Buckells and his bumbling Brummie burr

Apologies to everyone who's sick of everyone banging on about Line Of Duty. But I like it, so. 

Much has been said about the mis-spelling of the word definitely as definately, which kept all of us wondering if it was in fact Hastings who was 'H' (the bent copper) last series, and this series ended up being helpful in identifying the actual baddie. Spoilers, by the way. I was as much here for it as any other linguist, as it's not often you get to hear the word 'syntax' in the most-watched telly series of the year. I'd have been even more up for an extended glass-box scene where they went through every syntactic characteristic one by one, showing how they led to Buckells being found out. 

I hope they did find more than just that spelling, because it's so common I don't think you could hang anything on it. After all, we saw Hastings doing it too and don't try and tell me that was him being clever and aping the error. At a conservative estimate, about 85% of people spell it that way. (No, of course it's not that high, but I don't know how many it is, so it's a lot.) I assume they had more stuff because they literally mentioned syntax, so they must have had some. What were the patterns?? Linguists need to know, Jed Mercurio. 

I was also wondering, though, in related linguistics thoughts, about Buckells' accent. The plot twist is that he's basically an incompetent ninny, pootling through life, not caring much about policing, and so no one really suspected him of anything, but it turns out he's the linchpin, a kind of middle man on the take. He uses what I assume is his own accent, or an exaggeration of it, in the series - he's from Birmingham and he speaks with a Brummie accent. Brummie is unfairly maligned as a UK accent, and its speakers regularly derided as stupid in polls about attitudes to accents. So how much did his non-threatening, bumbling, not-very-clever accent cause the AC-12 team to overlook his role? Should they all go on a course of linguistic anti-bias training? Should I set up this service as a business model for the police? 

When who you are is relevant to what you think about accents

 A tweet from last week about London children's accents sparked a bit of twitter fuss and made me think about how the identity of the opinion-holder matters as much as the identity of the person the opinion is about. 

I think we can all agree that 'punching down' is bad, namely criticising or mocking someone in a position of less power than you. This would be like a very senior academic calling out a junior scholar in front of a room full of people at a conference, for instance - it's not cool. The opposite scenario may be confrontational, but the power dynamics mean that it probably isn't bullying in the second instance. Similarly, social groups have different levels of power or authority and so comedians' jokes can fall flat if they appear to be punching down: if you want to make jokes about poor people they'd better be couched in a lot of understanding and solidarity, whereas jokes about rich people are pretty fair game. 

The tweet was as follows: 

My sister has just started work teaching primary school kids in North London and has informed me that everybody at the school has such strong accents they don't say "Thoughtful", they just say "Fortfuw" and I don't know how she gets through the day without laughing at them.

— Matt Bevan 🎙 (@MatthewBevan) November 25, 2020

OK, so we have young children as the subject, so relative powerlessness, and working class children at that (we can tell from their accents), so a double whammy. Is this awful and mean? You'd think so, wouldn't you. Accent discrimination is a real insidious and nasty thing, a form of classism that often masks other prejudices and tends to be presented as concern or commentary on how people choose to live their lives. So this apparent mockery of these kids who do what linguists call th-fronting (pronouncing 'thought' and 'fort' the same) and l-vocalisation (pronouncing 'l' like a 'w') drew a bit of criticism from my linguist babes who are always on the lookout for injustice and sticking up for people who need a bit of help (trust me, there's a lot of Bad Opinions about language on the internet). 

The guy who tweeted it is Australian, and lives and works in Australia, and for me that puts a whole nother spin on things. Suddenly this isn't just some guy mocking the kids for speaking in an accent he thinks is 'wrong', it's delight in an utterly unfamiliar accent which probably sounds totally adorable if you don't hear it spoken around you or associate it with Eastenders. Maybe it has connotations of Victorian chimney sweeps and street urchins as in Oliver! and it seems anachronistic to find that it's just the everyday language of his sister's class. While it probably doesn't help with the overall ideal of removing the stigma of these features of London English, it also doesn't feel the same as people on the internet suggesting that the children should learn to 'speak properly' so that people take them more seriously. 

Kerry the marry

Starbucks is featured on this blog often enough lately that I'm starting to think I should ask for a promotional fee (for the record, I drink Starbucks only when I stop at a service station and there isn't another coffee place because, for reasons explored in another post, their coffee is not catered to my tastes). 

Here's their Christmas advert: 

The slogan is 'carry the merry', meaning that you're carrying around a drink full of Christmas spirit. Someone posted on twitter the other day that they bet linguists were all excited about it and I was thinking that it's a *bit* interesting that the adjective merry is the object of the verb, but not that exciting surely? and then days later I realised that this is an example of the merry-marry-Mary merger. 

