Regional dialects are dying out – it’s enough to get you blarting

Britons are increasingly speaking like southern Englanders, according to an app produced by Cambridge University. Here’s a guide to some bostin’ words and phrases at risk of extinction

Never mind whether you take it with jam or cream, does your “scone” rhyme with “gone” or “stone”? Chances are, it’s the former. Basically the “stone” pronunciation of scone is almost gone. Still with me?

According to the first set of results from an app mapping changes in English dialects launched in January by the University of Cambridge, regional accents are dying out. The English Dialects app, downloaded 70,000 times already, has generated data from 30,000 users across 4,000 locations.

And the results reveal Britons from the West Country to the north-east are increasingly speaking like southerners. In essence, the app draws a modern picture of a land of identikit scones and ‘arms’ lopped of their resounding ‘r’s in which a pesky piece of wood caught beneath the skin is no longer known as a spool, spile, speel, spell, spelk, shiver, spill, sliver, or splint, depending on where you are from, but simply a boring old splinter. It’s enough to get you blarting. Or crying, as it’s now more commonly known.

So in tribute to the dying art of talking like your ancestors, instead of the members of the Tory cabinet, here is a guide to a few words from around the UK that we don’t want to go south.

’Anging:disgusting (Manchester).
That chip butty was ’anging.

Antwacky:old fashioned, out of date (Liverpool).
Our kid’s new place is dead antwacky.

Backend:autumn (north), from the phrase ‘the back end of the year’.
We’re waiting until backend to go away this year.

Bishy barnabee:a ladybird (Norfolk), thought to refer to Bishop
Bonner, known as bloody Bonner for his persecution of heretics in the sixteenth century.
I hoolly blundered over in the rud when I saw that bishy barnabee.

Blart:crying (Black Country, Birmingham), from the bleating of sheep.
He’s blarting again because Aston Villa lost.

Bostin’:amazing, brilliant, excellent (Black Country, Birmingham).
Bost is slang for broken and thus bostin’ comes from ‘smashing’.
Bostin’ fittle! (Great food!).

Dibble:the police, derived from Officer Dibble in the cartoon Top Cat(Manchester).
We best get off, the dibble are coming…

Donny:hand (Birmingham, Black Country).
Wash your donnies before tea, bab.

Fettling:to give something a good old clean, mend or repair (Yorkshire, Northumberland) but also denotes a person’s (generally bad) mood(Northumberland, Cumbria).
What’s yer fettle marra?

Ginnel:alley (Manchester, Yorkshire), though in some parts gennel is preferred. Also known as snicket in the north-west, a twitchel in the East Midlands, and a chare in Newcastle.
He couldn’t stop a pig in a ginnel.

Nesh:unusually susceptible to cold weather (Midlands, north) and also timid, weedy, or cowardly.
Stop being a nesh git, it’s not even snowing.

Netty: toilet (Newcastle).
Where’s ya netty, hinny? I’m bustin’.

Paggered:exhausted (Newcastle, Cumbria) but pagger is also to fight.
Am awer paggered to pagger.

Yampy:daft, mad or losing the plot (various).
My iPhone’s gone totally yampy.
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Reference:

Ramaswamy, Chitra. 2016. “Regional dialects are dying out – it’s enough to get you blarting”. The Guardian. Posted: May 30, 2016. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2016/may/30/regional-dialects-dying-out-app-cambridge-university

Teenagers' role in language change is overstated, linguistics research finds

If you're too "basic" to "YOLO" or think that slang is never "on fleek," fear not: How teenagers speak IRL is not ruining the English language, according to Kansas State University linguistics research.

In fact, teenagers may not be causing language change the way that we typically think, said Mary Kohn, assistant professor of English. Kohn studies language variation and how language changes over time.

Kohn's latest research found that teenagers are not solely causing language change. Rather, language changes occur throughout a lifetime and not just during the teenage years.

"Our research has shown teens are being dynamic with language, but not necessarily in a consistent way," Kohn said. "We aren't eliminating the possibility that teenagers are driving sound change, but we might be grossly overstating the role of teenagers."

Kohn found there was not a consistent language path that a person took from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. Language change is more individualistic and varies for each person, she said.

"Very commonly, people think that teenagers are ruining language because they are texting or using shorthand or slang," Kohn said. "But our language is constantly developing and changing and becoming what it needs to be for the generation who is speaking it. As a linguist, I find this really exciting because it shows me that our language is alive."

Kohn used the Frank Porter Graham project, which is a database that followed 67 children from infancy to their early 20s. The database includes audio and interview recordings from nearly every year of the children's lives and also has recordings of family members, friends and teachers -- all valuable information for understanding how language changes as individuals grow up, Kohn said.

Using this database, Kohn studied sound waves -- a precise measurement of how people pronounce words. She focused on 20 individuals during four different time periods: fourth grade, eighth grade, 10th grade and post-high school at age 20. Kohn measured pronunciations to see if the participants dramatically changed during the teenage years. Her longitudinal approach offered a before and after look at linguistic pronunciation during the teenage years.

