#is this a sociolinguistic variable

[dkniade]

I’ve observed something interesting. I’m not sure why that’s the case, but each of these terms seem to have a slightly different connotation.

If you’re a Genshin Impact fan, which of the following would you rather be referred to as?

Does your enjoyment of the game/story influence your choice? Or whether you play the game or not? How about the way you perceive the English fandom? Is it the same if anyone calls you that, or is it restricted to those in the fandom, or maybe close friends?

[lingthusiasm]

Episode 93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones

There are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves. When doing linguistic analysis of one aspect, such as someone's voice, it's useful to also consider the fuller picture such as what they're wearing and who they're talking with.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how nonbinary people talk with Jacq Jones, who's a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. We talk about their research on how nonbinary and binary people make choices about how to perform gender using their voices and other variables like clothing, and later collaborating with one of their research participants to reflect on how it feels to have your personal voice and gender expression plotted on a chart. We also talk about linguistic geography, Canadian and New Zealand Englishes, and the secret plurality of R sounds in English and how you can figure out which one you have by poking yourself (gently!) with a toothpick.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about three of our favourite kinds of linguistic mixups: spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns! We talk about William Spooner, the Oxford prof from the 1800s that many spoonerisms are (falsely) attributed to, Lauren's very Australian 90s picture book of spoonerisms, the Scottish song "The Bonny Earl of Moray" which gave rise to the term mondegreen, why there are so many more mondegreens in older pop songs and folk songs than there are now, and how eggcorn is a double eggcorn (a mis-parsing of acorn, which itself is an eggcorn of oak-corn for akern).

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds about your favourite linguistic mixups.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Jacq Jones' website

'Beyond a dot on a graph: A participant’s perspective on being quantified in variationist sociolinguistic research' presentation slides by Kaspar Middendorf and Jacq Jones

Lingthusiasm episode 'What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are'

Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'How we made vowel plots with Bethany Gardner'

Lingthusiasm episode 'The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory' (linguistics and geography)

Lal Zimman's website

'The Female-to-Male Transsexual Voice: Physiology vs. Performance in Production' by Viktória Papp

'Voice and Communication Change for Gender Nonconforming Individuals: Giving Voice to the Person Inside' by Shelagh Davies, Viktória Papp, and Christella Antoni

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[outfoxt]

Another Käärijä Research Project

aka: käärijä style-shifting project

as a preface, here are my (non) qualifications for this project and the circumstances under which it happened:

I am a linguistics student, and this past semester I took a course on sociolinguistics. the goal of this project was to become familiar with the concept of and analyze style-shifting (it's more commonly known as code-switching online but theres a difference and this is style-shifting), specifically by analyzing the speech of one person. We had the option to study oprah or to have someone else approved by my prof, so you know I had to ask my prof if I could study jere. This project is solely my intellectual property; even though I had a tutor help me a lot, everything written in this paper and on this post was my work alone.

now, on to the actual findings! the full paper and transcripts will be linked at the end :D

the actual variables (words or sounds) that I studied were the pronunciation of r, and use of the word "the".

to make things a lot easier from the get-go, i'm going to introduce you all to one of my favorite websites, ipachart.com (the international phonetic alphabet [ipa] chart is a big chart with an entry for every sound that exists in a language. this handy dandy website has an audio recording for each one of those sounds).

go to this website, and then scroll down to the table. go to the column labeled "post alveolar" and then click on ɾ and ɹ. those are the sounds i studied in this paper! ɾ is the finnish r and ɹ is the american r :)

so basically what i did to find instances of my variable was i just looked up a bunch of esc interviews and listened out for use of the different r sounds. i also transcribed the entire dinner date live because i love torture apparently :) the specific interviews and lives/stories are in the bibliography of the paper :p

after i transcribed all the interviews and lives/stories i went through and highlighted every instance of the r sound. then i calculated the ratios of ɾ to ɹ based on the context they were spoken in. the two contexts i looked for were formal contexts (sit-down interviews) and informal contexts (literally anything else).

i found that jere uses ɹ WAY more often in formal contexts than he does in informal contexts, and the same in reverse with ɾ.

i then went back to the transcripts and looked for all instances of the word "the". i also looked for instances where i thought it should be present, but was omitted. i calculated the ratio of present vs omitted "the"s in formal vs informal contexts and made some charts.

the graph with the smaller black section is "use of 'the' in formal settings" and the one with the smaller green section is "use of 'the' in informal settings" (the images are transparent, sorry)

i found that jere uses "the" WAY more often when in formal settings! there were also some instances where he added a "the" where it was unnecessary, which is studied at length in this wonderful paper by @alien-girl-21

something i also noticed that i elected not to study because this paper took enough energy on its own was that in formal contexts, whenever the "or" sound came in the middle or at the end of a word, jere wouldn't pronounce the r. it stuck out to me mostly because i heard words like "performance" turning into "perfomance", which i thought was an interesting quirk.

unfortunately i was somewhat limited by both my brainpower and capacity to do more work on this paper in the relatively short timeframe i was given (2 weeks) and the fact that i was given a 5 page MAX for this paper (not including a bibliography). i had a lot of fun doing this though and am definitely planning on studying jere for for academic credit again in the future if given the chance!

also i would like it to be known that i spent an hour searching for that 5 second clip of the urheilucast where jere said that he used to sell kitchens and understands english better than he can speak it.

link to a google drive folder with the actual paper i wrote and the transcripts of the interviews with notation:

please feel free to send me asks and dms with questions or comments about this paper! i absolutely love rambling about linguistics :3!!

[english-lessons-bolzano]

The trap–bath split is a vowel split that occurs mainly in Southern England English (including Received Pronunciation), Australian English, New Zealand English, Indian English, South African English and to a lesser extent in some Welsh English as well as older Northeastern New England English by which the Early Modern English phoneme /æ/ was lengthened in certain environments and ultimately merged with the long /ɑː/ of palm. In that context, the lengthened vowel in words such as bath, laugh, grass and chance in accents affected by the split is referred to as a broad A (also called in Britain long A). Phonetically, the vowel is [ɑː] ⓘ in Received Pronunciation (RP), Cockney and Estuary English; in some other accents, including Australian and New Zealand accents, it is a more fronted vowel ([ɐː] ⓘ or [aː] ⓘ) and tends to be a rounded and shortened [ɒ~ɔ] in Broad South African English. A trap–bath split also occurs in the accents of the Middle Atlantic United States (New York City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia accents), but it results in very different vowel qualities to the aforementioned British-type split. To avoid confusion, the Middle Atlantic American split is usually referred to in American linguistics as a 'short-a split'.

In accents unaffected by the split, words like bath and laugh usually have the same vowel as words like cat, trap and man: the short A or flat A. Similar changes took place in words with ⟨o⟩ in the lot–cloth split.

The sound change originally occurred in Southern England and ultimately changed the sound of /æ/ ⓘ to /ɑː/ ⓘ in some words in which the former sound appeared before /f, s, θ, ns, nt, ntʃ, mpəl/. That led to RP /pɑːθ/ for path, /ˈsɑːmpəl/ for sample etc. The sound change did not occur before other consonants and so accents affected by the split preserve /æ/ in words like cat. (See the section below for more details on the words affected.) The lengthening of the bath vowel began in the 17th century but was "stigmatised as a Cockneyism until well into the 19th century". However, since the late 19th century, it has been embraced as a feature of upper-class Received Pronunciation.

Like all accents, RP has changed with time. For example, sound recordings and films from the first half of the 20th century demonstrate that it was usual for speakers of RP to pronounce the /æ/ sound, as in land, with a vowel close to [ɛ], so that land would sound similar to a present-day pronunciation of lend. RP is sometimes known as the Queen's English, but recordings show that even Queen Elizabeth II shifted her pronunciation over the course of her reign, ceasing to use an [ɛ]-like vowel in words like land. The change in RP may be observed in the home of "BBC English". The BBC accent of the 1950s is distinctly different from today's: a news report from the 1950s is recognisable as such, and a mock-1950s BBC voice is used for comic effect in programmes wishing to satirise 1950s social attitudes such as the Harry Enfield Show and its "Mr. Cholmondley-Warner" sketches

Gupta's study of students at the University of Leeds found that (on splitting the country in two halves) 93% of northerners used [a] in the word bath and 96% of southerners used [ɑː] However, there are areas of the Midlands where the two variants co-exist and, once these are excluded, there were very few individuals in the north who had a trap–bath split (or in the south who did not have the split). Gupta writes, 'There is no justification for the claims by Wells and Mugglestone that this is a sociolinguistic variable in the north, though it is a sociolinguistic variable on the areas on the border [the isogloss between north and south]'.