This is a sound pattern that's incredibly well described and studied so we don't need to go into it here, but suffice to say that for most North American speakers, those three words sound identical (there are regional patterns where only two of them do, or none, or it varies). In the UK, other English-speaking countries, and in the parts of the US without this merger (e.g. Philadelphia), the three words are pronounced differently, as they are for me. (I think this generalisation is true; there may be other varieties with the merger or part of it but I'm not a specialist in this area.) 

It affects words with a vowel coming before an /r/ so carry is also affected, and the slogan would rhyme for many Americans. For their customers without this particular merger, it's assonance instead. 

I think that the fact that I didn't even notice it despite someone saying it was linguistically interesting shows just how much this goes below the radar. When someone has a different accent from you, you accommodate really easily and hear vowels especially as being 'the same' as your own. It sounds a bit odd if you try to imitate their vowel sounds so we just accept that these very different sounds are 'the same' in some way and in many cases can't even hear that they're different. There was a bit in Vocal Fries last year where host Carrie Gillon describes a time when she asked her professor to say her name correctly because he was pronouncing it with a British-type vowel, and she said 'say it as if it's spelt Kerry'. This really surprised me because although I can hear how (my) Kerry vowel is closer* to (her) Carrie vowel than (my) Carrie vowel is, I distinctly hear her name as Carrie and not Kerry, probably in part because I've seen it written down. (This type of confusing sentence is also why lexical sets were invented.) 

*If you're interested, it sounds closer because it literally is closer: they're produced in a more similar area of the mouth, at the front, with the difference just in the height of the tongue, whereas the British** Carrie vowel is produced with the tongue further back in the mouth. 

**These things are different again in Scotland which has a different set of vowel rules, so some of what I say about the UK applies here but not all of it. 

Southern privilege

One of my favourite writers is Justin Myers, who among other things writes The Guyliner. He reviews the Guardian Blind Date every week and I look forward to it eagerly. It's funny, but it's also clever and insightful and often poignant. This week, he threw in a comment about 'doing funny accents' that was so spot-on in its identification of the problem of centring privilege.

Just to take a step back: we normally think about male privilege, white privilege, or straight privilege. It doesn't meant that (say) men don't have problems, or never face discrimination, but that they don't face the kind of systematic discrimination that those who aren't men face, while of course they may face systematic discrimination of other kinds (e.g. you might be a gay man, or a black man, and have male privilege but not straight or white privilege). In the grand scheme of things, northerners aren't who you think of as facing the worst discrimination, but nevertheless, there is a sort of 'southern privilege'. (North and south here refer to England, by the way - in itself this minimises the existence of the other UK countries and especially Scotland.) This shows up mostly in accent discrimination, which can be a proxy for class discrimination.

Justin talks about the way that people frequently imitate a 'northern' accent when he tells them that he is from Yorkshire. (UGH by the way - 'the north' is a big place with a lot of different accents.) He specifically mentions the way that they say 'oop north', and the way they think this must pronounced like 'poop' because they don't realise it's just the vowel like in 'book' but written with a double 'o' to emphasise the difference from the southern pronunciation. And here comes the part that I'd never even thought about before, which is that having this special spelling to indicate the northern pronunciation is in itself a staggeringly southern-centric way of doing things. As Justin points out, there is no northern equivalent of an approximation of the southern pronunciation (he writes it as 'ap', which is pretty close to the IPA for the RP pronunciation). The word 'up' spells both the southern and the northern pronunciation; the letter 'u' represents both the sounds /ʌ/ and /ʊ/. To write 'up' as 'oop' leaves it as representing only the southern pronunciation, ignoring the northern one altogether.

In this situation, as always, the people in the position of relative power fix the language in a way that positions the less powerful ones as 'others', not the norm.

"George Osborne and Tony Blair resemble the Kray brothers"

That surprising claim comes to you direct from the Dean of the University of Buckingham school of education, Barnaby Lenon. I've cut it down slightly - you might think he was perhaps referring to their perceived criminality, but no, it's their accents he is talking about. 

It's been a while since I've heard the term Estuary English. It's the kind of English that people speak all over the southeast of England. Jamie Oliver, for instance, speaks the Essex variety. We don't tend to hear it called that so much any more because you really only need a term for an accent when you're singling it out for some reason, for criticism for example, and lately (now that the speakers of Estuary English are the ones making the criticism) people's critical attentions have turned to what the young people are speaking, which is not Estuary English. 

So now who is speaking it, if not those damned teenagers? Well, Tony Blair, George Osborne, and Prince William, it seems. Yep, he who ought to be speaking the Queen's English is "lapsing" into Estuary English, according to Barnaby. 

