Naughty?

tut tut? tsk tsk?

We’re probably all used to hearing alveolar or dental clicks, when the tip of the tongue briefly meets the ridge just behind the top teeth. Usually this sound is thought to express irritation or disapproval, or sometimes sympathy. We may also be familiar with an ‘air kiss’ or what phoneticians term a bilabial click – when someone makes a clicking sound by bringing their lips together for a moment.  As Melissa Wright points out, though, the idea that clicks express emotions is based on anecdote and intuition rather than on analyses of naturally-occurring talk. She performed the first systematic study of clicks in everyday English talk-in-interaction, finding, for the first time, a relationship between clicks and the way that we organize talk in spoken English.

Wright analysed 18 hours of naturally-occurring telephone conversations in Britain and America. She found 86 bilabial and alveolar/dental clicks in these conversations, used by 20 different speakers: 13 men and 7 women.  The fact that 20 different speakers of different ages and from different social backgrounds all used clicks suggests that clicks are not simply idiosyncratic features of one person’s speech.

In fact, Wright found recurrent patterns in the way that all twenty speakers used clicks. All the clicks occurred between the end of one conversational sequence and the beginning of another. There is an example in the box, where lines 1-5 show the final part of a longer sequence where Norman was telling Lesley about his use of a dialysis machine. He closes down this sequence with an assessment, in line 6, which Lesley accepts, in line 7. She then offers a final closing token, hm, in line 9, followed by a bilabial click (the ‘air kiss’ sound, represented here by the ☉ symbol).  After the click she begins a new sequence (lines 9-12) about an arrangement between Norman and her son, Gordon.

1. Norman:    you leave Wincanton about three o’clock

2.                 and get back about two in the morning

3. Lesley:       hhhh oh [:

4. Norman:                 [and work full time on top of that

5. Lesley:       oh [dear

6. Norman:         [but it’s a lot easier no:w hh huh

7. Lesley:       yes I’m sure

(0.2)

8. Lesley:       hm: [☉] .hh okay well I’ll tell Gordon

10.                and uhm (0.3) I’m sure-and he was

11.                going to give you a ring anyway .hh

12.                before Sunday

13. Norman:   right you are (.) yes

All 81 clicks functioned alongside other phonetic factors that typically occur between sequences of talk. One such factor is a change in pitch: speakers produced the section of speech before the click with a low pitch typical of closing sequences of talk, and they then uttered the section of talk after the click with a higher pitch. After the clicks, the new sequences were often marked with words such as anyway, right or, as in Lesley’s case, okay well, all of which can demonstrate that the following talk will be a shift from what came before. The interlocutors showed that the click-initiated shifts in sequence were appropriately placed, as they consistently treated them as unproblematic in the interaction: thus in our example Norman’s right you are in his immediately subsequent turn, in line 13, indicates his acceptance of the topic shift.

Wright’s interactional and phonetic analysis, then, demonstrates that displaying emotion is not the only function that clicks have in talk. They are also a neglected phonetic resource that speakers of English can draw on to organize their talk, functioning alongside other linguistic features to manage the sequential unfurling of spoken interaction.

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Melissa Wright (2011) On clicks in English talk-in-interaction. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41/2: 207-229.

doi. 10.1017/S0025100311000144

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Language and gender on the internet

Millions of people around the world take part in large-scale group discussions on the internet. These discussions have been likened to very large-scale  conversations. We might wonder, therefore, whether the same kinds of gender differences exist in computer-mediated discussions as have been noted in face-to-face discussions.

Susan Herring set out to investigate this question by analysing four public computer-mediated discourse samples from three academic discussion lists. In some of the online discussions there were more male than female participants, while in others there were more female participants.  She found that in the male-predominant samples the discussion took place over more days, contained longer messages on a single theme, and was more argumentative in style. This behaviour can be thought of as paralleling what researchers have found in previous studies on face-to-face communication, where male speakers prefer a one-at-a-time pattern of speaking with one person holding the floor at any one time, often speaking as an expert. In contrast, in face-to-face communication female speakers prefer a collaborative floor with overlapping speech and with utterances often jointly produced by all participants in the conversation. In a somewhat similar way, and as expected, in Herring’s online samples the female-dominant discussions contained shorter posts, multiple themes and there was more agreement than disagreement. However, female contributors also showed some more hierarchical patterns of behaviour, mainly in the all-female discussions. In both female-predominant and male-predominant discussions, a small number of active individuals, both women and men, tended to dominate, initiating topics, posting the most messages and receiving the most responses.