In some West Country accents of English English in which the vowel in trap is realised as [a] rather than [æ], the vowel in the bath words was lengthened to [aː] and did not merge with the /ɑː/ of father. In those accents, trap, bath, and father all have distinct vowels /a/, /aː/, and /ɑː/.

In Cornwall, Bristol and its nearby towns, and many forms of Scottish English, there is no distinction corresponding to the RP distinction between /æ/ and /ɑː/.

In Multicultural London English, /θ/ sometimes merges with /t/ but the preceding vowel remains unchanged. That leads to the homophony between bath and path on the one hand and Bart and part on the other. Both pairs are thus pronounced [ˈbɑːt] and [ˈpɑːt], respectively, which is not common in other non-rhotic accents of English that differentiate /ɑː/ from /æ/. That is not categorical, and th-fronting may occur instead and so bath and path can be [ˈbɑːf] and [ˈpɑːf] instead, as in Cockney.

Silvio Pasqualini Bolzano inglese ripetizioni English

[cd-covington]

Hey friendo, also linguistics and fictional universes nerd!

I heard that you're game to share your wisdom with us mere mortals (aka authors) so here goes.

I'm writing a cyberpunk novel. Everyone speaks english cause writing a new language is FAR beyond my skill set, but I want to play with grammar as a way to show the reader class differences. (This is what happens when you let a socialist write a novel.)

In this futuristic dystopia, only the very rich can afford unlimited data (aka Canada in 2023). My thought is the working class have adopted speech patterns to minimize unnecessary words--dropped their article (goodbye 'the'), drop context markers unless necessary (goodbye 'that'), that kinda thing. The rich, being rich, speak in sentences the reader will recognize as grammatically 'correct.'

Two questions for Your Lingistic Eminance:

What do the middle class do? How do they sound?

2. Are there any great grammatical patterns I could include that I haven't thought of yet?

Thanks so much! I am VERY EXCITED to hear.

This is a great question! The short answer to part 1 is that they’ll mimic the upper class/upper middle class aspirationally, as least in situations where the UC/UMC will notice them, in what we call hypercorrection. A couple ideas for part 2 are dropping the subject of the verb if it’s obvious (which we already do in English - “love you” as a sign-off in a text message, or diary-style “went to the store. Didn’t find avocados.”) or deciding that even the limited verbal inflection that remains in English is unnecessary, so no more 3rd-person-singular s. (This is already present in several varieties of English, including African American English.)

The long answer for part 1 is really cool and relies on one of the foundational studies of sociolinguistics, published by Bill Labov in 1966. A 2012 paper by Mather replicates Labov’s study and points out some methodological problems caused by increased movement within the US and from outside the US (more on that in a minute), but it finds essentially the same stratification of this particular phoneme by social class.

For his original study, Labov wanted to see if socioeconomic class affected the way people spoke. He lived in New York City, and one of the distinctive features of a New Yorker accent is the absence of /r/ sounds (New Yawk). (As I wrote a little bit ago, rhotics aren’t real, but their presence or absence (or the ghosts of their presence) is a key feature of accents.) But Mainstream American English does have /r/ sounds, and this variety has what we call prestige.

Prestige varieties are typically spoken by the group with the most social (political, economic, etc) power – and, crucially, there is nothing inherent to the variety that makes it “better” than another variety. It’s just the one that the powerful use, and thus the one “correctness” is measured against.

So. New York English typically does not contain /r/ sounds, but the prestigious (standard) variety of US English does, and various social factors lead to the upper & upper middle classes preferring the more standard variety, while the lower and lower middle classes will prefer the non-standard variety. (Some of this has to do with group identity and using the non-standard variety to showcase group membership, but that’s an entirely different question.)

When Labov designed his study, he wanted to look at /r/ immediately after a vowel, because that’s where you notice its presence or absence most readily, so he used the phrase “fourth floor.” In fourth, you have a vowel followed by an /r/ which is followed by an obstruent /th/, which is phonotactically a different beast from floor, where the post-vocalic /r/ is the end of the word. And in the most typical New York English of 1962 (when he gathered his data), both of these /r/s were absent. But he wanted to study the effects of social stratification on the presence of /r/, so he devised a study based on proxy variables (aka markers).

The marker he used for socioeconomic class was department stores, assuming that employees would come from a similar class to the store they worked in (i.e. someone from the upper middle class isn’t going to work at TJ Maxx). He picked a low-cost one (S. Klein, now defunct) to represent the lower class, Macy’s to represent the middle class, and Saks Fifth Avenue to represent the upper middle class. (All stores are on the Lower East Side.)

To gather his data, he approached an employee of the store and asked where he could find a department that he knew was on the fourth floor. When they answered, he pretended he didn’t understand, and the employee repeated themself. This gave him proxy data for casual (first ask) and careful (repeated) speech.

What did he find? As expected, the employees of the lower-class store used /r/ far less often than in the other stores – in fact, barely 10% of the time. The charts in Labov 1972* are confusing, so I’ll use ones from Mather 2012, because I think they’re clearer. 

The working-class proxy store had, and still has, very few employees who pronounce the /r/ in fouRth flooR 100% of the time, while the middle- and upper-middle-class proxy stores have higher and increasing rates of 100%  /r/ pronunciation. (This indicates that /r/ pronunciation is probably a prestige variation, and increasing use indicates that the middle class and higher is adopting this variation.)

This graph confused me for about 5 minutes, because all [r-1] isn’t the same as “all [r-1],” so what it shows is the percentage of /r/-pronunciation in total. If someone said, for example, “fou’th flooR,” they would get an [r-1] for the category R2 and an [r-0] for R1. (The study may be foundational, but his coding of variables leaves something to be desired.) So, you can see that Klein, representing the working class, has between 5% and 18% of people pronouncing an /r/ at least once, while Macy’s and Saks are all 20% or higher. (The drop in /r/-pronunciation in R3 at Macy’s is interesting, but it’s not explained in the papers I read.)

*I have a scan of one chapter of something labelled “Labov 1972,” but not the 1966 book or the 2006 2nd edition.

I can’t find the paper I’m looking for that shows the crossover effect, where upper middle class speakers use /r/ less than middle class speakers (it may have been on paper, not a pdf, so it’s lost to the recycling bin of time), but fortunately it’s summarized in Allan Bell’s textbook (The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics, 2014). This didn’t come from the “fourth floor” study, but one where he had people read word lists or phrases, as well as elicit them in regular speech. Most interesting is the line “class 6-8” (lower middle class), where it spikes between C (reading) and D (word lists) and crosses over the line “class 9” (upper middle class). I don’t think I can improve on Bell’s wording, so I’ll quote him. The lower middle class hypercorrects: “in pursuit of prestige, the class that is just below the most prestigious actually overshoots their model. This became known as the lower-middle-class crossover effect” (168). 

So, 1000 words later, we have evidence for the existence of social stratification of a particular variable, and the theoretical methodology has been applied again and again in different situations and with different variables in the last nearly 60 years, and it seems pretty robust (with caveats and methodological improvements and so on, of course). You can, in fact, stratify linguistic variables by categories that include race, gender, and class. The aspirational class (the one just below the most prestigious class) wants to sound like the prestige class, so they imitate what they think the prestige class sounds like, and in so doing frequently overshoot and use the variable in question more than the prestige class, while the lower classes are far less likely to use the prestige variety. (And I haven’t even mentioned covert prestige yet, which is when a non-prestige variant is preferred in certain groups, because it symbolizes membership in the non-prestige group.)

If you think this is interesting, consider backing my Kickstarter, where I’ll be writing a book about how to use linguistics in your worldbuilding process. Or if tumblr ever sorts out tipping for my account, leave me a tip.