He seems to be commenting on research by someone else, Graeme Davis, who has been quote-bundled into this article in a way that conflates his findings with Lenon's, which may well not be terribly accurate. Davis says that we are seeing levelling, which is when different accents become more similar to each other and 'posher' accents become less 'posh' to fit in a bit more. This is a well-known and not very news-worthy finding, but it is true at least. As Lenon says: 

It is very important when you are with non-Etonians to try to conceal that you are an Etonian. They do not want to appear to be upper-class because being upper-class these days is not a good thing. If you are in politics, for instance, you want to appear to be a man of the people. 

Sure. Right now, populism is in. It's good to look like you're a man of the people. (You're totally screwed if you're a woman, by the way - no such thing as a woman of the people.) 

But he also says: 

George Osborne and Tony Blair are both prone to lapse into estuary English so they resemble the Kray brothers rather more than the private school background they come from. Remember the Old Etonian Prince William saying: ‘I need to check this with the missus.’

I mean, the Kray twins didn't have terribly pronounced features of Cockney but they did not sound like George Osborne. There's clips of them talking on YouTube. You can go and listen to them. They're just not the same. 

I would say that most Etonians and Harrovians these days go out of their way to employ an estuary accent.

Those poor old Etonians and Harrovians, held back by their posh accents, disguising them to try to fit in and get on in life. 

Really, what's going on here is that Davis has found that prep school boys' accents have continued the trend we've been seeing for many decades of becoming less distinct from a more everyday middle class English, features of which are shared among many varieties (glottal stops for 't', for instance). Essentially, RP is no longer so distinct from the other Englishes spoken in the London area, and has been on this path for many years. Politicians and young royals no longer get so much benefit from the authority conferred by a posh accent, and gain more benefit from being relatable (perhaps - Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson et al still play on the private-school vibe). So far so expected. Then this chap in his new job (mis-)interprets this research for a splash and uses a term that was derogatory in the 00s to spark the old 'mockney'-bashers' ire, and makes a daft claim that doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny. 

Ne translatez pas les languages

A friend posted this photo on facebook the other day:



A number of highly intelligent people then missed the point of the joke and began to comment on how bad the translations are. I think they're pretty good imitations of the languages in question, with one big error: the 'German' looks (unmistakably) more like Dutch in the second half of the sentence.

These are not intended to be translations, of course, or rather they're deliberately not accurate. They're just meant to amuse the English-speaking audience by including funny words to compound the humour of the warning in English ('avoid pouring on crotch area'). After all, we love nothing more than when a foreign language does something in a funny way (cf. Welsh popty-ping for 'microwave' or German Handy for 'mobile phone') so it's nice to imagine that these might be for real.

Let's begin with the French. The grammar is fine, as far as I know: you'd make an imperative in French with the negative and the 2nd person plural inflection, just as it's done there. The phrase dans l'area seems OK to me, too. The vocabulary used just isn't French, that's all. The verb for 'pour' should, I think (Google Translate helped) be verser so you'd have ne versez pas. I don't know if you'd also need a pronoun in there (don't pour it) or not. And, of course, no French person ever says ooh-la-la, but it's stereotypically French and referring to ones' crotch that way goes nicely with the French reputation for romance.

Next, the 'German'. This one caused a bit more controversy in the comment thread, because it very obviously isn't German. My German is less good than my French, but I'm pretty certain the word order here is wrong as well as the vocabulary and morphology. I think you would say literally 'drop you not...' rather than 'not drop...', which is what we appear to have here: nein is German for 'no'. Then the verb is obviously just English again, with droppen instead of pourez. I think they've simply selected words that have a combination of letters that resemble the language in question (so French has a word pour, for instance, but it doesn't look very Germanic).

Next, though, I think we've got a nice case of representing an accent in words that look like (or indeed exist in) the language. So ze haut kaffe does not mean 'the hot coffee' in German (haut apparently means 'skin', for instance, and the German for 'coffee' is in fact kaffee, which they could have used instead), but it looks German-ish and sounds like someone saying the hot coffee in (some kind of representation of) a German accent. It reminds me of this a bit. Notice also that the 'German' has an overt object with article, while the French has nothing at all ('don't drop _ on the crotch area' vs 'don't drop the hot coffee on the crotch area').

Then it most definitely switches to Dutch-looking words, if we hadn't already. Dutch word order is a little bit more familiar to English speakers as well, I think, although I know even less Dutch than I do German. Anyway, here we've got a dead giveaway for Dutch: that word oont. It just has a Dutch-like feel to it, though I don't know why (double 'o'? final 't'?). And then finally the lovely phrase, ze knakkers. Again, this is definitely Germanic and in fact Google Translate does give 'knackers' as the translation of this as a German word (it gives 'frankfurter cherry' if you tell it knakkers is Dutch!).