"The teenager subgroup did not stand out as a group from the rest of the subgroups, meaning there was nothing special about being a teenager," Kohn said. "Just because you are a teenager doesn't mean you will change your language. Perhaps our stereotypes about how teenagers speak are often based on subgroups of teenagers that stand out to us as most distinct. We notice the kids who make bold fashion statements, so we also might notice the kids who are making dramatic linguistic changes."

Other subgroups experience language change, Kohn said, and she suggests that sources of language change may happen in younger children. Children turn away from adult influence when they get to school, which may be the crucial point when language starts to shift.

During high school, teenagers often explore their own identities and may again choose to change their pronunciations and use language as a part of their identities. When these teens grow up and graduate from college or get a job, they may change their language again to sound more professional and meet the demands of their jobs and pressures of the workplace, Kohn said.

"All languages, throughout history, change as generations grow up and move through life," Kohn said. "As long as there are people who are living and breathing and speaking, we're going to invent new words. We're going to invent new ways of speaking."

Kohn recently published the research in a monograph, "The way I communicate changes but how I speak don't." The research was a collaboration with researchers at North Carolina State University, including Walt Wolfrom, Janneke Van Hofwegen, Charlie Farington and Jennifer Renn.
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Reference:

Science Daily. 2016. “Teenagers' role in language change is overstated, linguistics research finds”. Science Daily. Posted: January 14, 2016. Available online: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160114122029.htm

Phablets and fauxhawks: the linguistic secrets of a good blended word

A brilliant word like omnishambles makes blending look easy, but there’s more to it than just jamming words together and cutting off the bits that stick out

I’ve been getting increasingly irascible tweets from a friend. Her latest just read, “BREXIT?!?!” She’s also sent me wob (a wavy bob), bacne (acne on your back), consumity (a community of consumers), phygital (digital data made physical), and phablet (a combination of a phone and a tablet).

Lewis Carroll is sometimes blamed for introducing portmanteau words to the language, but he only gave them a name. Linguists call them blends, and they’ve been around for a while in English; words like twiddle (twist + fiddle) go back to the 16th century. “Yes, yes,” says my friend. “But this doesn’t explain why they’re so irritating.”

Perhaps it’s their refusal to play the syntactic game. Other neologisms make use of familiar processes. In English these include compounding, which sticks two existing words together without altering them (photobomb, smartphone, fangirl); derivation, which adds a prefix or suffix to an existing word (tweetable, touchless, forumite, unfollow); and conversion, which borrows an existing word and changes its grammatical class (the noun geek becomes a verb, to geek out; on Facebook, another noun, friend, becomes a verb, to friend someone). You don’t always need to construct a new word at all: hat tip, group hug, date night, first world problem, while still being written separately, function as single lexical items (and warrant dictionary entries of their own).

Words like phablet, jeggings, frenemy and mansplaining bypass all these routes. They’re essentially constructed by jamming two words together and cutting off the bits that stick out. This is related to clipping, where new words are produced by pruning an existing word (nightmare = mare, details = deets). But clippings usually remove entire syllables at a time. Blends aren’t always this principled.

There is some method in their madness. Some blends combine clipping and compounding (jazz + exercise = jazzercise; wedding + admin = wedmin). Others overlap sounds or syllables the two words have in common (alcohol + holiday = alcoholiday; him + bimbo = himbo). And some chop sounds off one or both words and stitch the results together (phone + tablet = phablet, British + exit = Brexit). But it’s quite hard to formulate hard-and-fast rules for them.

Is it this structural unpredictability that makes us trip up over blends? They’re not always infuriating: sometimes we notice them because they’re brilliant. If you’d coined omnishambles, you could probably die happy. So here are some features of the best blends.

1. They’re semantically transparent. It’s pretty easy to work out what a serviceable blend means. Himbo? Yes. Wob? No.

2. They fill lexical gaps in the language. We might not have realised we needed them, but we definitely do. Mansplaining, sexting, chugger? Yes. Phablet? No. (Sometimes a blend gives a name to something so subtle, you need a sizeable circumlocution to define it. I love how people who are obsessed with their Blackberry jokingly call it a Crackberry.)

3. They’re phonologically clever. Anecdata? Yes. What a gorgeous meld of the two words. Stegotortoise? Yes. The vowels in “tortoise” and “-saurus” match perfectly (in my accent, at least). Mompreneur? No. The vowels are different, and it’s not even the right number of syllables. Sexcapade? It squashes a word containing the sounds /ks/ (sex) into one containing /sk/. No wonder I can’t say it.

4. They’re funny. This feature can trump the others. Mankini isn’t phonologically clever, but it neatly encapsulates the abject wrongness of the garment. Sodcasting isn’t semantically transparent (it means playing your music in public so loudly that others can hear it), but it made me laugh out loud; in this case, having to explain it is part of the fun. Bacne? Gosh, no. Spots are not jokes. Please.