[interpretating]

La pronunciación esdrújula de diabetes

I recently worked with a young man from Honduras who pronounced the Spanish word for 'diabetes' with the stress on the antipenultimate syllable--that is, as an esdrújula word, diábetes, instead of the common, llana, pronunciation, diabetes. That was not the only example I've come across, as I had heard it in two different ocasions in the past, from speakers from Colombia and the Dominican Republic.

That is obviously a very rare pronunciation, as evidenced by the fact that I've only encountered a handful of examples among the thousands of interactions I've had as Spanish interpreter during the past decade or so. Since the speakers belonged to different nationalities and age groups, it's hard to pinpoint a dialectal or sociolinguistic motivation. The esdrújula form is mentioned by the Diccionario de la Real Academia: "Es voz llana: [diabétes], aunque en algunos países de América se oiga a menudo como esdrújula: ⊗‍[diábetes]."

Although there are several well documented cases of words with variable pronunciations, both of them accepted as correct--like cardíaco vs. cardiaco, or vídeo vs. video--, diábetes seems to be discouraged by the Academia. Its rare use may be due to individual idiosyncrasies and hypercorrection, but I would love to learn of additional examples.

[linguistlist-blog]

Calls: Journal of Arabic Sociolinguistics

The Journal of Arabic Sociolinguistics welcomes research which applies new theories and methodologies to Arabic data. We are particularly interested in articles that address the relation between linguistic variation and identity, variation and sociolinguistic variables (including but not limited to location, social class, education, age, gender and urbanization) and variation and political contexts . We also encourage submissions on code switching in the Arab world, language policy and the impac http://dlvr.it/T75H5J

[murderballadeer]

i rly wish sociolinguists would just get with the program and use the same formatting as phonologists by which i mean like in phonology it's /phoneme/ [allophone] so you would think in sociolinguistics it would be /variable/ [variant] but instead they had to have it be (variable) [variant] which i guess isn't so bad since but still idk why everyone couldn't just do things the same way

[jkurian23]

A social dance between culture and spoken language

In a social construct, language is used to categorize people based on their dialects, accents, and mannerism. Social identities and social groups are many and varied among people. For example, there may be 'teachers', ‘engineers', 'Parisians', and so on. Being able to speak the language, a variety, or use of a particular jargon gives a sense of belonging to the group. That is why it is often said, an individual's sense of belonging to a national group is often closely linked to their spoken language. The remainder of this piece will look at a few of the external factors that influence the adoption of certain spoken languages by a group of people along with how they shape personal identity.

Language and identity in Sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the study of how social parameters such as age and gender, influence language use. In practice, this considers how someone communicates and is able to come to their own judgment based on external variables. Geographic location, gender, employment, class, and ethnicity constitute a few of the social elements that might influence a person's language and identity. As a general rule, individuals from higher social classes are more likely to speak with Received Pronunciation (RP); this is because RP has historically been the accent used and taught in educational institutions.

As previously mentioned, the use of certain linguistic elements can convey a sense of belonging to various social groupings. These group-specific characteristics are utilized to convey to society as a whole a distinctive identity that has been recognized as belonging to a certain group's sociolect. Today, an example would be a teenager using the term "GOAT," which is just slang for "greatest of all time." Other phrases that are frequently encountered include 'lit' (to imply amazing/brilliant) and 'V' (very). The use of such jargon and particular slang phases allows individuals in distinguishing themselves from earlier generations, such as their parents or grandparents, and portray their age as a focal point of their identity.

Linguist Michael Nelson, conducted a study in the year 2000 on the use of jargon in the corporate field. He arrived at the conclusion that people at work employ language in a semantic field of business, such as business, firms, money, technology, and so on. Nelson's theory illustrates the idea of identity and how a person may acquire a workplace language, therefore he pointed out how certain phrases or topics were deliberately not used in business communication. Lexis such as weekend activities, difficulties at home, or family. This demonstrates how an external factor, such as a profession, can influence spoken language. When at work, speakers may use Nelson's business lexis to create a professional identity while keeping their home identity private, or they may deviate from Nelson's business lexis and use more of their idiolect features to create a more personable and approachable identity. This addresses the inclusion vs exclusion hypothesis, which examines how jargon might shape a group's sociolect among individuals who use it.

Immigrants and their self-identity Immigrants who settle in a place where a foreign language is spoken have distinct hurdles, which are often disregarded. Adults tend to assimilate the issue and have to cope with issues related to personal and cultural identity. When the dominant culture in the host country overlooks the immigrant's native language, the challenge becomes even harder. In her thesis on "The relationship between language and identity," Lourdes C. Rovira uses her own identity and experiences as an exiled Cuban, a teacher, and an administrator by profession, to address concerns about immigrant identification abroad. 'Our name, our national origin, and our citizenship constitute the most intimate parts of our being and identity,' says Rovira. People have fixed beliefs and presumptions, which are often not accurate, which determine whether we are embraced or neglected, accepted or rejected. However, who you are as a person and your distinctive characteristics are at the heart of self-identity.

Rovira emphasizes aspects of identity that pertain to the self as a member of a specific group, such as the identity of being an immigrant. The use of language and specific social experiences influence one's self-image. It is worth mentioning how culture plays a key role in developing a person's identity - shared values, conventions, and histories that are distinctive to an ethnic group have a great influence on the way a person behaves, thinks, and perceives the world. This is consistent with behaviorism theory, which holds that the development of a sense of self occurs parallel with the acquisition of language. Cultural identity, as defined by Rovira, comprises everything related to self, belonging, ideologies, as well as sensations of self-worth. Language is inextricably linked to cultural expression; it is the way by which we pass on the essence of ourselves from generation to generation. Rovira closes her ideas by saying, “Language – both code and content – is a complicated dance between internal and external interpretations of our identity.”

Language and social equality Language has left an influence on policy, research agendas, and society as a whole. Further, language reflects and sustains societal ideals and prejudices, and it is a potent tool for perpetuating inequities. For instance, websites, social media platforms as well and programmers on television.

It is typical for people to use improper or derogatory words to express their feelings toward other social groupings. For example, in 2017, Dany Cotton, the leader of the London Brigade, experienced severe outrage and online abuse when she advocated for personnel to refer to themselves as "firefighters" rather than "firemen." These are still indicators of inequity. Furthermore, while constructive steps have been taken to address blatantly biased language in which maleness is the standard ("mankind"), terminology such as gendered jobs and cultural attitudes remains difficult to dispute and alter. To address disparities in society, we must include individuals who are experiencing them and express concerns through our use of language; recent advancements in social media platforms have helped make this achievable.

In a nutshell, language plays a significant part in creating our self-image, altering our judgments, and, most crucially, establishing interpersonal connections with one another. In an instantaneous society like ours, it is essential to take the time to truly understand how the language that we use on a daily basis contributes to both our personal and societal identities.

[study-and-stitches]

21.10.20

jwoejej I forgot to come back to a question for my linguistics midsem exam.

[kaftan]

research mentor: And What Might Your Dependent Variable Be For Your Research Project :-)

me: [NOT going to say "well it could have been phonetic/phonological or sociolinguistic differences between different groups of darija speakers but YOUUUU don't like phonology or sociolinguistics for mysterious reasons so i guess not those]

[practicingtheliberalarts]

Media Influence on Implicit and Explicit Language Attitudes

Sociolinguists often assume that media influences language attitudes, but that assumption has not been tested using a methodology that can attribute cause. This dissertation examines implicit and explicit attitudes about American Southern English (ASE) and the influence television has upon them. Adapting methodologies and constructs from sociolinguistics, social psychology, and communications studies, I test listener attitudes before and after exposure to stereotypically unintelligent and counterstereotypically intelligent representations of Southern-accented speakers in scripted fictional television. The first attitudes experiment tests implicit attitudes through an Implicit Association Test (IAT). This experiment also serves to test sociolinguistic use of the IAT with a more holistic accent as opposed to single linguistic features. The second attitudes experiment tests the effect of television exposure on explicit attitudes towards an ASE-accented research assistant (RA). The experiments also investigate the influence of listener knowledge of regional origin of actors (speaker information), listener perception of how closely television represents the world around them (perceived realism), listener exposure to the South, and listener identity. The hypothesis is that those who hear counterstereotypically intelligent Southern characters will rate a Southern-accented research assistant higher in intelligence than those who hear stereotypically unintelligent Southern characters. The same pattern will hold in the auditory-based IAT. Accents in both the implicit and explicit attitudes experiments are viewed holistically, including multiple features rather than focusing on the most salient features. To clarify results related to the speaker information and perceived realism variables, a separate experiment tests how successful listeners are at differentiating natives from performers of regionally accented American English. 

