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PENGUIN BOOKS

LANGUAGE MYTHS

Laurie Bauer is Reader in Linguistics atVictoria University of Welling- ton, NewZealand. He is the author of many booksand articles on word-formation,international varieties of English, andlanguage change in current English,including Watching English Change(1994).

Peter Trudgill is Professor of EnglishLanguage and Linguistics at theUniversity of Lausanne, Switzerland. Hehas also taught at the universities ofReading and Essex. He is the author of anumber of books on dialect, and onlanguage and society, includingSociolinguistics (1974; third edition,Penguin 1992).

Language Myths

EDITED BY Laurie Bauer and PeterTrudgill

@

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group PenguinBooks Ltd, 27 Wrights Lme, London w85TZ, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375Hudson Street, New York, New York10014, USA Penguin Books Australia

Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, AustralIaPenguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 AlcornAvenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, PrivateBag 102902, NSMC Auckland, NewZealand Penguin Books Ltd, RegisteredOffices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex,England

Published in Penguin Books 1998 135791086 4 2

Copyright (Q Laurie Bauer and PeterTrudgill, 1998 All rights reserved

The moral right of the authors has beenasserted

Set in 10112.5 pt PostScript AdobeMinion Typeset by RowlandPhototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds,Suffolk Printed in England by Clays Ltd,St Ives pic

Except in the United States of America,this book is sold subject to the conditionthat it shall not, by way of trade orotherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or

otherwise circulated without thepublisher's prior consent in any form ofbinding or cover other than that in whichit is published and without a similarcondition including this condition beingimposed on the subsequent purchaser

Contents

A Note on the Contributors VllIntroduction xv MYTH 1 The Meaningsof Words Should Not be Allowed toVary or Change 1 Peter Trudgill MYTH2 Some Languages are Just Not GoodEnough 9 Ray Harlow MYTH 3 The

Media are Ruining English 15 JeanAitchison MYTH 4 French is a LogicalLanguage 23 Anthony Lodge MYTH 5English Spelling is Kattastroffik 32Edward Carney MYTH 6 Women TalkToo Much 4 1 Janet Holmes MYTH 7Some Languages are Harder than Others50 Lars-Gunnar Andersson MYTH 8Children Can't Speak or Write ProperlyAny More 58 James Milroy MYTH 9 Inthe Appalachians They Speak likeShakespeare 66 Michael MontgomeryMYTH 10 Some Languages Have NoGrammar 77 Winifred Bauer

v

Contents MYTH 11 Italian is Beautiful,German is Ugly 85 Howard Giles andNancy Niedzielski MYTH 12 BadGrammar is Slovenly 94 Lesley MilroyMYTH 13 Black Children are VerballyDeprived 103 Walt Wolfram MYTH 14Double Negatives are Illogical 113Jenny Cheshire MYTH 15 TV MakesPeople Sound the Same 123 J. K.Chambers MYTH 16 You Shouldn't Say'It is Me' because 'Me' is Accusative 132Laurie Bauer

MYTH 17 They Speak Really BadEnglish Down South and in New York

City 139 Dennis R. Preston MYTH 18Some Languages are Spoken MoreQuickly than Others 150 Peter RoachMYTH 19 Aborigines Speak a PrimitiveLanguage 159 Nicholas Evans

MYTH 20 Everyone Has an AccentExcept Me John H. Esling MYTH 21America is Ruining the EnglishLanguage John Algeo

169

176

Index

183

VI

A Note on the Contributors

Jean Aitchison is the Rupert MurdochProfessor of Language andCommunication at the University ofOxford. In her research) she isconcerned with the mental lexicon,language change and the language of themedia. She is the author of severalbooks) including Language Change:Progress or decay? (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press) 2nd edn1991) Words in the Mind: Anintroduction to the mental lexicon(Oxford: Blackwell) 2nd edn 1994), TheLanguage Web: The power and problemof words (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press) 1997).

John Algeo is Professor Emeritus ofEnglish at the University of Georgia. Heis co-author of Origins and Developmentof the English Language (Fort Worth:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) 4th edn1993) and author of Fifty Years amongthe New Words (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press) 1991). Editor ofvolume 6 of the Cambridge History ofthe English Language on English inNorth America) he is past President ofthe American Dialect Society and of theDictionary Society of North America.For ten years he was editor of AmericanSpeech) the journal of the AmericanDialect Society) and for ten years withhis wife Adele wrote the quarterlycolumn 'Among the New Words) for that

same journal.

Lars-Gunnar Andersson) Professor ofModern Swedish at the Univer- sity ofGothenburg in Sweden) received hisPh.D. in linguistics in 1975 from theUniversity of Gothenburg) where he alsoconducted his undergraduate studies. Hehas lectured at several universities andattended conferences in Europe) the USA and southern Africa. He has donemost of his linguistic work in syntax)semantics) typology

VB


and sociolinguistics. He has co-writtentwo books on the local dialect ofGothenburg and is also co-author) withtwo others) of Logic in Linguistics(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress) 1977). Together with PeterTrudgill he has written Bad Language(Harmondsworth: Penguin) 1990) andtogether with Tore Janson) Languages inBotswana (Gaborone: LongmanBotswana) 1997). He is also a columniston a daily newspaper in Gothenburg.

Laurie Bauer is Reader in Linguistics atVictoria University of Welling- ton)New Zealand. A graduate of theUniversity of Edinburgh) he is the authorof many books and articles on word-formation) international varieties ofEnglish and) most recently) languagechange in current English. His booksinclude English Word-Forl1zation(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress) 1983) Introducing LinguisticMorphology (Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press) 1988) and WatchingEnglish Change (London and New York:Longman) 1994).

Winifred Bauer is a New Zealander whofor over twenty years has devoted herresearch to the Maori language) and shehas a number of publications in thatfield) including Maori (London and New York: Routledge) 1993) and theReed Reference Grammar of Maori(Auckland: Reed) 1997). She has taughtat Victoria University of Wellington)New Zealand) the University ofNewcastle-upon- Tyne in England andOdense University in Denmark. She is anHonorary Research Fellow at VictoriaUniversity of Wellington) New Zealand.

Edward Carney read English atUniversity College) London. He spentmost of the 1950S in Sweden) teachingin the Department of English at theUniversity of Lund. In the early 1960s hejoined the newly established Departmentof Linguistics in the University ofManchester) where he eventuallybecame Senior Lecturer in Phonetics. Atpresent he is a Senior Research Fellowin the department. He is an HonoraryPellow of the Royal College of Speechand Language Therapists.

J. K. Chambers is Professor in theDepartment of Linguistics at the

University of Toronto. As a child) hebraved the howling winds on

Vll1


the tundra to reach the warmth of the pot-bellied stove and teacher in the one-room schoolhouse in Stoney Creek. Hehas written extensively about CanadianEnglish) beginning with 'CanadianRaising) in 1973 and including Canadian

English: Origins and structures (Toronto:Methuen) 1975), the first book on thetopic. More general research includesstudies of dialect acquisition) dialecttopography and linguistic variation. Heis co-author (with Peter Trudgill) ofDialectology (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press) 2nd edn 1997) andauthor of Sociolinguistic Theory:Language variation and its socialsignificance (Oxford and New York:Blackwell) 1995).

Jenny Cheshire is Professor ofLinguistics at Queen Mary and WestfieldCollege) University of London. She has

researched and published on languagevariation and change) modern Englishsyntax) and different aspects of languagein society. Recent editions includeEnglish around the World:Sociolinguistic perspectives(Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sityPress) 1991) and) with Dieter Stein)Taming the Vernacular: From dialect towritten standard language (London andNew York: Longman) 1997). She iscurrently writing a book on the syntax ofspoken English and co-directing) withPaul Kerswill) a research project ondialect levelling in three English cities.

John H. Esling is Associate Professor ofLinguistics at the University of Victoriain British Columbia) Canada. He isSecretary of the International PhoneticAssociation (http://www.arts.gla.ac. uk/IPAl ipa.html) and his research is on theauditory categorization of voice qualityand on the phonetic production oflaryngeal and pharyngeal speech sounds.He is the author of the University ofVictoria Phonetic Database on CD-ROMand has participated in the developmentof several phonetics teaching and speechanalysis software programs.

Nicholas Evans is Reader in Linguistics

in the Department of Linguis- tics andApplied Linguistics at the University ofMelbourne. Since 1980 he has workedextensively on a range of Aboriginallanguages spoken in Queensland and theNorthern Territory) publishing numer-ous articles) a grammar and dictionaryof Kayardild and (with Patrick

IX


McConvell) editing a book on linguisticsand prehistory in Australia. At presenthe is writing a grammar of Mayali and abook on polysemy (multiple meaning)and meaning change in Australianlanguages.

Howard Giles (Ph.D., D.Sc., Universityof Bristol) is Professor and Chair ofCommunication at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Bar- bara, where healso holds affiliated professorialpositions in psychology and inlinguistics. He is founding editor of boththe Journal of Language and SocialPsychology and the Journal of Asian

Pacific Communication. Currently, he isPresident-Elect of the InternationalCommunication Association andInternational Association for Languageand Social Psychology. Hisinterdisciplinary research interests spanthe following areas of language andintergroup communication: languageattitudes, ethnolinguistics, speechaccommodation, intergenerational com-munication across cultures and police-citizen interactions.

Ray Harlow trained initially as aclassicist in New Zealand and Switzer-land, turning to Polynesian linguistics

some twenty years ago. He is nowAssociate Professor in Linguistics at theUniversity of Waikato, Hamilton, NewZealand. Prom its establishment byparliament in 1987 until 1993, he was amember of Te Taura Whiri i te ReoMaori (The Maori LanguageCommission). Recent publications andwritings that relate to the topic of hiscontribution to this volume include:'Lexical expansion in Maori' in Journalof the Polynesian Society, 102.1 (1993),pp. 99- 1 07; 'A science and mathsterminology for Maori' in SAMEpapers(Hamilton, New Zealand: University ofWaikato, 1993, pp. 124-37); and acommissioned report to the MaoriLanguage Commission on a comparison

of the status of Maori in New Zealandand Romansh in Switzerland (1994).

Janet Holmes holds a personal Chair inLinguistics at Victoria Univer- sity ofWellington, where she teacheslinguistics and sociolinguistics courses.Her publications include a textbook, AnIntroduction to Sociolinguistics (Londonand New York: Longman, 1992) and thefirst book of sociolinguistic andpragmatic articles on New ZealandEnglish, New Zealand Ways of SpeakingEnglish (Clevedon and Philadelphia:

x


Multilingual Matters, 1990), co-editedwith Allan Bell. She has published ona range of topics, including NewZealand English, language and gender,sexist language, pragmatic particles andhedges, compli- ments and apologies.Her most recent book is Women, Menand Politeness (London and New York:Longman, 1995).

Anthony Lodge was formerly Professorof French at the University ofNewcastle-upon- Tyne and is nowProfessor of French Language andLinguistics at the University ofStAndrews. He has a strong interest inFrench language-teaching, but his workhas focused primarily on the history ofthe French language, culminating inFrench: From dialect to standard(London and New York: Routledge,1993), a general overview of therelationship between language andsociety in France since Roman times. Hehas recently co-authored a generalintroduction to the linguistic analysis ofFrench in Exploring the French Language(London: Arnold, 1997). He is joint

editor of the Journal of French LanguageStudies (published by CambridgeUniversity Press).

James Milroy is Emeritus Professor ofLinguistics at the University of Sheffieldand now teaches at the University ofMichigan. His publications include TheLanguage of Gerard Manley Hopkins(London: Andre Deutsch, 1977),Regional Accents of English: Belfast(Belfast: Blackstaff, 1981), LinguisticVariation and Change (Oxford and Cam-bridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992) and, withLesley Milroy, Authority in Language(London: Routledge, 1985, 2nd edn

1991). He has also written a largenumber of papers on sociolinguistics,historical linguistics, Middle Englishand Old Norse. He has recently beeninvolved in collaborative work based inNewcastle on phonological variationand change in present-day English and ispreparing a manuscript for Longman onsocial dialectology and language change.

Lesley Milroy has published on a widerange of topics within the general fieldof linguistics, including sociallysignificant patterns of variation andchange in urban dialects, processes oflanguage stan- dardization, bilingualism

and the conversational abilities ofaphasic speakers. Since 1994 she hasheld a professorship in linguistics at the

Xl


University of Michigan. She lived andworked in Belfast between 1968 and1982, and after a year as a researchfellow at the university, she moved to theUniversity of N ewcastle- upon - Tyne

where she remained till 1994. She hasinvestigated the urban dialects of bothNewcastle and Belfast and haspublished several books and a largenumber of articles on these academicinterests.

Michael Montgomery is Professor ofEnglish and Linguistics at the Universityof South Carolina, where he specializesin the history of American English and indialects of the American South. He isediting a dictionary of AppalachianEnglish and is writing a book onlinguistic connections between Scotlandand Ireland and the American South.

Nancy Niedzielski obtained her Ph.D. inlinguistics from the Univer- sity ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara. She is anavowed interdisciplinarian working andpublished across areas involving creolelanguages and identity, sociophonetics,speech accommodation and languagevariation. Currently, she is co-authoring a volume with Dennis Prestonon folk linguistics and working in theprivate sector.

Dennis R. Preston is Professor ofLinguistics at Michigan State Univer-sity in East Lansing. He is an old

dialectologist who has been trans-formed into a sociolinguist. He isinterested in the perception of languageand language varieties by non-linguistsand in attitudes towards varieties whichare prejudiced against. Most recently hehas been caught up in studying the factsof and attitudes towards massiveongoing vowel rotations in United StatesEnglish. In addition, he has beenintrigued by the parallels betweensociolinguistic variation and the learningof second languages, suspecting that theymay inform one another in ways not yetfully understood. Like any academic heteaches, publishes books and papers andhangs around with his cronies atconferences where he presents research

findings from time to time.

Peter Roach graduated from OxfordUniversity in psychology and philosophyand did postgraduate courses in TEFL(Manchester) and phonetics (UCL)before completing his Ph.D. at ReadingUniversity.

xu


He was Lecturer in Phonetics at ReadingUniversity from 1968 to 1978, thenmoved to the University of Leeds, wherehe was Senior Lecturer in Phoneticsfrom 1978 to 1991. After moving to theDepartment of Psychology there in 1991,he was made Professor of CognitivePsychology. He moved back to Readingin 1994 to become Professor ofPhonetics and Director of the SpeechResearch Laboratory; he is currentlyHead of the Department of LinguisticScience there. He has held manyresearch grants for work in speechscience, has published many researchpapers based on this work and is also

author of English Phonetics andPhonology (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2nd edn 1991) andIntroducing Phonetics (London: Penguin,1992). He was the principal editor of thefifteenth edition of the Daniel JonesEnglish Pronouncing Dictionary(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997). He is Vice-president of theInternational Phonetic Association.

Peter Trudgill is Professor of EnglishLanguage and Linguistics at theUniversity of Lausanne. He was born inNorwich, England, and taught at theuniversities of Reading and Essex before

moving to Switzerland. He is the authorof three other Penguin books,Sociolinguistics: An introduction tolanguage and society (1974), IntroducingLanguage and Society (1992), and BadLanguage (1990, with Lars Andersson).His other publications include Accent,Dialect and the School (London:Edward Arnold, 1975), The Dialects ofEngland (Oxford and Cambridge, MA:Blackwell, 1990), Dialects (London andNew York: Routledge, 1994) andDialects in Contact (Oxford and NewYork: Blackwell, 1986).

Walt Wolfram has pioneered research on

a broad range of vernacular dialects inthe United States over the past threedecades, including African-AmericanVernacular English, AppalachianEnglish, Puerto Rican English, NativeAmerican English, and Outer BanksEnglish. His research on African-American English in the 1960s helpedlaunch a national awareness of the roleof vernacular dialects in education andsociety. In 1992, after twenty-five yearsas Director of Research at the Center forApplied Linguistics in Washington, DC,he became the first William C. FridayDistinguished Professor at NorthCarolina

XliI


State, where he directs the NorthCarolina Language and Life Project.Recent books (with Natalie Schilling-Estes) include Hoi Toide on the OuterBanks: The story of the Ocracoke brogue(Chapel Hill: UN C Press, 1997) andAmerican English: Dialects andvariation (Oxford and New York:Blackwell, 1998).

XIV

Introduction Laurie Bauer and PeterTrudgill

The main reason for presenting this bookis that we believe that) on the whole)linguists have not been good aboutinforming the general public aboutlanguage. To see this) you have only tolook at some of the major books aboutlanguage aimed at a non-specialistaudience which have appeared in recentyears. Robert McCrum) William Cranand Robert MacNeil's The Story of

English (New York: Viking) 1986)which derived from the TV programmeof the same name) is written by aneditor) a producer of current affairsfilms and a TV reporter. Bill Bryson)sentertaining The Mother Tongue(London: Penguin) 1990) is written by ajournalist) and Steven Pinker)s tour deforce The Language Instinct (London:Penguin) 1994) is written by apsychologist. Only David Crystal's TheCambridge Encyclopedia of Language(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress) 1987) and The CambridgeEncyclopedia of the English Language(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress) 1995) are written by a linguist.So what have the linguists been doing?

And why is it that if you look atsomething written by the most influentiallinguists (N oam Chomsky) ClaudeHagege) William Labov and others) youwill not necessarily come away anywiser than you were when you began?The answer is that our knowledge aboutlanguage has been expanding at aphenomenal rate during the latter half ofthe twentieth century. Linguists havebeen busy keeping up with thatdeveloping knowledge and explainingtheir own findings to other linguists. Themost influential linguists are the oneswho have had the most importantmessages for other linguists rather thanfor the general public. For variousreasons (including the highly technical

nature of some of the work) very few ofthem have tried to explain their findingsto a lay audience. That being the case)you might wonder

xv

Introduction

whether journalists, editors, poets andpsychologists are not, despiteeverything, precisely the people whoshould be telling us about language.