Herring points out that we might expect to find a ‘one-at-a-time floor’ in computer-mediated discussions. Messages have to appear in a chronological order and although we can interpret posting a message as taking a turn in a conversation it is not possible to interrupt a post, as we can a turn in speech. But the technology does not explain why the women in this study took shorter turns overall, nor why there tended to be multiple themes to their discussions and more agreement than disagreement. These findings, she maintains, call for an explanation in terms of social rather than technological factors. On the other hand, the fact that in same gender discussions women as well as men dominate in participation and response rates calls for an explanation in terms of power rather than gender.

Herring concludes that men and women are socialised to manage conversational interaction differently, with men conventionally assigned greater power and privilege in public floors, but with certain powerful floor management practices available for use by empowered individuals of either gender. This interpretation can be extended to face-to-face communication, too: the different turn-taking styles that have been attributed to men (who are thought to prefer a one-at-a-time style) and to women (who seem to prefer a collaborative style) may be inherently power-based. These styles then map onto gender in ways that associate more powerful discourse management strategies with men rather than women.

______________________________________________

Herring, S.C. (2010) Who’s got the floor in computer-mediated conversation? Edelsky’s gender patterns revisited. Language@Internet, 7, article 8. (urn:nbn:de:0009-7-28579)

http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2801

accessed March 29 2013

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Clean teef or clean teeth?

Pronouncing words like tooth as toof or three as free is a well-known and long-established feature of Cockney English, but people all over Britain are now beginning to use ‘f’ for ‘th’, especially adolescent working-class speakers.  How does the change begin, though, and does it pattern in the same way in different parts of the country? Erik Schleef and Michael Ramsammy suggest answers to these questions by comparing young people’s speech in London, England, and in Edinburgh, Scotland, where this pronunciation is a more recent phenomenon.

Overall, young people in Edinburgh used ‘f’ pronunciations just as often as their counterparts in London. In Edinburgh, though – and not in London – ‘f’ was more frequent in words like maths, where it comes at the end of a syllable, before another consonant. It was less frequent where it is followed by a vowel, in words like thin. Schleef and Ramsammy suggest that these patterns point to the origins of the sound change. The sounds ‘f’ and ‘th’ share acoustic properties, and this can make it difficult for listeners to tell them apart in fast speech, especially in words like maths, when the following consonant makes them less perceptible.

Confusion of the two sounds may well explain the origin of the sound change in London too, but here there has been plenty of time for the use of ‘f’ for ‘th’ to spread to new phonetic contexts, not just the context where they are most easily confused.

Instead, young people in London used ‘f’ for ‘th’ more often in morphologically complex words containing more than one form: words like pathway (path plus way) or months (month plus plural –s). What seems to be happening, Schleef and Ramsammy point out, is that as the change becomes well-established in a variety of English the variation becomes increasingly integrated into grammatical word structure. It can also acquire a social function: in London male speakers use ‘f’ more often than female speakers, whereas in Edinburgh the variation is too new to be available for marking gendered ways of speaking.

Will the change follow the same processes in Edinburgh speech as it has in London, once it becomes more established, losing the phonetic patterning and becoming integrated into word structure instead? Not necessarily. Schleef and Ramsammy explain that the sound system in which the change is embedded differs in the two cities. In Edinburgh words like thing and think are often pronounced with an initial ‘h’. Also, a glottal stop is used for ‘th’ in Edinburgh, but only rarely in London. There is more overall variation, then, in Edinburgh than there is in London, and this makes it impossible to predict the future of this sound change.

What is clear, though, is that comparing social and linguistic influences on a sound change in different locations can help us understand how a change begins and how it becomes part of the language system.

You can hear sound clips of young people from London using this feature at our English Language Teaching Resources website http://linguistics.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/english-language-teaching/language-materials 
_________________________________________________

Schleef, Erik and Ramsammy, Michael (2013) Labiodental fronting of /θ/ in London and Edinburgh: a cross-dialectal study. English Language and Linguistics 17 (1): 25-54.

doi: 10.1017/S1360674312000317

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

☺ Am I just emotional? ☹

The term ‘emoticon’ is a mixture of the words “emotion” and “icon” and refers to the graphic signs, such as the smiley face, which often accompany textual computer-mediated communication (CMC).

