, giving them positive connotations. At first glance this is a puzzling phenomenon; however traditionally minority groups will often distinguish themselves by turning standard society’s norms on their heads.  So, for example, many black inner-city residents may feel that the wider white society has abandoned them and disrespects them.  In response, an oppositional culture develops and spreads within these groups.  Anything associated with conventional white society is seen as square and the cool things are the opposite things: untied trainers, low slung trousers, caps worn backwards, etc. Running alongside this, such groups will adapt their speech styles too and adopt words traditionally used against them, reversing their original intention in a way, which is exactly what has been seen to have happened with the word ‘nigger’.  Amongst young black people, the word now has positive connotations and this has extended to some extent to young white fans of hip-hop.  ‘Nigger’ is an oft-used term in the hip-hop culture and young white fans usually have no previous knowledge of the word’s history and will therefore also use it as a positive term.  The concept of ‘face’ is reversed as speakers use slurs to actually compliment each other and signal respect.

Croom makes the point that this is not only true of racial terms but also of sexist ones such as slut and bitch and homosexual terms such as queer.  It is a fascinating field of study and one which merits a lot more research.

*MacDonald, M., 2000. All Souls: A Family Story from Southie. Ballantine, New York.

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Croom, Adam M. (2013) How to do things with slurs: Studies in the way of derogatory words. Language and Communication 33: 177-204.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2013.03.008

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Gentlemen before ladies?

     Does word order perpetuate outdated images about women and men?                             

You probably say pots and pans, not pans and pots, and lords and ladies, not ladies and lords. Why, though? What makes us always produce one of the words in a pair first?

A previous post on this blog discussed ordering in word pairs in general (which way round?). Heiko Motschenbacher, though, argues that pairs involving personal nouns like lords and ladies need special treatment since, unlike pots and pans, pairs that refer to females and males can reflect and perpetuate power differences in society. The term that comes first in the pair is usually thought to represent the social role with the higher social ranking. This is why guidelines for non-sexist language often recommend placing the female term in first position, to symbolically reverse the traditional order.

Motschenbacher analysed 30 frequent mixed-gender word pairs in the 88 million word written part of the British National Corpus. These pairs occurred a total of 8, 156 times. In addition to general terms denoting men and women such as girl/boy, he/she, the pairs included address terms (ladies/gentlemen), nobility terms (lords/ladies), occupational terms (actor/actress) traditionally heterosexual role terms (husband/wife) and kinship terms (aunt/uncle).  She found that the order of the words in the pairs perpetuated images about the social roles of women and men that now seem outdated. Men came first in general, especially in pairs referring to professions (doctors and nurses) and the nobility. The conventional ordering in sons and daughters reflects, she claims, previous traditions of sons being more important than daughters. The ordering in word pairs related to marriage reflects traditional gender discourses: men dominate during marriage (husband and wife) but women come first when they are not yet married (bride and bridegroom), no longer married (widow and widower) or when raising children (mum and dad).

Other factors affect word order too. Just as with non-personal nouns, words with a smaller number of syllables tend to come first (hence, perhaps, ladies and gentlemen). This tendency is more common, though, when it is the male form that is shorter. The form of the word is also relevant, with less complex words occurring first (prince and princess, for example). The sex of the author had a small effect, with male authors using man and woman more often than woman and man, compared to female authors and mixed sex (co) authors. Male authors also had the highest rates of father and mother, preferring this to the more usual mother and father. The sex of the target audience also had an effect: higher female-first rates were found only in writing stereotypically targeted towards women (for example, in a book entitled The Art of Starvation).

In most cases though, the strongest factor overall was whether the word referred to a male or a female. This corresponds to research on word pairs in general, which finds that conceptually more salient semantic features prevail over other factors as far as the ordering of terms is concerned. Male-first predominance is not absolute though: as we have seen, there are some domains where females come first, reflecting traditional views about gendered social roles.

Motschenbacher does not want to make suggestions for language reform, arguing that for some pairs it would be hard to find gender-neutral alternatives and that in any case most recommendations are likely to be biased in some way. She is in favour instead of raising awareness of the fact that no linguistic choices are neutral. Individuals have the choice of shifting away from a traditional ordering that perpetuates harmful discourses about socially ‘appropriate’ roles of the two sexes; we need, therefore, to make up our minds about which messages we wish to convey. We should bear in mind, though, that putting females first is not necessarily the best way forward, since it can entrench domain-specific female stereotypes (in mother and father, for example). Word pairs that specify the two genders, she points out, are almost invariably connected to gender inequality.  

It’s much easier talking about pots and pans, isn’t it?!

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Motschenbacher, Heiko (2013) Gentlemen before ladies? A corpus-based study of conjunct order in personal binomials. Journal of English Linguistics 41 (3): 212-242.

doi. 10.1177/0075424213489993

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

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