They are the ones who have had to breakinto the charmed circle and extractrelevant information for their own needs.Perhaps not surprisingly, we take adifferent line. We believe that if youwant to know about human respiratoryphysiology you should ask a medic or aphysiologist, not an athlete who has beenbreathing successfully for a number ofyears. If you want to know how anunderground train works you should askan engineer and not a commuter. And ifyou want to know how language worksyou should ask a linguist and notsomeone who has used languagesuccessfully in the past. In all of thesecases, the reasoning is the same: usersdo not need to have a conscious

knowledge of how a system works inorder to exploit it. Explanations of thesystem require the type of knowledgethat only the specialist can provide. Wehave therefore invited some specialists -linguists - to address a number ofimportant issues connected withlanguage, and in this book you will findtheir responses. We have, though, beenvery specific in what we have askedthem to write about, and that specificityrequires some explanation. As linguists,we are very much aware that ordinarypeople have some well-establishedideas about language. We meet theseideas when non-linguists talk to us atparties, in the common rooms ofuniversities, from members of our

families and in the media. Some of theseideas are so well established that wemight say they were part of our culture.It is in this sense that we refer to them asmyths (although our colleagues inmythological studies might not approveof this use of the term). But in very manycases, our reactions, as professionals, tothese attitudes, to these myths, is: 'Well,it's not actually as simple as that.'Sometimes we think that the establishedmyth is downright wrong. Sometimes wethink that two things are being confused.Sometimes we think that the implicationsof the myth have not been thoughtthrough, or that the myth is based on afalse premise, or that the myth fails totake into account some important pieces

of information. So what we have done inthis book is to choose some of thesepieces

XVI

Introduction

of cultural wisdom about language andask professional linguists to explain whythings may not be as straightforward asthey seem. In each case we have tried topresent as a title a brief formulation of

the myth, and then we have asked thelinguists to consider the idea from theirprofessional point of view. If they thinkthe idea is wrong, they have said so. Ifthey think it is based on a false premise,they have said so. If they think thatpeople may not realize where the ideacomes from, they have explained this.But in every case, you will find that thelinguists are not totally happy with themyth encapsulated in the title, eventhough they may agree with some aspectsof it. You will notice that a number ofcommon themes appear and reappear inthe chapters that follow. We considerthis repetition to be a sign that, howeversurprising our points of view may be tonon-linguists, the professional linguistics

community is agreed about manyfundamental issues. Some of these topicsreappear because of the nature of thequestions we have asked: for example,the strength of the influence of Latinupon English; the ongoing and inevitablenature of language change; the fact thatdifferent languages do similar tasks inrather different ways. You will findother such recurrent themes as you readthe book. One of the recurrent themes -one that has encouraged us to producethis book - is that people in general arevery concerned about the state of Englishand wish to know more about language.Crucially for this book, some of therecurrent themes show the ways inwhich the beliefs of linguists about

language may differ from the beliefsabout language held in the widercommunity. We are agreed that alllanguages and dialects are complex andstructured means of expression andperception, and that prejudices based onthe way other people speak are akin toracism and sexism. We are agreed thatmost views about the superiority of onelanguage or dialect over another havesocial and historical rather thangenuinely linguistic origins. And we areagreed that languages and dialects areunique and miraculous products of thehuman brain and human society. Theyshould be discussed respectfully andknowledgeably and, for all that we maymarvel at them as objects of enormous

complexity and

xv 11

Introduction

as vehicles) sometimes) of sublimeexpression) they should also bediscussed dispassionately andobjectively if we are to achieve a betterunderstanding of this uniquely humancharacteristic.

XVlll

MYTH 1

The Meanings of Words Should Not beAllowed to Vary or Change PeterTrudgill

All languages change all the time. It isnot very well understood why this is thecase, but it is a universal characteristic

of human languages. The only languageswhich do not change are those, likeLatin, which nobody speaks. Languageschange their pronunciations through time.Five hundred years ago, all Englishspeakers used to pronounce the k in knee- now nobody does. Grammaticalstructures also change. English speakersused to say Saw you my son? Noweverybody says Did you see my son? Butperhaps the most obvious way in whichlanguages change is in the usage andmeaning of words. A number of peopleseem to think that the fact that languageschange the meanings of their words inthis way is unfortunate. They believe thatchange in language is inherentlyundesirable and that we should do

everything we can to stop it becausechange can be dangerous and confusing.In particular, any tendency for words tostart to mean something which they havenot always meant should be resisted.This leads such people to argue that itmakes sense to determine what a wordmeans by looking at its origins - the realmeaning of a word. So, for example,they would claim that it is wrong to useaggravate to mean 'irritate', even thoughthis is its most common use in English,because it comes originally from Latinaggravare, which meant 'to makeheavier' and was originally borrowedinto English with the meaning 'to nlakemore serious'. They also would maintainthat it is wrong to talk about having three

alternatives, because alternative comesfrom the Latin word alter, which meant'second', and that nice really means'precise' - and so on. Actually, thehistory of the word nice provides a verygood illustra- tion of the untenablenature of this way of thinking. Nicecomes

1

Language Myths

originally from two ancient Indo-European roots, *skei meaning 'cut',which came down into Latin as the verbscire 'to know', probably via a meaningsuch as 'be able to distinguish one thingfrom another', and *ne meaning 'not'. Thecombination of the two forms gave theLatin verb nescire which meant 'to beignorant of'. This led to the developmentof the adjective nescius 'ignorant', whichcame down into Old French as nicemeaning 'silly'. It was then borrowedfrom French into medieval English withthe meaning 'foolish, shy' and, over thecenturies, has gradually changed itsmeaning to 'modest', then 'delicate','considerate', 'pleasant' and finally'agreeable' - a very long way in 6,000

years from its original meaning. Noonein their right mind, though, would arguethat the 'real' meaning of nice is, or oughtto be, 'not cutting'. The English languageis full of words which have changedtheir meanings slightly or evendramatically over the centuries. Changesof meaning can be of a number ofdifferent types. Some words, such asnice, have changed gradually. Emotivewords tend to change more rapidly bylosing some of their force, so that awful,which originally meant 'inspiring awe',now means 'very bad' or, in expressionssuch as awfully good, simply somethinglike 'very'. In any case, all connectionwith 'awe' has been lost. Some changesof meaning, though, seem to attract more

attention than others. This is perhapsparticularly the case where the peoplewho worry about such things believe thata distinction is being lost. For example,there is a lot of concern at the momentabout the words uninterested anddisinterested. In modern English, thepositive form interested has twodifferent meanings. The first and oldermeaning is approximately 'having apersonal involvement in', as in

He is an interested party in the dispute.

The second and later, but now much

more common, meaning is'demonstrating or experiencing curiosityin, enthusiasm for, concern for', as in

He is very interested in cricket.

2

The Meanings of Words Should Not beAllowed to Vary or Change I t is not aproblem that this word has more thanone meaning. Confusion never seems tooccur, largely because the context will

normally make it obvious which meaningis intended. In all human languages thereare very many words which have morethan one meaning - this is a verycommon and entirely normal state ofaffairs. Most English speakers, forexample, can instantly think of a numberof different meanings for the wordscommon and state and affairs which Ihave just used. Perhaps surprisingly,according to dictionaries the twodifferent meanings of interested havedifferent negative forms. The negative ofthe first meaning is disinterested, as in

He is an interested party in the dispute,

and I am disinterested and therefore ableto be more objective about it.

Disinterested is thus roughly equivalentto 'neutral, impartial'. The negative formof the second, more usual meaning isuninterested, as in

He is very interested in cricket, but I amuninterested in all sports.

Uninterested is thus roughly equivalentto 'bored, feeling no curiosity'. Now it

happens that interested, in its originalmeaning, is today a rather unusual,learned, formal word in English. Mostpeople, if they wanted to convey thisconcept in normal everyday speech,would probably say something like notneutral, or biased or involved orconcerned. Recently, this unfamiliaritywith the older meaning of the wordinterested has led to many people nowusing disinterested with the samemeaning as uninterested:

I'm disinterested in cricket.

They have, perhaps, heard the worddisinterested and, not being aware of themeaning 'neutral, unbiased') they havestarted using it as the negative form ofinterested in the more recent sense.Opponents of this change claim that thisis an ignorant misuse of the word, and

3

Language Myths that a very usefuldistinction is being lost. What can wesay about this? We can notice that thisrelatively sudden change of meaning israther different from the changes of

meaning we discussed above in the caseof awful and nice) which seem to havechanged gradually over long periods oftime. But) all the same) it is notsomething which is particularlysurprising to students of languagechange. The English prefix dis- is verycommonly employed to turn positiveadjectives into negative adjectives. Inthis way) pleasing) honest) fluent)agreeable become displeasing)dishonest) disfluent) disagreeable. (Notealso that displeasing and unpleasing bothoccur with approximately identicalmeanings) although displeasing is morecommon. ) We cannot therefore besurprised if) by analogy) speakers startfollowing this pattern of using dis- to

make a negative form out of the newermeaning of interested. We also have topoint out to opponents of this change thatthere are actually some benefits to begained from this development. Forexample) there now seems to be atendency for speakers to make a smalldifference of meaning between the twoforms. This is something which veryoften happens to synonyms - they veryrarely stay complete synonyms. Sodisinterested often seems to be strongerin meaning than uninterested) with theformer indicating real, positive lack ofinterest) perhaps even hostility) whileuninterested refers to simple apathy orindifference. Even more useful is the factthat we now have something which we

never had before - the possibility of asingle-word noun corresponding to theadjective. There was never a worduninterestedness or uninterest in English)so we had to use rather clumsy) longernoun-phrases such as lack of interest)which I just used above. Now) however)we can say things like

John demonstrated considerabledisinterest in the game of cricket.

But are there also any difficulties causedby this change? Are those who resist thechange right to do so? Surely confusion

can result from this development?Actually) it does not seem so. For manypeople) of

4

The Meanings of Words Should Not beAllowed to Vary or Change course, therewas never any danger of confusionbecause they did not know or did not usedisinterested in its original meaninganyway. But even for those perhapsmore educated people who did and domake a distinction, there do not seem tobe any problems of comprehension. As

usually happens with words with morethan one meaning, the context in whichthe word is used nearly always makes itclear which meaning is intended. Afterall, we never seem to get confused aboutthe two different meanings of interested,so why should we be confused ifdisinterested has two meanings also? Wewill not usually confuse the meaning ofcommon in 'Chaffinches are verycommon in England' with its meaning in'Only common people eat peas with theirknife'. We are very unlikely tomisinterpret the meaning of state onhearing 'Slovakia has become anindependent state' as opposed to 'Johnwas in a very bad state'. How manypeople would confuse the meaning of

affairs in 'Mary's husband left herbecause she kept having affairs withother men' with its meaning in 'Mary isvery busy at her office and has manydifferent affairs to attend to'? Equally,

The school children looked verydisinterested

is not likely to be ambiguous, and nor is

As an arbitrator, they need someone whois completely disinterested.

This is true of a number of other pairs ofwords which dictionaries distinguishbetween, but for which many speakersand writers make no difference. Onesuch well-known pair is imply and infer.Dictionar- ies, and schoolteachers, tellus that these two words mean differentthings, and that they should be useddifferently. So,

She implied that he was stupid

means that, by something she said, she

hinted or gave clues to the effect that hewas stupid, without actually saying sooutright. On the other hand,

5

Language Myths

She inferred that he was stupid

means that his behaviour or speech was

such that she was able to deduce from itthat he was stupid. However, manypeople in the English -speaking worldwho do not read dictionaries or do notlisten to what their schoolteachers tellthem are liable to use infer with themeaning that the dictionary says shouldbe confined to imply:

Are you inferring I'm stupid?

Now, it is undoubtedly true that if youuse infer in this way, there are peoplearound who will infer that you areuneducated or careless. But it is very

unlikely indeed that there will be anyactual confusion of meaning. Even if thesituational context does not make it clearwhat is meant, the grammatical contextwill: if I imply something to you, youwill, if you are clever and sensitiveenough, infer that same something fromwhat I have said. This is a distinctionwhich can just as well be made, then, bymeans of infer to and infer from. Thesame can be said of certain other pairsof words which are related to each otherin this way. The technical term for suchpairs is converse terms. Examples arelend and borrow, and learn and teach.They are converse terms because, if youlend me something, I neces- sarilyborrow it from you. Lend and learn vary

in usage between one dialect of Englishand another. In some dialects, includingStandard English, they are alwaysdistinguished. Many English speakers ofother dialects, however, do not observethe distinctions enshrined indictionaries, and say things like

Can I lend your bike?

and

The teacher learnt us geography.

Purists might want to argue that weshould not permit potentially confusingvariation of this type between dialects.But, once again, it

6

The Meanings of Words Should Not beAllowed to Vary or Change is clear thatabsolutely no confusion of meaning canresult, and that speakers of the differentdialects will always understand oneanother even if they follow different

patterns of usage. The context, and/or theuse of prepositions like from and to, willmake it clear what is intended. It istherefore difficult to argue that there isanything particularly reprehensible infailing to observe such distinctions.(Actually, it is not only dialects ofEnglish which vary in this way.Individual languages differ from oneanother quite a lot in the extent to whichthey use different words for converseterms. The German verb leihen, forexample, means both 'to lend' and 'toborrow', something which causesGerman speakers no distresswhatsoever.) But - to go back todisinterested - what should we say aboutthe claims of'ignorance' and 'misuse'? It

is certainly true that those people whooriginally started saying disinterested inthe new way probably did not know itsother meaning. We could then say thatthey were misusing the word. There is avery important observation we can makeabout this, though. The fact is that noneof us can unilaterally decide what aword means. Meanings of words areshared between people - they are a kindof social contract we all agree to -otherwise communication would not bepossible. If somebody decides all bythemselves that nice ought to mean'ignorant' because that is what it meantoriginally in English, he or she will havea very hard time. If I said 'Because theydo not study very hard, my students are

very nice,' it is certain that people wouldmisunderstand me and probable that theywould think that I was mad. Similarly, itis certain that anyone who foundSalisbury cathedral enormouslyimpressive and said 'I find this buildingreally awful' would also be completelymisunderstood. The same is likely to bethe case in future with disinterested. Ifwe ask the question 'When is misuse notmisuse?', the answer is clearly 'Wheneverybody does it'. If, in 200 years' time,all English speakers use disinterested inthe new way, which they probably will,the language will perhaps have lostsomething, but it will also have gainedsome- thing, as we have seen above -and we will no longer be able to talk of

misuse, even though the initial changemay have occurred because of lack ofknowledge of the original meaning. Inany case, it is clear that even if theworriers regard this change

7

Language Myths as undesirable) there isnothing they can do about it. Words donot mean what we as individuals mightwish them to mean) but what speakers ofthe language in general want them tomean. These meanings can and dochange as they are modified and

negotiated in millions of everydayexchanges over the years between onespeaker and another. Language changecannot be halted. Nor should theworriers feel obliged to try to halt it.Languages are self-regulating systemswhich can be left to take care ofthemselves. They are self-regulatingbecause their speakers want tounderstand each other and beunderstood. If there is any danger ofmisunderstanding) speakers and writerswill appreciate this possibility andguard against it by avoiding synonyms)or by giving extra context) as in thewell-known

I mean funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar.

There is nothing at all funny-peculiarabout the fact that some words in modernEnglish are currently changing theirmeanings.

I would like to thank MalgorzataFabiszak, Jean Hannah and Ian Kirby fortheir comments and advice on earlierversions of this chapter.

Source

Lars Andersson and Peter Trudgill) BadLanguage (Oxford: Blackwell) 1990;and London: Penguin) 1990).

8

MYTH 2

Some Languages are Just Not GoodEnough Ray Harlow

If we look at the languages spoken in theworld today, we notice very widedifferences in the use to which they areput. Most languages are the firstlanguage of some community and servethe everyday functions of that communityperfectly well. A few languages have amore restricted range of uses, forinstance, until recently, Latin wasrestricted to certain uses within theRoman Catholic Church, particularly theconduct of services and formalcommunication internationally within theChurch. Now its use is even morerestricted and it is really only now usedby a few people to read the literature

originally written in that language. Onthe other hand, some languages havewider functions than that of everydaycommunication and are used as officiallanguages in the administration of wholestates and nations, in education to thehighest levels and in literature of allkinds. Yet other languages enjoy aninternational role, English perhaps beingthe best example of this at the moment.English is the language of internationalair traffic, business communication,scientific publication and the linguafranca of tourism. Unfortunately, thedifferences in the range of roles thatlanguages play frequently lead somepeople to believe that some languageswhich do not fulfil a wide range of

functions are in fact incapable of doingso. In the view of some people, somelanguages are just not good enough. Notonly do they not act as languages ofscience, of internationalcommunication, ofhigh literature, theyare inherently inferior and could not beused in these ways. This sort of opinioncan be seen particularly strikingly insocieties where a minority language isspoken alongside a major language. Acase of this kind is the situation ofMaori, the indigenous Polynesian

9

Language Myths language of NewZealand. Linguists estimate that Englishis the first language of some 95 per centof the New Zealand population and theonly language of about 90 per cent.People who identify themselves asMaori make up about 12 per cent of theNew Zealand population of just over 3million, but although the Maori languageis regarded as a very important part ofidentity as a Maofi, it is spoken fluentlyby perhaps 30,000 people. Because ofsocial changes in New Zealand withinthe past five decades Of so, Maori hasseen its uses increasingly restricted tillin many places it is now only used atformal insti- tutionalized events. Overthe last twenty years or so, there have

been a number of initiatives in the areasof politics, education and broadcastingto try to reverse the trend and, as aresult, Maori is now an official languageof New Zealand, is used in radio andtelevision broadcasting and is not only asubject of study but also the language inwhich teaching is carried out at anumber of schools and even at oneuniversity. As these initiatives haveprogressed, it has been possible tonotice in the reaction of some people thevery attitude I have been referring to,that Maori is simply not capable ofbeing used as an official language or asthe language of education beyond thevery basic level. Sometimes, theexpression of this opinion reveals that it

is in fact not based on logic. I fecall acomment in a New Zealand newspapersome years ago, which tried to make thepoint that Maori was no good as alanguage because it had to borrowwords from English in order to expressnew ideas. English on the othef handcould be seen to be a very flexible andvital language because it had throughoutits history been able to draw resourcesfrom all over the place to express newideas! However, it is not only in this sortof situation that we can encounter theidea that some languages are just not upto it. Cicero, the Roman orator,politician and philosopher of the firstcentury BC, composed his philosophicalworks in Latin partly to make Greek

philosophy available to a Latin-speakingaudience, but also partly to show that itcould be done. This was because someof his contemporaries were scepticalabout the possibility of Latin being ableto express the ideas and trains of thoughtof the Greeks! In their view, Latin wasjust not

10

Some Languages are Just Not GoodEnough

good enough. However, this was alanguage which went on to be thelanguage of scholarship, science,international diplomacy and literaturefor well over a millennium! Sir IsaacNewton, the famous scholar of theseventeenth century, published his ideasin Latin. The same sort of thing occurredagain in Western Europe at the end of theMiddle Ages, as the so-calledvernacular languages took over functionsthat had previously been the domain ofLatin. At this time, there were peoplewho believed that the emerginglanguages like French, English, Italian,and so on were too unpolished,immature and lacking in resources to beable to convey the abstract thought and

breadth of knowledge usually expressedin the ancient languages of Latin andGreek.