Emoticons began in CMC in 1982 when the sideways smiley face :-) was first proposed by an American computer scientist, as a means to signal that something was a joke in messages posted to a computer science discussion forum.  Since that time thousands of similar signs have developed.  They vary considerably in form and meaning and have become more graphically reduced over time, such as ☺.  A growing number of signs represent objects of various kinds (such as a heart or a beer mug), although the majority mimic facial expressions.

Emoticons are used in all types of CMC these days, including chat rooms and instant messaging, as well as e-mails, bulletin board postings and blogs.  They can also occasionally make their way into more traditional written contexts that are not CMC, such as advertisements and handwritten notes.  As their name suggests, they have traditionally been thought of as indicators of an emotional state, in that they are assumed to show non-linguistic information that would be conveyed through facial gestures and body language in face-to-face communication.  The argument goes that in CMC these are missing and emoticons are used to replace them. 

However, the researchers Eli Dresner and Susan C. Herring think that this view of emoticons as emotional ‘signals’ is over simplistic. They argue that they actually have a much greater role to play in CMC than just conveying emotions: in fact, they help to form meaning.  They begin by arguing that many facial emoticons do not seem to express a single emotion, or indeed any emotion at all.  For example, is a face with a tongue sticking out (  ;-p  ) a sign of a specific emotion? It could be interpreted in a variety of ways including teasing, flirting and sarcasm, all of which may be associated with emotional states but are not actually emotions themselves.  Or consider the winking face ;-).  This usually indicates that the writer is joking, but are jokes really associated with a single emotive state?  People may joke when they are happy or sad.  Even the smiley face itself does not always only convey happiness.  It has also been found to express sarcasm, again not exactly a state of emotion.  So what do emoticons express other than emotions?

Dresner and Herring argue that emoticons cannot stand alone as separate emotions isolated from a text.  Instead, they are very much a part of it and play a vital role in showing the meaning behind it.  This can be quite straightforward at times, such as in the following excerpt from an online conversation:

STUDENT:           just wanted to let you know that Jason found me a        place to stay so looks like I’ll be going to the                conference ☺

PROFESSOR:       I wish I could be there ☹

The student’s smiling face seems to express their happiness at being able to attend the conference and the professor’s frowning face expresses sadness or regret at not going. However, at times emoticons seem to be used in a less straightforward way, as in the following example posted on an online medical support forum:

i’m 23 and was diagnosed with this condition 3 years ago but i’ve been ill for a lot longer than that. i’m feeling really down at the mo and decided to see if anyone had posted. i’m pretty bad at mo. i am very sensitive and cry easily, and gets even worse when I feel awful :)

This writer is clearly not happy and seems to use a smiley in the opposite way to how we would expect.  It seems that here it maybe functions to mitigate what could otherwise be read as a self-pitying list of complaints and suggests that the writer is not complaining but instead just describing the situation.

Dresner and Herring suggest that all emoticons seem to convey that the utterance they are attached to is not intended to be taken completely seriously.  However, they stress that this is a generalisation and that context is always required for a reader to interpret the specific intended meaning of any emoticon.  They suggest that, just like the rules of conversation, these meanings have to somehow be ‘learned’ by their users and that further research will be needed to determine not only how this happens but also to ascertain the many varied and constantly changing functions of all the different emoticons.  

Anybody fancy it? ;)     

__________________________________________________ 

Dresner, Eli and Herring, Susan C. (2010) Functions of the nonverbal in CMC: Emoticons and Illocutionary Force. Communication Theory 20: 249-268.

doi. 10.1111/j.l468-2885.2010.01362.x

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Accommodating across social borders

How do people on either side of the border accommodate to each other?

It’s easy to see that language changes, but how do the changes happen? One key way is when we’re talking face to face with someone who speaks a bit differently to us. Both people unconsciously accommodate to each other’s way of speaking. If this happens often and if many people make the same kinds of linguistic adjustments to their speech, the changes become more permanent.

