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Teachit Language Newsletter August 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Divergence in the face of levelling? | Kevin Watson From the cutting room floor | Detective Work: Julie Blake Food Stories | Anna Lobbenberg Emagpast, emagplus and now…emagclips! | Barbara Bleiman What is English? | Dick Hudson
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Divergence in the face of levelling? | Kevin Watson discusses the case of Liverpool EnglishA recurrent theme in English sociolinguistics is dialect levelling. Phonological features, it is thought, are spreading from socially prestigious centres to neighbouring areas, and this is making the accents of English sound more like each other. Thus, supra-local regiolects are being created, as a result of increased intra-regional mobility over the latter half of the 20th century. This report examines this idea in relation to the accent of Liverpool . The Liverpool accent (Scouse) has similarities to other accents in northern England but is also quite distinct. Scouse /k/ can be pronounced as a velar fricative [x] (e.g. in ‘duck’ or ‘docker’), /t/ can be pronounced as [s] (e.g. in ‘right’ and ‘water’) and as [h] in words such as ‘what’, ‘it’ and ‘at’. The glottal stop, in contrast, is not a typical Liverpool pronunciation of /t/. I recorded a group of 16 adolescent speakers to investigate whether Scouse was becoming a ‘supra-local regiolect’. A data table with audio source is on the next page. Some of the results are summarised below:
These results are surprising. The variables represent salient features which are part of the Scouse stereotype – precisely the kinds of features that are lost to levelling. However, they are not disappearing. Furthermore, the glottal stop has found its way into many English accents, but is still infrequent in Scouse. Most surprisingly, young speakers have extended the set of words in which /t/ can be realized as [h]. This is a very regionally restricted feature that couldn’t have been borrowed from neighbouring accents - it doesn’t occur elsewhere. Scouse is not only maintaining its distinctive characteristics, but is also expanding those that are most regionally marked. The next question is: why? And the answer is: I don’t know, yet. I would hypothesize that a sense of regional identity is strengthening Liverpool English speakers’ linguistic security, which is impacting upon the phonological system. Next we must try to find out what speakers think, and look for correlations between their beliefs and what they actually do when they talk. Here is some of the data with audio sources (choose the blue icon if you have Quicktime or the green icon if you have Windows Media Player and then press play in the audio window that appears):
Kevin Watson is Lecturer in English Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University NotesA longer discussion of levelling in Liverpool can be found in the following article: Watson, K. (2006) Phonological resistance and innovation in the North-West of England. English Today 22/02. 55-61. From the cutting room floor | Detective Work: Julie Blake finds the clues and figures it outThe basic ideaPresent the students with a scenario in which a library, publisher, auctioneer or expert on The Antiques Roadshow has been presented with a document which it is claimed was written by a specific author. A previously unknown poem. a letter, juvenilia, extra chapter, early draft of a scene, alternative ending, a journal entry. You either use real contested stuff, make it up, use a bit of real text by the writer that the students won’t easily be able to get their hands on (i.e. it’s not from the internet…), or by a suitably similar writer. Or a scenario in which someone’s life or liberty is at stake on the basis of a contested text: a confession, a ransom note, death threat letters, etc. Then invite the students to be the forensic linguists who must decide whether or not the text bears witness to the truth, by looking closely at the internal evidence (language, themes, references) and external evidence (dates, places, connections) and making their deductions. Applying it
What’s the point?The scenario is exciting as this is the kind of stuff that makes the news when an unearthed text gets auctioned for a shedload of cash. It requires a sharp focus on evidence, deductive reasoning, and the underrated use of intuition. Really strong work can be done on precise details of language and style, persistent thematic concerns, and on the contextual factors shaping a text’s identity. Miles of room for all kinds of lively discussion and debate. Tricks of the tradeChoose good texts that present an appropriate level of challenge for the students you are working with – not too much that it seems impossible, not so little that they finish it in three seconds flat. You may need to give some support in determining what kinds of internal and external evidence it might be most useful to look at. Variations on a theme
Food stories | Anna Lobbenberg introduces a new online talking transcript resource – all about foodThe changes that have taken place in UK food culture over the last century are nothing short of revolutionary. How many young people can imagine a world without supermarkets, a world of only seasonal produce, in which olive oil is only sold in pharmacies as an ear-cleaning lubricant, in which the British sneer at the exotic ‘foreignness’ of foods such as spaghetti and curry? These themes are explored in a new British Library Learning interactive entitled Food Stories, a resource that revolves around innovative, colourful animations, and oral history recordings from the Library’s Sound Archive. These recordings cover a range of subjects: identity, tradition and ritual; cultural diversity; the experience of the consumer (both past and present); the habits of the retailer and changes in food production (including farming, technology, food miles and globalisation). Among the many interviews included on the site are an Asian food entrepreneur talking about 1950s Chinese restaurants in the UK, and the incongruous dishes on the menu: sweet and sour pork, chips and bread and butter; a Middle Eastern food writer discussing how the British prejudged her food as ‘disgusting’; descriptions of a 1920s mother using her own stocking to cook spotted dick; accounts of old fashioned grocery shopping and early supermarkets; and discussions of Fair Trade, food miles and migrant workers. All the interviews are accompanied by ‘go-deeper’ notes providing background information for each of the subjects covered. Transcripts, activities and questions are also provided. Anyone who has enjoyed the cookery books on Texts in Context will find rich comparative material on this site, and students will learn how the production and consumption of food in the UK has been transformed within living memory. www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/foodstories