Why are some languages not goodenough?

Let's look briefly at the ways in whichlanguages are supposed to beinadequate, in what respects they are notgood enough and also at the question:'Not good enough for what?' In someinstances, it is features of the structure ofa language which are picked on as thereason why another language is to be

preferred for a particular function. In thesouth-east of Switzerland, many peoplestill speak a language descended fromthe Latin of the Roman colonists. It iscalled Romansh and is still the everydaylanguage in a number of villages andregions, though German has been makinginroads in the area for centuries. As withMaori, which I mentioned above, therehas been a push in recent decades toincrease the areas of life and activity inwhich Romansh is used. Now, Germanis a language which can very easilycombine words into what are called'compounds'. Romansh is a languagewhich cannot do this so readily andinstead uses phrases as a way ofcombining ideas. Some speakers of

Romansh have reacted to this structuraldifference by believing that Romansh isnot good enough to be used in reallytechnical areas of life because 'Germanis able to construct clearly definedsingle words for technical ideas,Romansh is not.' This notion ignores thefacts that other languages such as Frenchand Italian are in exactly

11

Language Myths the same boat asRomansh yet obviously have no problemin being precise in technical areas) and

that Romansh had for centuries been thelanguage in which all the aspects) someof them very 'technical') of an alpineagricultural society were dealt with.This kind of view is not unlike the 'myth)discussed in Myth 10: Some LanguagesHave No Grammar) the myth thatbecause languages differ in the way theywork structurally) they also differ in theextent to which they can express logicalconnections between words and ideas.In other instances) the reason why alanguage is 'just not good enough) is that'it is ugly) rude) barbaric.' This is one ofthe reasons why some people felt that thevernacular languages were incapable ofassuming the roles that Latin played. Asone scholar has put it) the common

languages were redolent of ' the stenchof dung and the sweat of the warrior'.Even Dante) who was a champion forthe cause of the use of vernaculars and iscredited with the establishment ofmodern Italian) in his survey of Italiandialects in search of a suitable one forhis literary purposes) ruled out theRoman dialect because 'of all Italianvernaculars) their wretched savagenoise is the most foul - and no wonder)since it matches the depravity andcoarseness of their ways.) These twoexamples in fact point to what is reallygoing on here. This is a matter which istaken up more fully in Myth 11: Italian isBeautiful, German is Ugly. It turns outthat people will often transfer to a

language or dialect their opinions of thepeople whose language or dialect it is.Thus) Dante saw the Roman dialect assavage and wretched because this washis opinion of the Roman people of histime. The third reason given for the viewthat a language is not good enough israther more serious; it is the argumentthat 'X is not good enough because youcan)t discuss nuclear physics in it.' Theimplication is that English (or someother language like German or Russian)for instance) is a better language than Xbecause there are topics you can discussin one but not the other. At first glancethis seems a very telling argument. Thereare things you can do in one language butnot another) therefore some languages

are better than others) therefore somelanguages are not good enough at leastfor some purposes.

12

Some Languages are Just Not GoodEnough

However, this view confuses a feature oflanguages which is due just to theirhistory with an inherent property oflanguages. That is, this opinion

concludes that because there has been nooccasion or need to discuss, forargument's sake, nuclear physics inMaori, it could never be done becauseof some inherent fault in Maori. A littlethought, however, will show that thisargument cannot be maintained.Computers were not discussed in OldEnglish; Modern English is the samelanguage as Old English, only later; itshould follow that Modern Englishcannot be used to discuss computers.This is clearly absurd. What of coursehas happened is that through timeEnglish has developed the resourcesnecessary to the discussion of computersand very many other topics which weresimply unknown in earlier times. In

order for us to discuss some topic in aparticular language, that language mustprovide us with words to refer to thevarious aspects of our topic; it must havethe appropriate vocabulary. Of coursethe language must also provide ways ofcombining the words to form statements,questions, and so on. But all languageshave these ways. This is a theme whichwill be taken up below in other chapters,especially, Myth 10: Some LanguagesHave No Grammar and Myth 4: french isa Logical Language. Essentially,languages may differ as to the wayvarious aspects of structure are handled,but they are all capable of expressing thesame range of structural meanings. Notall languages have the same vocabulary

though. It is true that some languageshave developed vocabularies to dealwith topics which are just not discussedin some other languages. And'developed' is the crucial word in thismatter. English can discuss nuclearphysics because, over the centuries, asscientific thought has developed, it hasacquired the vocabulary to deal with thenew developments; it has not alwaysbeen there as an inherent feature ofEnglish. Rather, English expanded itsvocabulary in a variety of ways over thecenturies so as to meet the new demandsbeing made of it. All languages arecapable of the same types of expansionof vocabulary to deal with whatevernew areas of life their speakers need to

talk about. If one looks at the wordswhich are used in English to handletechnical subjects, and indeed many non-technical ones as well, one sees that infact the vast majority of these wordshave actually come

13

Language Myths from some otherlanguage and been incorporated intoEnglish. This process is usually called'borrowing', though there is no thoughtthat the words will be given backsomehow! All languages do this to some

extent, though English is perhaps thelanguage which has the highest level of'borrowed' vocabulary, at least amongthe world's major languages. However,this is by no means the only way inwhich a language can develop itsvocabulary; there are many cases wherea language's vocabulary is developed'from within', that is, by using its ownexisting resources. Sometimes, but by nomeans always, this path is followed by alanguage and its speakers, if there is anotion that borrowing will hurt thelanguage. Another reason why alanguage's own resources may be used inthe expansion of its vocabulary isbecause a writer wants his/her work tobe readily understood by its intended

audience, who might be put off by toomuch borrowing. This is what Cicerodid. In order to write in Latin about theideas of Greek philosophy, he had todevelop a Latin vocabulary whichcorresponded to the ideas he wanted toput across. Most of the time he did thisby taking a particular Latin word anddeliberately assigning it a technicalmeaning. A particularly importantexample of this was his use of the Latinword ratio to mean 'reason', a usagewhich has come down to us today inEnglish. On other occasions, he inventednew words made up of Latin elements,for instance, the word qualitas, whichbecame of course 'quality' in English,was deliberately coined by Cicero to

correspond to a Greek idea. Minoritylanguages, like Maori and Romansh, aretoday doing very much the same thing asCicero did for Latin, constructingvocabulary out of existing resourceswithin the languages, precisely so thatthey can be used to talk about areas likecomputers, law, science, and so on, forwhich they have not been used so muchin the past. These two languages areunlikely ever to become internationallanguages of science or diplomacy, but ifhistory had been different, they couldhave, and then we might have beenwondering whether perhaps English was'just not good enough'.

14

MYTH 3

The Media are Ruining English JeanAitchison

English is sick, maybe even fatally ill,judging from complaints: 'The languagethe world is crying out to learn isdiseased in its own country,' moaned oneanxious worrier. 'Oh, please, English-lovers everywhere, do your bit for the

language. Let's stop this slide down theslippery slope . . . before communicationbecomes a frustrating exercise we areunable to face,' urged another. Thismorbid concern for the health of Englishis not new. In every decade, language'defenders' pop up like sentries beforeold castles. They behave as if they aloneare preventing the language fromcrumbling into dust. As the writerThomas Lounsbury commented in 1908:

There seems to have been in everyperiod of the past, as there is now, adistinct apprehension in the minds ofvery many worthy persons that the

English tongue is always in the conditionapproaching collapse, and that arduousefforts must be put forth, and put forthpersistently, in order to save it fromdestruction.

The delusion that our language is sick istherefore a recurring one. What changesare the culprits of this supposedlinguistic slide? These vary. Parents,teachers, the press, have all beenblamed. But in recent years, the media -television, radio, newspapers - havebeen widely criticized as linguisticcriminals. To take a typical example:

. . . what I find . . . hard . . . to stomachthese days is the pidgin being served upmore and more by television and radioas well as the press. . . Only Canute'scourtiers would deny that language is aliving thing. . .

15

Language Myths But the increasinglyrapid spread of what I can only describeas Engloid throughout the all-pervasivecommunications media foreshadows ananarchy that must eventually defeat thewhole object of communication - to

understand and be understood. . .

Even in the last century, journalists wereregarded as linguistic troublemakers:'Among writers, those who do the mostmischief are . . . the men generally whowrite for the newspapers,' commented awriter on 'popular errors in language'(1880). 'Many causes exist which tend tocorrupt the "well of English undefiled"... [One] is the immense extension andinfluence of the newspaper press. . .'lamented another (1889). He continued:'The newspaper press of the UnitedStates and the British colonies, as wellas the inferior class of newspapers in

this country, is to a large extent in thehands of writers who have no respect forthe propriety or reticence of language.'In the twentieth century, complaintsabout media language have escalated,above all because of the advent of radioand television. This has added concernabout spoken speech to that aboutwritten: 'We are plagued with idiots onradio and television who speak Englishlike the dregs of humanity,' bemoanedone letter-writer. 'I have two youngchildren. . . who try to keep afloat in aflood of sloppy speech poured at themfrom the television set,' raged another.The objections range over all aspects oflanguage. When the 'Top Twenty'complaints about broadcast language

were listed by David Crystal in 1982, hefound that nine related to grammar (theway words are combined), six wereabout pronunciation (the way wordswere articulated) and five aboutvocabulary (the particular words used).Disliked usages are frequently assumedby grumblers to be new, a sign ofmodern decadence. Yet, as Crystalcommented, many have been around fora long time. Top of the 'Top Twenty'complaints was the supposed misuse ofyou and I versus you and me. Yet around400 years ago, in Shakespeare's TheMerchant of Venice, the merchantAntonio says: 'All debts are clearedbetween you and I,' so breaking thesupposed 'rule' that you and me is the

'correct' form after a preposition. In thelate-eighteenth century a writercommented on 'the phrase between youand I, which tho' it must be confessed tobe

16

The Media are Ruining Englishungrammatical, is yet almost universallyused in familiar conversation.' And inthe last ten years, Oxford-educated LadyThatcher proclaimed: 'It's not for youand I to condemn the Malawi economy.'So this is not a 'new' phenomenon. So if

media usages which upset languageworriers are often old ones, why do somany people complain about 'moderndecadence' and 'journalisticincompetence'? Two interwovenmisunderstandings underlie complaintsabout media language. First, a 'dirtyfingernails' fallacy, a notion that journal-ists are sloppy language users. Second, a'garbage heap' fallacy, a false belief that'journalism is junk writing.' Let usconsider each in turn.

Dirty fingernails fallacy: journalists uselanguage sloppily

According to the 'dirty fingernails'fallacy, journalists do not pay sufficientattention to language details: they neverbother to scrub their linguisticfingernails clean, as it were. On closerinspection, this is untrue. The fallacy islargely due to ignorance about howlanguage changes - perhaps notsurprisingly, since how change happenshas become clear only in the last thirtyor so years. Until around 1960 languagechange was regarded as a slow andmysterious process, rather like thebudding and blooming of flowers -something hard to see, however long youstare. A popular view in the 1950S wasthat change occurred when speakerssomehow missed their linguistic target

and drifted away from the original norm.One word was assumed to turn intoanother over time, like a tadpole slowlytransforming itself into a frog. Yet thistadpole-to-frog view of change is nowoutdated. In recent years a 'youngcuckoo' model has replaced it. This new,more realistic viewpoint arose largelyfrom the pioneering work of theAmerican sociolinguist William Labov.Competition rather than metamorphosisis at the root of language alterations, hedemonstrated. A new variant arises insome section of the community andcompetes with an existing one. Then thenewer form is likely to expand andgradually oust the older ones, like ayoung cuckoo pushing a previous

occupant out of

17

Language Myths the nest. Old and newforms therefore coexist and compete: theold is not magically transformed into thenew. These young cuckoo takeoverstypically have a slow beginning, then asudden upsurge. A form first creeps inamong a subsection of the population.The word gay for 'homosexual' had longbeen in use in San Francisco before itexpanded its territory and pushed asideother terms such as queer, poof The term

wimp for 'feeble male' had also beenaround for years in California before itgradually ousted other words for 'weakor insignificant person' such as nebbish,nerd, weed. The older words get usedless and less often and graduallydwindle away. But the media did notinitiate these changes; they werereflecting current usage. The prefix mini-provides a blueprint for the slowbeginning and sudden upswing of atypical change. It also illustrates the roleof the media. The prefix occurred asearly as 1845, when the Scotsmannewspaper carried a notice of an'important sale of horses, harness, andcarriages', which included 'one excellent12-inside omnibus' and 'one handsome

minibus', both horse-drawn. A fairlylong time elapsed before sporadic othermini- forms arrived in the language:mini-camera came in the 1930S, mini-piano in the 1940S. The prefix thereforegradually crept into the language, like abit-player in a drama. Take-off pointcame in the 1960s when mini-cab, mini-van and other transport words becamewidely used, alongside clothing words,such as mini-skirt and mini-dress. Thenmini- started appearing on other types ofword: a mini-boom occurred ineconomics, a mini-bar became standardin some hotel rOOITIS, mini-computerswere widely used, and a writercommented that he must have been out ofhis mini-mind. The media nurtured the

mini- explosion by reporting the news.Vogue, the fashion magazine, noted mini-skirt first in 1965. Television producedseveral mini-series. Newspapers alsojoined in. A total of 125 storiescontained a mini- prefix in The Timesand Sunday Times in the first threemonths of 1993, for example. The mediaare therefore linguistic mirrors: theyreflect current language usage and extendit. Journalists are observant reporterswho pick up early on new forms andspread them to a wider audience.

18

The Media are Ruining English

They do not normally invent these forms,nor are they corrupting the language.Radio and television reproduce thevarious ways of speaking we heararound, they do not invent them. Often,several different ways of pronouncingthe same word co-exist. This worriessome people. In a recent radio talk, thespeaker referred to kilO metres, apronunciation which attracted angryletters, such as:

I was astonished to hear you pronounce

kllometre as kilO metre . . . Surely, evenif it is argued that language has no rightsor wrongs, but merely usage, there ISsense and nonsense. The pronunciationkilO metre is in the latter category, kIlometre in the former.

Yet both pronunciations are common,according to a survey carried out by theeditor of the Longnzan PronunciationDictionary (1990): 52 per cent preferredthe older kIlometre and 48 per cent thenewer kilO metre. This type offluctuation suggests that a change isunderway. The main pronunciationgrumble in David Crystal's 'Top Twenty'

complaints was about the stress onwords such as controversy. The surveyfound that 44 per cent preferredCONtroversy, and 56 per centconTROVersy, indicating that both areacceptable. The kilometre andcontroversy complaints are puzzling: thealtered stress is fairly trivial and doesnot affect understanding. Perhapsworriers are working with an outdatedview of language: an old 'for want of anail' image is embedded in somepeople's minds, the old proverb in whicha lost nail led to a lost battle: 'For wantof a nail, a shoe was lost, for want of ashoe, a horse was lost, for want of ahorse a man was lost, for want of a man,a battle was lost.' Lack of care over

'linguistic fingernails' is presumed tolead to language collapse. But metaphorswhich apply to one area of life do notnecessarily apply to others. The 'youngcuckoo' image is a more realistic one.Furthermore, the young cuckoos cannotunbalance language. English, like anytongue, maintains its own patterns andkeeps itself organized: a language, like athermostat, regulates itself constantly.Some inbuilt property in the human mindmaintains all languages, everywhere.

19

Language Myths

Garbage heap fallacy: journalism is junkwriting

The 'garbage heap' fallacy is a falsebelief that 'journalism is junk writing.'Yet writing for the press is a demandingskill. The public reads newspapersavidly because they are written in a waywhich attracts attention and then sustainsit. Such writing requires training andpractice. Newcomers may flounder, assatirized by Evelyn Waugh in his novelScoop. The hero, Boot, is a novice

writer who pens a bi-weekly half-column on nature: 'Feather-footedthrough the plashy fen passes thequesting vole. . .' He is mistaken for atop journalist and sent to a worldtrouble-spot. His heart heavy withmisgiving, he types the first news reportof his career:

Nothing much has happened except to thepresident who has been imprisoned inhis own palace by revolutionary junta. . .They say he is drunk when his childrentry to see him but governess says mostunusual. Lovely spring weather. Bubonicplague raging.

Compare this with a typical 'real'newspaper report:

Up to six people were feared dead and60 injured yesterday after a cargo shiplost power and ploughed into a busyshopping mall built on a wharf in theAmerican port of New Orleans.

Here the writer has specified whathappened) where it happened) when ithappened) who was involved, how ithappened in thirty-five words - a so-

called 'hard news formula'. It's clear, it'sinformative and, in the words of GeorgeOrwell) it uses 'language as aninstrument for expressing and not forconcealing or preventing thought'.Orwell, best known as the author of thenovels Animal Farm and NineteenEighty-Four) was a successful journalistas well as a best-selling novelist. Hepointed out the importance of makingone's meaning clear. For doing this) heprovided 'rules that one can rely onwhen instinct fails'. Below) slightlyrephrased, are his six guidelines, whichtrainee journalists are still taught tofollow:

20

The Media are Ruining English 1. If it'spossible to cut out a word, cut it out. 2.Never use a long word where a shortwill do. 3. Never use a passive if youcan use an active. 4. Avoid foreign andtechnical words. 5. Never use ametaphor you've seen in print. 6. Breakthese rules to avoid somethingoutlandish. Readers may dispute thechoice of newspaper content: 'An editoris one who separates the wheat from thechaff and prints the chaff,' according toAdlai Stevenson. The blood-and-gutsdetail of a recent murder may disgust

some, the convolutions of a film star'slove-life may bore others. But thelanguage in which the murders andmarriages are recounted is likely to belucid and polished. Journalists generallyfollow the advice not only of GeorgeOrwell but also of Joel Chandler Harris,the nineteenth-century author of UncleRemus. Harris worked as a journalist fora large part of his life. He advised:

When you've got a thing to say, Say it!Don't take half a day. . . Life is short - afleeting vapour - Don't you fill the wholeblamed paper With a tale, which at apinch, Could be covered in an inch! Boil

her down until she simmers, Polish heruntil she glimmers.

Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-centurydictionary-writer, once said: 'I neveropen up a newspaper without findingsomething 1 should have deemed it aloss not to have seen; never withoutderiving from it instruction andamusement.' He does not specify whatkind of 'instruction' he was seeking. Butalmost certainly, if he looked at anewspaper today, he would learn bothabout the modern language and how touse it clearly.