Good work, coffee-cup-humour-producing-person!

Seen as this is the 1930s

I watched ITV's Harry Price: Ghost Hunter over the Christmas break, which starred Rafe Spall as the eponymous psychic investigator/faker/unmasker.

One linguistic fact of note is the spelling of his first name, which I assume is a respelling reflecting the pronunciation of the name Ralph, which is now usually pronounced as it looks.

But what caught my ear was the very modern-sounding language. One character used vowels which I would have said were characteristic of Estuary English or MLE: monophthongs where RP would have had a diphthong, for instance. And Rafe Spall himself said, at one point, seen as rather than the normatively correct seeing as (meaning more or less because or since). I'm hesitant to say that this is anachronistic, as it's almost invariably a 'recency illusion' when anyone makes an argument like that. Rather, it's probably just that we expect posh and middle class people in period dramas to speak in RP, and when they don't we find it jarring. But I can't find out how old this variant is, because it's virtually ungoogleable and I'm not sure where else to go to look for it. Seen as has indeed increased massively since 1960, but I can't filter out the false hits like we were seen as inferior, where it's not the same thing. Anyone happen to know about this? (Sorry if the chart is not the right size - html skillz are failing me today. Follow the link above to the original.)

Grainy painies

For some reason, the other day I remembered a thing that happened on TV years ago. Frank Skinner had a chat show at the time, and Britney Spears was big, so I suppose it was probably the late 1990s. Britney was on Frank’s programme, and she at some point used the term ‘granny panties’ to mean ‘big knickers’.

Normally, we translate effortlessly between accents, so much so that we don’t even notice that we’re doing it most of the time. If someone tells you their name and they have an accent different from yours, you repeat it back in your own accent, not in an imitation of the way they said it. Let’s say you’re from London and your friend is from Vancouver, and her name is Martina. She’s probably got a ‘rhotic’ accent so she’ll pronounce the ‘r’ in her name, but you probably won’t. When you say her name back to her to check you heard it right, you aren’t going to pronounce the ‘r’ just because she does.

That’s why it’s weird when this doesn’t happen. When Britney said ‘granny panties’, it wasn’t a phrase Frank had ever heard before. Britney’s accent is also very different from Frank’s, and when she said it, what he heard (and repeated back to her) was ‘grainy painies’. If you can’t relate the sound string you hear to a known word or phrase, the only thing you can do is approximate the way it sounded. What you say sounds just like the phrase but you don’t know what it is you’re saying.

I see something like this in my first year seminars. One week, we do an exercise where they have to work out what phrase is written in phonetic transcription. The way to do this is to ‘sound it out’. Often, they are literally saying the exact phrase perfectly, but they can’t hear the words or extract the meaning from the string of sound. It’s fascinating and completely hilarious.

Esperanto 2: Warning, contains meat

Esperanto has certain suffixes for various grammatical purposes, and others that add some extra meaning. One of the latter is -aĵ, which you add to the name of an animal in order to get the word for its meat. Some examples:

Chicken (the bird) - koko, chicken (meat) - kokaĵo

Cow/bull - bovo, beef - bovaĵo

One of the sentences I had to translate was kokaĵo estas viando, which means 'chicken is meat'. Now obviously the word for 'chicken' in that sentence has the 'meat' suffix already in it, so there's a certain redundancy here. It's a bit like saying chicken meat is meat in English. (Incidentally, I don't know if any other language has a suffix specifically for 'meat', and I don't know if it can be extended to fruits, for instance, as in the flesh of a peach, which I'm sure does exist in other languages.)

I was thinking about this redundancy and its counterparts in English. We don't have exactly the same thing, of course, as our words for meat are either the same (chicken, fish) or a different word entirely (beef, pork). So I suppose what we have is a kind of semantic redundancy: 'meat' is part of the meaning of beef. In other words, beef is a hyponym of meat. But someone might not know that beef is a meat (say they were learning English and you were explaining what the word meant, for instance). That wouldn't happen with Esperanto because the meaning is right there in the word if you know what the parts mean. It's 'compositional'. 

That said, people are not always that conscious of the grammatical parts of words, especially if the word is common. It's pretty usual for me to discover that many of my second and third year students can't correctly identify clauses as past or present tense, for instance. (Sorry students, if you're reading, but it's true.) They know as a native speaker what it means, but it's subconscious knowledge. 

And we have comparable redundancy in English. Imagine if you said I've been hurt in the past. Well, I've been hurt is past tense so in the past isn't necessary. It is possible that it might remove the 'immediate past' meaning that we would normally understand from the perfect tense if it's uttered out of the blue, but in context it is definitely redundant and still perfectly fine to say. Similarly, a little duckling doesn't normally mean a duckling that is particularly small compared to other ducklings, and the -ling tells us it's little anyway. 

