polyglot conspiracy

It’s local NPR Pledge Drive time, which you know I like very much. Two mornings in a row, I’ve heard the hosts say something about the perceived affective content of BBC broadcasters’ accents. First anecdote, in paraphrase:

So please, call in now. Call in now because you love the BBC NewsHour. You know you love the BBC News, you know you love the different perspective it gives you from the American news. It’s good news, it’s well-produced. Or you know what? Maybe you just like the accents. Maybe you don’t even listen to the words they say, maybe you just like the way they sound, maybe those accents are comforting to you. Whatever, you like the BBC, so let’s get some calls in.

I’m taking a seminar this semester on Experimental Sociolinguistics, and we’ve been reading a slew of papers that study people’s perceptions of accents, usually via some “personality” measures, such as likeability or intelligence. We talk about the way that speech patterns evoke stereotypes, and people then judge a speaker based on the stereotype attributable to the speech of the group they think they’re perceiving. So we’re (mostly) always making sure to look for the intermediate cause of personality attribution, namely group membership. But lately I’ve been thinking that maybe there are also some purely aesthetic reasons that people perceive speakers as smarter or more kind, and moreover some aesthetic reasons for language gripes.

The comment above demonstrates that accents seem to sometimes evoke not just stereotypes, but “feelings.” To what extent are those “feelings” also related to stereotypes, and to what extent are their feelings based on an aesthetic (as if you’re looking at an art piece, or hearing a song) that is somehow separable from social categories or groups? I’m vaguely aware of some experimental work playing subjects tapes of people speaking languages that the subjects don’t know, and subjects still make judgments about personality even without having a clue who or where the speaker is. Maybe this is the kind of thing I’m getting at - Rousseau’s old tropes. Anyway, the point is that lately I’ve been questioning whether it really is ALL social, or whether there’s a sense in which we can also view language as subject to aesthetic judgments (and I’m not talking about literature, or poetry, or oratory - I’m talking about talking). Of course, an aesthetic is also not cultivated in a social vacuum, so maybe it’s ultimately not going to be very different.

The second anecdote in paraphrase:

BBC News Hour, you know you love it, and while you’re listening you can practice your accent!

I think this one just shows how salient British English is to American ears.

Also, Heidi Harley posted an amazing Daily Show clip about the N-word (reflective note: I felt a big uncomfortable shock seeing this as a headword on Wikipedia. I can’t explain this reaction, other than to say I’m a product of my environment.). It’s REALLY good: funny, and poignant.

[A note on the term accent: I've used it here instead of dialect because that's what the NPR people said. Normally I would say dialect, especially since it's not like British speakers are nonnative English speakers (duh!) - this is another problem that comes up in this experimental work about dialect/accent/language attitudes! What does it all mean?!?!?!]

Last month I wrote about the word shocklog not being accepted at Wikipedia because it was neologistic. The other day, I got an email from C.J. Croy (thanks!) sending links to the relevant Wikipedia policy pages that outline the criteria that shocklog fails to meet. I hadn’t looked at these firsthand before, but seeing them now makes me even more firmly committed to the statement I made before:

Wikipedia is way more like traditional encyclopedias than it wants to think it is, and that the press likes to think it is. The public ultimately decides on similar norms as the privately-vetted media they’re used to.

Except apparently it isn’t just the public editors and contributors who are deciding, but site policymakers as well. I’m not saying that if Wikipedia is going to be a democratic collaborative project it shouldn’t have ANY guidelines, of course. But the main reason given for why neologisms are unacceptable is ridiculous. Well, first of all, it defines neologisms as “words and terms that have recently been coined, generally do not appear in any dictionary, but may be used widely or within certain communities.” This obviously depends on what you mean by “dictionary.” There are plenty of neologisms in UrbanDictionary and Wiktionary. So “dictionary” must mean the mainstream, nationally printed references - MW, OED, AHD, etc. Second of all:

Generally speaking, neologisms should be avoided in articles because they may not be well understood, may not be clearly definable, and may even have different meanings to different people. Determining which meaning is the true meaning is original research — we don’t do that here at Wikipedia.