21

Language Myths

Sources and further reading

How and why language changes isdiscussed in Jean Aitchison, Lan- guageChange: Progress or decay?(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2nd edn 1991) . Worries aboutlanguage decline and the role of themedia in change are explored in Jean

Aitchison, Language Joyriding(Inaugural lecture at Oxford University,Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); JeanAitchison, The Language Web: Thepower and problem of words (BBC1996 Reith Lectures, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997).Attitudes to language are documented inRichard Bailey, Images of English: Acultural history of the language (AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press,1991; Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992), which contains the ThomasLounsbury quote about perpetualworriers. The 'Top Twenty' complaintsabout the radio were listed in DavidCrystal, 'Language on the air - has itdegenerated?' (Listener, 9 July 1981, pp.

37-9). The skill involved in writing forthe media is dissected in 'How to do it'books, such as Nicholas Bagnall,Newspaper Language (Oxford: FocalPress, 1993) and Andrew Boyd,Broadcast Journalism: Techniques ofradio and TV news (Oxford: FocalPress, 3rd edn 1994), who quotes thelines from Joel Chandler Harris. Thenovice writer Boot is in Evelyn Waugh,Scoop (London: Chapman and Hall,1938; Penguin Books, 1943). Orwell'sgood-writing precepts are in his essay'Politics and the English language'(1946), reprinted in George Orwell,Inside the Whale and Other Essays(London: Penguin, 1962).

22

MYTH 4

French is a Logical Language AnthonyLodge

French people have been claiming thattheirs is a logical language for the pastthree and a half centuries) though whatthey mean when they say this is rather

obscure - which is a pity) since the otheradjective they use to describe French)along with 'logical') is the word 'clear')as we shall see. In 1647 the father of allFrench purist grammarians - ClaudeFavre de Vaugelas - referred to 'clarityof language the which property Frenchpossesses over all other languages in theworld,' and he was swiftly followed bypeople who asserted things like) 'we[the French] in everything we say followexactly the order of rational thought)which is the order of Nature.) The mostcelebrated expression of this idea camein 1784 when a self-styled aristocrat(Count Antoine de Rivarol, 1753-1801)won the prize for the best essaypresented at the Berlin Academy that

year. Actually) 'Count' Rivarol was theson of an innkeeper in the southernFrench town of Bagnols) but he knewthere was little hope of advance- mentunless such an unfortunate fact could bedisguised. The title of his prize-winningessay was: 'Concerning the universalityof the French language') and the author'saim was to explain why French wasused by all the toffs and intellectuals ofEurope (including students at the BerlinAcademy) in preference to otherlanguages) even their own. Of course) ithad nothing whatsoever to do with thefact that France had been 'top nation) inEurope for a century and a half. French)he believed) was preferred by allrational-minded people on account of its

inherently logical structure:

What distinguishes our language from theancient and the modern

23

Language Myths languages is the orderand structure of the sentence. This ordermust always be direct and necessarilyclear. In French the subject of thediscourse is named first, then the verbwhich is the action, and finally the

object of this action: this is the naturallogic present in all human beings. . .French syntax is incorruptible. It is fromthis that results this admirable claritywhich is the eternal basis of ourlanguage. What is not clear is notFrench: what is not clear is still English,Italian, Greek or Latin.

Given the importance Rivarol attaches insentence three to placing the subjectbefore the verb in order to establish thelogical credentials of french, it isunfortunate that he should himself placethe subject ('this admirable clarity') afterthe verb ('results') in sentence five.

However, difficulties such as this havenot stood in the way of successivegenerations of teachers andcommentators peddling similar ideas. Inthe nineteenth century C. Allou - amining engineer turned grammarian -reproduced Rivarol's thoughts almostverbatim: 'One of the chiefcharacteristics of French is its extremeclarity which renders it less susceptiblethan any other language to obscurity,ambiguity and double-meaning.' Thedistinguished critic F. Brunetiere wentone better: 'People have often vauntedthe" clarity", the "logic", the "precision"of the French language, and they havebeen right. However, it is not the Frenchlanguage which is in itself clearer and

more logical than the others, it is Frenchthinking.' Not all were agreed, however,about the ability of the inarticulatemasses to do justice to the superlativequalities of their language. Many Frenchpeople were felt unworthy of thetreasure bestowed upon them. In 1910Abbe C. Vincent declared, 'Our nationallanguage, so clear, so subtle, so logical,so distinguished, is becomingincreasingly fuzzy, turgid, deformed andvulgar.' However, as the Great Warapproached, the French closed ranks.Claims about the intellectual qualities ofFrench and of the French usually becomeshriller and more chauvinistic as thefrench nation comes under threat fromoutside - from the Germans, for instance,

or from the Anglo-Saxons. On the eve ofthe First World War J. Payot announced,'We find everywhere among Frenchpeople the courageous

24

French is a Logical Language

striving after clarity.' In the hey-day ofGauUist hostility to American influencein France, J. Duron declared in 1963:

I consider precision and clarity to be theprime qualities of our language . .. tosuch an extent that I doubt whether therehas ever existed, since the time of theGreeks, a language which reflectedthought so transparently. . . And it is inprecisely this area that the Frenchlanguage has for a long time had thereputation of being beyond compare.Well handled, it makes clear the mostdifficult ideas, and this is one of thereasons for its long domination inEurope. . . It carries further than anyother language the requirement and thecapacity for clarity.

Such drum-banging in favour of theFrench language is not the monopoly ofthe conservative right. Even the socialistPresident Mitter- rand was drawn intoit:

On the subject of the French language,after so many others it is hard to addfurther praising words to those so oftenrepeated concerning its rigour, itsclarity, its elegance, its nuances, therichness of its tenses and its moods, thedelicacy of its sounds, the logic of itsword order.

It is perhaps understandable that thismyth about French should have had astrong hold on the minds of nativespeakers of the language, but it is a littlesurprising that it should be shared bydistinguished professors of French inBritain:

In translating English prose into Frenchwe shall often find that the meaning ofthe text is not clear and definite. . .Looseness of reasoning and lackoflogical sequence are our commonfaults. . . The French genius is clear andprecise. . . In translating into French we

thus learn the lesson of clarity andprecision. -Ritchie and Moore

It is even more surprising when we findeminent linguists pushing the idea:

25

Language Myths The seventeenthcentury, which believed it could bendeverything to the demands of reason,undoubtedly gave logic the opportunityto transform the French language in the

direction of reason. Even today it isclear that it conforms much more closelyto the demands of pure logic than anyother language. - W. von Wartburg

What are people thinking of when theymake claims like these about the inherentlogic and clarity of the French language?The implication contained in all of thequotations we have looked at is that thestructure of French is miraculouslycloser to that of pure, language-freethought ('mentalese', as Steven Pinkerexpresses it) than the structure of otherlanguages. Indeed, we have seen howFrench commentators have regarded

their language as the universal languageto which all rational human beingsnaturally aspire in spite of themselvesand in spite of their own mother tongue.Allegedly, French syntax follows veryclosely the order of logical thoughtprocesses; allegedly, the organization ofFrench grammar and vocabularycoincides with the natural ordering oftime and space; and French styleallegedly clothes ideas in a simpler andmore elegant garb than is to be foundelsewhere. Let us look at each of thesenotions briefly in turn.

French syntax follows the order of logic

The argument most frequently advancedin defence of the logicality of French isthat based on word order: just as (inlogic' the agent precedes the action,which precedes the patient, so thefundamental word order of French(unlike that of Latin and German) isSubject + Verb + Object. This argumentis suspect on several counts. Firstly,French is by no means the only languageto be of the SVO type - so is thatlanguage which Rivarol found soterribly unclear and illogical, English.Secondly, it is legitimate to ask just howfundamental the SVO order is in French.In formal style cases of inversion of

Subject and Verb are quite common, asRivarol himself unwittingly demon-strated.

26


o V S e.g. Sans doute vous ecrira-t-elle= No doubt she will write to you

In informal style 'dislocated structures'like the following are the rule rather thanthe exception.

o s v e.g. Mon chien, je l'ai perdu = Ihave lost my dog

Moreover, if we base our argument onmeaning rather than on grammaticalfunction, all passive sentences in Frenchbecome a breach of the so-called naturalorder.

patient action agent e.g. Le vieillard aete soigne par un guerisseur = The oldchap was looked after by a healer

The organization of French grammar andvocabulary coincides with the (natural'ordering of time and space

Here we would expect the language toprovide a linguistic expression for everydistinct idea and reserve only one ideafor each linguistic expression. On thesecounts it is very hard to demonstrate thatFrench fares better (or worse) than anyother language. Indeed, don't the

speakers of most languages considertheir mother tongue to provide the mostnatural vehicle for their thoughts? Sincethere is no limit to the ideas humanbeings are likely to have, we can be surethat there will be plenty of ideas forwhich French has no neatly codedexpression. The French past-tensesystem, for instance, fails to distinguishbetween 'I sang' and 'I have sung' - adistinction which we in English findindispensable. They have the same wordfor 'sheep' and 'mutton', for 'ox' and'beef'. Similarly, there are plenty ofwords in French which have more thanone meaning (e.g. poser = (1) put down,(2) ask [a question], (3) pose [for apicture]), and a large number of words

which all sound the same (e.g. ver ='worm',

27

Language Myths

' I ' , , ., f fu ' , d ' verre = g ass, vert =green, valr = a type 0 r , vers = towar s,vers = 'verse'). All of these breach the'rule' of clarity and are potential sourcesof ambiguity. Indeed, one of theprincipal sources of jokes in French is

the pun:

e.g. Napoleon: 'Ma sacree toux' (= Mybloody cough!) Dim officer takes this tomean 'Massacrez tout!' (= Massacreeverything!), so liquidates the entirepopulation of the village.

French is a lucid language

I twas Rivarol who declared that 'Whatis not clear is not French.' Well, on thiscount there must be millions of deprived

people living and working in Francewith no language to call their own. Somemight not be surprised if the unletteredmasses produce jumbled and confused'non-French', but even the educated elite,even those people whose business isstyle, have their problems:

Donner a I'analyse du style uneconfiguration epistemique plusrigoureuse que celle qui consisteactuellement a remettre en circulationdes concepts detrames et effiloches parI'usage, qui - dans les perspectives troppositiv- istes d'une extension reiteree dela rhetorique et de la 'linguistique du

discours' aux actes de parole ou a lapragmatique - cherche a reduire l'analyse a des inventairestechnologiques: tel est Ie dessein . . .

Giving to the analysis of style a morerigorous epistemic configuration than theone which currently consists of puttingback into circulation concepts slackenedand frayed by usage, which - in the over-positivistic perspective of a repeatedextension of rhetoric and 'discourselinguistics' to speech-acts or pragmatics- seeks to reduce analysis totechnological inventories: such is thepurpose. . .

The idea which people seem to find veryhard to grasp is that languages cannotpossess good or bad qualities: nolanguage system can ever be shown to beclearer or more logical (or morebeautiful

28


or more ugly) than any other languagesystem. Where differences of clarity andlogic are to be found is not in thelanguage itself but in the abilities ofdifferent users of the language to handleit effectively. Some french speakersproduce utterances which aremarvellous in their lucidity, while otherscan always be relied upon to produceimpenetrable gibberish - but it is thespeakers who deserve our praise orblame, not the language.

How is it that so obviously mythical anidea as the logicality of french has takensuch strong root in France and to some

extent among her neighbours? Theexternal perceptions of french are nottoo hard to explain - they seem to bebound up with the national stereotypeswhich developed in Europe a centuryago and which are sadly still aroundtoday. Italian became a 'musicallanguage' , no doubt because of itsassociation in the minds of non-Italianswith Italian opera; German became a'harsh, guttural language' because ofPrussian militarism; Spanish became a'romantic language' because of bull-fighters and flamenco dancing; frenchalmost inevitably became a 'logicallanguage' thanks to prestigiousphilosophers like Descartes, whosemode of thinking was felt to contrast

sharply with that of the 'pragmaticEnglish'. But why should the french havetaken on board the myth of logic andclarity so fully themselves? Here theanswer perhaps lies in the important roleplayed in the development of frenchculture by the standard language. Astandard language is a set of ideas aboutwhat constitutes the best form of alanguage, the form which everyone oughtto imitate. When the notion of standardlanguage started to gain ground in Francein the sixteenth century, the question ofwhat made the 'best form' of frenchbetter than the rest was a relativelysimple one: the 'best french was the best,because it was spoken by the bestpeople (Le. the King and his Court).' In

the age of absolutism established in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries,hitching linguistic norms to aristocraticfashion came to be regarded as too crudeand too fragile a basis upon which to fixthe standard language. What constitutedthe 'best french' had to be anchored insomething more rational and

29

Language Myths permanent: so thepowers-that-be convinced themselvesthat 'the French (of the best people) wasthe best, because it corresponded the

most closely to the timeless dictates oflogic and clarity.' Thereafter, only 'thebest French' - those uses of Frenchwhich complied with what people thenconsidered clear and logical - wasdeemed worthy of the label 'French' atall. Hence Rivarol's circular slogan'What is not clear is not French.' Butthings did not stop there. In 1793 theRevolutionaries decapitated their kingand the nation desperately needed a newsymbol for its identity to ensuresolidarity within France anddistinctiveness without. The Frenchstandard language was roped in for thejob. It is not uncommon, even today, tohear French people speak of 'HerMajesty the French language'. Since the

French language is the language ofreason and logic, any French person whouses it improperly must be cognitivelydefective, irrational, even mad. Sincethe French language is now the symbolof the nation, failure to use the nationallanguage and even failure to use it'properly' makes you a traitor to thenational cause. Indeed, it is still widelybelieved that to speak French badly, tobreak the rules of French grammar or tomake frequent use of foreign words is tobe in some way unpatriotic. In 1980 thepolitician Raymond Barre is reported tohave said, 'The first of the fundamentalvalues of our civilization is the correctusage of our language. There is amongyoung people a moral and civic virtue in

the loyal practice of French.' I t is easyfor Anglo-Saxons, for whom language isnot normally a fundamental element ofnational identity, to be patronizing aboutthe French agonizing over the intrinsicqualities and status of their language.However, they would be unwise tounderestimate the capacity of language togenerate national solidarity in thestruggle for economic and culturaldominance which permanentlycharacterizes international affairs. Thisis particularly so in France. Frenchpoliticians know this and exploit it topowerful effect.

30



For a general overview of myths aboutlanguage circulating in France, seeMarina Yaguello, Catalogue des ideesrerues sur la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1988).For a collection of studies focusingspecifically on the question of the clarityof French, see the journal Langue

franraise 75 (1987), Marc Wilmet (ed.).The question is discussed in English in'The myth of clarity', The Times LiterarySupplement, 4.6.62.

31

MYTH 5

English Spelling is Kattastroffik EdwardCarney

BRITISH WORKER: I can't work today.I've got diarrhoea. AMERICAN BOSS:Diarrhea? That's dreadful. You couldhave sent me a sick note. BRITISHWORKER: But I can't spell it.

Not many people can spell thisparticular word either in the British or inthe somewhat simplified Americanfashion. Yet if you know how an Englishword is pronounced and roughly what itmeans, you ought to be able to write itdown without much trouble. If you findthat you can't do that, then the writingsystem may well seem to be at fault.However, 'catastrophic' is a severe

word. Before rushing to condemn thewhole system, you ought to see whatEnglish spelling sets out to do and theextent to which it is consistent in doingit. In looking at spelling we need to keepsounds and letters quite separate. Soletters are cited in angled brackets andsymbols for speech-sounds are putbetween slant lines. The letters <said>spell /sed/ and <text> spells /tekst/.People often foul things up when talkingabout spelling because they do notdifferentiate between letters and sounds.It is best to use 'vowel' and 'consonant'only for sounds. The words fight, cry,shop, axe, coin, caught each contain twoconsonants and one vowel. If you wantto talk about letters then say 'vowel

letter' and' consonant letter'. Unusual re-spellings or mistakes are marked with anasterisk: * <stoopid>, * <langwidge>.

3 2

English Spelling is Kattastroffik

How the alphabet copes

The myth that there are 'five vowels' in

English refers to the vowel letters <a, e,i, 0, u> of the roman alphabet.Depending on your accent, you will findabout twenty vowels in English. Trycollecting them by changing the vowelsound in a series of otherwise identical-sounding words, noting each new vowelthat turns up. If you start with, say, lick,you can change the vowel sound and geta different word lack. Without botheringabout the spelling, carry on ringing thechanges of sound and you will turn uplock, luck, leak, lake, like. You will findthe vowel of leak again in feel, but thatframe will give you some new ones, asin fell, full, foil, fowl, foal, fall, and soon in other frames. Some twenty-fourconsonant sounds can be found by the

same method: bet, debt, get, jet, let, met,net, pet, set, vet, wet, yet. A differentframe will give you some new ones insheaf, sheath, sheathe, sheet, and evenchic (or sheik). Some less commonconsonants will be quite hard to find,such as the middle one in measure. In aGarden-of-Eden alphabetic writingsystem, you would have a single letterfor each speech-sound and one speech-sound for each single letter. Largenumbers of English words appear tofollow this strict pattern: best, dispel,dividend, film, frog, help, jam, limit,map, profit, rob, splint, tendril, win, yet,etc. But if we look further, we soon seethat too many speech-sounds are chasingtoo few letters. Most consonants, at least

some of the time, may have a single-letter 'alphabetic' spelling: <b, d, f, g, h,j, 1, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z>; IkJ has achoice of <c> or <k>. But there is often'divergence', where one speech -soundhas several different spellings and onespelling may stand for different speech-sounds. In spite of the available single-letter spelling <f>, the consonant at thebeginning of foot has more complexspellings in physics, enough, offer. The<s> in easy represents Iz/, the inquick represents Iwl and the <f> in ofrepresents Iv/. The consonant at thebeginning of yet, yellow also comes pre-packed as part of the vowel spelt <u(e»in cue, cute, pure. The most divergentconsonant is IkJ, which has different

spellings in catch, chemist, back,acclaim, chukker, key, quay, quite, Iraqand as part of the Iksl in axe.

33

Language Myths Six consonants do nothave a single-letter spelling of their ownand require at least two letters) such as<sh> or <ch>. These are the consonantsfound in the middle of the followingwords: method) bother) wishing)measure) patches and the consonantrepresented by <ng> in singer when noactual /g/ is pronounced.

Vowel markers

Five pairs of vowels can have single-letter spellings: <a> in scrap) scraping)<e> in met) meter) in pip) piper)<0> in cop) coping) in rub) ruby.There is also <y> in cryptic) cry) whichduplicates the spellings. Theexamples given in each pair represent a'short' and a 'long) vowel. For this letter-sharing to work) 'markers' are needed insome contexts to tell you which value theletter has. To get the long value of <a> ina single-syllable word) you have to adda marker <-e» as in scrape. To get the

short value before a suffix beginningwith a vowel like <-ing» you double afinal consonant letter) as in scrapping.So) with this marking) a single vowelletter can be used with two values inscrap) scrape) scrapping) scraping. Fourconsonants have unusual doubling. Thenormal doubling of /k/ in native words is<ck>: stoking) stocking; baker) backer.The consonant at the end of beach andbatch has <ch> as its 'single) spellingand <tch> as its 'doubled) spelling.Similarly we have <g( e) > as a 'single)spelling and <dg(e) > as a 'doubled)spelling in cadge) cage. A doubled <vv>occurs only in slang words: navvy)luvvies) revving. So the voweldifference in words such as level)

seven) devil and fever) even) evil is notmarked.