5. They give the language more than just a single word. A creative language user divides alcoholic into alc + oholic and bingo, a whole new suffix is born. It’s quite a productive one, too: the Oxford English Dictionary now gives 17 examples of different words ending in –oholic.

In fact, this final process (called backformation) combines many of the above features. It’s semantically transparent. New words like workaholic fill genuine lexical gaps. The phonology of the best examples is pleasing (think about the repeated “o” sounds in shopaholic, chocoholic, and shockaholic). Franken- works in the same way (Frankenfood, Frankenbike), with the added bonus of being funny. And I’m watching the rise of man- as a prefix with a grin: we’ve gone from mansplaining to manspreading and manterrupting.

If nothing else, this list might explain why I shun webinars and go to bed every night hoping for a sleepiphany. And the people I know on Twitter are my friends. Don’t even think about calling them tweeple.
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Reference:

Crutchley, Alison. 2015. “Phablets and fauxhawks: the linguistic secrets of a good blended word”. The Guardian. Posted: May 29, 2015. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2015/may/29/phablets-and-fauxhawks-the-linguistic-secrets-of-a-good-blended-word

ICYMI, English language is changing faster than ever, says expert

Parents’ fomo is justified as they are left behind by terms like fleek, bae and other neologisms their children are using online

The English language is evolving at a faster rate now than at any other time in history because of social media and instant messaging, a language expert has said.

John Sutherland, professor of English from University College London, who led a study into common social media and “text speak” terms, found most parents were baffled by the language used by their children.

According to the study, commissioned by Samsung for a phone launch, there was a “seismic generational gap” between the older and younger generations when it came to how modern informal language was used.

Modern terms such as “fleek” and “bae” were found to be the most commonly confused by parents, with 10% of the 2,000 surveyed being able to identify the true meaning of “bae” – a term of affection; while 86% of parents who took part in the survey said they felt teenagers spoke an entirely different language on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

“Fleek” – which means looking good – came top of the list of terms parents did not understand, with 43% selecting it as a term they did not know.

This was ahead of fomo (fear of missing out) and bae (thought to have come from “before anyone else”, or to represent a shortened version of “babe”) – which 40% of parents said they didn’t know.

Popular social media acronyms ICYMI (in case you missed it), TBT (throwback Thursday) and NSFW (not safe for work) also made the list of terms parents failed to understand.

Sutherland said: “The limitation of characters on old handsets were a key factor in the rise of acronyms in text messaging such as TXT, GR8 and M8.

“However technological evolution has meant that these words are now effectively extinct from the text speak language and are seen as antique text speak.”

The rise of emojis could be the next phase in language and communication, and that the increasing use of icons had an historical link, Sutherland said.

“The use of audio and visual messaging has become more commonplace with the soaring popularity of social media and instant messaging apps such as Instagram, Vine and Snapchat,” he said.

“In fact we are moving to a more pictographic form of communication with the increasing popularity of emoticon.

“This harks back to a caveman form of communication where a single picture can convey a full range of messages and emotions.

“In the future less words and letters will be used in messaging as pictures and icons take over the text speak language.”

Both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile platforms now have emoji keyboards built into their software as standard.
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Reference:

The Guardian. 2015. “ICYMI, English language is changing faster than ever, says expert”. The Guardian. Posted: May 1, 2015. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/01/icymi-english-language-is-changing-faster-than-ever-says-expert

Research studies role native language plays in processing words in new languages

Research at the University of Kansas is exploring how a person's native language can influence the way the brain processes auditory words in a second language.

Because cues that signal the beginning and ending of words can differ from language to language, a person's native language can provide misleading information when learning to segment a second language into words. Annie Tremblay, an assistant professor of linguistics, is trying to better understand the kinds of cues second language learners listen for when recognizing words in continuous speech. She also is studying how adaptive adult learners are in acquiring these new speech cues.

Working with a group of international collaborators in the Netherlands, South Korea and France, Tremblay received a three-and-half year, $259,000 National Science Foundation grant for the research.

"The moment we hear a new language, all of a sudden we hear a stream of sounds and don't know where the words begin or end," Tremblay said. "Even if we know words from the second language and can recognize them in isolation, we may not be able to locate these words in continuous speech, because a variety of processes affect how words are realized in context."

For second language learners, some cues are easier to pick up than others, such as which consonants are common in starting and ending words. An example is the "z" sound, which is a common end to words in English but is not often found at the beginning of words.

Other cues, such as intonation, are harder to master and are more likely to be influenced by a speaker's native language. Tremblay points to English where a stressed syllable is a strong indication that a new word is beginning. But in French the opposite is true; prominent syllables tend to be at the end of words.

"This kind of information can't be memorized in a language such as French. It has to be computed. And this is where second language learners struggle," Tremblay said.