I cannot tell you how many waves of displeasure this passage sends through me. 1) Everything has different meanings to different people. 2) Almost nothing is “clearly” definable; hence disputes among contributors to collaborative knowledge projects. 3) Wikipedia is a resource for the not-well-understood. You don’t use Wikipedia if you already understand something well. 4) “Well understood” by who? 5) “True meaning”? WTF? 6) Why can’t someone do original research and contribute it to the site if they want? What if a contributor to a page is herself an expert on the topic, and much of her definition comes from her own personal knowledge and research? Is that “original,” whether or not she cites external sources? What’s the difference between using that kind of first-hand-attained knowledge and doing a google search to “clear up” the meaning/uses of a neologism? 7) Words like shocklog actually probably have fewer disparate meanings running around, since neologisms tend to have fairly narrow applications, then they broaden out semantically through spreading usage (this seems right, anyway; experts on semantic change and spread should speak up here if I’m way off).

Other reasons against including neologisms include:

Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and so articles simply attempting to define a neologism are inappropriate.

[A]rticles on neologisms frequently attempt to track the emergence and use of the term as observed in communities of interest or on the internet — without attributing these claims to reliable secondary sources. If the article is not verifiable (see Reliable sources for neologisms, below) then it constitutes analysis, synthesis and original research and consequently cannot be accepted by Wikipedia.

8) The difference between an encyclopedia and a dictionary is becoming ever more tenuous, and can only be maintained if you commit to saying that words DO have one clear meaning or set of clear meanings that can be elucidated context-independently. It’s my personal view that this isn’t the case, but I know that’s not a particularly popular one. 9) “Analysis” and “synthesis” are what ALL Wikipedia articles (should) represent. You can’t just cut and paste multiple passages from different other sources - you’ve got to synthesize that information if it’s going to be readable in one sitting, and this inevitably involves some level of analysis. Not to mention all the evaluation (= analysis) that goes into editorial disputes.

Finally, a note on primary and secondary sources:

Neologisms that are in wide use — but for which there are no treatments in secondary sources — are not yet ready for use and coverage in Wikipedia. They may be in time, but not yet. The term does not need to be in Wikipedia in order to be a “true” term, and when secondary sources become available it will be appropriate to create an article on the topic or use the term within other articles.

10) The idea that one needs to refer to secondary sources to verify the meaning of a new term is just weird, because what they’re saying here is not just that you have to find a “real” source that uses the term - that’s in fact unacceptable - but that you have to find a “real” source that talks about the term. A dictionary would apparently work, or an academic paper - but how many times are neologisms (inasmuch as they’re often considered informal lexical items) used in primary research? Someone may well write a scholarly paper about shocklogs in the next year or so (in fact, someone probably already has or currently is), but it could easily not get published. It may not find its way into secondary sources for years. It’s silly that Wikipedia shouldn’t want to provide a resource for people interested in these terms.

OK, that’s an even 10.

(cross-posted at Language Log)

There have been several [Language Log] posts lately regarding linguistic prescriptivism and its public manifestation, namely in the form of “abusage” forums and online griping. Coming from the sociolinguistics side of the field, I wanted to share with interested readers some relevant corners of linguisticky research around prescriptivist issues. You might not find this stuff by doing a search on prescriptivism per se, but it seems as if prescriptivism is a cluster concept pointing to several related terms, among them language attitudes, language ideologies, folk linguistics, linguistic awareness and metalanguage, language correctness, and language standardization. In fact, maybe one way to look at prescriptivism is as an outcome of the social processes these terms describe. From this perspective, sociolinguists have learned a good deal about griping and what drives it.

Sociolinguistics is concerned with the question of not only how people speak, but of how they think about how they and others speak. You thus have people studying language attitudes, seeking to identify and understand what people think about linguistic variation: Why do Michiganders think they speak the most “correct” form of English in the United States? Why do people judge speakers with certain non-English-accented English as less socially desirable, less intelligent, or less agreeable than speakers without a discernible accent? How many Detroiters fail to recognize “Canadian” phonological features within their own speech community? (For excellent references on this topic, see Harold Schiffman’s page on bibliographies on Language Attitudes.)

Then there’s the language ideologies work, which goes beyond what people think about language to ask what social processes are underlying the attitudes, often by appealing to political systems, historical influences, socioeconomic structure, and semiotic processes that turn language into a carrier of social meaning in various ways. Language ideologies are often defined as sets of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that influence how people use language (by imposing some sort of schema about what is “right,” “appropriate,” or whatever), and they also serve as speakers’ means of rationalizing or otherwise explaining the language that they or someone else uses.