Keeping a spelling constant

Some words are made up of severalrecognizable building blocks. The wordreason is a single unit) whileun+reason+able+ness consists of four.The son bit is not such a unit. Englishspelling often tries to give

34

English Spelling is Kattastroffik each ofthese building blocks a constant spelling.A good example is the verbal ending <-ed>. This sounds quite different inwished, begged, and wanted. If you thinkthat they would be better speltphonetically as * <wisht>, * <begd>,you are losing the advantage of aconstant spelling for the regular past-tense ending. You may think it awkwardto have Isl spelt differently in sent andcent. That may be, but the <c> spellingof both IkJ in electric and Isl inelectricity keeps the spelling of that unitconstant. The best examples of thisprinciple are the long and short spellings

of single vowel letters seen in wordpairs such as:

atrocious - atrocity austere - austeritychaste - chastity crime - criminal

female - feminine grateful - gratitudelegal - legislate mine - mineral

omen - ominous reside - residual sole -solitude supreme - supremacy

In these pairs the basic long vowel isshortened when it comes three syllablesfrom the end of the word. Theseshortened vowels do not require markingwith a double consonant letter as *<omminous>, * <minneral> or *<sollitude>. Keeping a constant spellingmay involve the use of so-called 'silent'letters. The <g> does not represent Igl insign, but it does in derived formsresignation, signal, signature, signify.Similarly we have malign, malignant.Changing to * <sine>, * <maline> wouldspoil the visual link. Should we keep the<w> of two because twenty, twin,between are remotely related? Shouldshepherd be re-spelt as * <sheppard>, aregularized spelling when used as a

name? On the other hand the <g> ofgnarled, gnat, gnash, gnaw, gnome andthe <k> of knee, knife, knight, knock,know, knuckle are quite empty letters.They are the debris of history and arenever pronounced in any derived word(except for acknowledge). It would beno loss to change to * <narled>, * <nat>,* <nife>, * <nuckle>, etc.

35

Language Myths

Other markers

There are other important markers. The<-e> in bathe, breathe, loathe, wreathenot only marks the vowel as long butmarks the last consonant as 'voiced'rather than the 'voiceless' one in bath,breath, loath, wreath. Other examplesare lathe, lithe, swathe. Mouth andsmooth used as verbs lack this marking.The marker <-e> in browse, copse,lapse, please, tease, tense is used toprevent confusion with the plural formsbrows, cops, laps, pleas, teas, tens. Itmarks the browse group as single unitsand as such is called 'lexical <-e>'.

Some marking is needed to sort out thetwo distinct consonants represented by<g>. Before <a, 0, u> we have /g/, as ingap, got, gum and the consonant spelt<j> in jam before <i, e> in gin, gem. Theproblem is that there are someexceptions with /g/ before <i, e>: gear,geese, get, giddy, gild, gilt, gimmick,girl, give. Some words however haveused the letter as a marker for /g/ inguess, guest, guide, guild, guilt, guise,guitar. Its use is not very consistent,since guard, guarantee do not need any marker (cf. garden).

Look-alikes and sound-alikes

Words spelt the same but pronounceddifferently are called homo- graphs:<minute> may be an adjective ('a reallyminute insect') or a noun ('half aminute'). A minute steak has to beinterpreted by the reader: either a verysmall steak or one cooked for a minute.Words pronounced the same but speltdifferently are called homophones:<vain>, <vane>, <vein>, or <foul>,<fowl>, or <meat>, <meet>, <mete>.These variant vowel spellings clearlymake it harder for the writer, but it isoften claimed that such divergence is notalways a bad thing for the reader, sincedifferent words should look different on

the printed page. Even so, a goodnumber of words are both homographsand homophones: sounding the same andlooking the same. These are

36

English Spelling is Kattastroffiksometimes called homonyms. Forinstance, hamper represents twocompletely different unrelated words:either 'a basket' or 'to hinder'. Quarrymeans either 'a stone quarry' or 'a huntedanimal' . You will find two or more verydifferent words sharing each of the

following forms: bark, bellows, bound,cricket, fine, firm, fit, flat, hail, last,leaves, pants, plane, quail, rest, rose,stable. Check in a good dictionary if indoubt. The intended sense is usuallyobvious from the context. If spellingreform reduced divergence, it wouldclearly add to the number of suchhomonyms: 'a weather vane', 'a *vane inthe wrist' and 'very *vane' .

A muddy sort of vowel

A vowel may be weakened by lack ofstress. Unless you are speaking very

formally the highlighted vowel letters inthe following words all spell the sameindistinct /a/ sound: about, asparagus,author, caravan, courageous, driver,polite, together. This obscure vowel hasborrowed the name 'schwa' fromHebrew. As you can see, the spelling of/a/ varies widely, since it reflects whatthe vowel would be in a stressedcontext. You find /a/ equally in organ,political, president, but the spelling isprompted by the stressed vowels oforganic, politics, presiden- tial. Thespelling of the basic units is constant.

Clever stuff

Words borrowed from French havesometimes been altered by anxiousacademics looking beyond the Frenchspelling to the distant Latin original. Thewords debt, doubt, were medievalborrowings of French dette 'debt', doute'doubt' without a . The 'silent' was inserted in the sixteenth century toresemble the original Latin debitum,dubit- are, and to draw attention to theshared meaning of related English wordsderived from the same roots, such asdebit, dubitative. Before the eighteenthcentury, subtle was generally spelt<suttle>, just like regular scuttle, evenby authors such as Milton, a well-known

37

Language Myths Latin scholar. In spite ofthis the present spelling with an empty was adopted to match Latin subtilis)though the has never beenpronounced in English. Such interferenceis often inconsistent. The of receiptlinks it to receptacle) reception) butdeceit lacks a <p» in spite of deception.The <c> spelling of the early french loangrocer is a regular English spelling(racer) slicer) so why not have grossspelt * <groce> on the lines of race)truce) slice? As it is) gross is the only

English word in which <oss> does notsound as it does in boss) cross) doss)dross) floss. Ironically) the regular *<groce> was a common medievalspelling that did not survive. A similarmismatch is the french <gn> spelling ofalign) alignment. The base form inEnglish is <line> and not) as in french) *<ligne>. However) some dictionaries doallow the common -sense spelling<aline» <alinement>. The of crumb)crumby is only pronounced in crumble.Interestingly) when used as slang)crummy will have a straight phoneticspelling. Dummy likewise comes fromdumb.

A system of subsystems

The Old English of the Anglo-Saxonshas given us our basic stock of words:life) death) earth) heaven) sun) moon)day) night) black) white) broad) narrow)teach) learn) seek) find) eat) drink)food) meat) fire) wood) tree) eye) knee)hand) foot and so on. Since medievaltimes English has adopted culturalloanwords from french. The early onesincluded attach) certain) chance)conquer) cour- age) language) money)place) pleasant) royal) strange) sure)tender) value) and even a word ascommon now as very) which at first

meant 'true). Modern loanwords fromfrench come with their present frenchspelling and a close approximation tofrench pronunciation: collage)entourage) piquant) pirouette. Technicalterms for use in science are oftenderived from Latin or Greek. Aqueduct)subaquatic are Latinate counterparts inmeaning to ordinary English waterway)underwater. Similarly) Greek elementsmake up scientific terms such asphotosynthesis) polyglot) pyromania.

38

English Spelling is Kattastroffik The <-rrh( 0 )ea> of diarrhea ('through-flow')recurs in other Greek- based words suchas catarrh ('down-flow'), seborrhoea('grease-flow'). Scientists have to learna mini-language of such elements. Whensuch terms escape into common use theyoften cause spelling problems for theordinary person, as we saw at the outset.That leaves a whole array of loanwordsthat are variously 'exotic': kayak is fromEskimo, felucca is from Arabic by wayof Italian. The now familiar tobaccocomes from Arawak, an American-Indian language. These varioussubsystems are often marked by theirown peculiar spelling correspondences.If you know a yucca to be an exotic

plant, you will not spell it * <yucker>.The <ch> of chief, an early French loan,has the same sound as in native cheap,cheese. The modern loan chef retains itspresent French value of <ch> (like the<sh> of shop), as do chauffeur, charade.The spelling is not altered to * <shef>.This same <ch> will also spell Ikl inGreek-based words such as character,chemist, synchronic. Similarly, <ph> is a'Greek' spelling for If I , as indiaphragm, philosophy, phobia,symphony. Borrowing foreign spellingsalong with foreign loanwords is not theonly way of doing it. In Swedish, forexample, foreign loans are usually speltwith ordinary Swedish spelling. SoFrench loans coiffure, pirouette are spelt

in Swedish as <koaffyr> and <piruett>.If we decided to impose a single uniformsystem of regular alphabetic spellingsand ignore the origin of words, markersof cultural origin would be lost. Wouldthat matter?

Different speakers, different problems

English spelling has to cater for a widerange of English accents, which differ intheir goodness of fit with presentspelling conventions. If you pronounce<w> and <wh> the same in witch,which; weather, whether; wine, whine;

then you have to learn by rote whichindividual words have <wh- >. If, as inmuch of southern England, youpronounce court, cores, floor, formerly,source without an Irl and hence the sameas caught, cause, flaw, formally, sauce,you have to learn which individual

39

Language Myths words have an <r> andwhich do not. Most Scottish, Irish andAmerican speakers have kept their /r/ inall positions and so have a spellingadvantage here.

The price of history

The spelling system has to cater as bestit can for phonetic differences betweenspeakers. If people were encouraged tospell as they spoke, there would emergea number of different written dialects ofEnglish. Like flies in amber, Englishspelling has preserved a continuousrecord of cultural activity by borrowingforeign spelling conventions along withthe borrowed words. The spelling ofphlegm tells you that it is a scientificterm and that it is related to phlegmatic.But for those who are struggling towards

literacy, it might be better to spell it *<flem>.


For detailed references on topics such asspelling reform, spelling and dialect, thespelling of names, types of spellingmistake, homophones and homographsand an analysis in detail of spellingcorrespondences, see Edward Carney, ASurvey of English Spelling (London:Routledge, 1994). A short practicaltextbook by the same author is EnglishSpelling (London: Routledge, 1997) in

the series Language Workbooks.

40

MYTH 6

Women Talk Too Much Janet Holmes

Do women talk more than men?Proverbs and sayings in many languagesexpress the view that women are always

talking:

Women's tongues are like lambs' tails -they are never still. -English

The North Sea will sooner be foundwanting in water than a woman at a lossfor words. -Jutlandic

The woman with active hands and feet,marry her, but the woman withoveractive mouth, leave well alone. -Maori

Some suggest that while women talk,men are silent patient listeners.

When both husband and wife wear pantsit is not difficult to tell them apart - he isthe one who is listening. -American

Nothing is so unnatural as a talkativeman or a quiet woman. -Scottish

Others indicate that women's talk is not

valued but is rather considered noisy,irritating prattle:

Where there are women and geesethere's noise. -Japanese

Indeed, there is a Japanese characterwhich consists of three instances of thecharacter for the concept 'woman' andwhich translates as 'noisy'! My favouriteproverb, because it attributes not noisebut rather power to the woman speakeris this Chinese one:

41

Language Myths The tongue is the swordof a woman and she never lets it becomerusty.

So what are the facts? Do womendominate the talking time? Do menstruggle to get a word in edgewise, asthe stereotype suggests?

THE WIZARD OF ID

The evidence

Brant parker and oJ ohnny hart

Despite the widespread belief thatwomen talk more than men, most of theavailable evidence suggests just theopposite. When women and men aretogether, it is the men who talk most.Two Canadian researchers, DeborahJames and Janice Drakich, reviewedsixty-three studies which examined theamount of talk used by American women

and men in different contexts. Womentalked more than men in only twostudies. In New Zealand, too, researchsuggests that men generally dominate thetalking time. Margaret Frankencompared the amount of talk used byfemale and male 'experts' assisting afemale TV host to interview well-knownpublic figures. In a situation where eachof three interviewers was entitled to athird of the interviewers' talking time,the men took more than half on everyoccasion. I found the same patternanalysing the number of questions askedby participants in one hundred publicseminars. In all but seven, mendominated the discussion time. Wherethe numbers of women and men present

were about the same, men asked almosttwo-thirds of the questions during thediscussion. Clearly women were nottalking more than men in these contexts.

42

Women Talk Too Much

Even when they hold influentialpositions, women sometimes find it hardto contribute as much as men to adiscussion. A British company appointed

four women and four men to the eightmost highly paid management positions.The managing director commented thatthe men often patronized the women andtended to dominate meetings:

I had a meeting with a [female} salesmanager and three of my [male}directors once. . . it took about twohours. She only spoke once and one ofmy fellow directors cut across her andsaid (What Anne is trying to say Rogeris . . .' and I think that about sums it up.He knew better than Anne what she wastrying to say, and she never got anythingsaid.

There is abundant evidence that thispattern starts early. Many researchershave compared the relative amounts thatgirls and boys contribute to classroomtalk. In a wide range of communities,from kindergarten through primary,secondary and tertiary education, thesame pattern recurs - males dominateclassroom talk. So on this evidence wemust conclude that the stereotype of thegarrulous woman reflects sexistprejudice rather than objective reality.

Looking for an explanation

Why is the reality so different from themyth? To answer this question, we needto go beyond broad generalizations andlook more carefully at the patternsidentified. Although some teachers claimthat boys are 'by nature more spiritedand less disciplined', there is noevidence to suggest that males arebiologically programmed to talk morethan females. It is much more likely thatthe explanation involves social factors.

What is the purpose of the talk? Onerelevant clue is the fact that talk servesdifferent functions in different contexts.

Formal public talk is often aimed atinforming people or persuading them toagree to a particular point of view (e.g.

43

Language Myths political speeches)television debates) fadio intefviews)public lectures) etc.). Public talk is oftenundertaken by people who wish to claimor confirm some degree of public status.Effective talk in public and in the mediacan enhance your social status - aspoliticians and other public performefsknow well. Getting and holding the

flOOf is fegarded as desirable) andcompetition fOf the flOOf in suchcontexts is common. (Thefe is also somefisk) of COUfse) since a poorperfofmance can be damaging. )Classroom research suggests that moretalk is associated with higher socialstatus or power. Many studies haveshown that teachers (regardless of theirgender) tend to talk for about two-thirdsof the available time. But the boysdominate the felatively small share ofthe talking time that remains fOf pupils.In this context) whefe talk is clearlyvalued) it appears that the person withmost status has the right to talk most. Theboys may therefore be assefting a claimto highef status than the girls by

appropriating the majority of the timeleft for pupil talk.

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The way women and men behave in

fOfmal meetings and seminars providesfurther support fOf this explanation.Evidence collected by

44

Women Talk Too Much

American, British and New Zealandresearchers shows that men dominate thetalking time in committee meetings, staffmeetings, seminars and task-orienteddecision-making groups. If you are

scepti- cal, use a stopwatch to time theamount of talk contributed by womenand men at political and communitymeetings you attend. This explanationproposes that men talk more than womenin public, formal contexts because theyperceive participating and verbally con-tributing in such contexts as an activitywhich enhances their status, and menseem to be more concerned withasserting status and power than womenare. By contrast, in more privatecontexts, talk usually serves interper-sonal functions. The purpose of informalor intimate talk is not so much statusenhancement as establishing ormaintaining social contact with others,making social connections, developing

and reinforcing friendships and intimaterelationships. Interestingly, the fewstudies which have investigated informaltalk have found that there are fewerdifferences in the amount contributed bywomen and men in these contexts(though men still talked more in nearly athird of the informal studies reviewed byDeborah James and Janice Drakich).Women, it seems, are willing to talkmore in relaxed social contexts,especially where the talk functions todevelop and maintain socialrelationships. Another piece of evidencethat supports this interpretation is thekind of talk women and men contributein mixed-sex discussions. Researchersanalysing the functions of different

utterances have found that men tend tocontribute more information andopinions, while women contribute moreagreeing, supportive talk, more of thekind of talk that encourages others tocontribute. So men's talk tends to bemore referential or informative, whilewomen's talk is more supportive andfacilitative. Overall, then, women seemto use talk to develop personal relation-ships and maintain family connectionsand friendships more often than to makeclaims to status or to directly influenceothers in public contexts. Of course,there are exceptions, as MargaretThatcher, Benazir Bhutto and JennyShipley demonstrate. But, until recently,many women seem not to have perceived

themselves as appropriate contributorsto public, formal talk.

45

Language Myths In New Zealand weidentified another context where womencon- tributed more talk than men.Interviewing people to collect samplesof talk for linguistic analysis, we foundthat women were much more likely thanmen (especially young men) to bewilling to talk to us at length. Forexample, Miriam Meyerhoff asked agroup of ten young people to describe a

picture to a female and to a maleinterviewer. It was made quite clear tothe interviewees that the more speechthey produced the better. In this situation,the women contributed signifi- cantlymore speech than the men, both to themale and to the female in terviewer. Inthe private but semi-formal context of aninterview, then, women contributed moretalk than men. Talk in this context couldnot be seen as enhancing the status of thepeople interviewed. The interviewerswere young people with no influenceover the interviewees. The explanationfor the results seems to be that thewomen were being more cooperativethan the men in a context where moretalk was explicitly sought by the

interviewer.

Social confidence If you know a lotabout a particular topic, you aregenerally more likely to be willing tocontribute to a discussion about it. Sofamiliarity or expertise can also affectthe amount a person contributes to aparticular discussion. In one interestingstudy the researcher supplied particularpeople with extra information, makingthem the 'experts' on the topic to bediscussed. Regardless of gender, these'experts' talked more in the subsequentdiscussions than their uninformedconversational partners (though male

'experts' still used more talking time inconversation with uninformed womenthan female 'experts' did withuninformed men). Looking at people'scontributions to the discussion section ofseminars, I found a similar effect fromexpertise or topic familiarity. Womenwere more likely to ask questions andmake comments when the topic was onethey could claim expert knowledgeabout. In a small seminar on the currentstate of the economy, for instance,several women economists who hadbeen invited to attend contributed to

4 6

Women Talk Too Much

the discussion, making this one of thevery few semInars where women'scontributions exceeded men's. Anotherstudy compared the relative amount oftalk of spouses. Men dominated theconversations between couples withtraditional gender roles andexpectations, but when the women wereassociated with a feminist organizationthey tended to talk more than theirhusbands. So feminist women were morelikely to challenge traditional genderroles in interaction. It SeelTIS possible

that both these factors - expert status andfeminist philosophy - have the effect ofdeveloping women's social confidence.This explanation also fits with the factthat women tend to talk more with closefriends and family, when women are inthe majority, and also when they areexplicitly invited to talk (in aninterview, for example) .