I might need to find a fluent Esperantist to give me some 'native' speaker judgements on whether the sentence I had to translate has the 'explaining the meaning of the word' interpretation or not. 

Incidentally, Esperanto is literally the only language that uses the character ĵ, which means it's not on my computer's keyboard and is hard to type and that's annoying. 

Some cheeky findings

[This relates to my recent post about 'cheeky Nando's'. If you want to take the survey, do so here. We'd be really grateful!]

Do you call a misbehaving child a cheeky monkey? Do you ever go for a cheeky beer after work? Would you take your Significant Other out for a cheeky Valentine's Day dinner at a nice Italian restaurant? Chances are you said no to the last question, not because you wouldn't make such a romantic gesture, but because cheeky doesn't sound right in that sentence. What's more, if you're from the United States, you probably aren't as keen on the word cheeky in the first place. At least that’s what we thought when the cheeky Nando’s meme went viral a few weeks ago. 

The cheeky Nando’s meme  involved British internet users coming up with ever more incomprehensible (to Americans) explanations of what a cheeky Nando's means. But how come Americans don't know what it means? And, actually, what does it mean? We tried to find out by sciencing.

Daily Fail fails to ask a linguist (again)

It's no surprise when a newspaper publishes an article about language and fails to ask a linguist. They rarely do. It's even less of a surprise when the newspaper is the Daily Mail and the 'article' is actually just a summary of a website (note to newspapers: this is not journalism. It's lazy. Especially when you get to it two weeks after the rest of the internet has already seen it).

This 'article' summarises a reddit thread for us, which is actually quite handy because reddit threads are horrible things to read. The questioner wanted to know what the hardest English words to pronounce are. Here's the top ten, as reported by the Mail:

1. Worcestershire
2. Specific
3. Squirrel
4. Brewery 
5. Phenomenon
6. Derby
7. Regularly
8. February
9. Edited
10. Heir

The Mail then helpfully made some very condescending comments about how specific and squirrel are 'apparently easy' and brewery and edited 'seem rather straightforward to the average Brit', while February and phenomenon are 'notorious tongue twisters even for native speakers'.

So far, so utterly, utterly dull and vacuous.

Among the linguistically interesting things to note here is the fact that there are two types of difficulty: hard to articulate, and hard to predict. Derby is very easy to say for most people, but it's hard to predict its pronunciation from its spelling. Similarly heir and, of course, Worcestershire, which has the further problem of being long and daunting.

On the other hand, specific, squirrel, brewery, February and edited are all pronounced more or less like they're spelt, but it's actually saying them without stumbling that can prove tricky. They have consonant clusters like [skw], and lots of [r] sounds and 'glides' [w] that occur between vowels, making them hard to keep control of. February causes native speakers less trouble than the Mail would have you believe, because we don't try to pronounce both those [r] sounds.

[r] in general crops up a lot here, probably because a lot of the contributors to the list speak a first language like Chinese where [r] and [l] are not two different sounds, but rather two 'versions' of a sound ('allophones'). English contrasts these sounds (so read and lead are different words), but doesn't contrast the two 'k' sounds in car and key, for instance (so you can't the difference unless you're trained to do so). If your language treats [r] and [l] as being as similar as those English considers those two 'k' sounds, you can imagine the difficulty regularly or squirrel is going to cause you.

Likewise, edited contains a string of short, similar vowels separated by [d] or [t]. Those two sounds are very similar to each other, differing only in terms of whether they're 'voiced' or not ([d] is, [t] isn't) and again, many languages don't contrast these sounds. In many English dialects (e.g. US English), they are actually pronounced more or less the same in this word. You end up with some sequence of rapid tapping of the tongue against the back of the teeth which is over almost before you realise you've begun it.

(Incidentally, no one in real life pronounces the name of the sauce as Worcestershire - everyone calls it 'Worcester sauce'. Apparently this is frowned upon by the company that makes it, but it's true.)

Geek English

This is an open question, or an idle wondering, depending how you view it.

I've noticed a particular variety of English which I'm calling 'Geek English'. I'm calling it that because I notice that it's particularly used by people who I would broadly identify as geeks, nerds, whatever you like, in a basically positive sense. You know, the kind of people who spend time playing online games, a lot of time in the internet in general, and are happy to be thought intelligent. It might also be people who would otherwise sound quite posh. For instance, some of the QI elves on their podcast 'No Such Thing as a Fish' have this accent (particularly Anna).