In the case of the United States, one can make a pretty good argument that our dominant language ideologies include ideas about there being one standard style that is considered “correct,” that language can be something subject to judgments of “correctness” to begin with, and that nation-states are best off when their citizens speak one unified language. Studies on standardization, and particularly with regard to English, point out that in literate societies, ideas of “standard” become even more salient and powerful because of the tendency of print to “freeze” language or at least impose stratification on its use, elevating some formal or allegedly generic style above more colloquial or regional ones.

You can also argue that the written form serves as a trigger for linguistic awareness, on which there seems to be less research but which is of no less importance (if you ask me!). In order to make a usage gripe, you have to be aware of the linguistic feature you’re griping about. You may be more aware because you were taught something about it, or you may notice it because it varies a lot among your acquaintances, or there may be something that makes it especially salient because of the kind of linguistic thing it is (phoneme, morpheme, word, spelling, etc.). You may also be more aware of it because it’s been culturally packaged: invoking a term from Dennis Preston’s work, a linguistic feature or language variety can become a folk linguistic artifact that circulates through the culture, picking up different social connotations along the way. Standard English is most certainly one of these, and so are “Ebonics,” “Spanglish,” “Southern drawl,” and “Netspeak.”

In public discourse (and educational settings), these are framed as distinct varieties to be either aspired to or avoided, having either high or low mainstream social prestige. We can pinpoint some contents of the artifacts, too, in media reports: about change in language as language decay, about linguistic “revolution” as socially harmful, about how no one sends thank-you notes anymore, about how multilingualism is a threat to the health of English and Americans, about how emoticons are rampant in school essays, about how you’d better understand your teenagers’ online lingo fast, before it’s too late and they’re pregnant or in rehab or, worse, cavorting with a sexual predator.

So, the gripers. You have people who believe that there’s a correct way of speaking and writing, and who impose that belief on others. For them, what they are doing is fighting for the truth, tradition, and the Natural Order of Language. While lots of them may have some interest in language and its inner workings, for most, language is simply a material/symbolic system that gets roped into social Othering. Language is accessible, convenient, and flexible for use in doing so: it’s always there, it’s always changing, and it’s always going to be socially differentiated. With linguistic variation, it seems that the grass is always greener on the other side, if you’re talking about a usage associated with an appealing group of people (**swoon** those Aussies with their exotic diphthongs!), or it’s greener on your side, if you’re talking about a usage associated with a somehow undesirable group (**shakes fist** those Mexicans/teens/rednecks and their bad English!).

When you give gripers an outlet for their opinions, they’re going to feel validated, and they’re going to enjoy the feeling that their comments are helping to preserve the Natural Order. Maybe they see it as their duty, or maybe it’s just a playful pastime. Either way, it’s not (entirely) their fault, and it reflects issues beyond what people are taught about language. It’s the reality of the social divisions we are constantly reproducing — every day, all the time, each of us. While I agree that it would be nice to get some teachable moments out of the gripes, I’m not certain that it would ultimately change anything until some deeper cultural issues were addressed.

Perhaps what Mark Liberman is asking for in terms of “serious social science of prescriptivism” is yet a different line of research; maybe we also need a quantitative, demographic breakdown of what kinds of people are bothered by split infinitives and who is likely to poo-poo the use of singular generic “they”. But we already have a pretty rich set of sociolinguistic analyses that show us something about why people have the gripes about language in the first place, why they probably feel compelled to publicize them, and what social effects this activity has.

I suggest that even if we had the numbers on who hates what where and when, we’d still be left asking that why.

ABC News has a little report on a company that’s enforced a policy prohibiting employees to use email on Fridays.

“Some [e-mails] are very valuable, and some of them are just an excuse not to communicate or to protect myself from something that’s going on,” said Jay Ellison, executive vice president at Chicago-based U.S. Cellular.

Two and a half years ago, Ellison was receiving an average of 200 e-mails a day, many of which went unopened. After getting cyber-indigestion, he sent out a memo to his 5,500 subordinates.

“I’m announcing a ban on e-mail every Friday,” Ellison’s memo read. “Get out to meet your teams face-to-face. Pick up the phone and give someone a call. … I look forward to not hearing from any of you, but stop by as often as you like.”