Perceptions and implications

If social confidence explains the greatercontributions of women in some socialcontexts, it is worth asking why girls in

school tend to contribute less than boys.Why should they feel unconfident in theclassroom? Here is the answer whichone sixteen-year-old gave:

Sometimes I feel like saying that Idisagree, that there are other ways oflooking at it, but where would that getme? My teacher thinks I'm showing off,and the boys jeer. But if I pretend I don'tunderstand, it's very different. Theteacher is sympathetic and the boys arehelpful. They really respond if they canshow YO U how it is done, but there'snothing but 'aggro' if you give any signsof showing THEM how it is done.

Talking in class is often perceived as'showing off', especially if it is girl-talk.Until recently, girls have preferred tokeep a low profile rather than attractnegative attention. Teachers are oftenunaware of the gender distribution oftalk in their classrooms. They usuallyconsider that they give equal amounts ofattention to girls and boys, and it is onlywhen they make a tape

47

Language Myths recording that theyrealize that boys are dominating theinteractions. Dale Spender, anAustralian feminist who has been astrong advocate of female rights in thisarea, noted that teachers who tried torestore the balance by deliberately'favouring' the girls were astounded tofind that despite their efforts theycontinued to devote more time to theboys in their classrooms. Another studyreported that a male science teacher whomanaged to create an atmosphere inwhich girls and boys contributed moreequally to discussion felt that he wasdevoting 90 per cent of his attention tothe girls. And so did his male pupils.They complained vociferously that the

girls were getting too much talking time.In other public contexts, too, such asseminars and debates, when women andmen are deliberately given an equalamount of the highly valued talking time,there is often a perception that they aregetting more than their fair share. DaleSpender explains this as follows:

The talkativeness of women has beengauged in comparison not with men butwith silence. Women have not beenjudged on the grounds of whether theytalk more than men, but of whether theytalk more than silent women.

In other words, if women talk at all, thismay be perceived as 'too much' by menwho expect them to provide a silent,decorative background in many socialcontexts. This may sound outrageous, butthink about how you react whenprecocious children dominate the talk atan adult party. As women begin to makeinroads into formerly 'male' domainssuch as business and professionalcontexts, we should not be surprised tofind that their contributions are notalways perceived positively or evenaccurately.

Conclusion

We have now reached the conclusionthat the question 'Do women talk morethan men?' can't be answered with astraight 'yes' or 'no'. The answer israther, 'It all depends.' It depends onmany different

48

Women Talk Too Much

factors, including the social context inwhich the talk is taking place, the kind oftalk involved and the relative socialconfidence of the speakers, which isaffected by such things as their socialroles (e.g. teacher, host, interviewee,wife) and their familiarity with the topic.It appears that men generally talk morein formal, public contexts whereinformative and persuasive talk is highlyvalued, and where talk is generally theprerogative of those with some societalstatus and has the potential forincreasing that status. Women, on theother hand, are more likely to contributein private, informal interactions, wheretalk more often functions to maintainrelationships, and in other situations

where for various reasons they feelsocially confident. Finally, and mostradically, we might question theassumption that more talk is always agood thing. 'Silence is golden,' says theproverb, and there are certainly contextsin all cultures where silence is moreappropriate than talk, where words areregarded as inadequate vehicles forfeelings, or where keeping silent is anexpression of appreciation or respect.Sometimes it is the silent participantswho are the powerful players. In somecontexts the strong silent male is anadmired stereotype. However, whilethis is true, it must be recognized thattalk is very highly valued in westernculture. It seems likely, then, that as long

as holding the floor is equated withinfluence, the complexities of whetherwomen or men talk most will continue tobe a matter for deba te.


For more detailed information includingmore details about the examplesdiscussed, see the following sources:Deborah James and Janice Drakich,'Understanding gender differences inamount of talk' in Gender andConversational Interaction, DeborahTannen (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1993, pp. 281- 312); JanetHolmes, Women, Men and Politeness(London: Longman, 1995, chs. 2 and 6);Dale Spender, Man Made Language(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,1980); and Dale Spender and ElizabethSarah (eds.), Learning to Lose (London:The Women's Press, 1982).

49

MYTH 7

Some Languages are Harder than Others

Lars-Gunnar Andersson

Many people speak of languages as easyor difficult, meaning that it is easy ordifficult to learn these languages. Peopledo not usually talk about their mothertongues as being easy or difficult forthem as native speakers to use. Swedishschoolchildren may say that English ismuch easier than German becauseEnglish does not have as much grammar(see also Myth 10: Some LanguagesHave No Grammar). Immigrants can be

heard saying that English, Swedish,German or some other language is quitedifficult. Linguists prefer not to commenton such matters globally. There is, theywould say, no single scale from easy todifficult, and degree of difficulty can bediscussed on many levels. The difficultyof learning a language as a foreignlanguage refers to some kind of relativedifficulty: how hard is it to get therefrom here? The real question posed here,though, is whether some languages aresimpler than others in some absolutesense, in terms of their own systemsrather than in terms of some externalperspective. It is quite obvious that it iseasier for a Swede to learn Norwegianthan Polish. For a Czech it is easier to

learn Polish than Norwegian. Swedishand Norwegian are similar because theyare closely related linguistically andalso because they have existed in closecultural contact for several centuries.Correspondingly, the Slavic languagesCzech and Polish are close to each other,as are the Bantu languages Zulu andXhosa in South Africa and the Dravidianlanguages Tamil and Telegu in southernIndia. This means that if you haveEnglish as your mother tongue, it iseasier to learn Germanic languages likeDutch and German than it would be tolearn Slavic languages like Polish andRussian or Turkic languages like Kazakhand Tatar. The major reason for this is

5°


that the vocabularies have so manysimilarities in both form and content inthe related languages. Let us look at thecomponents of our linguistic knowledge,and let us assume that our knowledge ofa language consists of the followingthree parts: grammar, vocabulary andrules of usage. This means that if youhave English as your first language, you

have an English grammar in your head.This grammar makes your pronunciationand your word order similar to that ofother English speakers. You also have anEnglish vocabulary at your disposal. Wedon't always find the right word whenwe speak, but very often we do(compare how hard it can be to find theright word when speaking a foreignlanguage) . You also have a number ofrules of usage at your disposal. Theserules tell you when to speak and when tokeep quiet, how to address a person,how to ask questions and how to conducta telephone conversation. The difficultthing about learning a language is thevocabulary, whether learning one'snative language or learning a foreign

language. I make this claim even though Irealize that millions of foreign-languagelearners have cursed the three gendersand four cases of German grammar andthe inflection of the french auxiliaries.Still, vocabulary takes longer to learnthan either of the other facets mentioned.Each individual word is not difficult tolearn, but when it is a matter ofthousands of words, it does take a lot oftime. We learn the grammar of our nativelanguage before we start school, but wework on our vocabulary as long as welive. Vocabulary is, then, the mostdifficult part and that which takes thelongest time to learn. In the absolutesense, a language with few words shouldbe easier to learn than one with many,

but we cannot look at it that way. Weneed words to express our thoughts, andwith fewer words some thoughts will beharder to express. Nobody learns all thewords in a language, not even in his orher native language. Nor can anyonespecify exactly how many words thereare in a language; it is even difficult todefine exactly what a word is. But to putthings into perspective, we can say thatmodern dictionaries for English, Germanand other languages containapproximately 100,000 words. The term'rules of usage' refers to a number ofthings, for example rules for how andwhen one should speak and rules forwho gets

51

Language Myths the floor in varioussocial situations. The principle isprobably that increased culturalproximity leads to increasingly similarrules of usage. Lees look at an exampleof this line of thought. For example, thevocabulary of Dutch is much easier foran English speaker than that of Irish orWelsh: so many Dutch words closelyresemble English ones because theselanguages are so closely related. On theother hand the rules of usage areprobably equally simple (or hard) in

Dutch and Irish, and this is due to thecultural similarities of the WesternEuropean countries. In the absolutesense, a language without complicatedrules for politeness and indirect styles ofexpression should be easier to learn.Lees look at an example. A Britishlecturer says, 'Are you sure the babywill be all right in here?' to a Swedishstudent who has brought her baby alongto a lecture. The student replies 'Sure, noproblem,' but the lecturer probablyintended the question as a request for thestudent to leave the room with the baby.This sort of misunderstanding is notuncommon when people from differentcultures communicate and can beexplained by different rules of usage. An

easy language ought to be one with fewrules for indirectness and a simplesystem for expressing politeness. In mostof Europe, there are pronouns of powerand solidarity (du-Sie in German, tu-vous in French and ty-vy in Russian).Nowadays, neither English nor Swedishmakes use of this distinction. Thus, whenit comes to form of address, English issimpler than either German or French.On the other hand, there might be otherways to signal social distance which aremore subtle and, therefore, just as hardto learn, for example, choosing betweenJohnnie, John, Smith, Mr Smith and soon. It is difficult to say if there really arelanguages that are easier than others withrespect to rules of usage. Natural

languages are not only used to transferinformation from one individual toanother but also to indicate and topreserve social distinctions. And thereare social distinctions in all societies.However, a language like Esperanto,which was constructed specifically tosim- plify communication betweenlanguage groups, is in all likelihoodeasier than others in this particularrespect. For a language learner, thewriting system and the orthography(rules for spelling) are major obstacles.Europeans have to spend a

52


lot of time learning how to use theArabic) Chinese or Japanese writingsystems. These difficulties are notconsidered here) and the main argumentfor this is that the writing system and thespelling can be considered as external tothe language. It is) in principle) possibleto switch from one writing system toanother without changing anything in thelanguage structure. Turkish) forexample) was written in the Arabicscript before 1928. Since then it hasbeen written in the Latin alphabet. This)

of course) makes it much easier foranyone accustomed to the Latin alphabet.As far as spelling is concerned) anorthography following the principle thatthere should be a one- to-one correspon-dence between sounds and letters issimpler than one not meeting thiscondition. European languages with awritten language history going back athousand years or more have morecomplicated orthogra- phies thanlanguages which have only recently beenreduced to writing. In making a neworthography) one would not invent muteletters) for example. If we are lookingfor an absolute measure of linguisticsimplicity) we should find it in the fieldof grammar. We can begin by

considering the sound systems oflanguages. It must surely be the case thatthe fewer vowels) the fewer consonantsand the simpler syllabic structure alanguage has) the simpler the soundsystem is. Hawaiian has thirteendistinctive sounds ('phonemes) inlinguistic terminology) of which eightare consonants and five are vowels.Since the language also has strict rulesabout the syllable structure (almost allsyllables have to consist of oneconsonant and one vowel in that order)the total number of possible syllables inthe language is only 162. CompareEnglish) where consonants can begrouped together both before and afterthe vowel as in screams and splints. Of

all the languages of the world) Hawaiianhas one of the simplest sound systems.At the other end of the scale we find theKhoisan languages (previously known asBushman and Hottentot languages).According to a recently publisheddescription) !X66 (that is actually how itis spelt) a language spoken in SouthernBotswana) has 156 phonemes) of which78 are rather unusual sounds calledclicks) 50 are ordinary consonants and28 are vowels. Studies of otherlanguages in the area have also arrivedat phoneme counts of around 150. Thesound systems of these languages

53

Language Myths are extremely complex.We can rest assured that thepronunciation of Hawaiian would beeasier to learn than that of the Khoisanlan- guages. We can also sum up bysaying that it actually seems to makesense to place the languages of the worldalong a scale from simple sound systemsto difficult. English takes a place nearthe middle of such a scale, where mostof the languages of the world alsocrowd. Hence, most languages areequally difficult as far as the soundsystem is concerned, but there are some

examples of considerably simpler andmore difficult languages at this level.There are classifications of thelanguages of the world according to howthey deal with inflection and derivation,that is, patterns for constructing wordsby the addition of word elements('morphemes' in linguistic terminology).A word such as teachers can be dividedinto the following morphemes teach-er-s, where -er is a derivational morphemeand -s an inflectional morpheme. Wespeak of analytic languages with little orno inflection and derivation andsynthetic languages with a large degreeof inflection and derivation. We can saythat English is more analytic thanSwedish and that Swedish is more

analytic than German, but none of theselanguages are among the extreme cases.Vietnamese is extremely analytic andGreenlandic is extremely synthetic, justto mention two examples. In absoluteterms one could say that analyticlanguages are easier than synthetic lan-guages, and there are two arguments forthis claim. Firstly, children always learna more analytic version of their nativelanguage first; inflectional andderivational suffixes are learned lateron. Secondly, pidgin languages fromaround the world are typically analytic.By pidgin languages we mean contactlanguages that arise or developspontaneously. Most pidgin languagesare found in the old European colonies

around the world. One such language isFanagalo, which has been used as acontact language between whites, blacksand coloureds in southern Africa sincethe nineteenth century, not least in themining industry and in domesticservices. Here are some examples froman introduction to the language. What weare interested in here is the grammaticalstructure of the sentences, not what theyreveal about the social situation in pre-independent South Africa.

54


Wena azi 10 golof? You know the golf?'Have you caddied before?'

Mina hayifuna 10 mampara mfan I not-want the useless boy 'I don't want auseless boy.'

Yebo nkos, mina festklas kedi Yes Sir, Ifirst -class caddie 'Yes, Sir, I'm a first-class caddie.'

Tata mabol, yena doti, susa yena nga 10manzi Take balls, they dirty, wash themin the water 'These balls are dirty, cleanthem in water.'

There are several things making thislanguage much simpler than any of thelanguages from which it has beenformed. Mina means both I and me, yenaboth they and them. To expresspossession, ga- is placed before theword: gamina 'mine' and gayena 'their'.The plural is always formed by placingma- in front of the word: bol, 'ball' andmabol, 'balls'. It is simpler to have one

plural ending instead of several, asEnglish does. The definite article isinvariably 10, which is easier thanhaving a number of different articles asin German, where there are threegenders with different articles (der, dieand das) or French, with two genders (Ieand la). The list of simple and generalrules of the language could be mademuch longer. The world's most famouspidgin language speaker is Tarzan. Whenhe says 'Me Tarzan, you Jane,' he uses asimplified version of English. SinceTarzan has been translated and publishedin several languages, we could travelaround the globe buying Tarzanmagazines and in that way get animpression of what people regard as

simplified versions of their respectivelan- guages. A safe guess is that Tarzanspeaks a more analytic version of thelanguage than his readership and in eachcase Tarzan is likely to have fewerforms in his morphology than thereadership. One could, of course, objectthat pidgin languages are not real

55

Language Myths languages becausenobody has them as a mother tongue. Onthe other hand, pidgin languagessometimes become the mother tongue of

a group of people. They are then calledcreole languages. During the process ofcreolization, different complications inthe grammar (as well as in the lexicon)will arise, but for a number ofgenerations these creole languages willremain relatively simple. There is thengood reason to believe that analyticlanguages are easier than synthetic. Amore general conclusion could be that itis actually possible to speak of easierand harder languages with regard togrammar. Once we look away frompidgins and creoles, which may bethought of as developing languages, wefind another problem with talking aboutsimplicity. Languages are not uniformlysimple or difficult. We might think that

Finnish is simpler than English becauseit has no articles (words correspondingto a and the); on the other hand, we mightthink it is more difficult than Englishbecause it has an elaborate system ofinflections on nouns. Simplicity in onepart of the language may be balanced bycomplexity in another part. In fact,matters are less straightforward thaneven this suggests, because it is notnecessarily the case that we can judge inany sensible way what is or is notsimple. For example, some languages -Maori is one - allow only one adjectiveto modify a noun at a time. So, totranslate the English I saw a fat blackcat, you would have to say theequivalent of something like I saw a fat

cat. It was black. Is the English systemsimpler because it uses fewer words?Or is the other system simpler because ithas a less complex structure of modifi-cation? It is not clear that such questionscan be meaningfully answered, and sonot clear that we can give overallmeasurements of simplicity in syntax.Considering what has been said above,the myth that some languages are harderthan others is not merely a myth. In afairly complicated way, and in certainrespects, some languages are harder thanothers. Furthermore, there is no singlescale for measuring simplicity inlanguage; there are, at least, a handful ofsuch scales. The real problems emergewhen we try to figure out the possible

trading relationships between thedifferent scales. For example: doessimplification on one scale lead tocomplication on another? Summing up:Some languages

56


appear to be harder than others, but it ishard to explain exactly how and to whatextent.


Many of the facts about the languages ofthe world have been taken from DavidCrystal's The Cambridge Encyclopediaof Language (Cam- bridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987). The Fanagalosentences are taken from J. D. Bold'sFanagalo: Phrase-Book, grammar anddictionary (Pretoria: J. L. van Schaik,15th edn, 1990). This book is referred toin L.-G. Andersson and T. Janson'sLanguages in Botswana (Gaborone:Longman, Botswana, 1997), from whichmost of the facts about African languages

are taken. The technical terms used, suchas 'phoneme', 'morpheme', 'orthography','analytic' and 'synthetic', can be found inmost introductory books aboutlinguistics.

57

MYTH 8

Children Can't Speak or Write ProperlyAny More James Milroy

For centuries now there have beenrecurrent complaints about the state ofthe English language. These complaintsalways seem to assume that the languageis in decline and that this decline isassociated with moral decline. Certainsections of society are normally heldresponsible for this decline) and oneform that the complaint tradition can takeis to associate linguistic decline with theuse of the language by the youngergeneration. Young people) it is said) areliable to misuse the language) or notlearn it properly: therefore) everythingpossible must be done to arrest thisdecline; for example) by tightening up in

some way on language teaching inschools. In recent decades) there havebeen many complaints about what arebelieved to be declining educationalstandards) and in Britain suchcomplaints have been fuelled by thegovernment's proposals for a 'NationalCurriculum). It is typically claimed thatthe schools are failing in their duty toteach children how to use Englishproperly - both in speaking and inwriting - and usually further claimed thatthis is due to modern teaching methods)which are said to be too permissive.Traditional methods) involvingclassroom drills and rote learning ofcorrect spelling and grammar) arebelieved to have been in the past more

effective in achieving and maintaininghigh standards of speaking and writingamong children. Although it is of courseimportant that educational standards inschools should be carefully maintained)there is in reality nothing to suggest thattoday) s youngsters are less competent atspeaking and writing their nativelanguage than older generations ofchildren were. Their ability to speak thelanguage is just as good) and theirability to read and write it is) almostcertainly) a great deal better on average.