Anna Lobbenberg is eLearning Manager in the British Library Learning Team Emagpast, emagplus and now… emagclips! | Barbara Bleiman introduces old and new online language resources from the English and Media CentreFrom the start, emagazine , the magazine for A Level English students, has combined articles about Literature with really strong pieces on Language. It has articles by academic linguists such as Angela Goddard, Jean Aitchison, Dick Hudson, Ron Carter, Jennifer Coates and Clive Upton, teachers like Julie Blake , Dan Clayton, Adam Oliver, Ben Farndon and Beth Kemp and examiners including Adrian Beard and Alison Ross. The magazine aims to support students with their A Level studies and be a stimulating read. Perhaps less well known is the fact that all of the articles from past magazines have been collected in an online library called emagpast on the emagazine subscription website. There are over two hundred language articles organised under headings such as Accent and Dialect, Aspects of Grammar, CLA, The Spoken Word, Language and Gender, Language Debates, Language and Power, Occupations and Technology, Semantics, Phonology, Linguistic Approaches to Literary Texts and so on. There are also specially written articles and items in a section called emagplus. In September emagazine is introducing a new website resource called emagclips – downloadable 3-5 minute video clips. Students will be able to watch and/or download ‘mini-tutorials’ on key aspects of their course, presented by academics or experts. During the first year, the language clips will be Graeme Trousdale, of Edinburgh University , on a range of issues, from semantics, phonology and language change to prescriptivism, grammar and poetry, accent and dialect and word classes. Three or four new Language clips will appear on the site with each new issue of the magazine, alongside Literature clips by experts like John Mullan, Peggy Reynolds and Andy Dickson (Rough Guide to Shakespeare). In future years we hope to add to the bank of experts. The clips are small in size, so really quick to download and can be watched on screen or downloaded to a computer, mobile phone or iPod. Part of the idea behind this is to give students quick access to expert opinions and encourage them to be active users of the site. We want to encourage students to make full use of the site and realise just how many resources they can access themselves. Any centre that subscribes can give out their password to every student in the institution, so that they can use the site in school and at home. There are sample videoclips up on the open page of the website at http://www.emagazine.org.uk, including Graeme Trousdale talking about ‘Why Study Language?’ But if you want a real taste of what’s on offer, there’s a cluster of free material exclusively for Teachit Language Newsletter readers at http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/emagteachit.html . Here you’ll find some material on the prescriptivism debate, with articles by Matt Carmichael, Julie Blake and Tricia Lennie and an emagclip featuring Graeme Trousdale. If you fancy yourself as a writer for emagazine, then do contact us at barbara@englishandmedia.co.uk or look at the information for writers on the website home page. We’re always looking for budding writers and feel really proud to have been able to give some of our writers their first chance to be published! What is English? | Dick Hudson explores the shifting semantics of this thing we all do for a livingHave you ever noticed how the noun English shifts its meaning when it moves into education? This question may sound ‘merely academic’ or (worse still) ‘just a matter of semantics’ (which of course it is), but it’ll turn out below to have been crucial in your career. If you know or speak English, there’s only one thing English can mean: the English language. But in a school classroom the ‘English’ that you’re teaching can stand at quite a distance from the English language. For example, the plot of Hamlet is no more a part of ‘English’ (in the usual sense of the term) than, say, the structure of a cell or the causes of the First World War. At university level, it’s even odder. A degree in English is typically a degree in English Literature so, paradoxically, English, tout court, is never used for a degree in English Language. At one level, this is a good example of how a word’s meaning varies from context to context, so anyone interested in curious word meanings may find it mildly interesting. However, any English teacher knows that this semantic shift is anything but ‘academic’. Secondary teachers are expected to have a degree in the subject they teach, so English teachers need a degree in …. well, what? Traditionally, the answer was obvious – but equally obviously, it wasn’t quite right. How does degree-level training in Literature prepare you for helping year 7 to use more ambitious sentence structures – or, worse still, for teaching A Level English language to Year 13? Ideally, you need a degree in both Language and Literature, but Language alone is no worse than Literature on its own. Ten years ago, few PGCE tutors would consider Language or Linguistics graduates for a PGCE English course, but a survey in 2006 found much more open-mindedness, with about a quarter of PGCE English courses open to graduates from Language-based degrees – you can see the list at http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/ec/pgce-clie.htm. The chances are that your career as an English teacher depended on the curiously shifting semantics of the noun English. A nice example, perhaps, of language influencing the way we think about the world? Dick Hudson is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at University College London |
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