My question is, what characterises it and where does it come from? I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, but my immediate impression is that it has a vaguely transatlantic sound. There's a bit of what sounds like 'flapping' of the t's, and also the intonation is quite distinctive, and I think perhaps the vowels are a bit non-UK-like. But then, all this could be an incorrect assumption based simply on its unfamiliarity to me. A proper phonetician needs to study it.

Annual check-up on my dialect

I moved to Kent two years ago now, or very nearly, and we've been properly living in Margate for just over a year (I semi-commuted for the first year between Canterbury and Newcastle). Seems about time to do the annual check-in with what language changes I've undergone in that time.

Margate Main Sands

It's notoriously hard to analyse your own speech, but I'll have a go. I do know that the very instant we moved here, I dropped almost all the Newcastle features I'd spent 20 years very slowly acquiring and enthusiastically embraced a southern accent. This is a departure from last year, when I was trying to create an identity for myself and was 'the Geordie', and played up my accent a bit. I suppose now that my partner is also here, who has a much stronger accent than me, I can't be the one with the Geordie accent. Maybe it's also to do with the fact that I'm now settled here, whereas last year I was still not sure I'd be here any longer than that one year.

Some accent features I spotted very quickly were a change in my long vowels, which I can't quite pinpoint but I think it's a slight lengthening and lowering (technical stuff - they're basically very slightly different), and l-vocalisation. This means that your l's sound more like vowels, or w's, so you say 'miwk' rather than 'milk'. In addition, I've been levelling my copulas (oo-er). That means that instead of saying 'I was' and 'we were', you say 'we was' - just using that one form. You can also do it the other way, and say 'I were', but I've not been doing that one. This is funny because they do a similar thing in Newcastle and I hardly picked it up at all, but I got the southern one straight away.

Aldi vs Audi

I now call the southeastern corner of England my home. Down here, they have a funny thing called 'l-vocalisation', which means that instead of the sound /l/, people are quite likely to produce a vowel (or sometimes it sounds like /w/). This is a widespread thing, people are familiar with it, it's not something that's really remarked upon. It does lead to some nice mix-ups though: someone recently said that he used to work for Audi. The person he was talking to said 'Audi, or Aldi?'. The two sound basically exactly the same.

Tom Daley's sibilant 's'

The diver Tom Daley posted a video on YouTube in which he told his viewers that he has a boyfriend (if he made any more revelations in the last minute or so, I missed them because I stopped watching - he doesn't half go on). Some delightful person called RogerGT posted a comment saying 'Of course he's gay! He has a sibilant 's'.':

This is obviously a gross stereotype. While there may be a stereotypical 'gay' manner of speech, this is about campness rather than gayness, and Daley does not have camp mannerisms. This is likely to be a post-hoc application of new knowledge causing delusions of prior knowledge. Similarly, an acquaintance of mine said people often tell her they could hear the German in her accent after she reveals her nationality, despite the fact that she sounds entirely English.

More to the point, though, is that everyone's 's' is sibilant: that's the term for that particular type of 'hissing' sound. 'S', as normally pronounced, is the canonical example of a sibilant. So, not a good diagnostic for someone's sexuality then.

What RogerGT is probably referring to is the camp stereotype of 'lisping': producing a sound more like 'th' /θ/ instead of 's' /s/. Daley does actually do this a tiny bit, though I'd never noticed it before I went back and listened out for it.

So what  have we learnt today? Well, from a linguistic point of view, we've learnt that people are quick to stereotype or judge people based on their accent, that people don't use linguistic terminology right (jk we all knew that already), and that people are really extraordinarily good at spotting even tiny differences in the production of speech sounds.

Linguists have accent opinions too!

Linguists have to spend quite a lot of time explaining that they don't correct people's grammar, and trying to prevent people from judging each other based on the language they use, and trying to explain that one standard language is not inherently better than a non-standard version or a different standard version.

But you know, we're people too, and we have human opinions. This was an exchange between two linguists:

As you can see, the second linguist, as well as the one mentioned in the first tweet, have negative opinions of their own regional dialects. I also know another linguist who said that she didn't think she'd be taken seriously as an academic if she used the accent she grew up with.

It seems that we need to distinguish between disliking an accent and thinking that it's wrong or worse than the standard. We know that all dialects (and indeed languages) are equally valid, equally correct and equally suitable for use. This is where we differ from many non-linguists, who often think that a person speaks in a non-standard way because they're lazy or stupid. We also know that objectively, accents don't sound stupid or unfriendly or untrustworthy: those are values projected onto speakers of that dialect by the listener. We're like non-linguists, though, in thinking that some accents are simply not as suited to our own preference. And we also know how much people judge you based solely on the way you speak - more reason than any other to moderate your accent if you think people might regard it unfavourably.

Swansea question tag on 'the Call Centre'?