The no-e-mail-Friday idea landed with a thud.

….

Eventually, the policy won over staff members. Forced to use the phone, employee John Coyle learned that a co-worker who he thought was across the country was, in fact, across the hall.

“I asked him where he was and he said I’m on the fourth floor, and I said, ‘Well so am I,’” said Coyle. “We now have a working relationship that is deeper than he’s the guy that provides reports.”

Public affairs manager Tyler Caroll, because of her gender-neutral name, used to get e-mails addressing her as a “he” or “Mr.” Phone calls on a no-e-mail-Friday changed all that.

“People were really surprised that they had a woman’s voice at the other end of the line instead of a man’s,” said Carroll with a laugh.

As much as I love email, I can sympathize - my inbox gets very easily overwhelming, and I can only imagine what it would be like if I were in a position of some authority (boss, professor, chairperson) rather than being a minion. But it’s also interesting the kinds of things this article says that cutting out email has allowed people to “discover” about their coworkers: their gender, their location, their age, etc. All the social characteristics we assume about a person based on looks, essentially; yet, I wonder what other cues in organizational emails people use to assume these exact same things. Why did people assume that “Tyler” was a man, not a woman? Was it because “man” is the default assumption for a coworker, or was it something about the way that “Tyler” wrote emails? A setting like this - offline epiphanies - would be a very interesting site for research about (or confirmation about research findings of) who people assume they’re talking to online. Additionally, while this article indicates that people are enjoying finding out the “reality” of their coworkers’ personae, I could see where some people might also really find it advantageous to maintain the illusions.

On a different note, Language Log has been all up on the topic of “public griping” regarding language use/”abusage” lately. The progression has (from what I can tell, based on somewhat superficial persual) gone something like: there are all these usage gripe forums opening up online –> the forums are heavily populated with language gripes, with language-related forums garnering lots more responses than ones that aren’t about language –> gee, tons of people must be really interested in language! –> this is an opportunity to take that heretofore-unrealized public interest in language and do some linguistic teachin’ –> because people’s gripes are usually founded on misinformation, they are usually wrong, and perhaps if we taught them where their alleged “rules” for “correctness” come from, they would back off –> no, these aren’t *real* complaints about *real* language, they are merely instantiations of verbal elitism, evidence that people want to socially differentiate themselves via language –> still, it displays some deep interest in language on the part of the public.

I appreciate very much this discussion being publicized, yet there’s much fuller sociolinguistic analysis to be done with it - it’s by no means a new phenomenon (though perhaps the publicity of the internet forums makes it seem more widespread), and I agree with Peter Gerdes, who today was quoted in a Liberman post, that this behavior is *not* ultimately about language. Language is a material system that gets roped into social Othering; it’s accessible, convenient, and flexible for use in doing so. Actually, there’s already a rich literature in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology about language attitudes, language ideologies, language correctness, and (meta)linguistic awareness. For starters, I *highly* recommend that people read Dennis Preston’s 1996 piece Whaddayaknow?: The Modes of Folk Linguistic Awareness (Language Awareness 5(1), 40-74). [If you are curious, and don't have library/journal access, shoot me an email and I'll send you a PDF.] And then, if you want a more semiotically inclined explanation/analysis of how this stuff happens, you should look at Judy Irvine & Susan Gal’s 2000 chapter “Language ideology and linguistic differentiation,” in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (Paul Kroskrity, ed.). I am not sure why work like this hasn’t figured into the Log discussions so far (that I can tell - I haven’t been following with my most attuned eye, so please correct me if I’m underrepresenting the coverage), but I think it’s crucial to understanding what drives people to make such seemingly wrong, elitist, misguided, and yet passionate comments about language.

Speaking of apostrophes, this was just published (including, more specifically relevant, this). Some of you may remember me (or my blog) talking of this work, in varying formats, the past couple years.

Related to the Arkansas apostrophe act (?I wish it were called this?), Mark Liberman posted a link to a U of A Daily Headlines article (er, more like a press release) in which an English professor offers explanation for the decreasing use of apostrophes in general. (Unlike Mark, I am deeply interested in punctuation.)

The apostrophe may be disappearing in part because students increasingly learn by hearing, rather than by reading and seeing words, and many people communicate electronically, Slattery suggested.