One puzzle, though, is why only some aspects of language are changed during this accommodation process, while others remain the same. Dominic Watt, Carmen Llamas and Daniel Ezra Johnson propose that this depends on the social meanings attached to different linguistic features, and also whether or not the features are already involved in language change. They reached this conclusion after research in two towns on either side of the border between England and Scotland. People tend to speak differently on either side of the border, so they analysed the speech of a 25-year old Scottish woman interviewing people from Eyemouth, Scotland and Carlisle, England.  In each town she interviewed 2 older men aged between 65 and 82, and 4 younger male speakers aged between 11 and 13.

As expected, the interviewer adjusted her own way of speaking to match that of her interviewers. She did not do this, though, for features that were stable in the two communities. For example, the pronunciation of /r/ after a vowel in words such as cart or car is very frequent in Eyemouth but almost nonexistent in Carlisle, and this pronunciation does not seem to be changing in either town. Regardless of the way her interviewee spoke, the interviewer did not change the overall frequency with which she herself pronounced /r/ in these words. Watt, Llamas and Johnson suggest that features such as these are very noticeable, so they are less susceptible to unconscious accommodation.

The interviewer was more likely to adjust her speech when it came to traditional, declining, forms in the Scottish variety. For example, older speakers in Eyemouth pronounce from as ‘frae’ more often than younger speakers in the same town, and are more likely to use ken than know in phrases such as do you ken John? But rather than matching the frequency with which her interviewee used a particular form, the interviewer adjusted her language in line with her social assessments of her interlocutor. When she was talking to older Scottish men, she unconsciously increased her frequency of the traditional forms, to such an extent that she overshot the frequencies used by the older men themselves. When she was talking to younger Scottish men, the reverse process happened: she undershot their use of these forms, employing them less often than the young men did. The researchers comment that for these features the interviewer seems to be reacting not to actual usage of traditional forms but to her perception of their usage, which she associates with both Scotland and older speakers.

With forms that are currently undergoing change in both communities, the interviewer reacted towards the age of the person she was talking to. For example, older speakers in both the Scottish and the English speech communities tended to pronounce ‘r’ in words like very or brown as a tap, [ɾ]. They also vocalised /l/ in words such as feel or sold, pronouncing it as [o] or [u]. The interviewer’s speech reflected this: in both localities, she used more tapped /r/ and more vocalized /l/ with older speakers than younger ones. Again, though, the interviewer seemed to be responding to her perceptions of the national identities of the informants, as she used more [ɾ] with the older Scottish speakers than with the older English speakers, even though the older English men used more [ɾ] than the older Scottish men.

The researchers point out that although more research is needed, their findings reveal that the ability of linguistic forms to index social meanings is crucial to whether or not individual speakers accommodate to them. Consequently, understanding the social meaning of different forms is central to our understanding of the process and progress of linguistic change in the speech community more generally.

____________________________________________________

Dominic Watt, Carmen Llamas, and Daniel Ezra Johnson (2011) Levels of Linguistic Accommodation across a National Border. Journal of English Linguistics 38: 270-289.

doi 10.1177/0075424210373039

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Gay Talk

According to the online British and World English Oxford Dictionaries, the word gay has four different meanings assigned to it. Two of those meanings, the use of gay to mean ‘light-hearted and carefree’ and the use of gay to mean ‘brightly coloured, showy’, are both said to be ‘dated’.  The primary meaning of gay in current usage appears to be its reference to a ‘homosexual, especially a man’. Interestingly, though, a fourth meaning of ‘foolish, stupid or unimpressive’ has been documented. In this latter case, the use of gay is said to be ‘informal, often offensive’.

Using sociolinguistic methods, researcher Justyna Robinson investigated the semantic changes-in-progress of the word gay to see whether such an analysis can provide further insights into the variation and change of this word. She traced the word across selected data from the British National Corpus and the Oxford English Corpus and found that the corpora data supports the perception that gay is undergoing semantic change. She found that the older sense of gay ‘happy’ is diminishing, balanced by an increase in the use of gay ‘homosexual’. She also found that the data provides evidence that gay can mean ‘lame’ (meanings similar to the dictionary definitions of ‘foolish, stupid’ or even ‘boring’) but also that it can mean ‘unmanly’ to refer to activities considered to be ‘effeminate’ or ‘not masculine enough’.