Results indicate that televised representations of Southern accents affect explicit, but not implicit attitudes. Participants who heard intelligent Southern characters rated an ASE-accented RA higher in competence than those who heard unintelligent Southern characters. Several demographic variables influenced results regardless of the stereotypicality of the speakers that the listener heard in the television clips, including self-identified race and exposure to Southern television. While implicit attitudes were not affected by television in this case, the IAT was successfully adapted for use with a holistic accent rather than a single feature and also captures associations between an L1 regional accent and a specific stereotype of that accent. I discuss these results in regard to language attitudes at large as well as their implications for an indirect language change model, the Associative-Propositional Evaluation (APE) model of attitudes, and cultivation theory. The dissertation argues that scripted television does influence language attitudes, but in more complex ways than a simple cause-and-effect relationship. While television can affect explicit attitudes towards individual speakers, implicit attitude shift is more difficult and may need more time and/or need a direct cause for a shift to occur. Regardless of media influence, language attitudes are affected by identity and demographic features listeners bring into the interaction with speakers.

Heaton, H. E. (2018). Media influence on implicit and explicit language attitudes (Order No. 11006885). Available from Linguistics Database. (2166299268). Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/media-influence-on-implicit-explicit-language/docview/2166299268/se-2?accountid=9900

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 55: R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 55: R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 55 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about R and R-like sounds, also known as “rhoticity.” But first, we have a liveshow! It’s happening in a very few days, late April 2021 if you’re listening to this from the future. You can get access to it by becoming a patron or, if you are already a patron, you will have access to it already. We will send you a link to the livestream video when it goes up.

Lauren: If you’ve missed the livestream, you can catch it as a bonus Lingthusiasm episode, along with 49 other bonuses, including our most recent one on speaking to kids and pets.

[Music]

Gretchen: It was really good that it was my turn to say what this episode was about because if you said the topic “R and R-like sounds,” Lauren, I feel like you might say it a little bit differently.

Lauren: I don’t know what’s wrong with talking about “/a/-like” sounds.

Gretchen: “/a/-like sounds” is a vowel.

Lauren: That is definitely convenient that you were the person to introduce this topic because rhoticity and this R-ness is something I can do, and I can definitely do it at the start of words like “red” or “rice,” but it’s a sound that is missing from the ends of words for me. So, it definitely is easier to hear exactly what we’re talking about with “/ɹoʊtɪsɪti/.” I can do it at the start, but when I’m talking about /aɹɹɹ/, I really have to work it to articulate that.

Gretchen: Welcome to International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Lauren, “Arrrrrrgh” is this whole episode.

Lauren: I get a bit over-enthusiastic with putting it in there for sure.

Gretchen: The nice thing is, is because this feature of English accents where some of them do pronounce the Rs after the vowels and some of them don’t is a feature of English accents that is one of the big accent splits that we have in English. We also don’t have to listen to me trying to do the bad impression of non-rhotic people saying, “/a/, /a/ and /a/-like sounds.”

Lauren: Our entire podcasting collaboration has really led up to this episode. This is entirely what our accent distribution was made for.

Gretchen: It was totally made for this. It’s a really salient feature across English accents that some of them do have this R after a vowel – “post-vocalic R” – and some of them don’t. In English, that’s what gets called “rhoticity.” Is this accent rhotic like mine or is it non-rhotic like yours?

Lauren: The class of R-like sounds is something we’ll be talking about all episode because it’s a bit of a grab bag both within English and across languages more broadly.

Gretchen: What exactly we mean by an R-like sound is one of those nebulous, squishy categories that it seems like it makes sense and then you look at it too hard and then it stops making sense and then you realise that you can drift your mind into soft focus and have it make sense again. One of the things that I enjoyed learning about English accents is how is it that in Canada we have this R and down in Australia you don’t have it. Where does that come from?

Lauren: It’s a really nice example of how migration creates these little accent time capsules. The R sound is something that’s very easy to lose from the ends of words. Across languages this happens. It’s a very easy target for something to get lost. It was far more common in England four centuries ago when a lot of people migrated. The areas that people migrated from in England and the British Isles and the United Kingdom, more generally, people migrated to what is now the United States and Canada. They had more of this R at the end of words as a feature. Then a couple of centuries later, when the colonists arrived in Australia from the United Kingdom, that feature was far less common there. You don’t find it in Australian or New Zealand accents, but you do find it in those North American accents more predominantly. Not always – but as a general feature. You have this really nice time capsule just because the migrants came a couple of centuries earlier to the US than they did to Australia.

Gretchen: It’s a neat – I mean, there are, obviously, historical records of when all this migration was happening, but it’s comforting to know that if we didn’t have those historical records, we would be able to reconstruct them from the accents.

Lauren: Yeah. Or if we didn’t have those records and, for some reason, the lack of R was also really common in North America, we have the written record in English to show us that there is an R at the end of words like “car” that there isn’t in some other words. As someone who doesn’t have this feature, sometimes, if I’m trying to put on a North American accent, I over apply it to words where there isn’t an R in writing as well. I recently tried to say the word, “tuna,” the fish, with an American accent and over compensated and went with “tunar,” which is absolutely not correct and also a terrible accent.

Gretchen: Also, that’s a piano tuner or something.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, a “tuner” that you tune a piano with – it sounds exactly the same for me, but it’s a completely different spelling and a completely different word.

Gretchen: Well, and the interesting thing is, I do have Rs in my accent, but I’m also very accustomed to hearing non-rhotic accents because I think I’ve listened to more Australian English in the last, say, five years or so because, you know, we talk to each other quite a lot doing this podcast. I visited Australia. But even before that, I’d consume plenty of British media and stuff like that, which a lot of the British accents are non-rhotic, but some of them are still rhotic, especially in the North and in Scotland and so on. I consumed a lot of non-rhotic accents, so I’m using to hearing it. In many cases, if you’re used to hearing those accents, you don’t even necessarily notice it as, “Oh, there aren’t Rs here,” you notice it, “This just sounds like it’s from wherever.” But sometimes when I’m hearing a non-rhotic speaker, I over apply, and I insert, mentally, Rs in what they’re trying to say even when they aren’t trying to say an R because I’m so used to reconstructing that R in my head.

Lauren: Amazing. You just hallucinate sound is basically what’s happening.

Gretchen: Yeah! A non-rhotic friend of mine was recently talking about lava, like the thing that comes out from the earth in a volcano, but saying, “There’s a lot of lava here.” I misheard her as saying, “larva.”

Lauren: As in bug babies?

Gretchen: Yes, as in bug babies, which is a very different mental image from molten rock.

Lauren: Especially if you think of them spewing out of the earth like a volcano. That’s actually terrifying.

Gretchen: It’s kind of horrific. But yeah, sometimes it happens on both the production and the perception side. Sometimes you can hear an R that isn’t there or hear a ghost of an R that wasn’t there, or you can end up producing it when you weren’t trying to.

Lauren: I think it is really interesting that, obviously, I consume a lot of Australian media. You hear a lot of Canadian voices. The two big producers of culture for that anglosphere, English speakers, is that Southern England English and the North American English. One in England is traditionally marked with not having R at the end of words pronounced, and American English does have that R. It’s very rhotic. We’re exposed to both types very commonly, which is why I think it’s hard to hear or remember that you’re hearing it.

Gretchen: I think it’s interesting to think about this in terms of the prestige varieties in both of these places because there are American accents that are non-rhotic. In the American South, a lot of the accents don’t have that R at the end of the syllable. There are British accents that are rhotic, especially in the north. The prestigious accent that you find on media and television, unless a character is being stereotyped as having an accent, the unmarked accent that you see on both of these is different with respect to that R. This was something that was one of those early revelations that I had as a budding linguist of like, hey, here’s this R. In one country it’s having the R that’s prestigious and it’s not having the R that’s looked down on. Then in the other country, it’s not having the R that’s prestigious and it’s having the R that’s more stigmatised. Clearly, it’s not R’s fault here. R is just a consonant just trying to live its life.