58

Children Can't Speak or Write ProperlyAny More Lees first consider thequestion of literacy. Is there any reallypersuasive evidence that literacystandards have declined? In 1850 inEngland and Wales 31 per cent ofbridegrooms and 46 per cent of bridescould not write their names in themarriage register. By 1900 thepercentage had declined to 3 per cent,and this reduction was largely a result ofthe 1870 Education Act, in which theBritish Government recognized the needfor functional literacy among theworking population and encouraged theteaching of the three Rs to everyone.Functional literacy means only theability to read and write for practical

purposes - understanding writtenmessages from employers, for example,or writing simple instructions to otherworkers. It does not mean the ability toread Shakespeare with pleasure orpartake in a high literary culture. If 97per cent of the people could write theirown names in 1900, it does not followthat they were all highly literate. It islikely that many of these people couldnot reliably spell 'difficult' words likeaccommodate and desiccate, keep upwith international news in The Times oreven write a fluent personal letter. Thenational aim had been to achievefunctional literacy only, as this was theminimum necessary for the demands of amodern nation. Those who complain

today that standards of literacy aredeclining assume tacitly that there was aGolden Age in the past when ourchildren, for the most part, could readand write more competently than theycan today, and the complaints fit into apattern of complaint literature that hasbeen with us since the eighteenth century.In these complaints, linguistic decline isassociated with moral decline, and thisis the most powerful myth of all. ForJonathan Swift in 1712, it was the'Licentiousness which entered with theRestoration [1660]' that infected ourmorals and then corrupted our language.In the nineteenth century, the poet G. M.Hopkins found 'this Victorian English. . .a bad business' - a language in decline.

As for today, a headline in the Observer(4 August 1996) proclaims that 'writtenEnglish is dying amid jargon, obscenityand ignorance,' and complaints of thiskind can be found frequently in Britishand American newspapers. If we wereto accept all this, we would have toaccept that since the language has beendeclining since 1700, it must by nowhardly be fit for use in writing a chapterin a book like this. Concern

59

Language Myths about our children's

literacy and use of language generally isan aspect of this myth of moral andlinguistic decline - as our childrenrepresent the future of the language, andthe moral decline is often said to beassociated with permissiveness inteaching method. There is, however, atacit assumption in present-daycomplaints that things were better in theGood Old Days of strong n10raldiscipline. There was a Golden Agewhen children could write much betterthan they can now. Present-daycomplaints are never clear as to theGolden Age when children were moreliterate than they are now. When could ithave been? Presumably, it cannot havebeen the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries, when - it seems - nearly 40per cent of brides and bride- groomscould not write their own names.Perhaps the Golden Age envisaged ismore recent than this: 1970? 1950?1940? But again, when we look back atthose times, it seems that much the samekinds of complaint about decliningstandards were current then. Moreimportantly, it certainly does not seemthat general standards of literacy werehigher then than they are now. In Britainthe 1970S were the time of the BlackPapers, edited by C. B. Cox and A. E.Dyson, which, among other things, drewattention to what were thought to be lowstandards ofliteracy in teacher-trainingcolleges. These complaints made quite a

strong impact, but from our present pointof view, they suggest that we will notfind the Golden Age in the 1970S. SOcould the Golden Age perhaps be thepost-war period - approximately 1945-60? One important development inBritain around that time was the 1944Education Act. Before 1944 thepopulation of England and Wales wasnot guaran- teed a secondary education,and tertiary education was blocked to allbut the rich and a few winners ofuniversity scholarships. A few peoplewere highly literate and well versed ingreat literature, but not the majority.Higher education was, frankly, elitistand a preserve of the few. Indeed, duringthe recent debates about the National

Curriculum, there were some letters tothe newspapers questioning whetherthere really had been a Golden Age inthose years. Here is one:

For some time I have been wondering ifI was suffering from an acute shortage ofmemory. I remember many children inmy primary school

60

Children Can't Speak or Write Properly

Any More

who were unable to read, and rememberbeing shocked when called up fornational service to find myself in aplatoon in which the majority ofmembers were illiterate. . . Howconsoling therefore to read. . . of DirkBogarde's experience: 'The greatmajority of what was called the "Intake"at Catterick Camp was, to myastonishment, illiterate.' When exactlywas the time that we hear so much about,when children could all read and writeand do everything so much better thantoday's pupils? -Letter in the Observer, 4

April 1993

As national service ended in 1961, thisis likely to refer to the 1950S. The armyrecruits had presumably been educatedat secondary modern schools and hadleft at fourteen or fifteen years of age.The 1944 Education Act had guaranteedthem a minimum secondary education,but at the bottom end of a selectiveelitist system and for a shorter time thannow. Whether they had been taught toread and write by 'phonics' or by the'look -and -say' method or in any otherway seems, sadly, to have been besidethe point for these young men. There can

be little doubt that general standards ofliteracy were lower in 1945- 60 thanthey are now. There are other generalindications that standards of literacy inBritain are likely to have risen since theSecond World War. In 1950 there werefewer than twenty universities in Britain,with much smaller student bodies thannow, and since then the pendulum hasswung away from selective, elitistaccess to tertiary education towards amass tertiary education system open toall who can benefit from it. There is alsomore public accountability within thesystem, so that its defects are more opento scrutiny. More than 30 per cent of therelevant age-group is now in tertiaryeducation. It is unlikely that all of these

are literary wizards, but it is equallyunlikely that any of them can be calledilliterate. What has happened is that themodern world requires a much higherlevel of functional literacy from agreater proportion of the population thanin the past. We are expected to meethigher standards. It does not of coursefollow that everyone will be certain ofthe spellings of supersede anddilapidate: even the most highly literatehave trouble with the spelling of somesuch words, simply because ourorthography is complicated. We cannotmeasure 'literacy'

61

Language Myths by singling out suchexamples (although this is what thecomplainers normally do). Much of thejournalistic commentary on thisimportant question has been extremelybiased and usually driven by a desire toreturn to traditional methods of rotelearning in schools. It has been full ofoversimplification and, at times,ignorance. In general, the problem (ifsuch it is) has been presented in politicalterms, and those who do not exclusivelyadvocate phonics and rote learning of'difficult' spellings are presented as left-

wing trendies (or, in the USA, 'liberals').The imagery is that of a battlefield inwhich the forces of good and evil fightfor the souls of our children. In theObserver (8 September 1996), MelaniePhillips presents the question in theseterms, advocating rote learning and usingheadings such as 'Revenge of the TrendyTeachers'. These 'trendies' turn out to bea group of 576 university teachers ofEnglish (this must be a wide cross-section), and the letter she quotes fromthem is entirely reasonable. But she doesnot spare us the information that it wasdrafted by a 'Marxist', even though thereis nothing Marxist in the reasoning of theletter. So we know what we aresupposed to think of the letter before we

read it. We can dismiss the opinion of576 teachers of English and accept theopinion of one highly opinionatedjournalist, who gives no reliableevidence for her views. As for left- andright-wing politics - the British left-wingjournal the New Statesman has oftenbeen outspoken in its defence oflinguistic correctness, and one of thebest-known advocates of 'liberalism' inlanguage use is reported to have been asupporter of M ussolini. It is unhelpful totreat a serious question of this kind as ifit were a political football. Teachingmethods should certainly be debated, butthere is no reason to believe thatexclusive reliance on classroom drillsand rote learning was particularly

successful in the past. There was noGolden Age. Clearly, if it were true thatonly systematic drills and tests would beeffective in the teaching of literacy, wewould have no excuse for not basing ourteaching on them. But it does not seem tobe true. My own experience is relevant,I think. I attended primary school in the1940S in a rural area of Scotland. Theheadmistress believed in the

62

Children Can't Speak or Write ProperlyAny More

good old methods. Almost every day wehad a spelling test (having been giventwenty spellings to learn). When the testswere marked) the teacher drew a chalkline on the floor and invited those whohad twenty correct spellings to comeforward. Those who got one wrong andtwo wrong were also invited to stand onchalk lines. When it got to three wrong)however) she would loudly announce'And now the failures!' A large group ofsheepish children would come forward,and the teacher would then strap them onthe hand - one by one - with perhaps twoor three blows for the worst spellers. Itwas virtually always the same children

who got the strap) and there is no reasonto believe that these 'good old methods'were effective at all) except to punishand demoralize dyslexics and slowlearners. 'fhey never improved. This maybe an extreme example) but we shouldbear in mind that the advocates ofmaximum reliance on these methodsnever give any evidence that they reallywork and never advocate safeguards toprevent maltreatment and discrimination.If there is no evidence for decliningstandards of literacy) what are we to sayof children's speech? This is a morecomplicated question) beset with evenmore misunderstanding than the questionof literacy. The first point that must beunderstood is that) whereas children

normally learn to read and write atschool, they do not learn to speak atschool. The idea that schools areresponsible for teaching the basics ofspoken English is therefore a myth.Spoken language is acquired withoutexplicit instruction) and by the time thechild goes to school, the basic grammarand pronunciation of the variety oflanguage that the child is exposed to hasbeen largely acquired. The complaintsabout declining standards of speakingare not normally about the child's abilityto 'speak English' (although they areoften phrased in this way) but about thevariety of English that he or she speaks.Like complaints about decliningliteracy) they are largely untrue. What is

at issue is not the child's competence inspeaking English) but his/hercompetence in speaking a variety knownas 'standard English). This is equated inthe public mind with 'correct' English.There are two points that must be madeabout this variety. First) it is not welldefined as a spoken variety (it isessentially a written variety)

63

Language Myths and judgements aboutcorrectness in speech are therefore oftenmade on the basis of what is correct in

writing. The 'rules' of speech are,however, very different from the 'rules'of writing. Second, in so far as it can bedescribed as a spoken variety, standardspeech is essentially the speech of theupper and upper-middle classes - aminority of the population. There is avery strong social dimension, and 'non-standard' accents and dialects are openlydiscriminated against and 'corrected',even though most people in Britainspeak partly non- standard varieties.Generally, these varieties are said to be'ungrammatical'. However, theacceptability or otherwise of thesevarieties is a purely social matter andhas nothing to do with grammar.Recently it has been announced that the

government is to introduce 'grammar'tests for fourteen-year-olds. Among thegrammatical 'errors' listed in an articlein the Independent (19 June 1996) arethe following: 'She come to my house';'We was going to the shops'; 'I threw itout the window'; 'The government thinkthey can do what they like.' Of these, thelast one is actually standard BritishEnglish, which allows a choice betweensingular and plural verbs for certaincollective nouns (such as government),but to get things wrong in this way istypical of the general incompetence oflanguage prescriptivists. The others arewidespread in spoken British Englishand are grammatical in non-standardvarieties. Their acceptability, as we

have noted, is a social matter. If theywere common usage of the upper-middleclasses (as we was used to be), theywould be called 'grammatical'. It isprobable, however, that the immediatereason for including sentences of thiskind in 'grammar' tests is that they arenot acceptable in writing today, eventhough many of them were acceptable toShakespeare. However, it is alsoproposed to teach children how to speakstandard English in the belief that thiswill be good for them - it will give themmore chances in life. If this is to be doneby administering 'grammar' tests of thekind that seem to be contemplated, itwill not work. There is in BritishEnglish today a discernible tendency to

level out regional differences in speech,and this process will continue regardlessof grammar tests in schools. The latter infact will merely continue the process ofdiscriminating against non-standardspeakers. In an age

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Children Can't Speak or Write ProperlyAny More

when discrimination in terms of race)

colour) religion or gender is not publiclyacceptable) the last bastion of overtsocial discrimination will continue to bea person)s use of language.

Source

Carlo M. Cipolla) Literacy andDevelopment in the West (Harmonds-worth: Penguin) 1969).

65

MYTH 9

In the Appalachians They Speak likeShakespeare Michael Montgomery

Every day thousands of motoristsentering North Carolina stop at ahighway welcome center for directions)refreshment or a break from the road.Until not long ago) while there theycould also pick up a brief)complimentary booklet titled ADictionary of the Queen's English)

which was produced by the state's traveland tourism division in the mid 1960s.Its preface reads as follows:

To outsiders it sounds strange, evenuncultured. But what many NorthCarolinians do to the King's English wasdone centuries ago by the Queen. Thecorrespondence and writings of QueenElizabeth I and such men as Sir WalterRalegh, Marlowe, Dryden, Bacon andeven Shakespeare are sprinkled withwords and expressions which today arecommonplace in remote regions of NorthCarolina. You hear the Queen)s Englishin the coves and hollows of the Blue

Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountainsand on the windswept Outer Bankswhere time moves more leisurely.(c1965: 2-3)

Even for Americans unacquainted withthis small publication) its existencecomes as anything but a surprise. Theidea that in isolated places somewherein the country people still use'Elizabethan) or 'Shakespearean) speechis widely held) and it is probably one ofthe hardier cultural beliefs or myths inthe collective American psyche. Yet itlacks a definitive version and is oftenexpressed in vague geographical and

chronological terms. Since its beginningin the late nineteenth century the idea hasmost often been associated with thesouthern mountains- the Appalachians ofNorth Carolina) Tennessee)

66

In the Appalachians They Speak likeShakespeare Kentucky and WestVirginia) and the Ozarks of Arkansasand Missouri. At one extreme it reflectsnothing less than a relatively youngnation)s desire for an account of itsorigins) while at the other extreme the

incidental fact that English colonizationof North America began during the reignof Queen Elizabeth I four centuries ago.Two things in particular account for itscontinued vitality: its romanticism andits political usefulness. Its linguisticvalidity is another matter. Linguistshaven)t substantiated it) nor have theytried) since the claim of Eliza- bethanEnglish is based on such little evidence.But this is a secondary) if not irrelevant)consideration for those who havearticulated it in print - popular writersand the occasional academic - for over acentury. It has indisputably achieved thestatus of a myth in the sense of apowerful cultural belief. Growing up ineast Tennessee) this writer heard it said

occasionally that people in the nearbymountains still spoke ElizabethanEnglish (the location of the communitywas never specified) but if anything hehas met the idea more often sinceleaving Tennessee twenty years ago.When people learn that he is a linguistwho grew up near the mountains) theyfrequently ask) 'Isn)t there supposed tobe some place up there where they stillspeak Elizabethan English?' Whenasked) none could recall where theyheard the idea or where the communitywas supposed to be. That peoplesomewhere used Elizabethan speechwas something that 'everybody justknows.) In the United States it oftenforms part of a general characterization

of the southern mountains as an idyllic)if rugged) locale where people havesomehow been lost in time. Balladry)story-telling) traditional dancing andweaving are cited as archaic culturalfeatures similarly preserved by peoplewho have been isolated geographicallyand socially. An especially dreamyversion of this appears in a 1929 articletitled 'Elizabethan America' by CharlesMorrow Wilson.

We know a land of Elizabethan ways - acountry of Spenserian speech,Shakespearean people) and of cavaliersand curtsies. It is a land of high hopes

and mystic allegiances, where one maystroll through the forests of Arden andfind heaths and habits like those of oldenEngland. We are speaking of theSouthern highlands - Appalachia and

67

Language Myths Ozarkadia . . .Husbandmen and plough men inShakespeare's England and present-dayupland farmers could very likely haverubbed shoulders and swapped yarnswith few misunderstandings, linguisticor otherwise; for Elizabethan English, as

well as Elizabethan England, appears tohave survived magnificently in theseisolated Southern uplands. The speech ofthe Southern mountains is a survival ofthe language of older days, rather than adegradation of the United States English.. . a surprisingly large number of oldwords have survived, along with asurprisingly large number of old ways,giving a quaint and delightful flavor ofolden England. Illustrations are plentifulenough. The most casual of listeners willbecome conscious of the preponderanceof strong preterites in mountain speech:clum for 'climbed', drug for 'dragged',wropped for 'wrapped', fotch forfetched', and holp for 'helped' - all soundElizabethanisms to be found in

Shakespeare, Lovelace or the KingJames Bible. The Southern uplandersays fur (for) with Sir Philip Sidney,furder with Lord Bacon, and in commonwith Hakluyt, allow for 'suppose'. LikeChaucer, he forms the plurals ofmonosyllables ending in -st by adding -es: postes, beastes, jystes (joists), nestesand ghostes. Shakespearean-like, heprobably calls a salad a sallet, a bag apoke and uses antic for 'careful' andbobble for 'mix-up' . . . (1929:238-39)

Wilson begins with such a far-fetcheddescription that it's tempting not to takeit seriously, but this passage is typical of

many others. As with the miniature NorthCarolina dictionary cited earlier, Wilsoncites writers and sources other thanShakespeare (especially Chaucer and theauthorized version of the Bible).

rhough dating from very differentcenturies, these are alike in being highlyprestigious texts, universally esteemedfor their use of language. The'Elizabethan Eng- lish' cited is not thecolorful language of Shakespeare and hiscontem- poraries but rather common,down-to-earth verb forms like clum andfotch, which today would be consideredrustic and uneducated, if not improperand illiterate. Wilson's list of words islonger than most others, but it's typical in

being mainly verb past tenses, old-fashioned plurals and vocabulary thatwould probably not strike many asespeci- ally 'Shakespearean'. It's notclear exactly when the idea ofShakespearean English in the

68

In the Appalachians They Speak likeShakespeare mountains was firstarticulated, but William Goodell Frost,President of Berea College in the eastKentucky mountains, was undoubtedlymost influential in promoting and

establishing the view that mountainspeech and culture were legitimatesurvivals from older times. His 1899essay, 'Our Contemporary Ancestors',was the published form of an addressgiven for years to alumni andcontributors to his college. In it hestated:

The rude language of the mountains is farless a degradation than a survival. The[Old English] pronoun 'hit' holds itsplace almost universally. Strong pasttenses, 'holp' for helped, 'drug' fordragged, and the like, are heardconstantly; and the syllabic plural is

retained in words ending in -st andothers. The greeting as we ride up to acabin is 'Howdy, strangers. 'Light andhitch your beastes.' Quite a vocabularyof Chaucer's words, which have beendropped by polite lips but which lingerin these solitudes, has been made out bysome of our students. 'Pack' for carry,'gorm' for muss, 'feisty' for full of life,impertinent, are examples.