Robinson also analysed the speech of 72 speakers born and bred in South Yorkshire that she had interviewed as part of a larger project on semantic change. The speakers represented different age groups (age range: 11-94), genders and socio-economic groups. From these speakers, Robinson elicited all the different senses of gay that each participant knew and, once more, she found that the most salient senses of the word gay matched the meanings of ‘happy / bright’, ‘homosexual’, ‘lame’ and ‘unmanly’.   

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she found that it was the older speakers who retained the most use of gay in the sense of ‘happy, bright’ and that the younger generations, most notably young males still in education, were the main users of the most recent sense of gay to mean ‘lame’. For the older speakers, their views about the shift in meaning of gay were often expressed in negative terms and Robinson reports comments such as ‘I really fight against the use of this word [as ‘homosexual’]. I object strongly to hijacking of the word’. In general, as is often the case with language change, a ‘common, nostalgic narrative’ emerges among the older speakers. The majority of younger speakers seem to be aware of the use of gay to mean ‘happy / bright’ but it has not been part of their usage. Their comments were more likely to be along the lines of ‘it used to mean’ or that ‘happy / bright’ was the ‘older meaning’. The younger speakers assigned meanings to gay ‘lame’ ranging from ‘boring’ (school, lessons, friends) to ‘not interesting’, ‘weird’, ‘annoying’, ‘bad’, ‘rubbish’ and ‘stupid’. None of the speakers in the study seemed to suggest that this usage projected homophobic undertones, a concern that has been raised in other academic literature.

While it seems that teenage boys use gay ‘lame’ the most, Robinson’s analysis showed that young adult males employ gay in a slightly different way, in the sense of ‘unmanly’ and that it is used to describe activities such as ‘eating salad’ or ‘carrying an umbrella’. Used in this way, Robinson argues that gay projects masculinity through distancing a speaker from anything considered ‘effeminate’ or ‘not masculine enough’. She suggests that men use gay in this way (note that no women in the study used gay in this sense) to challenge the masculinity of other men. Once more, though, these participants clearly indicated that they did not think this sense was used as a homophobic pejorative but that it applied to behaviour that goes against traditional notions of masculinity, particularly as they might pertain to local ‘northern’ English toughness.

Robinson concludes by tracking the different stages of change for the word gay and shows that older meanings often overlap with newer meanings, with the newest meaning of gay ‘lame’ emerging along with the meaning of gay ‘unmanly’.

______________________________________________________

Robinson, J. (2012). A gay paper: why should sociolinguists bother with semantics? English Today 28: 38-54.

Doi: 10.1017/SO266078412000399

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Interesting, isn't it?

it's on the left, isn't it?

It’s on the left isn’t it is a typical English tag question: there’s a statement (it’s on the left) followed by a reduced question (isn’t it?). The form is sometimes linked to the characteristic dual functions of tag questions. They can show that we are less than certain about the statement we’ve just made: so, it’s on the left isn’t it can convey less confidence than it’s on the left. At the same time, tags can involve the listener: it’s on the left isn’t it is more likely to get a response than it’s on the left.

Many English tags, though, are just single words: think, for example, of right, eh, huh or innit. Marianne Mithun set out to discover whether all tags, whatever their form, are united by having some core function. She examined the way people use tags not only in English but also in a language with a very different structure: Mohawk, an Iroquoian language spoken in Northeast America. She found some striking initial similarities in the functions of tags in the two languages, but beyond these were some interesting differences. These, she claims, can be understood in terms of some of the deeper characteristics of human language.

In Mohawk tags are very frequent, but unlike English there is just one form, the single word wáhi’. Mohawk speakers use the tag to show how certain they are about what they have just said and to appeal to their audience for confirmation, in just the same way as speakers of English.

However Mohawk speakers can also use the same tag form to achieve the opposite effect. The example in the box illustrates this. Here speaker B first uses the particle ki’ to show that the contribution is relevant to what A has just said, then uses wáhi’ to confirm A’s statement. Rather than indicating a lack of certainty, then, the tag shows confidence, albeit in a polite consensual way. Speaker C’s contribution serves the same function.

A:  That’s the reason there’s a lot of cancer nowadays. It’s the food.

      They mix in all kinds of stuff.