Lauren: Just a hapless victim.

Gretchen: A hapless victim of our human prejudices. There’s not some sort of objective right or wrong answer of, “Is R good or is R bad?” Other things that are associated with particular accents are also neutral variables, but some of them are widely disparaged all over and some of them are widely prestigious all over. This one is interesting, in the case of R, because it has this local difference on whether it’s prestigious or not prestigious.

Lauren: It’s made it a really attractive topic of study for linguists who are interested in the social values that we apply to different accents. One thing I find particularly interesting in the American context where this has been studied quite a lot is that it’s not just a matter of whether you have a rhotic accent or not. There are lots of people who can produce the rhotic accent and do include that R at the end of words or might not depending on the social context and how fancy they want to sound. Which means that we get to talk about probably one of the most famous studies in English sociolinguistics.

Gretchen: Yes. There is this very classic study by Bill Labov who is an American sociolinguist. He went to three different levels of department stores – one that was very fancy, one that was mid-level, and one that was like a bargain basement store. You really get a feeling for the vintage department store vibe. He found the location of something – I think the women’s shoe section is what he says in the paper – that was already on the fourth floor. He would find it on the map, and then he would go up to sales keepers and say, “Hey, can you tell me where to find the women’s shoes?”, and they would say, “fourth floor.” And he would say, “Pardon me?”

Lauren: Or they would say, /fɑ:ð flɑː/.

Gretchen: Yes, /fæːð flæ:/, in my bad imitation of a New York accent. He would say, “Pardon me?”, and then they would say it again, more distinctly. Then he would go around the corner, whip out his notebook, and write down whether or not they said the R in both the first one – the natural one – and then the careful-er, more enunciated one afterwards.

Lauren: You could more or less map the fancier the department store, the more likely the salesperson was to use the rhotic R. If you asked someone to repeat something, it then becomes careful speech, where they’re trying to be as articulate as possible, for whatever that means, and they’re more likely to include an R in that context as well. You see all these factors really elegantly. I think this study is attractive because it’s so elegant in how it was set up that people are more likely to use an R to sound fancy in New York in this context. It’s been replicated over decades. People have moved more towards R, and it’s become the concrete standard of pronunciation.

Gretchen: Also, I think it’s just such a fun mental image of some guy with a notebook wandering around from department store to department store. When we were doing Crash Course Linguistics, one of the thought bubbles, which are little animated bits, we actually suggested, and they took our suggestion, that they do a little animated Labov wandering from department store to department store. That’s a really cute animation that you can now watch.

Lauren: It also means that the concept of the fourth floor has become a bit of a linguist in-joke. I am so pleased to say that my office at work is on the fourth floor.

Gretchen: I went to a Linguistic Society of America conference a number of years ago in which all of the conference rooms at the hotel where on the fourth floor. You could just hear all the linguists taking delight in saying to each other, “Which way to the conference?”, “Go to the FOURTH FLOOR.”

Lauren: You could not have planned that better.

Gretchen: It’s also a bit of a meme in linguistics that stuff happens on the fourth floor. It’s a fairly salient thing about English accents that they do different things with Rs. There’s also downstream effects of what happens when your accent only sometimes has this R.

Lauren: Yes. Even though I say that I don’t have an R at the end of words, if you were to actually monitor my speech very carefully and do all the fancy phonetician sound analysis things or even just use your ears, I have R popping up at the end of words all the time in the context known as “linking” or “obtrusive R,” which is where you get a word that should have an R at the end, and then you have another word that begins with a vowel.

Gretchen: Because your Rs are only dropped when they’re at the end of a syllable, when they’re after a vowel, if there’s another vowel following, they can become the host for that R, then you don’t need to drop it anymore.

Lauren: If I said something like, “ca-r and /dɹɑɪvə/,” or “pasta-r and sauce” – it can even go in where there wouldn’t be an R. I guess if I said something like, “tuna-r and rice.”

Gretchen: There’s a bit of an R there, whereas I have “tuna and rice” and there’s nothing R-like there because, for me, “tuna” and “tuner” – “tuner” and “player” or something like that – those are totally different.

Lauren: It’s a way for my accent to mark the boundary between words in a way that works even though I can’t say an R at the end of a word without trying very hard.

Gretchen: Very “harrrrd.”

Lauren: In English. I should say R at the end of words is a feature of Nepali, and I can do that fine. I don’t think about it in Nepali, and I don’t think about it in English, but I have to put an R there. I have to work so hard in English.

Gretchen: So “harrrrd.”

Lauren: So “harrrrd.”

Gretchen: It’s something that stands out more strongly if you’re a non-rhotic speaker because, to me, I’m always paying attention to that R when it’s after a vowel. Having it show up in “pasta-r and sauce” or “tuna-r and rice,” that’s very salient to me as opposed to just being a thing you could stick between stuff. There’s also, sometimes, this R or lack of R shows up in certain stereotyped pronunciations of things. I’m thinking, you know that song in The Sound of Music where you’re learning the names of the notes – do re mi fa so la ti do – and they have this bit that’s like, “Fa – a long, long way to run”?

Lauren: Yeah, because it’s “/fɑ:/ – a long, long way to run.” You’re running /fɑ:/.

Gretchen: No, you’re running “far.”

Lauren: Hang on, yeah, because “far” in that song is F-A.

Gretchen: It’s F-A.

Lauren: I guess it’s a homophone, but it’s not a homograph. They’re not written the same. It’s a homophone for me but not for you.

Gretchen: It’s a homophone for, clearly, the writers of this song. As a child I was like, “What word are they trying to get me to say?” Because something like “ti – a drink with jam and bread,” that’s fine. I don’t write those the same, but I still pronounce it /ti/.

Lauren: Also, not spelled the same, yes.

Gretchen: I still pronounce it “/ti/”, we’re okay with one that. But “Fa – a long, long way to run,” I had to stop and think and be like, “What word are they trying to get at here?”

Lauren: One of those classic scenarios of a bunch of supposed German speakers in German singing a song that only – the whole song actually falls apart because they’re English homophones –

Gretchen: None of these are German words. They’re in Austria. Why are they singing all these English rhymes? It’s like you find the ancient inscription in the cave, and somehow you translate this poem into English, and it rhymes perfectly in English, and you’re like, “This was written in Sumerian. Like, what?”

Lauren: This is why we’re super fun to watch films with.

Gretchen: It’s like, “How does this song work in English? They’re speaking German!”

Lauren: This reminds me of another thing I have confounded you with in non-rhotic English, which is that because I don’t pronounce the R, I can use A-R-G-H to represent an excited exclamation of like, “AH!”

Gretchen: Oh, no.

Lauren: I have, on occasion, used this at Gretchen as a form of messaging enthusiasm. Gretchen has seen it as like I am –

Gretchen: Like, “ARGH I got ice cream!” It’s like, “Why are you upset about the ice cream? I thought ice cream was nice.”

Lauren: It turns out what we have completely different readings of this because, in my non-rhotic accent, it has way more of a general exclamatory-ness. What do you read “Argh” or “Arrr” as?

Gretchen: It’s an expression of frustration for me. Like, “Arrrgh, I don’t wanna do this,” or “Arrrgh, I got a flat tire,” or something. Not “Arrrgh, I got free ice cream.”

Lauren: I can use it in a much more broad range of contexts. Maybe this is just me. Maybe this is some idiosyncratic usage.

Gretchen: But like, A-H, “Ah!” I have a broader range of contexts for, but it is very distinct from “Argh.”

Lauren: I would have to say something like, “AH, I got ice cream,” A-H?

Gretchen: Yeah. This is fine.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: I had this experience when I was reading, especially, British children’s fiction or British YA. The characters would say things like, “erm” and “er.” I was like, okay, fine, “Er, I don’t know where this is” or “Erm, I don’t know the answer.” I was like, “That’s just what they say in British. Sure. That’s fine.” How would you pronounce “erm” and “er”?

Lauren: They say /ə/ and /ə:m/. “Erm, let me think about that I, er, don’t know.” I do know. Exactly like that.