I couldn't sleep a few nights ago and watched a truly horrific programme called 'The Call Centre'. It's a 'structured reality' programme, which basically means getting real people to provide cheap, low quality, soap opera type entertainment. It's set in a call centre in Swansea and most of the young call centre workers have very strong Swansea accents. It's a really distinctive accent so I began to enjoy the programme for its linguistic appeal, if nothing else.

Accent is the thing we notice most about the way people from other areas of the country speak, but dialect is not only a matter of accent. Accent is only the sounds: things like what vowel you use in 'bath' or whether you tend to use a fully aspirated /k/ sound in the middle of 'chicken'. Dialect is 'accent plus'. It includes lexis (words), morphology (whether you say 'I've gone' or 'I've went'), and syntax (whether you can say 'Hasn't she not?' or just 'Hasn't she?').

The Swansea accent is great, but what struck me was a matter of syntax. I don't know if it really is a feature of the Swansea dialect, but what I heard was what sounded like an invariant question tag 'inne' (not sure how to spell that, but it sounds like 'innie').

A tag question is one that ends in a tag, like 'isn't it', 'wasn't she', 'aren't they' and so on. These tags vary to match the subject and verb of the main clause, so you get 'That's nice, isn't it?', 'She was good, wasn't she?', and 'The students are keen, aren't they?' Invariant tags, as the name implies, don't vary. We see ones like 'right', 'yeah' and 'no', but we also see ones that look like they should vary. 'Innit' is the famous one: 'He's a good worker, innit?' (rather than 'isn't he').

This 'inne' that I heard, twice in one episode, sounds like a reduced form of 'isn't he'. If you're going to have an invariant tag, then you just pick one of the available tags, and 'isn't he' is just as good as 'isn't it' (well, I would have a preference for 'it', but preference has never had much to do with language).

The thing is, I only heard it twice in that one episode. I watched another one (for research...) and didn't hear it again. Any Welsh readers know if it's widely used?

Quiz!

OK, tell me this: can you translate the following conversation, in a language that you almost certainly speak?

Jon do?
A dee nah. 

Answer after the fold.

Ian McMillan and arse

Ian McMillan, the poet, does a lot of stuff on the radio about language. He's keen on accents, particularly Yorkshire ones, and recently I listened to a programme from August in which he tootled about in search of an isogloss; specifically, the house/arse isogloss.

As the blurb notes, an isogloss is 'a kind of linguistic boundary line where accent and dialect changes'. Of course isoglosses are not fixed and absolute, so McMillan's early desire to hear someone stand on one side and say 'house' and stand on the other side and say 'arse' is doomed to remain unfulfilled.

The main point of the programme is that (according to McMillan) in some parts of South Yorkshire they pronounce 'house' as 'house' and in others they pronounce it 'arse'. That's /haʊs/ versus /a:s/, in the International Phonetic Alphabet that linguists use to represent sounds. (In fact, when McMillan says 'arse', it's more like /ɑ:s/, as it is for most southerners. However, he consistently pronounces it with a long version of the vowel in 'man' when he's imitating the pronunciation. Think Jim in the Royle Family.) You'll note from the symbols used that although the two words seem very different, all that's happening is that the 'standard' version has a diphthong (two sounds) and the 'arse' version simply ditches the second sound of the diphthong. We can call it monophthongisation, if we want to win at Scrabble.

McMillan is off, with a musician friend and a local linguist in tow, to try to find these people with 'one of Britain's strangest linguistic features' (I can assure you, it's not even close to that honour). What follows is a lot of highly unscientific questioning of bemused pensioners outside the post office as they turn up to collect their pensions. One, when McMillan asks him if he says 'arse', says 'no, I wouldn't like to swear'.

Anyway, there's a bit of linguistics in there, as we learn about isogloss maps (though it would have been good to follow up with an explanation of how they're drawn and why the line on the map is an idealisation of reality, and why you can't really find it in the real world). McMillan gets a bit mixed up at times, thinking that at the isogloss he should find people who say 'arse', whereas the isogloss is the border. It's precisely there that he might not find them - if he wants those, he needs to look in the heart of the area enclosed by the isogloss. The linguist says that it's likely to be old people who have this pronunciation, and it would have been nice to have been told why that is. But McMillan is a powerful character and most of the time must necessarily be given over to his impressions of other Yorkshire accents, which he clearly enjoys doing.

Something that struck me was that when McMillan was taking care to say the two different pronunciations properly, he would pronounce the /h/ on the 'house' version, and yet when he said it in his normal speech he very often didn't pronounce the /h/ (as is common all over Yorkshire). Even more interestingly, he sometimes merged the two vowel sounds a bit, and sometimes sounded very much like he was in fact saying 'arse', despite claiming to say 'house'. I'd really like someone with a bit more phonetics ability than me to check that he really does say 'house' when he thinks he does.

In the end (spoiler alert), they end up finding people saying 'arse' much further north than they expected (Hillsborough), and McMillan is happy he's found them and all is well. It's an entertainment programme, not a documentary, and we should take what we can get when it comes to linguistics on the radio. Worth a listen, if you're at all interested in poets from Barnsley saying 'arse' at pensioners, peppered with gobbets of linguistic stuff.

As an aside, I noticed an interesting pronunciation of 'house' the other day. McMillan is a Yorkshireman so he wouldn't set foot in the north-west, of course, but Stuart Maconie happened to say the word in a conversation with Mark Radcliffe on their BBC6Music radio programme. They were discussing the MediaCityUK complex in Salford, from where they broadcast, and mentioned the television building, which Stuart called 'Telly House'. He pronounced 'house' like 'ice' (/ɑɪs/ in IPA). I don't know where that's from. According to Wikipedia, Stuart's from Whiston in Merseyside, hung out in Wigan as a youngster, and now lives in Birmingham, and of course he spends every weekday afternoon with a load of Lancashire folk. It could be any of them. Perhaps if I tweet him this link he'll let me know what he thinks.

Footballers' Foreign Accent Syndrome?

You might have seen that Joey Barton has been filmed speaking English in what sounds very much like a French accent (he's playing for a French team at the moment). It's hilarious, obvs, and gives us all another chance to snigger at Steve McLaren, who spoke English with a Dutch accent when he went to the Netherlands.

We can ask why they might do this. It's likely to be at least partly because they're surrounded by other people speaking English with a French or Dutch accent. This is especially true for McLaren, living in a country where everyone speaks English, but also for Barton, because in the football world there are so many players from all over the world I imagine English is something of a lingua franca in the dressing room. They're bound to be a little bit affected by this and pick up something of the accent.

Another factor is probably that they both have fairly strong regional accents (Merseyside for Barton, and something that sounds like Yorkshire for McLaren), and they will have made an effort to speak more slowly and clearly to non-native speakers. They are therefore not speaking in a completely natural way, and might pick up different mannerisms accordingly.

You know what else we might ask? Are they really speaking in French/Dutch accents at all, that's what. There's a condition called 'foreign accent syndrome', usually a result of brain damage, which causes a person to speak in what sounds like a foreign accent. Family members may be convinced that the sufferer has a New York, Eastern European or Chinese accent, and this can cause problems: one woman in Norway had great difficulties when she began speaking in a German accent in the 1940s. However, it's not actually a specific foreign accent, but simply difficulty in speaking. The accent is never one that listeners are very familiar with, and this is crucial. The brain damage can cause particular problems with speech, which the listener hears as some or other accent. Wikipedia suggests that an American who normally has a rhotic accent (pronounces the 'r' sounds in car park) might have difficulty pronouncing 'r' and therefore omit it. This might sound like a Boston accent to a listener because non-rhoticity is a very salient feature of a stereotypical Boston accent. So is there some other feature of their speech that we're hearing as a foreign accent?

I've had a listen to both, and what follows is entirely unscientific speculation and waffle. You can very definitely hear their original accents in both cases. What is noticeable to me is that they both use very few contractions, saying we are instead of we're, for instance. They also speak slowly, perhaps as a result of the afore-mentioned concession to non-native speakers or possibly even interpreters, in the case of Barton's press conference. I think that some of the filler sounds Barton uses do seem a bit French, but that's because the vowel sounds used in er and similar noises are different from the standard southern English er, and it might well be the same as is used in Merseyside er. Likewise for some of the vowels in his words. His intonation and prosody sound quite Frenchified too: his fairly constant stress placement, for instance, differentiates French from English quite markedly. But it could also be a result of slower speech than he's used to. The frequent final rising intonation he uses is a feature of a Merseyside accent but might well sound French if one was listening in the expectation of hearing one.

I'm just not convinced there's much in it. I think that a combination of some minor changes in their accent and a bit of pareidolia on the listeners' part has made this into something more than it is. One case of foreign accent syndrome involved a woman who went from Geordie to Jamaican, French Canadian, Italian or Slovak. Those are not similar to each other, and there is known (among Geordies, at least) to be some similarity between Geordie and Jamaican. As further evidence, this video is of McLaren supposedly speaking with a Dutch accent, and many of the commenters hear only unremarkable 'northern English'. You make your own mind up.

Wikipedia has this to say on Barton's case, though probably not for much longer:

Barton is now currently under examination by medical professionals and although they are uncertain, the cause of Barton's condition is believed to have been caused when he used both Heads and Shoulders and Aussie Hair Shine Shampoo at the same time. However, this is only an early prognosis.