“The culture is more aural than in the past,” Slattery said. “Conventions are evolving for communicating electronically. For many people using e-mail, there is a sense that prose doesn’t have to be technically correct. It’s especially difficult with instant messaging to proofread and to write in standard usage.”

A couple of things about this explanation don’t make sense to me. First and most interestingly is the claim that the “culture is more aural than in the past.” This doesn’t really make sense if you’re also saying that part of the reason is that people are communicating electronically more - since “communicating electronically” generally means in writing. Independently it also doesn’t make sense to me: this is conjecture, but even if we’re experiencing MORE auditory stimuli in our daily lives before (via TV, YouTube, phones, radio, in addition to F2F interaction), it seems that a greater PORTION of most people’s verbal stimuli (in this ["the"] culture) comes via text, not speech. So while we have more means of transmitting aural information, we have even more more-than-before means of transmitting written information, and moreover these are the means that people seem to be becoming more and more immersed in.

Second, I can’t disagree with the claim that people feel that email or IM doesn’t need to be “technically correct.” This is often true, and probably more true now than it was even 5 or 10 years ago (some friends were talking last night about how emails used to be written “like actual letters,” whereas now they’re usually like sticky notes or something akin). But I’ve never heard anyone claim that it’s actually more *difficult* to proofread or use standard conventions in IM (or any other electronic format). In fact, most of the technologies we have now (e.g., where word processing is usually built-in) seem to facilitate writing “properly” and editing online text; by contrast, older technologies - typewriters, handwriting - don’t offer as expedient tools for self-correction.

The only angle from which this argument makes sense to me is the one that assumes that IM requires a certain speed of use: there are expectations that the communication be approximating “synchronous” (i.e., real-time), and due to that expectation, one is less likely to feel like they can spare the time to edit or press the shift key. It is my hunch from both personal experience and research (mine and others), though, that lack of punctuation/preserving punctuation (and other non/standard written usage issues) has more to do with attitudes toward standard usage and written style than it does with actual medium constraints. It may be that people omit apostrophes because it saves a keystroke (or two, if you omit the whole ’s), but it is just as likely, and possibly more likely that it’s because they perceive the apostrophe as dispensable and their message as interpretable without it. We do all kinds of things in writing that aren’t “efficient” or “economical” (e.g. funky capitalization patterns, using parentheses instead of hyphens, making arguably unnecessary emoticons, including arguably unnecessary words), so I don’t think this argument makes it very far.

Hat tip to Jeremy Hunsinger via the AoIR mailing list, for this video of a 1993 Canadian news broadcast about the internet. Watch it! I found it pretty interesting as an exercise in recent history. Of particular note:

1) Text is shown to be revealed from the sender to the receiver “as they type,” not once all the typing is done. This doesn’t happen anymore, that I know of - the sender now types everything to completion, editing as they go (potentially), and then sends it off to the receiver. This is the case whether you’re in typically asynchronous (message board) or synchronous (IM) systems [as always, counterexamples are welcome here]. Of course in the NEWER, but not OLDER, versions of AIM, you get something telling you WHEN your interlocutor is typing, but you don’t see the actual text as it’s made. I am not sure to what extent this representation of internet text exchange in 1993 is representative of internet text exchanges in 1993, but if it’s very representative, that’s an interesting shift in terms of how people see the text they’re being sent; I’d be curious to know what systemic/applicational changes occurred (something about interfaces or text encoding??) that fostered such a shift.

2) The phenomenon is referred to without a definite article. As in, “Internet is really cool!”

3) Emoticons are discussed (emphasis mine): “Computer communication is not much like most human communication. There’s no body language, no intonation, no facial expression to help you know which way something ambiguous is meant. ‘That’s great’ reads the same on internet as ‘Ooh, that’s GReat.’ So the isolated communicators of cyberspace have come up with little signs made out of punctuation marks. They’re called emoticons. They go at the end of sentences as graphic explanations.” Then on the screen we see:

:-] I AM KIDDING
:-[ I AM SERIOUS

Honestly, there’s little about this account that I can find fault with - for one, I wasn’t old enough in 1993 to be able to retrospectively critique the report in contextual 1993 internet terms. For another, it’s got almost *none* of the alarmist, doom-and-gloom tendencies of today’s news reports about the internet that get me riled up, especially when language is involved. I’d like to hear other people’s thoughts, or get links to other early reports like this if you know of any!