B:  Ki’ wáhi’.

      ‘That’s right, isn’t it.’

C:  Ki’ wáhi’.

      ‘Isn’t that so.’

Note: A’s utterance, though uttered in Mohawk, is given in English by Mithun for ease of interpretation

A further difference lies in the type of discourse where tags occur. Speakers of English use tags more frequently in the discussion parts of a conversation rather than in the narrative sections. In Mohawk, though, the division between narrative and discussion is less clearcut. Mithun found that narratives of varying length were typically embedded throughout conversations, especially where there were many speakers. In these narratives the tag was used very frequently, with a range of important discourse-structuring functions. It could highlight the topic or the setting of a story, draw attention to key points, and emphasise background information, explanations, evaluations or other kinds of commentary. In these contexts tags do not directly solicit a response, but their function is still interactive, checking that listeners are following the story. In English these kinds of functions tend to filled not by tags but by other discourse pragmatic features such as y’know, right or are you with me.

Mithun concludes that English and Mohawk tag constructions share a functional core, mingling interactive functions with an indication of the speaker’s degree of certainty about what they have just said. These overlapping meanings lie at the root of the cross-linguistic similarities and differences between the two languages, allowing speakers to sometimes privilege one meaning and sometimes another. The contexts in which tags are used, Mithun claims, are ultimately constrained by both universal and language specific factors. These include the grammatical structure of the tag form, the presence in the language of competing forms like English y’know, the social relationships among speakers, and culturally-specific styles of interaction such as the greater use of narrative in Mohawk. The differences reflect a deeper characteristic common to speakers of all languages: the propensity to exploit available linguistic resources for creative acts of communication.

_________________________________________________________

Mithun, Marianne (2012) Tags: Cross-linguistic diversity and commonality. Journal of Pragmatics 44: 2165- 2182.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.09.010

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

R u tryin to b formal?

Nowadays, it’s hard for us to imagine a life without mobile phones.  Texting and instant messaging are as much, if not more, a part of our daily life as phone calls and emails.  For example, since 2008 in the USA there has been a huge increase in the amount of texts sent, with teenagers using their phones to text much more than to talk and half of them able to do so blindfolded!

Over the past fifteen years or so a language of texting has evolved and continues to develop.  The types of ‘textisms’ that people might use include shortened words (e.g., tues instead of Tuesday); missing letters (e.g., & instead of and); missing apostrophes (e.g., dont for don’t); ‘emoticons’ (e.g., ;-)); capital letters to express strong emotions (e.g., I AM ANGRY) and surrounding words with special symbols to intensify feeling (e.g., I **love** you).

There has been a mixed reception to the rise of texting and instant messaging with some educators, and particularly the media, advocating that it is causing young people to lose the ability to write in acceptable English prose and even destroying the English language itself.  Most linguists, like David Crystal in his book Txting: The Gr8 Db8 (2008, Oxford University Press) are more measured in their approach.  Crystal himself feels that texting may actually help children’s writing and that it actually requires ‘sophisticated abilities in reading and writing’ (p.157). 

Unfortunately, as yet there has been a limited amount of research into this area and what does exist is conflicting, with some studies finding that texting aids and others that it hinders literacy.  Five researchers in the USA (Rosen, Chang, Erwin, Carrier and Cheever) were keen to investigate whether texting affects young people’s ability to write.  They examined the writing of young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 who, despite having varying educational backgrounds, were all experienced texters.  Rosen and his colleagues were keen to discover whether females or males used textisms more often in their writing and whether their educational background had any bearing on this use.  They examined the use of textisms in both formal and informal writing, asking the participants to write a formal letter of complaint and an informal description of what it feels like to be unhappy, as well as surveying them on how often they used different types of textisms.

They found that the female participants sent more texts and used more textisms than the males. This could be for a psychological reason as it has been found that girls tend to mainly use texts to establish and maintain relationships.  This takes longer and uses more words than just conveying concrete information, which is the reason males have generally been found to text.

An interesting result was that a more frequent use of texting and instant messaging, and particularly of using shortened words when texting, seemed to relate to a worse standard of formal writing amongst the participants. This suggests that daily texting may well be carrying over into the participants’ formal writing. However, these results seemed to reverse when it came to informal writing, as a more frequent use of texting and instant messaging related to a better standard of informal writing amongst the participants in the study. 