An example of confusion is the French phrase for cranky cat, which in French is "chat grincheux." For a brief second, the phrase can sound like the English pronunciation for "chagrin," a word with French origins.

"If you hear the 'cha' syllable as being prominent, it cannot come from the word chagrin in French because the first syllable of chagrin will not be stressed in French," Tremblay said.

With her international collaborators, Tremblay manipulates intonation cues similar to the example above to test how listeners use these cues to recognize words. In one experiment, participants hear a sentence containing a phrase such as 'chat grincheux,' see four word options on a computer screen such as chat, chagrin and two unrelated words, then are asked to click the correct word. An eye-tracking device determines when and how long the participant focuses on each word.

Another experiment has participants listen to an artificial, made-up language for 20 minutes. They are then asked to identify words in that language.

So far the research group has studied native English and Korean speakers who have learned French, and native French speakers who live in France or in the United States.

One of the more interesting findings is that when languages share more similarities but still have slight differences, it can be harder for second language learners to use the correct speech cues to identify words. For example, in French and Korean, prominent syllables tend to be at the end of words. However, there is one small difference: Korean intonation drops before the next word begins. In French, intonation drops during the first syllable of the next word.

"For English speakers, the differences between English stress and French prominence are so salient that it ought to be obvious and they ought to readjust their system," Tremblay said. "Whereas in Korean they think, 'Oh, this is just like Korean.' It sounds similar, and they don't readjust their use of this information."

Researchers also found that native French speakers who lived in France did better than native French speakers who lived in the United States at using French-like intonation cues to locate words in an artificial language. In fact, the longer a native French speaker lived in the United States, the worse they did at using the cues from their native language.

"This suggests that the speech processing system is extremely adaptive. Despite all the claims about the existence of a critical period for language learning, the speech processing system is actually very flexible; it might just take a long time to completely override the effects of the native language," Tremblay said.

The research group continues to collect data and plans to include native Dutch speakers who speak French.
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EurekAlert. 2015. “Research studies role native language plays in processing words in new languages”. EurekAlert. Posted: December 16, 2014. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-12/uok-rsr121614.php

Massive Study Shows How Languages Change

More than 100 years ago, the playwright Oscar Wilde had one of his British characters say that England and America "have everything in common nowadays except, of course, language.” It turns out, according to linguists, he was almost right. But lately, the two languages are getting closer.

Languages change over time -- some faster than others. Some reflect changes in the world around them, according to a new paper published by The Royal Society in London. There are universal and historical factors at work, and languages change at varying rates, the scientists found.

The researchers used the Google Books Ngram corpus to monitor word and phrase usage in the past five centuries in eight languages. They drew from 8 million books – roughly 6 percent of all the books ever published, according to Google's own estimates. The books were scanned into a database by Google.

While linguists have always known that the changes vary, this use of the gigantic Google database is by far the largest.

The researchers were an international group that ironically had its own language difficulties.

The lead author was Søren Wichmann, a Dane working at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His coauthors were Valery Solovyev, a linguist at Kazan Federal University in the Republic of Tartarstan in Russia, and astrophysicist Vladimir Bochkarev, also at Kazan, who was interested in languages. The work was done at the Kazan linguistics lab.

Research was hampered by the fact Wichmann did not speak Russian, and Bochkarev didn’t speak English.

Wichmann’s wife translated part of the time. Otherwise they used Google’s translator, which was not always useful.

For this study, they delved into written languages, which are more conservative in their expressions, rather than tackle spoken languages for which there is no good record. They looked specifically at how frequently words were used. Each word form counted as one word; for instance "park" and "parked" were counted as two different words.

The process they used is called "glottochronology" by linguists.

Language Shaped by Culture

“One word which was earlier specialized might take on a broader meaning and can replace the word that had a broader meaning before,” Wichmann said.

Sometimes it is just a matter of fashion; sometimes it is outside events. For instance, the early English word for “dog” was “hound.” Now “hound" is a specific kind of dog. The same thing may be happening in reverse to the word “vodka,” which in some places is replacing “liquor.”

“Any major change in society will change the frequency of words,” Wichmann said.

Mostly, the researchers found, languages change at a similar rate but that rate usually is measured in terms of half a century unless something intervenes, like a war. When wars come, Wichmann said, changes in vocabulary came more rapidly as new words like “Nazis” came into the language and people start thinking about things they did not contemplate before hostilities, he said.

During the Victorian era, the height of the British Empire and a very stable time in Britain, the language was fairly steady. With the tumult and chaos of the 20th century, vocabulary changes came more rapidly.

From about 1850 on, British English and American English drifted apart. For the first half of the 19th century the Queen’s English and American English were the same except that the British English lagged behind about 20 years. New words came into the American English lexicon, but only appeared in Britain about 20 years later.

Then, the influence of the mass media began to bring the two languages together starting in 1950. Now, the two languages are far more similar than they were before, Wichmann said.

Challenges in Learning Languages

Ever wonder why some languages are harder for adults to learn than others? The researchers point out that languages contain what linguists call a “kernel lexicon,” meaning a list of words that constitute 75 percent of the written language. If you know those words, you can make out much of the literature. These also are the words least likely to change even as the language morphs.

The kernel lexicon for English is less than 2,400 words. If you know them you can read 75 percent of the text. The kernel lexicon for Russian is about 24,000 words. So, even though the whole of the English language has about 600,000 words and Russian only has about a sixth of that, without the crucial 21,000 kernel words, most Russian writing would be largely incomprehensible.

"The fact a given word might be used a lot in one period doesn't necessarily mean the word is new," said Brian Joseph, distinguished university professor of linguistics at the Ohio State University in Columbus. For instance, one word now trending in English is "cupcake."

Sometimes words combine, like "labradoodles," he said.

Definitions change too. Some words meant one thing to Shakespeare but mean something else to us, said David Lightfoot, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. "Scientist" is in the current lexicon but before the 19th century, they were called "natural philosophers."

Sometimes the change in wording tells us more than we think it would. In recent years, the use of the word “divorce” has become more frequent than “marry,” Wichmann said.

Perhaps more telling, “information” is replacing “wisdom.”
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Shurkin, Joel N.2014. “Massive Study Shows How Languages Change”. Inside Science. Posted: September 30, 2014. Available online: http://www.insidescience.org/content/massive-study-shows-how-languages-change/2096

Germans try to get their tongues around gender-neutral language

Der, die or das? For centuries, the seemingly arbitrary allocation of masculine, feminine and neutral gender articles in German has driven non-native speakers to despair. "In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has," the American writer Mark Twain once complained. "Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl."

But hope may finally be in sight. Changing attitudes to gender are increasingly transforming the German language, and some theorists argue that scrapping the gendered articles altogether may be the most logical outcome.

Predictions vary: one suggestion is that Angela Merkel will eventually no longer be die Bundeskanzlerin but a neutral das Bundeskanzler, as she would be in English. Others believe that the feminine gender, already the most common fallback form used by non-native speakers, will become the default article: a policeman would no longer be der Polizist but die Polizist.

The changing nature of German is particularly noticeable at university campuses. Addressing groups of students in German has been problematic ever since universities stopped being bastions of male privilege. Should they be sehr geehrte Studenten or sehr geehrte Studentinnen?

In official documents, such as job advertisements, administrators used to get around the problem with typographical hybrid forms such as Student(inn)en or StudentInnen – an unfair compromise, some say, which still treats the archetype of any profession as masculine.

Now, with the federal justice ministry emphasising that all state bodies should stick to "gender-neutral" formulations in their paperwork, things are changing again. Increasingly, job ads use the feminine form as the root of a noun, so that even a male professor may be referred to as der Professorin. Lecturers are advised to address their students not as Studenten but Studierende ("those that study"), thus sidestepping the gender question altogether.

In the long run, such solutions would prove too complicated, linguists such as Luise Pusch argue. She told the Guardian that men would eventually get so frustrated with the current compromises that they would clock on to the fundamental problem, and the German language would gradually simplify its gender articles, just as English has managed to do since the Middle Ages.

"Language should be comfortable and fair," said Pusch. "At the moment, German is a very comfortable language, but a very unfair one."

Many linguists question whether language can be changed through human will. "It's hard to transform grammar through legislation, and even if so, such changes often happen over centuries," said Anatol Stefanowitsch, a linguist at Berlin's Free University.

But he also points out that some dialects, such as Niederdeutsch (Low German), have lost the cumbersome distinction between der and die already: in Low German, for example, both men and women are simply referred to as de.
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References:

Oltermann, Philip. 2014. “Germans try to get their tongues around gender-neutral language”. The Guardian. Posted: March 24, 2014. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/24/germans-get-tongues-around-gender-neutral-language

Nouns before verbs?

New research agenda could help shed light on early language, cognitive development

Researchers are digging deeper into whether infants' ability to learn new words is shaped by the particular language being acquired.

A new Northwestern University study cites a promising new research agenda aimed at bringing researchers closer to discovering the impact of different languages on early language and cognitive development.

For decades, researchers have asked why infants learn new nouns more rapidly and more easily than new verbs. Many researchers have asserted that the early advantage for learning nouns over verbs is a universal feature of human language.

In contrast, other researchers have argued that early noun-advantage is not a universal feature of human language but rather a consequence of the particular language being acquired.

Sandra Waxman, lead author of the study and Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern, shows in her research that even before infants begin to produce many verbs in earnest, infants acquiring either noun-friendly or verb-friendly languages already appreciate the concepts underlying both noun and verb meaning.

In all languages examined to date, researchers see a robust ability to map nouns to objects, Waxman said, but when it comes to mapping verbs to events, infants' performance is less robust and more variable. Their ability to learn new verbs varied not only as a function of the native language being acquired, but also with the particular linguistic context in which the verb was presented.

Based on new evidence, a shift in the research agenda is necessary, according to Waxman and her colleagues.

"We now know that by 24 months infants acquiring distinctly different languages can successfully map novel nouns to objects and novel verbs to event categories," Waxman said. "It is essential that we shift the research focus to include infants at 24 months and younger, infants who are engaged in the very process of acquiring distinctly different native languages."

Waxman said the implications are clear. "Rather than characterizing languages as either 'noun friendly' or 'verb friendly,' it would be advantageous to adopt a more nuanced treatment of the syntactic, semantic, morphologic and pragmatic properties of each language and the consequences of these properties on infants' acquisition of linguistic structure and meaning."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “Nouns before verbs?”. EurekAlert. Posted: March 25, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/nu-nbv032513.php

How language change sneaks in

Languages are continually changing, not just words but also grammar. A recent study examines how such changes happen and what the changes can tell us about how speakers' grammars work. The study, "The course of actualization", to be published in the September 2012 issue of the scholarly journal Language, is authored by Hendrik De Smet of the University of Leuven /Research Foundation Flanders. A preprint version is available online at: http://lsadc.org/info/documents/2012/press-releases/de-smet.pdf

Historical linguists, who document and study language change, have long noticed that language changes have a sneaky quality, starting small and unobtrusive and then gradually conquering more ground, a process termed 'actualization'. De Smet's study investigates how actualization proceeds by tracking and comparing different language changes, using large collections of digitized historical texts. This way, it is shown that any actualization process consists of a series of smaller changes with each new change building on and following from the previous ones, each time making only a minimal adjustment. A crucial role in this is played by similarity.

Consider the development of so-called downtoners – grammatical elements that minimize the force of the word they accompany. Nineteenth-century English saw the emergence of a new downtoner, all but, meaning 'almost'. All but started out being used only with adjectives, as in her escape was all but miraculous. But later it also began to turn up with verbs, as in until his clothes all but dropped from him. In grammatical terms, that is a fairly big leap, but when looked at closely the leap is found to go in smaller steps. Before all but spread to verbs, it appeared with past participles, which very much resemble both adjectives and verbs, as in her breath was all but gone. So, changes can sneak into a language and spread from context to context by exploiting the similarities between contexts.

The role of similarity in language change makes a number of predictions. For one thing, actualization processes will differ from item to item because in each case there will be different similarities to exploit. English is currently seeing some nouns developing into adjectives, such as fun or key. This again goes by small adjustments, but along different pathways. For fun, speakers started from expressions like that was really fun, which they would adjust to that was very fun, and from there they would go on to a very fun time and by now some have even gone on to expressions like the funnest time ever. For key, change started from expressions like a key player, which could be adjusted to an absolutely key player, and from there to a player who is absolutely key. When the changes are over, the eventual outcome will be the same – fun and key will have all the characteristics of any other English adjective – but the way that is coming about is different.

Another prediction is that actualization processes will differ from language to language, because grammatical contexts that are similar in one language may not be in another. Comparing the development of another English downtoner, far from (as in far from perfect), to its Dutch equivalent, verre van, it is found that, even though they started out quite similar, the two downtoners went on to develop differently due to differences in the overall structure of English and Dutch. Importantly, this is one way in which even small changes may reinforce and gradually increase existing differences between languages.

Finally, this research can say something about how language works in general. Similarity is so important to how changes unfold precisely because it is important to how speakers subconsciously use language all the time. Presumably, whenever a speaker thinks up a new sentence and decides it is acceptable, they do so by evaluating its resemblance to previous sentences. In this respect, actualization processes are giving us a unique window on how similarity works in organizing and reorganizing speakers' internal grammars, showing just how sensitive speakers are to all sorts of similarities. Strikingly, then, the same similarity judgments that speakers make to form acceptable and intelligible sentences allow their grammars to gradually change over time.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. “How language change sneaks in”. EurekAlert. Posted: September 4, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-09/lsoa-hlc083012.php

How language change sneaks in

Languages are continually changing, not just words but also grammar. A recent study examines how such changes happen and what the changes can tell us about how speakers' grammars work. The study, "The course of actualization", to be published in the September 2012 issue of the scholarly journal Language, is authored by Hendrik De Smet of the University of Leuven /Research Foundation Flanders. A preprint version is available online at: http://lsadc.org/info/documents/2012/press-releases/de-smet.pdf Historical linguists, who document and study language change, have long noticed that language changes have a sneaky quality, starting small and unobtrusive and then gradually conquering more ground, a process termed 'actualization'. De Smet's study investigates how actualization proceeds by tracking and comparing different language changes, using large collections of digitized historical texts. This way, it is shown that any actualization process consists of a series of smaller changes with each new change building on and following from the previous ones, each time making only a minimal adjustment. A crucial role in this is played by similarity.

Consider the development of so-called downtoners – grammatical elements that minimize the force of the word they accompany. Nineteenth-century English saw the emergence of a new downtoner, all but, meaning 'almost'. All but started out being used only with adjectives, as in her escape was all but miraculous. But later it also began to turn up with verbs, as in until his clothes all but dropped from him. In grammatical terms, that is a fairly big leap, but when looked at closely the leap is found to go in smaller steps. Before all but spread to verbs, it appeared with past participles, which very much resemble both adjectives and verbs, as in her breath was all but gone. So, changes can sneak into a language and spread from context to context by exploiting the similarities between contexts.

The role of similarity in language change makes a number of predictions. For one thing, actualization processes will differ from item to item because in each case there will be different similarities to exploit. English is currently seeing some nouns developing into adjectives, such as fun or key. This again goes by small adjustments, but along different pathways. For fun, speakers started from expressions like that was really fun, which they would adjust to that was very fun, and from there they would go on to a very fun time and by now some have even gone on to expressions like the funnest time ever. For key, change started from expressions like a key player, which could be adjusted to an absolutely key player, and from there to a player who is absolutely key. When the changes are over, the eventual outcome will be the same – fun and key will have all the characteristics of any other English adjective – but the way that is coming about is different.

Another prediction is that actualization processes will differ from language to language, because grammatical contexts that are similar in one language may not be in another. Comparing the development of another English downtoner, far from (as in far from perfect), to its Dutch equivalent, verre van, it is found that, even though they started out quite similar, the two downtoners went on to develop differently due to differences in the overall structure of English and Dutch. Importantly, this is one way in which even small changes may reinforce and gradually increase existing differences between languages.

Finally, this research can say something about how language works in general. Similarity is so important to how changes unfold precisely because it is important to how speakers subconsciously use language all the time. Presumably, whenever a speaker thinks up a new sentence and decides it is acceptable, they do so by evaluating its resemblance to previous sentences. In this respect, actualization processes are giving us a unique window on how similarity works in organizing and reorganizing speakers' internal grammars, showing just how sensitive speakers are to all sorts of similarities. Strikingly, then, the same similarity judgments that speakers make to form acceptable and intelligible sentences allow their grammars to gradually change over time.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. “How language change sneaks in”. EurekAlert. Posted: September 4, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-09/lsoa-hlc083012.php

Linguistic Myths and Adventures in Etymology

The folk wisdom built up around common English expressions is often wrong, but it can be fun ferreting out the real origins.

The alarm went off. What does that mean? Recently, a friend who is learning English couldn’t quite figure it out. Isn’t the alarm going on, not off, he asked.

Comprehending such phrases is often one of the more difficult steps in learning a language. These idiomatic expressions are collections of words that mean something different than each word’s dictionary definition. For example, “that barking dog next door is driving me up the wall,” if taken literally, could mean that the neighbor’s poodle has recently earned a driver’s license and is using a car to accelerate up the wall dividing our houses. “Woof, woof” could equal “Vroom, vroom.”

But how well do native speakers know their own language? Let’s have fun with our critical thinking skills and apply a little skepticism to some widely believed verbal urban legends.

David Wilton, author of Word Myths and webmaster at Wordorigins.org, coined the concept of “linguistic urban legends,” which tend to be false tales, yet which spring from some grain of truth. These expressions, Wilton claims, “arise mysteriously and spread widely.”

OK? Consider OK. Stories of its origin range all over the map: a Haitian rum port called Aux Cayes, a Choctaw word, okeh, meaning “indeed,” or President Martin van Buren’s nickname of Old Kinderhook. Writer (and noted skeptic) H.L. Mencken got into the act in 1921 when he debunked the popular belief floating around in 1828 that OK was short-hand for “all correct” because of Andrew Jackson’s abbreviations on documents and his misspelling as “oll korrect.”

That last one about Jackson is close but no cigar. It is now generally accepted that the original use of OK came about in 1839 as part of newspaper fads to humorously abbreviate phrases, including funny misspellings from supposedly illiterate characters. So some would use GTDHD for “give the devil his due” for a more literal acronym, and OK for a misspelled “oll korrect.” By now, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were LOL or ROTFL over this silly 19th-century fad! OMG, who’d do that these days?

Or maybe you’re too posh to play along this way. Another widely held linguistic urban legend claims “posh” was an abbreviation for “port out, starboard home” stamped on tickets to designate the shadier and more luxurious sides of the ship when traveling between England and India. Yet, no tickets have been uncovered with “POSH” stamped on them, and evidence exists from the late 19th century of the use of the word posh in a similar way as it is used today. While its exact source is unknown, posh may derive from a Romani or an Urdu word, referring variously to money, a dandy, well-dressed, affluent. Phrases like “port out, starboard home” to define the word posh are sometimes called “backronyms” as we work backwards from the letters to an invented phrase and end up creating what appears to be an original acronym.

Lacking historical perspective can lead us to overlook that there may be nothing new under the sun. Not only were humorous abbreviations used centuries before Twitter, but another computer-related word may not be as new as you think. Let’s hope that your choice of platform to read this article is not infected with a bug. While it is generally believed that an actual insect jammed some relay switches in an earlier version of the computer and the word spread throughout the industry, the Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to Thomas Edison in 1889 using it metaphorically to indicate a difficulty with his new phonograph invention and blaming the glitch on some imaginary bug.

Successfully finding the source of many of our idiomatic expressions sometimes has a snowball’s chance in hell. Many are passed along orally, and no written record exists. Yet, sometimes, good critical thinking and skeptical analysis can uncover the linguistic rumor.

One famous example is the alleged multiple words for snow that Eskimos use. Noted anthropologist and linguist Franz Boas, discussed the Inuit’s four — only four — words for snow in 1911.

However, by 1940, thanks to Benjamin Lee Whorf of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis fame, the original point of Boas’ linguistic observation got transformed into the idea that Eskimos actually see snow in multiple ways and categorize the world differently. Whorf, in one of his writings, increased Boas’ examples to at least seven, according to research in 1989 by linguist Geoffrey Pullum. Pullum argues that “the myth of the multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all. It is a kind of accidentally developed hoax….”

This seemingly provocative notion of many words and perceptions of the Eskimos’ world, well, snowballed. Anthropologist Laura Martin provided many examples in her 1986 published research about the Eskimo snow hoax, such as the Lanford Wilson play, The Fifth of July, which said there were 50 Eskimo words for snow, a New York Times editorial in 1984 that claimed there were 100 types of snow, and a Cleveland television station that reported the existence of 200 words while discussing the local snow storm.

Discovering the meanings behind our idiomatic expressions, linguistic hoaxes, and proverbs illustrates the fun side of skeptical thinking. So join in and when that alarm comes on (or goes off), wake up and smell the coffee.
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References:

Nardi, Peter M. 2012. "Linguistic Myths and Adventures in Etymology". Miller-McCune. Posted: March 22, 2012. Available online: http://www.miller-mccune.com/education/linguistic-myths-and-adventures-in-etymology-40524/

Endangered languages: the full list

How many endangered languages are there in the World and what are the chances they will die out completely?

This week the Guardian reported that the last two fluent speakers of the language Ayapaneco aren't speaking to each other.

This poignant story got us thinking about the number of endangered languages in the World.

To get to the bottom of this we turned to United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), who regularly publish a list of endangered languages.

UNESCO provide a classification system to show just how 'in trouble' the language is:

Vulnerable - most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home)

Definitely endangered - children no longer learn the language as a 'mother tongue' in the home

Severely endangered - language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves

Critically endangered - the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently

Extinct - there are no speakers left

...

Finally, here is the full list of languages in danger and there is even more detail in the spreadsheet that goes with this post.

The UNESCO provide an Alas of endangered languages on their website. Do you have a nice idea for displaying this same data?

Full Endangered Language List
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References:

Evans, Lisa. 2011. "Endangered languages: the full list". Guardian. Posted: April 15, 2011. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/apr/15/language-extinct-endangered

The 'bumpy ride' of linguistic change

A recent study of an ancient language provides new insights into the nature of linguistic evolution, with potential applications for today's world. The study, "Dvandvas, Blocking, and the Associative: The Bumpy Ride from Phrase to Word," to be published in the June 2010 issue of the scholarly journal Language, is authored by Paul Kiparsky of Stanford University. A preprint version is available on line at: http://lsadc.org/info/documents/2010/press-releases/kiparsky.pdf

Dr. Kiparsky's research focuses on the reasons why languages change over time, and the mechanisms by which this change occurs. Linguistic change differs from biological evolution and socio-cultural change because of the way language is organized and learned. Languages are passed on by example, but each is governed by a coherent set of rules that conform to a common set of organizing principles. Linguistic change is typically initiated by children as they make "intelligent" errors in seeking the simplest way of navigating the languages they are learning. By studying linguistic change, we gain new insights into how language is organized and how children learn language.

Dr. Kiparsky observed that linguistic change does not follow a straightforward path toward a simpler system. Instead, it takes a "bumpy ride" to its destination. A language is like an enormous house that has to be reconstructed by each new occupant, who has to discover its design as the work is in progress, and while the previous occupants are still living in it. Construction is always going on, now and then a room is finished, but only after centuries can an outside observer see that a fundamental renovation has taken place. Dr. Kiparsky's new study shows how the stepwise progress of innovations through a language follows an orderly course predicted by principles that appear to be shared by all languages.

This new insight into the nature of how language change occurs will help linguists and those who rely on their research to gain a greater understanding of language and the mind.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2010. "The 'bumpy ride' of linguistic change". EurekAlert. Posted: June 21, 2010. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-06/lsoa-tr062110.php