No more smut, filth and obscenity...

...Well, not as much, anyway.

Since my last post on Smut, filth and obscenity...? there have been some interesting developments in the whole 'swearing on the BBC' row. According to this article, there is to be a crack down on the use of 'foul language' following "a review of bad language across the corporation's services".

Commissioned in response to what has come to be known as 'Sachsgate' (nice word formation there), the review comments not only on Jonathan Ross's use of taboo language but also makes the observation that Ross's language is frequently "gratuitous and unnecessarily offensive" and concedes that "it is possible that some language alienates some audiences unnecessarily". Who those audiences are, though, is not necessarily easy to determine - language that, for one person, is gratuitous and offensive might be considered by another person to be harmless and humourous self-expression. The BBC's recently-revised guidelines on offensive language take this point on board.

The guidelines state:

There is no consensus about words that are acceptable, when, and by whom.
Different words cause different degrees of offence in different parts of the
world. So a person's age, sex, education, employment, belief, nationality, and
where they live, all impact on whether or not they might be offended.

They also comment on what constitutes the most offensive language:

Language that causes most offence includes:• sexual swearwords• terms of racist
abuse• terms of sexual and sexist abuse or abuse referring to sexuality•
pejorative terms relating to illness or disabilities• casual or derogatory use
of holy names or religious words and especially in combination with other
offensive language.

As a father of three young children, I'm also relieved to read that the BBC guidelines stipulate that they "do not include any offensive language in pre-school children's programmes or websites (four years and under)". Glad to hear it!! After all, can you imagine Iggle-Piggle shouting the F-word at Macca-Pacca? Or PC Plum branding the youth of Balamory "a load of little s***s"? A little less reassuring, though, is the next line of the guidelines, which states that "We (the BBC) must not include offensive language in programmes or websites made for younger children except in the most exceptional circumstances". Except in the most exceptional circumstances??? I dread to think what that might mean...

Obamania!

With the US Presidency safely in his hands earlier today, Barack Obama delivered a victory speech that was crammed full of the kinds of rhetorical devices that we linguists find fascinating (very nice of him too, considering we're just starting rhetoric in our AS English Language classes!).

You can listen to the man himself deliver his speech here, and there's a full transcript here. See how many linguistic devices you can spot (clue: there are lots of them!).

Dialect, dialect, dialect...

The subject of regional accents and dialects is rarely absent from the pages of national and local newspapers for very long, and in the last week or so there have been a number of interesting articles in various publications.

This article from the Northumberland Gazette looks at the work of the Northumbrian Language Society, whose efforts to keep the local dialect alive will this week include an event which sees the recital of a selection of poems written in the Northumbrian dialect. Further south in Hull, meanwhile, a hotel has begun to issue its guests with a tongue-in-cheek guide to the local dialect, as reported here. It's a pretty comprehensive list, which takes an affectionate look at the local regional variety - although there are a few people from the area who are less than pleased with what they consider to be bit of a mickey-take (although the hotel management denies it was ever meant to be seen in this way).

Elsewhere in Yorkshire, one of last week's editions of the Huddersfield Daily Examiner issued a plea to bring back the Yorkshire dialect - an article which, in turn, prompted some negative responses a few days later because of its use of what some people considered to be regional forms that were not from Yorkshire but from across the border in Lancashire.

And finally, no blog post (at least, no blog post from this writer) would be complete without something on the dialects of the West Midlands, which is why this video report gets a mention. Them bostin' Brummies have got in on the Facebook act, setting up a group called 'Faycebook' (the extra 'y' being an attempt to replicate the West Midlands vowel pronunication) to celebrate all things Brummie.

Some accents just Palin comparison to others

Tee hee hee, see what I did there? A headline truly worthy of the hallowed pages of the "Sun Writer's Pun-Writer" handbook. For this post is indeed all about accents (accents such as that of Sarah Palin, candidate for the US Vice-Presidency) and how some accents (Sarah Palin's, for example) are seen to be less prestigious and/or desirable than others - in fact, some accents pale in comparison to others (Palin comparison... geddit?). Ahh-herrmmm... anyway...*

One article from the American press chooses to headline specific negative perceptions of Sarah Palin's accent ("What an accent! Mush!") as a summary of the writer's generally less than positive views about her as a politician. This highlights the fact that people tend to see accent and dialect as an important characteristic when it comes to making judgements about other people, and another article from the American press picks up on this. Like the first article, this one starts by focusing on Sarah Palin's accent ("Really? That's an Alaskan accent?") but moves on to a more detailed discussion of the significance of attitudes towards language varieties, drawing on the views and observations of a number of expert linguists. Whilst this article focuses exclusively on American accents (and is therefore technically outside of our remit for Unit 5 'Contemporary Language Variation in the British Isles'), many of the issues that are raised about accents of American English are of equal significance for British English varieties. Among the points raised is the observation that, contrary to earlier predictions that regional accents would 'die out', people are actually holding on to their distinctive linguistic varieties as a means of marking their identity.

On the other hand, the article reports, there are some people who see a distinctive regional accent as an obstacle to progression in socio-economic terms, and it is perhaps these people that are adopting a more standard language variety that is not marked for any particular region. The writer picks on "rural Maine" as the undesirable antithesis to the "city", and there's an important point to bear in mind here: attitudes towards regional accents and dialects are not always based on their linguistic characteristics, but often on society's percpetions of the region with which the variety is associated.

Nowhere is this more true than in Britain, where you can pretty much guarantee that any opinion poll asking which is Britain's coolest/most prestigious/sexiest accent will show one variety coming bottom of the heap: the Birmingham accent and dialect. The results of a recent CoolBrands survey identified 'Brummie' as the least cool accent of British English, with Received Pronunciation seen as the coolest (don't ask me why, I don't make up the rules!), closely followed by Scotts and Geordie. You can read the full story here and here. Like users of any regional variety, though, many Brummies are proud of their accent and dialect, even if they are aware of the negative light in which it casts them in many people's eyes.

The road sign pictured left actually appeared at roadworks in Dudley in the West Midlands a few years ago (I'm offering a prize for the first correct translation posted in the 'comments' section of this post), and gives a clear indication of the sense of solidarity that can come with the use of a regional variety. As a proud ex-pat Brummie myself, I'm always pleased to see this kind of thing. Imagine my delight last year, then, when I found out about national Talk Like a Brummie day. And how much more delighted do you think I was when I found out that said event is to be repeated on 19th July 2009?!! Yowm gunna loov it, aah kid.


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*I'll get my coat...

Yoof slang sucks. End of.

This week's copy of the Huddersfield Daily Examiner (everyone's No.1 local paper) features a letter from a rather disgruntled Mr Dennis R Fisher, who makes some heart-felt observations on the 'state' of modern youth slang.

On the one hand Mr Fisher acknowledges that "language naturally changes and evolves over time", but at the same time he observes that "we are now beginning to sound like a nation of infantile losers and potato heads". At the heart of Mr Fisher's argument, it seems, is his view that the English language is being 'eroded' by a generation of speakers whose desire to be just like their favourite celebreties extends to mimicking their linguistic behaviour.

Have a look at the letter and let us know your views - is the English language being damaged beyond repair, or is this just another stage in its natural evolution? If you have something you'd like to say about this topic, why not post a thread on the VLE discussion forum?