Gretchen: I didn’t realise until much, much later that this was just a rhotic description of the pronunciation that I would write “um” and “uh” – U-M and U-H.

Lauren: I guess this is one context where audiobooks read by someone who has the same general rhoticity as the original author would be very handy.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because I think, among me and at least some other nerds of my generation, sometimes I do write, “er,” when I’m in text because, to me, it has a slightly different meaning from “uh” because I encountered it in text.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: But the best one of you read something and it’s written for an accent that’s not your accent is – you know the donkey character in Winne the Pooh?

Lauren: Eeyore?

Gretchen: Yeah. As I would say, /ijoɹ/, because there’s an R in the writing there. I didn’t learn until I was well into my 20s that, of course, A. A. Milne was a non-rhotic speaker, and he would’ve pronounced that donkey /iɑ:/, like the sound a donkey makes.

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Gretchen: This is a massive revelation for me, and you’re just like, “Yeah, I’ve known this my entire life.”

Lauren: Uh, yes, because donkeys have a non-rhotic accent. I thought that was obvious to everyone.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Donkeys don’t have Rs. A lot of these particular Rs that we’re talking about are specifically the R at the end of a syllable or the, what linguists call, “R-coloured vowels.” It’s a vowel and it’s an R smooshed together. This is how I would say the name of the letter R – it’s not /a: ɹ/ – it’s all one /aɹ/, all one thing. Or /ɹ̩/ like in “tuner” or “player” or “maker” or any of these words that end in /ɹ̩/.

Lauren: If you were writing it down in a specific phonetic notation, you wouldn’t have a vowel and then a distinct R there together.

Gretchen: Yeah. Sometimes, there’s a bit of gradience in terms of how you do that. If you think of something like, say I’m saying a single syllable that ends in an unambiguous consonant like /æt/, I have two different things going on in my mouth at the same time. I have the /a/ part and then immediately after that I have my mouth closing to make the T. But for R, or /ɹ̩/, my mouth is staying in the same position. I can just make the /ɹ̩/ – I can make the vowel and the R-ness of it at the same time without having to change my tongue position or anything about my mouth position. That’s what it means when a vowel can have R features on it at the same time or be R-coloured.

Lauren: That’s why we also hedge by talking about “R-like sounds” because it’s not that this is separately and by itself the sound /aɹ/ but that it has this influence over the vowel.

Gretchen: It’s got this influence over the vowel, especially when it’s written as coming after it. If you have something like “raw” or “ray,” “re-,” you do have “ra-”– you do have a movement from the R at the beginning to afterwards. That’s why it’s so easy to drop that R after a vowel because it’s already just a slightly different position for how you’re holding that vowel. R-coloured vowels are a thing that everyone taking intro English linguistics learns about because it’s a thing that we have in English – and I haven’t learned any other languages that have them. But you never know what that means about your language typology.

Lauren: Whether this is some super common phenomenon and you just happen to have not learnt a language with it or whether it’s just a weird North American thing.

Gretchen: Yeah, not even all of English. It turns out that R-coloured vowels are both very rare and very common depending on how you measure commonness.

Lauren: That’s because they also turn up in a couple of the more dominant varieties of Mandarin. This is one of those things that it was really nice to be able to put a name to, but I realised that I had been using this R-coloured-ness to help myself distinguish between whether I was likely overhearing Mandarin or spoken Cantonese because this R-colouring is really common – especially in really major dialects like Beijing and other Northern Chinese varieties of spoken Mandarin.

Gretchen: On the one hand, R-coloured vowels occur in less than 1% of the languages of the world, at least as we’re currently able to measure them.

Lauren: In terms of the speakers.

Gretchen: But they occur in two of the most widely spoken languages – right. North American English or certain varieties of English and certain varieties of Chinese, both of which have millions and millions of speakers.

Lauren: And are really common as the prestige types in media as well.

Gretchen: And are a really common second language. There are also R-coloured vowels in Quebec French where you have /ɹ̩/ a bit more – now that I’m thinking about it – is more a feature of Quebec French than in France French, and in some varieties of Brazilian Portuguese and, you know, a few other languages, a few Indigenous languages like Yurok in the US. There is a whole name for this phenomenon in Chinese because it’s common in Mandarin. It’s called, “érhuàyīn” [simplified Chinese: 儿化音; traditional Chinese: 兒化音]. It works differently to how rhotacisation works in English because it’s obligatory in certain contexts in English, whereas the way that it happens in Mandarin is – like other things, I don’t speak this, so I’m not exactly sure what the details are – but apparently, it’s used by speakers to notice people from different varieties.

Lauren: It’s so interesting that it was a feature I had been attracted to in Mandarin, and you had noticed without particularly noticing in Quebec French until we put together this episode and realised we were attending to the same phenomenon of R-colouring.

Gretchen: This gets us into this broader class of R-like sounds. Linguists talk about “rhotics,” but if you learned languages beyond English, really any language other than English, you’ve probably learned a different way to produce those particular R sounds because like, “Oh, this language has yet a different R.” It’s one of those interestingly nebulous bits of linguistics that people seem to share this very strong intuition that some sounds are R-like. And yet, when you’re trying to actually put your finger on, “Well, what makes them R-like?”, it becomes a way more complicated question.

Lauren: I guess one of the ones that is most immediately noticeable because it’s quite a fancy R is the /r/ in – I learnt to pronounce trilled R when I was learning Polish in a word like “pierogi.” It’s not as strong, but I could really emphasise it and talk about /piroʊgi/, which is definitely not how I would normally say that word, but you can hear that trilling of the R sound.

Gretchen: I encountered this R when I was trying to learn Spanish in high school. I got okay at Spanish, but I had a really hard time with this R. Because Spanish has two Rs. It has the tap R like in /pɛɾo/, meaning “but,” and then there’s this trilled R like in the word for “dog,” which is /pɛro/ – /pɛro/? Which I’m still not very good at. I can kind of make it now because there was a really helpful YouTube video that I watched a couple years ago after way too many years of trying and failing to produce this trilled R with the tip of your tongue. It turned out the thing about the trilled R is that you have to get a part of your mouth vibrating at such a fast speed that you don’t have conscious control over it. The way that you do that is you direct air in your mouth towards a place that’s just a little bit in front of where you actually want the vibration to happen. It’s like blowing into an instrument with a reed in it or blowing into a blade of grass between your fingers. You can direct that air and make this wavy – I think it’s the Bernoulli Reaction – happen in your mouth. That’s what’s making this sound that’s too fast for you to do it consciously. The mistake that I had been making was to direct the air actually at the tip of my tongue rather than directing it a little bit before so that the tongue can wave in the breeze like a little flag. I’m still not 100% on it, but I can sometimes do that [trilling sound] sometimes.

Lauren: It’s interesting that the R sound that the trill contrasts with is just a single tap. Instead of a repeated tapping motion, it’s just that single /pɛɾo/. One thing that is difficult about these R-like sounds that we’re talking about is that that’s more like something that we sometimes use for a D in English or a T in a word like /bʌɾə/ if we’re just saying it very rapidly. It is an R-thing in Spanish, but it’s not necessarily an R thing in English.

Gretchen: That’s what makes the category of rhotics or R-like sounds such a bizarre thing because basically it’s an R if people think it’s an R. There’s a lot of agreement within speakers about like, “Oh, yeah, this feels like an R to me, and this doesn’t feel like an R.” I really had to convince myself that the sound in “water” or “butter” or something was actually the same as in /pɛɾo/ because I was like, “But those feel like different sounds to me even though I can produce them both,” and I guess my tongue is doing the same thing. But one of them feels like an R.

Lauren: Whereas for the trill, you can replace an English R. You could say, “Let’s talk about /roʊtɪsɪti/” and that fits in as an R. [Gretchen laughs] I’m sorry to –

Gretchen: That’s great. No. Please. Let’s talk about – I’m just jealous that I can’t make it.

Lauren: Sorry to show off there. But you can see that in English, at least, that trilled R can substitute in for our usual R.