So, texting seems to have a negative impact on formal writing but a positive impact on informal writing.  It seems that daily texting serves as good ‘practice’ for writing in an informal style.  This may be especially true for those participants with a less formal educational background for whom writing texts and instant messaging may be the only writing practice they are engaged in on a daily basis.  This could indicate that young people in general are able to express more thoughts by using the shortcuts that textisms give them and this is especially beneficial when they are asked to write about their feelings and emotions.  Whatever the reasons may be, it is clear that a complicated relationship exists between texting/instant messaging and writing, one that certainly deserves further investigation.

______________________________________________

Larry D. Rosen, Jennifer Chang, Lynne Erwin, L. Mark Carrier and Nancy A. Cheever (2010). The Relationship Between “Textisms” and Formal and Informal writing Among Young Adults. Communication Research 37:420- 440.

doi: 10.  1177/0093650210362465

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Are regional dialects dying out?

is increasing mobility the cause?

It’s often thought that local dialect forms are withering away as people adopt more widespread ‘supralocal’ forms. In England, for example, glottal stop pronunciations are now widely used for /t/ in words like butter, in rural and urban areas alike.

David Britain’s review of recent research, though, sounds a note of caution. He accepts that in areas where traditional dialects are spoken, there is evidence of increasing use of language forms with a wider geographical currency.  But he points to three aspects of dialect studies where researchers need to think more carefully about the processes involved.

First, although supralocal forms may be arriving in areas where rural dialects are spoken, traditional local forms have by no means all disappeared. What is more, the supralocal forms are arriving at different speeds, to different extents, in different places and are used by different social classes (for one example, see the box). We should reflect more, then, on what the robust variation that still exists can tell us about the delocalization process.

Joanna Przedlacka investigated the use of 14 supralocal forms in four counties to the north and south of London: Buckinghamshire, Essex, Kent and Surrey. She found differences of between 18 and 55 per cent between uses of the 14 forms in the different locations. For example, people in Buckinghamshire used the glottal stop pronunciation of /t/ the most and people in Essex the least, with their rates of use differing by 35 per cent.  The pronunciation of words like tooth and mother as toof and muvver varied by about 30 per cent between the county where it was used most and the one where it was used least, but this time it was Kent where people used the supralocal /f/ and /v/ pronunciations the most, and Surrey where people used these forms the least.

Przedlacka, Joanna (2002). Estuary English? A sociophonetic study of teenage speech in the Home Counties. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Secondly, although forms with wider currency may be replacing more localized dialect forms, how wide is wider? Supralocal forms become used as people become more mobile, but we still spend a good deal of time moving around our own local neighbourhoods. It is not surprising, then, that people in a particular neighbourhood sometimes adopt local forms and sometimes supralocal forms, with the supralocal forms coming from the local area, the wider local region, or beyond (see the example in the second box). Local dialect forms, then, still compete strongly with their supralocal competitors.

Carmen Llamas’ study in Middlesbrough, in North East England, even found three different pronunciations for three related features, /p, t, k/: a local North Eastern form for /p/, the supralocal glottal stop for /t/ and the standard pronunciation for /k/.

Llamas, Carmen (2007). “A place between places”: Language and identities in a border town. Language in Society 36: 579-604.

Thirdly, supralocal dialects are the result of mobility, but it is middle class English people who are the more mobile. Middle class people are more likely to commute long distances to work, to choose to leave the city and live in the countryside, to leave home when they go to university rather than attend their local institution, and to buy basic goods in an out of town shopping centre rather than the local grocery store. This kind of mobility affects rural areas the most, bringing relatively traditional nonstandard rural accents into contact with middle class urban, possibly standard-influenced accents. No wonder then if, overall, rural accents are in decline. Britain points out, however, that we know little about the sociolinguistics of this interplay of dialects at the local level.

Britain concludes that we need to socialise studies of the supralocalisation process, to find out how and why individuals begin to use forms with a wider currency, and why some traditional forms survive longer than others.

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Britain, David (2011) The heterogeneous homogenisation of dialects in England. Taal & Tongval 63: 43-60.

http://www.taalentongval.eu/index.php/TenT/article/view/4/23

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire