CONGRATULATIONS...

...on choosing to take the most exciting*, useful** and just plain excellent*** A level course known to humankind. We'd just like to take this opportunity to say "welcome" to all our new AS English Language students, and "welcome back" to those of you starting your second year of English Language at Strode's.

The purpose of this blog is to help you to keep up to date with current news articles, websites and other resources that focus on a wide range of topics, issues and debates surrounding the English language in all its forms and uses. Not only will this blog support your learning, but it is also guaranteed to stimulate your curiosity about language and provoke debate and discussion with fellow English Language students, friends and family alike. I often say that there is no such thing as an 'off-duty' English Language student, and you'll find that the links and comments on this blog will open up a whole world of issues in which you will quickly find yourself becoming immersed.

The blog is updated by members of the English Language team on a regular basis (although you might have noticed that there was something of a 'hiatus' last year!), so please do log in as frequently as possible (there's a link to the blog on the AS and A2 English Language VLE sites). If you've got something to say about the issues raised in one of the blog entries, please do feel free to post a comment. You could even start a discussion about the topic on the VLE. Similarly, if you happen to come across an interesting language-related resource/website/news item somewhere and you think other students would benefit from accessing it, then please email the details to your teacher at jjones@strodes.ac.uk, nwhillans@strodes.ac.uk or telliott@strodes.ac.uk and we'll post it up. You'll find that each entry is tagged for the particular aspect(s) or unit(s) of the course to which it relates, which makes it easy for you to search through older posts if you're looking for something in particular.

To get us started for this year, here's a link to an interesting article about modern slang that appeared in The Sun. "What???", I hear you cry, outraged, "An English teacher recommending something written in THE SUN??? Preposterous!". Well, yes, actually. As students of English Language we are interested in language in all its forms and uses, both formal and informal. Much of our work over the two years of the course focuses on what society in general thinks and says about language, and how language is used by a wide range of social groups, and those attitudes and uses can be found in all sorts of places and texts. This article about 'modern' slang is particularly relevant to both AS and A2 at this point in the year, as we begin to look in AS at our own language habits and in A2 at age variation in language.

Enjoy the course!

*probably
**no doubt about this one
***well, we like to think so

Noughty language

Now that 2009 is well and truly behind us and the so-called Noughties are nought (pun intended) but a distant memory, what could be more heart-warmingly nostalgic than to have a look back at some of the most popular linguistic innovations of the past decade? That's precisely what this Guardian blog does.

You say tomato...

Here's an interesting article that ties in nicely with some of the work we've been doing recently on regional variation on the A2 course. In it the writer, Richard Morrison, discusses the 'state' of regional accents and dialects in modern Britain. It is a widely-held (if not necessarily always empirically based) view that 'accents and dialects are dying out', but Morrison seeks to debunk this perspective. He observes that "the British are reasserting their regional distinctions, at least in the one area over which ordinary folk have total control — the way we speak". Morrison continues:

Academics at Lancaster University have found that, rather than disappearing or merging, British dialects and accents are stronger than ever. Indeed, it seems that the great urban argots — Geordie, Scouse, Glaswegian, Brummie and the like — are actually extending their reach into the surrounding towns and countryside, as more and more people assert with their mode of speech their pride in belonging to a particular region.

The writer goes on to observe:

What’s really important is that, despite all the predictions made half a century ago, regional accents clearly haven’t been steamrollered into oblivion by mass communication and social mobility. Yes, all of us listen to the same TV and radio presenters, and many of us live hundreds of miles from where we learnt to speak our mother tongue. Yet we appear not merely to be clinging to the distinctive figures of speech and vowel sounds of our native soil, but actively nurturing them.

We're about to start looking at a phenomenon known as dialect levelling, and related theories that suggest that varieties associated with particular regions are becoming less distinct and are instead adopting non-standard forms that are shared by speakers across the country. The spread of so-called 'Estuary English' over the last couple of decades is often cited as evidence of this phenomenon, whereby speakers from areas as far north as Hull have been recorded using non-standard linguistic features not associated with the traditional varieties of their area but with varieties linked to the South-East of England. Whilst on one level Morrison's observations would appear to run counter to this, he does comment that "[t]he academics say that there are fewer and fewer differences between the way that people speak in neighbouring villages or urban districts. These micro-distinctions are being subsumed into regional “super-dialects”...". So to some extent this is like a localised version of dialect levelling. This gives us another angle to consider when looking at the issue of change in regional varieties, and should encourage us not to make blanket assumptions about the extent or nature of dialect levelling, but instead to consider each regioan and their related varieties on their own merits.

Mind your language... again!

In an earlier post we asked the question "Does it matter what we call things?". This article from today's Guardian goes some way towards answering that question - at least with regard to the language used to describe some specific medical conditions. It's only a short piece, but one of the more interesting points the writer makes is about the use of words like 'schizophrenic' as nouns labelling individuals, rather than as adjectives used to describe their condition. The writer argues that the latter is acceptable, while the former is less so, because it reduces the person concerned to nothing more than a sufferer of their condition, defining them solely in terms of their disability.

You might remember us discussing this very process in class in relation to ethnicity: we talked about the use of adjectives such as 'Chinese' - as in 'Chinese people' - as compared with the generally less acceptable noun 'Chinese', as in 'the Chinese' (or, even more contentious, the use of 'black' as a noun rather than as an adjective). You might think this is 'linguistic pedantry', but it's worth asking yourself whether these subtle differences actually make a difference to people's perceptions of the group or individual being represented. In some cases maybe not... but in other cases I think there is something to be considered here.

War of the words...

...or, more accurately, the words of war. As we begin to move on (in the AS course) to studying the language of political speeches and rhetoric in general, how much more timely could this article in yesterday's Guardian be? The article focuses on the subtle linguistic shifts that are taking place with regard to the ways in which politicians talk about the war in Afghanistan. In line with the ideas about language that we have been considering on the course, the writer comments that "terminology is important because it shapes the thinking". Indeed. And so it is that there is no longer talk of defeating the Taliban; instead the insurgency is dispelled. Have a look at the article for further linguistic nuggets, and if you want to read more on this then have a look at some previous posts on this blog here and here.

Representations of young people

With all of the AS groups currently working on Representation and Language, I thought you might find it useful if we were to gather together on this blog some links to texts that construct representations of particular social groups, individuals, issues etc. So, first up: representations of young people.

In the first of these articles, which is primarily about the new Michael Caine film Harry Brown, the writer considers the use of 'the hoodie' as a universal symbol of undesirable or even criminal elements in society. Although this is a text which more or less analyses representation (rather than creating its own representation of young people), the writer makes some interesting points about the ways in which society presents and views members of this age group. The following extract is a good example:

What separates hoodies from the youth cults of previous moral panics – the teddy boys, the mods and rockers, the punks, the ravers have all had their day at the cinema – is that they don't have the pop-cultural weight of the other subcultures, whose members bonded through music, art and customised fashion. Instead, they're defined by their class (perceived as being bottom of the heap) and their social standing (their relationship to society is always seen as being oppositional). Hoodies aren't "kids" or "youngsters" or even "rebels" – in fact, recent research by Women in Journalism on regional and national newspaper reporting of hoodies shows that the word is most commonly interchanged with (in order of popularity) "yob", "thug", "lout" and "scum".

The Women in Journalism article that is referred to in the quotation above contains some really interesting observations on language that relate very closely to the work we've been focusing on in class.

But are media representations of young people always as negative as this? In the first of a number of articles that appeared in the press last year, we see a number of examples of young people being labelled in precisely the way that the writer of the Harry Brown article was talking about. In this article the labels teenager and teen - which in themselves are arguably neutral - are used in collocation with descriptors such as callous and reports that these young people "casually snacked on McDonald's burgers as an 82-year-old driver lay dying with his wife critically injured beside him".

By contrast, this article uses the term teenagers in a much more neutral way, reinforcing the representation with the far more positive label young people. Similarly, in this article and this article the victims of violent attacks are given the neutral label boy, while their attackers are labelled far mroe negatively as youths and gangs.

The writing's on the wall...

...OK, it's actually on paper, but that doesn't quite work as a blog post title, so you'll just have to give me some slack on this one.

I've always imagined the world of Forensic Linguistics to be an exciting one, but it's an area that I've never really had the opportunity to look into in much detail - until now. In doing one of my usual net-trawls for interesting stuff to post on this blog, I came across this article. It reports on the work of researchers at the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, who have been carrying out detailed studies of the language used in hate mail. One of these linguists, Dr Tim Grant, comments in the article on the way in which his team have come to the conclusion that the 57 letters they have been studying could have been written by a woman. They have based this hypothesis on a range of observations about the language used within the letters, much of which conforms to what many linguists consider to be female linguistic traits. Dr Grant's comments contribute significantly to the debates that we've been having in A2 English Language about gender variation :

He said: "One of the things that were striking about the letters was the heavy use of expressive adjectives, which is more typical of women than men. You could say women use more adjectives because they can be more socially evaluative but we don't look at why rather than how the two different groups behave. We just know that's the case because we read a lot of letters and make statistical correlations. The words (in the letters) used were things like 'squalor', 'dirty' and some sexual adjectives which were suggestive of women's writing. Another thing we know is that women tend to use fewer first person pronouns, such as 'I'."

This line of argument of course flies in the face of some of the most recent observations on gender variation made by the likes of Deborah Cameron (who argues that the supposed differences between male and female linguistic behaviour are nothing more than myth). It'll be interesting to see if the boffins at Aston Uni turn out to be right...

If you want to find out more about the work of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics, then take a look at their website.