Gretchen: It sounds fancy, but it still sounds like an R. If I encounter a language, and I’m like, “Oh, it’s got this alveolar trilled R with the tip of the tongue,” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, totally normal R. Nothing to see here. Nothing surprising.” It’s found in Italian. It’s found in Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Dutch, Bulgarian, Swedish. There’s a whole bunch of languages that have this trilled R with the tip of the tongue. There are also a lot of languages that have the tap, which is just the single tap. Again, Spanish also has it. Japanese and Korean both have it. This is quite common in a lot of languages as well.

Lauren: I can do that trill at the alveolar, but I do struggle with the one that happens further back in the mouth that you find in French.

Gretchen: Oh, yay! That’s the one I can do.

Lauren: It’s in French and German and languages like modern Hebrew as well. Again, one of this category of R-like sounds but a bit further back.

Gretchen: /ʀ/ /ʀ/. This is the one that uses the little dangly bit at the back of your throat that you can see if you look in a mirror and scream. I think of it as a sort of cartoon screaming thing. If you can get that one waving in the back of your throat, /ʀ/ – I’m good at this one. My theory is that people are either good at this –

Lauren: You get one.

Gretchen: – the throat one or the tip of the tongue one and that very few people are good at both of them. Many people can do one or the other and are very frustrated they can’t do the other one. There are a variety of things that are done with the back of the throat that are often lumped together. In French you can have like, “roi,” the word for “king,” or “rue,” the word for “street,” and you can either /ʁ/ or /χ/. You can make it either with the vocal cords vibrating or not vibrating. You can pretty much do whichever one you want. Something that’s interesting about French is that French actually underwent a shift from the tip of the tongue one, which is still produced by a few, I think it’s mostly old men in rural Quebec, who still produce the one that you have in Polish. They still produce that R.

Lauren: Again, migration working as an amazing time capsule creation device.

Gretchen: Most of French speakers, including most people in Quebec – like younger people – but occasionally you’ll get some especially old men in less geographically central areas who still have that one because this has happened over the last 100 years that French has switched what kind of R it has. That’s one of the reasons why you can say, “Well, what do these two sounds have in common?” Okay. They’re both produced as a trill with that very fast vibration but so is the trill with the lips, /B/. Basically no languages consider the lip trill to be an R. That one’s not an R. /B/. I don’t know of any languages that consider that one to be an R-like sound. The other two that are midway in the mouth and back in the throat, those are R-like, and yet not this other one. The reason why it makes sense to consider all of these sounds together in the “R-like” category is because sometimes languages really do hop from one to the other because they still feel R-like somehow even though we don’t have a good way to pin down exactly what it is physically that you’re doing that makes it R-like.

Lauren: You can tell the sounds that linguists think fit into this category because the International Phonetic Alphabet character for them tends to be some variation on our character for the letter R.

Gretchen: It’s like shameless pandering to the R lobby.

Lauren: It’s really one of the cruellest things we do to people trying to learn to memorise all the symbols on the IPA because you have what we think of as a common R in English for words like “red,” or “rhotic,” is the letter R upside-down. Those uvular ones that you were talking about – is it a capital R upside down? The trill at the alveolar that we were talking about is the standard letter R. They’re all just little variations on it.

Gretchen: One of the things, speaking of Rs that vary, that I learned when we were researching this is that in Northern England there were once accents that used this /ʁ/, the back of the throat R like French has, which was described as a “burr.”

Lauren: That’s what people are trying to get at with that description of Northern accents.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because I’ve read – I dunno if it was Jane Austin specifically – but that era of English writer where they would say, “Oh, and this character had a ‘burr’ in his voice,” and I was just like, “A little fuzzy Velcro-y creature that sticks to you? What are you talking about this?” It’s actually trying to describe this /ʁ/ R that people had.

Lauren: Again, a nice example of the incredible variety of rhotic things that people have done with English.

Gretchen: What’s interesting is this R, too, is not always an R in every language because Arabic has a bog standard, tip of the tongue R like is common in very many languages. I actually had to go look up like, “What kind of R does Arabic have, again?” Because I studied it for a few years, and I’d forgotten what kind of R they have. And, oh, they have the normal one. Okay. Arabic also has a sound that’s very similar to what, in French, is the R sound at the back of the throat. It’s not treated as an R for the purposes of the rest of Arabic. It’s written with a G-H when you’re transcribing Arabic, and it’s produced in a very similar manner as what French considers an R, but it’s not an R language-internally, based on what people think of as R-like – in a similar way as this D in “water.”

Lauren: There’s this very loose set of what linguists broadly think of as potentially R-like, and then that manifests differently depending on the language and the other sounds that it’s in contrast to.

Gretchen: Exactly. Maybe the best example of this is that – because there’s a certain kind of sound that in some contexts can be an R-like sound, but most of the time in English, is more like a W.

Lauren: Right. Is that the very fancy Received Pronunciation English accent of talking about “woticity”?

Gretchen: “‘Mawwidge’ is what ‘bwrings’ us here together today.”

Lauren: It’s also a not-uncommon phase for children to go through. I think it’s worth saying, if you have any anxiety about not being able to produce one of the trills or one of the other R-type sounds that we’ve talked about today, it’s very common to not be able to hit sounds that aren’t in your languages that you’ve grown up with.

Gretchen: R is one of those hard sounds even for English-speaking children who’ve been exposed to it from birth.

Lauren: Children go through developmental stages where it takes them a while to get the hang of it. A lot of the time they’ll outgrow it. It’s worth just keeping an eye on and enjoying while it briefly occurs. If it’s persistent and your child is getting into 3 and 4 and it’s really not moving at all, that can be a time to maybe chat to a speech pathologist. But it is a completely normal phase to go through. It’s also completely normal not to be able to acquire sounds that aren’t in the languages that you are exposed to and that you speak. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you can’t hit one of those trills.

Gretchen: I have lost track of the number of small children, like extended family and friends’ kids, who have called me “Gwetchen” for six months.

Lauren: Oh my gosh, too cute.

Gretchen: “Gwetchen!” It’s great. It’s really wonderful. It’s so cute. There’s the classic Looney Tunes, “wascaly wabbit.” This is clearly also a stereotyped feature of a certain kind of childish speech in English. In addition to this T and G-H and W, sometimes, have ties with R, another really interesting sound that has ties with R is the /z/ sound, which is often written with S but actually pronounced /z/ as in “Zed.” In both the history of English and the history of Latin and the history of other languages, sometimes you get a /z/ changing to an R. This is how we get words like “was” and “were.”

Lauren: Ah. It’s one of those things that’s been staring me right in the face.

Gretchen: Yeah. “Was” and “were,” “is” and “are,” “rise” and “rear,” as in “to bring up.”

Lauren: Ah, yes.

Gretchen: And the suffixes “-er” and “-est” as in “bigger,” “biggest,” is another pair. Or words like “more” and “most,” “better” and “best,” “loss” and “forlorn.”

Lauren: Oh my gosh, this is a lot of very core English that I’m re-thinking for the first time.

Gretchen: Right? Sometimes an S or a Z just becomes an R or vice versa. Especially, the R often shows up between two vowels. The S changes to a /z/ sound between two vowels, and then that /z/ can change to an R because if you’re producing your R with the tongue near the front of the mouth, that’s kind of also where you’re pronouncing a /z/ sound. They’re not quite as different as you might think they are – at least if you’re producing that particular R. There’s also examples of this in Latin. You have things like “genus” – or /d͡ʒinəs/ – and “generous.”

Lauren: Which gives us “genre,”

Gretchen: “Genre,” and “generic,” and a whole bunch of words like that. And “genus,” like “species.” This happens in a bunch of languages. It’s not just those two. But you can see it in English and be like, “Wait! This has been here all along.”

Lauren: It’s another really great example of how rhoticity and rhotic sounds have this incredible flexibility and ability to change over time that makes them such an interesting little feature to pull apart and look at across a single language, across history, or across lots of different languages. You can start off going, “Okay, we’re going to look at R-like things,” and you can dig down and dig down and build more of an appreciation. You dig down so far you come back to they’re all just kind of R-like things.

Gretchen: You know how in nature the shape of a crab – the sideways scuttling, pinch-y arm thing – has evolved in several completely different branches of the family tree?

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: They call this “cancericization” – “everything wants to become a crab.” That’s “cancer” as in the Zodiac sign not “cancer” as in the disease. I think there’s also maybe – rhotacisation is like cancericization. Everything wants to become a crab; everything wants to become an R. R just shows up and has its little pinching fingers in so many different places.

Lauren: It’s never quite the same thing. Whenever you come across something written as an R in a language, it’s always good to keep an open mind about exactly what that is an exactly how it’s used. It’s a little recurring motif.

Gretchen: You keep coming back to this sense of similarity that people have noticed over and over again, even though these sounds are produced in incredibly different ways.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar, Just Analysing It” T-shirts, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

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[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[fractallogic]

okay so like. here's the thing. at some point, you have to be more... encompassing of your definition of what linguistics is and what matters to linguistics. everything is linguistics. nothing is linguistics. because guess what? language is the same principle as the body.

let me explain/continue to think out loud.

when people come into a yoga class and you ask for requests, sometimes people (I) will request particular poses because you know what I fucking love reversed revolved crescent and I don't get enough of it in These Trying Yoga Times. more often, people will say "my shoulders/lower back/neck/entire being is kinda sore, could we stretch that out?" because sometimes you're stretching one way because it seems to get at the sore spot but it doesn't resolve the underlying problem.

the underlying problem is that the entire body is connected. so when your lower back hurts, it's probably a mixture of a lot of things: actual load on your lower back muscles, but also tight hamstrings and hip flexors because we sit all day in this society and your hamstrings and hip flexors shorten when they spend a lot of time in one position (like sitting in your office chair). so you're probably making all kinds of weird shapes to stretch out your lower back, but not also addressing contributors (hamstrings, hip flexors, quads, etc.) and the underlying cause (we should get up and move more often).

one of the partitionings of linguistics is the difference between Linguistics and Applied Linguistics when it comes to things like, oh, I don't know, word learning. when I was applying to grad school I had no idea whether I should be applying to applied linguistics programs or linguistics programs, except the applied linguistics ones usually wanted either a master's degree and/or explicit interest (at least for doing coursework) in curriculum design and in-the-classroom application. fine. okay. I don't really want to be a language teacher or a language-teacher-teacher, so linguistics! great.

but then, among other things, it turns out linguists are very snooty about what "counts" as "language" and "a good way to study language", where "good" is code for physics' textbook problems involving spherical cows in vacuums—variables are maximally reduced so that we can look at "what's really going on" without any of the messy stuff getting in the way (and I think the assumption that a lot of Linguists have is that they're going to get to the messy stuff later, but it turns out, language is complicated and the messy psychosocial human stuff actually affects how we formulate our theories of language, and also, language is complicated enough that you can spend an entire 40-50-year career focused on Just That One Thing). the important thing in Linguistics is this idea of "fundamental research" or "basic science", which is our attempt at saying "no really, we're a Hard Science like chemistry and physics, not a social science or (god forbid) one of the (ugh) humanities", which like, whatever. it all matters, actually! it's all good and important!

so then obviously we get to the point where there's like, Linguistics, but also Linguistics and Psychology (caring about very different things than Linguistics, but could also care about similar things, but not if you want to be taken seriously in psychology journals) and Linguistics and Social Factors (but then you can be a fraudulent/naive sociolinguist like me and go "i mean sure I don't know the foundational works but totally I love doing social + language stuff it's so interesting") and Linguistics and Computers, and on and on and on until everyone's so siloed out that as a young ("early career") researcher in linguistics who's interested in like, all of these tendrils of other areas goes "I mean but AM I a _____linguist?" because when you're applying for jobs, they want a particular flavor of linguist and they specify in the ads which flavor they want in the "broad subfields" of linguistics.

but that part, kind of like your achy lower back, doesn't actually matter. what needs to happen is that everything needs to talk to each other, like how it's a revelation that sometimes you can stretch your hamstrings to make your back feel better. sometimes psychological and social research can make theories of linguistics better. you know why? because your body is all one interconnected piece. SUPER ANNOYING (probably) when you're a medical doctor or just a human trying to figure out why the fuck your back hurts. language is also one complicated, interconnected piece. SUPER ANNOYING when you're like "but I only care about syntax" and I come up to you and say okay but what about this psychological thing that (supports or not) this other thing in syntax? and you're like oh no, that makes things too complicated (and if you're not an asshole, you hedge and say but that's a good and important idea, language isn't something we do in a vacuum, blah blah blah, with various degrees of sincerity).

anyway, I'm bored of the nephrologists of linguistics having all the say in stuff. I want myself and the other internal medicine people of linguistics to be in charge. I AM INTERESTED IN A WHOLE THING AND GOOD AT A WHOLE THING and not just the boring shit about kidneys and syntax. and like yeah, "specializations", but if you can see how things connect, you're a lot less concerned about "oh shit I'm downloading papers on syntax AND phonology ~*what am I*~"

in conclusion, I'm applying for a big cluster hire in "learning sciences" and my PI as an example in our last meeting said "well you could frame your research statement as 'I'm interested in learning, and here are the ways'", so like, obviously I'm the #1 person who needs that job. and also I still cannot BELIEVE I got the "this seems almost too applied????? wHeRe'S tHe ThEoRy" in my reviews on this grant. it's because how humans actually do the learning matters too, brett. they're good dogs, brett.

[hungwy]

it's not so much folk wisdom vs. academic 'knowledge'... the point is for the vanguard party to introduce sophisticated academic concepts to the working class by way of policy, agitation and organization. notions like surplus value are so deeply rooted in economic and political theory that 'folk' explanations of them obviously wouldn't be sufficient

the post recognizes only that there will always be a contextual divide between academics and non-academics (if the structure of academia necessarily distances itself from non-academia of course). its within the nature of academia to produce concepts using a great deal of background knowledge, or intellectual concepts. commonly-educated citizens will not hold this background knowledge naturally, unless for some reason they spend their free time being academic -- at which point id say they’ve transgressed the boundary into academia. what counts as “being academic” is also not the scope of this post lol, i dont mean to socratic dialogue this; just assume there is a difference between being so and not being so. anyway, the capacity for understanding these terms is limited by one’s background knowledge. common folk will not have that capacity and will (generally) not completely comprehend the scope of a given concept, as they essentially are not able to completely understand it without the given background knowledge. even if the concept is successfully transmitted there exist sociolinguistic processes that can also transform the meaning and application of the term over time, turning it into slang and eventually a codified term altogether different in usage from its past. the process of reducing the complexity of and popularizing concepts specifically precedes the formation of “folk understandings of terms”. so long as there exists an academic sphere separate from folk pools of knowledge, there will always be a trickling down of technically-reduced terminology, and thus a disconnect in how the two spheres operate the terms in communication. this is a generic overarching process, though, and like basically every system the more individual you go the more chaotic and broken down the system is. the “atom” of this system is a person; therefore, interest, education, critical thinking skills, and tons of other personal variables will decide what informational bits stick and how creatively or restrictively you use the bits.

despite all this my actual opinion is that both academic and folk spheres aren’t doing anything incorrect. i believe that to understand a word’s definition you must understand all the different contexts and meanings which might apply to that word. that post just means to highlight that the process of transmission from academic to folk spheres is essentially a game of telephone with specific reductive properties but i just worded it really badly.

whether vanguard parties may or may not successfully preserve the full integrity of scientific terms when translating them to the working class is not really the point of the post, as you can see, because it depends on how they would do it. the success of that depends on how successful it is lol

[libriaco]

Suggerimenti di lettura - 1

Swearing in English uses the spoken section of the British National Corpus to establish how swearing is used, and to explore the associations between bad language and gender, social class and age. The book goes on to consider why bad language is a major locus of variation in English and investigates the historical origins of modern attitudes to bad language. The effects that centuries of censorious attitudes to swearing have had on bad language are examined, as are the social processes that have brought about the associations between swearing and a number of sociolinguistic variables. Drawing on a variety of methodologies, including historical research and corpus linguistics, and a range of data such as corpora, dramatic texts, early modern newsbooks and television programmes, Tony McEnery takes a sociohistorical approach to discourses about bad language in English. [...] Tony  McEnery is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK, and has published widely in the area of corpus linguistics.

T. McEnery, Swearing in English (Imprecare in inglese) [2006], London-New York, Routledge