As the country experienced immigrationfrom southern and eastern Europe in thelate nineteenth century and its peoplebecame increasingly diverse, Frost andother writers focused attention on the

fellow citizens of 'pure Anglo-Saxon'heritage who had yet to join the advanceof American civilization. However, itwas, they claimed, a misconception toview mountain people as neglected ordeprived, because they had preservedmuch of the language and culture of theBritish Isles which the dominant,mainstream culture neither recognizednor valued, even though most of its ownancestors had spoken in like manner. TheShakespearean English idea wasformulated and promoted by people bornand bred outside the mountains, first byeducators and clergymen (Frost wasboth) and later by journalists and travelwriters. Often these were individualswho, having come to know mountain

people firsthand, wished to identify theirpositive qualities to a wider audience, tocombat the distorted, negative images ofmountain people popularized in thepress. In the late nineteenth century,newspapers ran sensational stories aboutmountain feuding and moonshining,

69

Language Myths just as today theyperiodically feature accounts of snake-handling religion, high homicide ratesand endemic social deprivation.Modern- day Hollywood movies like

Deliverance have done nothing tocounter this image problem. Entering themountains with such negative stereo-types, outsiders are surprised when they'discover' the 'true' nature of mountainspeech and write as if this were arevelation. Just three years ago theLexington (KY) Press-Herald ran anarticle by a Midwest- ern schoolteacherwho had taken a job in a tiny, easternKentucky comnlunity and found that hispupils to his amazement used many'Shakespearean' and 'Chaucerian'expressions. For these counter-propagandists, as we might call them,identifying the Elizabethan nature ofmountain speech can be accomplishedby citing a mere handful of words. The

issue was one of perceptions and publicrelations, not of linguistics. However,the contention that mountaineers talk likeShakespeare cannot withstand even alittle objective scrutiny. Here are somereasons why: First, relatively littleevidence is cited in such accounts.Support- ing examples are few andhighly selective - often only half a dozenare used to make far-fetched assertionsabout mountain language as a whole.Words are often labeled as being'Shakespearean' or 'Chaucerian' withoutan accompanying citation from thoseauthors. Some are not traceable to thesixteenth century (for instance, theDictionary of Queen's English cites tee-toncey 'tiny', in 'I'll have just a tee-

toncey piece of pie' as Elizabethan).Second, the evidence is not persuasive.Although they may not be known to theeducated, middle-class, city-dwellingoutsiders who write aboutShakespearean English, the terms citedcan usually be found in many parts ofNorth America and the British Isles.Here are three examples, the third ofwhich is especially common: afeard'afraid' (A Midsummer Night's DreamIII.i.25: 'Will not the ladies be afeard ofthe lion?'); holp (Richard III I.ii.l07: 'Lethim thank me that holp to send himthither.'); and learn 'teach' (Romeo andJuliet III.ii.12: 'Learn me how to lose awinning match.') Such shortcomings inusing evidence do not restrain advocates

of the

70

In the Appalachians They Speak likeShakespeare Shakespearean idea, whichis not empirically based orsystematically induced from facts. Third,these accounts mix facts and images,places and times, even immigrant groupsfrom very different parts of the BritishIsles. For instance, the English aresometimes lumped together with theScotch- Irish (also called the UlsterScots), something which amateur

historians and genealogists would notdo, as in the following passage, againfrom Charles Morrow Wilson:

Broadly speaking, the Southernhighlanders are an Old England folk,English and Scotch-Irish, whoseforebears came forth from ElizabethanEngland, a nation of young life whichhad just found its prime, a nation ofenergy and daring, a nation leaping fromchildhood into manhood. And the spiritof Elizabethan England has longsurvived the weathering of time. Thefirst settlers brought with themElizabethan ways of living, and these

ways have lasted in a country ofmagnificent isolation, one little touchedby the ways of a modern world.

'Elizabethan' is not used in the sense of'the literary world of southern Englandin the latter half of the sixteenth century'or even 'England during theRenaissance'. Not only are immigrantsfrom Ireland sometimes subsumed withthose from England, but Chaucer (whoflourished in the late fourteenth century),Dryden (in the late seventeenth) andwriters from other periods are regularlycited as having used terms nowemployed by mountaineers. What the

wide-ranging texts from which citationsare drawn have in common is that theyare familiar - and prestigious - canonicalsources which used to be requiredreading in the schoolroom. (Thus theyreveal more about the reading ofpromoters of the Shakespearean ideathan about mountain speakers. )Shakespeare and Elizabeth I lived 400years ago, but the southern mountainshave been populated by Europeans foronly half that length of time. The settlerswho came to North America duringElizabeth I's reign either did not surviveor did not stay (the first permanentcolony, Jamestown, was founded underJames I). Since no one came directly

71

Language Myths from Britain to theAppalachians, we wonder how theypreserved their English during theintervening period. The more one reads,the less concrete meaning 'Elizabethan'and 'Shakespearean' have. In the popularmind they appear to mean nothing morethan 'old- fashioned' . Fourth, writersmake other sweeping and improbablestatements, such as that mountainchildren have a natural affinity forShakespeare:

It is said that when the mountaineerbegins to read all, he displays so markeda preference for Shakespeare that it isinvariably the works of that poet thathave most frequently to be rebound inany library to which he has access. Thereason he himself gives for thispredilection is that the thingsShakespeare makes his characters doalways seem so 'natural'. (WilliamAspenwall Bradley, In Shakespeare'sAmerica, 1915:436)

More recently a tlatlander who took ajob as a schoolteacher in the North

Carolina mountains became convincedof the Elizabethan English idea and gavehis first-grade pupils Shakespeare toread, with predictably dismal results,and a scholar writing a book onproducing Shakespeare in NorthCarolina found that theater directors andcritics believed that Shakespeareanlanguage was most intelligible in thewestern part of the state because it wascloser to the everyday speech there(Champion, 1983). Fifth, writersroutinely characterize large areas of themountains as homogeneous, as thoughthere were no regional and socialdifferences. Though Elizabethan speechcame to Appalachia indirectly, if it cameat all, this has not prevented

commentators from often labeling it'pure'. In North Carolina, according toone writer, mountaineers use a variety ofEnglish that has forms reminiscent ofShakespeare and Chaucer and is 'purely"American"'. In Kentucky, according toanother, 'the purest English on earth' isspoken. Finally, the ShakespeareanEnglish idea ignores many things thatlinguists know to be true. All varietiesof language change, even isolated onesand, contrary to popular impression,mountain culture has been far fromisolated over the past two centuries. Invocabulary, mountain speech actuallyhas far more innovations (terms notknown in the

7 2

In the Appalachians They Speak likeShakespeare old country) than hold-overs from the British Isles. TheShakespeare myth reflects simplistic)popular views about the static nature oftraditional folk cultures) especiallythose in out-of-the-way places. With somany inconsistencies and problems) nowonder that Ameri- can scholars havelittle interest in assessing how'Elizabethan) Appa- lachian speech is.Scholars would say that mountain speechhas more archaisms than other types of

American English) but that's about it.They certainly wouldn)t put a label like'Elizabethan) on it. But believers haveno logical difficulty generalizing from ahandful of words to a blanket label.Especially for them the idea ofShakespearean English has become amyth) actually a combination of twomyths) an origin myth claiming toexplain where mountain culture camefrom and a myth of the noble savagewhich satisfies our nostalgia for asimpler) purer past) which may neverhave existed but which we neverthelesslong for because of the complexities andambiguities of modern life. All of thishelps innumerable Americans who haveno direct experience of the mountains

and who consider themselves thoroughlyrational people to believe thatElizabethan English is spoken there. Theidea that somewhere in the mountainspeople preserve a type of speech fromthe days of Shakespeare is more than justa romanticization of mountain life byoutsiders. Many natives believe it too)associating it with the mountains ingeneral or at least with older) lesseducated people. Most likely they havepicked it up from schoolteachers) andsometimes they turn it to their advantage.If you ask Charles Bradley) mayor ofGatlinburg) Tennessee) in the latenineties the self-styled 'Captain of theSmoky Mountains» what distin- guishesmountain people) he)ll tell you

immediately that they)ve hung on toElizabethan English. For insiders) theShakespearean English idea fills avariety of purposes: foremost)affirmation that their culture hasrespectable) even reputable roots) butalso the promotion of tourism) a college(William Goodell Frost) or even apolitical career. In his autobiography)The Mountains Within Me) Zell Miller)Governor of Georgia in the late nineties,actually names the community hedescribes and claims that he himselftalks like Shakespeare:

If Shakespeare could have been

reincarnated in Nineteenth Century

73

Language Myths

Choestoe [GA], he would have felt rightat home. The open fireplaces, spinningwheels, handmade looms, Greek lampsand good, if sometimes ungrammatical,Elizabethan English would all have beenquite familiar to the Bard of Avon and,with the exception of having to adapt to

homespun clothes, he would have hadlittle difficulty assimilating intomountain society. . . It no longer bothersme to be kidded about my mountainexpressions. In fact, I have come toregard them as status symbols becausewho else do we have running around inpublic life today who speaks thelanguage of Chaucer and Shakespeare asdistilled, literally and figuratively, bytwo centuries of Georgia Mountainusage?

For mountain people the idea appears tobe as prevalent as ever. TheShakespearean English idea argues that

isolation and the lack of moderneducation have caused words andmeanings to survive in the mountainsidentical to ones ,used in the Elizabethanperiod, often considered the liveliestand richest flowering of literature in thelanguage. These have either disappearedfrom mainstream/dominant culture orbecome labeled as illiterate or vulgar byit. Because their ancestry is forgotten ormisunderstood, their modern-dayspeakers are wrongly labeled. At thesame time, mainstream culture has lostits awareness of its own roots, thosewho espouse the Shakespeare idea seemto be saying. Being a cultural repositoryhas helped regions like Appalachia andthe Ozarks define themselves against

mainstream cultures that possessimmense socio-economic power andprominence. Though lacking a culturalmemory and having no conscious rootsof its own other than a few two-dimensional, textbook images, massAmerican culture has created anideology that dominates regional andethnic cultures and articulates andimparts a value system through themedia, the educational system and avariety of institutions. Less wellendowed economically and absentfrom the pages of the nation's history,regional cultures find themselvesmarginalized by modern nation states,cen- tralized institutions and educationalestablishments. Consequently, their

speech is viewed by those in power asrustic, if not backward and uncouth. Asmuch as anything else, it is this lack ofstatus (both in North America and theBritish Isles - where it is mostcommonly

74

In the Appalachians They Speak likeShakespeare associated with Ireland)that has led people to elaborate andadvocate the 'Shakespearean myth' tobring status and recognition to thesecultures. This explains perhaps why for

Appalachia there have been so manyexpositions of the same idea decadeafter decade. Advancing the idea,improbable as it is, that mountain peoplespeak like Shakespeare counters theprevailing ideology of the classroom andsociety at large that unfairly handicapsrural mountain people as uneducated andunpolished and that considers theirlanguage to be a corruption of properEnglish. This modern ideology not onlyforms the backdrop against which theShakespearean myth is articulated, butironically it turns the history of thelanguage on its head by dismissing its'ancient legitimate lineage', as one writercalled it not long ago (Hays 1975). Oneof the most interesting aspects of the

subject is the contrast between images,at least in Appalachia. Even today thename of the region conjures up images ofpoor diets, proneness to violence andcountless other chronic ills, and socialpsychologists into the present generationhave labored to examine the region interms of deprivation theory. There is anobvious tension between heavilyromanticized images and the jarringlynegative ones, each being a product ofselection of features. Without a culturalmemory, mainstream culture has littleperspec- tive to understand the trueorigin of mountain culture, whether thisis Elizabethan or anything else, and itsometimes makes for profoundmisapprehensions. This calls for cultural

education, which should begin locallybut which at some point will probablyrun counter to mainstream societybecause it is the latter which usuallychooses what is to be valued and what isnot. The regional or ethnic culture haslittle, if any, role in the evaluation ofitself. The evaluation made by masssociety often produces a schizophrenia,especially among upwardly mobilemembers of a regional or minorityculture, as they are asked to choosebetween two value systems and ways oftalking. Mountain people may talk likeShakespeare, but in the schoolroomnothing should be permitted but 'standardEnglish'. At the beginning of this essaythe idea of Shakespearean English being

spoken today, on the eve of the thirdmillennium, probably

75

Language Myths appeared to besomething between nostalgia and a fable.But it has been a very persistent idea)and commentators a century ago dididentify the crux of the matter - thatnatives of the mountains deserve respectas culture bearers - even though they didnot contextualize it in terms of a socio-economic dynamic. They recognizedsome of its educational implications)

however questionable its validity was inreality. Today Americans have almost noawareness of the roots of their English)and whatever respect they may have forregional cultures often does not extend toregional speech. All this means thatthere) s definitely a place for theShakespearean myth as an educationaland political tool for the foreseeablefuture. Since it reflects only a smallportion of reality) it would be wise forlinguists to playa role in working out itspedagogical applications) but even theymust appreciate that it has achieved thestatus of a myth.

76

MYTH 10

Some Languages Have No GrammarWinifred Bauer

I t is not uncommon to hear people say(usually derogatorily) of a language 'Itdoesn't have any grammar.' Toappreciate the absurdity of thisstatement, it is helpful to specify what'grammar' is. For linguists, the 'grammar'

of a language is the set of rules whichthe speakers of the language followwhen they speak. It encompasses rulesabout the possible forms of words(shplernk is not a possible word inEnglish), rules about the way bits ofwords can be put together (you can'tmake plurals in English by putting the -sfirst), rules about the way words are puttogether to make longer units (in Englishyou have to say This is an interestingbook, not A book interesting is this) andrules about the way meanings areencoded by speakers. For some non-linguists, 'grammar' refers only to thesecond and third of these types of rules.Even on that narrower definition, it iseasy to demonstrate that all languages

have grammar. For argument's sake, letus discuss the proposition 'Spelitzian hasno grammar.' I shall demonstrate that thiscannot be true by considering whatSpelitzian would be like if it were true.If Spelitzian had no grammar, it wouldbe impossible to make a mistake whenspeaking Spelitzian. Saying that asentence is wrong in Spelitzian is thesame as saying that it breaks a rule orrules of Spelitzian. If Spelitzian hasrules, then it has grammar. IfSpelitzianhad no grammar, there could be nodifference between nouns and verbs orother word classes. There could be nopronouns, because they - by definition -stand for nouns, not verbs, and thusimply a distinction between the classes.

If it is possible to distinguish wordclasses in Spelitzian, Spelitzian hasgrammar. All known human languagesdistinguish at least nouns and verbs.

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Language Myths If Spelitzian had nogrammar, there could be no rules for theplacement of words in sentences. Everyorder would be possible in every case.To say 'John said Pip hit the fence,' youcould say the equivalent of 'Pip say johnhit fence,' 'Fence say john hit pip,' 'Hitsay fence pip john,' 'Say fence john pip

hit,' or any other of the 120 possibleword orders! Each of these would, ofcourse, also be able to mean 'Pip saidJohn hit the fence,' and other things like'John, say "The fence hit Pip." , Clearly,the listener would not know what wasintended. Such a 'language' would onlyallow people to communicate extremelysimple messages, probably only one-word messages. If Spelitzian had nogrammar, it could not have prefixes orsuffixes, for example. These wouldimply that Spelitzian had rules forforming words, and thus that it hadgrammar. (If English had no rules for theplacement of such forms, then pots couldequally well be replaced by spot, psotor post on any occasion. Imagine what

would happen if you tried to say 'Spotthe pots on the post.') If Spelitzian hadno grammar, it could not have 'littlewords' (particles) to mark grammaticalfunctions. Suppose it had a conjunc- tionlike and. If it could not be fixed inposition, you would not know what itjoined, so it would be possible to say'Pip and Pat like John' by the Spelitzianequivalent for 'pip and john like pat' or'pat pip john and like.' Particles workbecause they occur in specifiedpositions in relation to other words. IfSpelitzian had no grammar, it would notbe possible to mark the differencesbetween sentences by changing the 'tune'or intonation of the sentence. Thus itwould not be possible to mark

differences between statements,questions and commands, between Piphit Pat, Pip hit Pat? (or Did Pip hit Pat?)and Pip, hit Pat. If Spelitzian usedintonation to mark these changes, theintonation would have a grammaticalfunction, and thus Spelitzian would havegrammar. In all known human languagesthese differences are conveyed by somecombination of word order, modificationof word forms (e.g. adding a suffix),function-marking particles andintonation. To sum up, if Spelitziandistinguishes different word classes ithas grammar. If Spelitzian has rulesabout word order, it has grammar. IfSpelitzian has rules about the addition ofprefixes, suffixes, etc., it

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Some Languages Have No Grammar

has grammar. If Spelitzian has particleswhich 'go with' particular types ofwords (such as prepositions like to, in,by), it has grammar. If Spelitzian usesdifferent 'tunes' which change themeaning of what the speaker ofSpelitzian says, it has grammar. IfSpelitzian had none of these, then whentwo speakers of this 'language' were

talking, the listener would not knowwhat the speaker intended. At best thelistener would guess. With such animprecise system, language would be ofvery little use. Such a system resembleswhat we know of very simple animalcommunication systems. No humanlanguages we know behave like this. Allallow the precise communication ofcomplex messages, and this requiresgrammar. Next I will consider whether itis true that some languages don't havevery much grammar, or that somelanguages have more grammar thanothers. Latin is often taken by non-linguists as the 'standard' against whichother languages are measured. Is itpossible for Spelitzian to have less

grammar than Latin? There are severalclasses of nouns in Latin, and each classhas a special pattern of endings,different in singular and plural, whichmark the functions of nouns in sentences.I will illustrate with the first two classes(or declensions, as they are usuallycalled). Puella 'girl' is 1st declension(felninine), and dominus, 'lord' is 2nddeclension (masculine ):

1st Declension Nominative VocativeAccusative Genitive Dative Ablative

2nd Declension Nominative Vocative

Accusative

Singular puell-a puell-a puell-am puell-ae puell-ae puell-a

Singular domin-us domin-e domin-um

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Plural puell-ae puell-ae puell-as puell-arum puell-is puell-is

Plural domin-i domin-i domin-os

Genitive Dative Ablative

Language Myths domin - i domin-odomin-o

domin-orum domin-is domin-is

In basic terms) the nominative is usedfor the subject of a sentence (the personor thing that performs the action) thevocative is used to mark the person orthing addressed) the accusative is usedfor the direct object of a sentence (theperson or thing which is affected by theaction), the genitive is used forpossessors of things) the dative is usedfor the goal of an action (to phrases) andthe ablative is used for by) with andfrom phrases. Thus to say 'The girl sawthe lord) in Latin) girl is translated withthe form puella) the nominative) andlord is translated with dominum) theaccusative. To say '0 girls) bow to yourlord!') girls would be translated with thevocative plural form puellae) lord

would be translated with the dativesingular domino) and your wouldrequire the genitive form of the pronoun.Latin verbs also have patterns of endingswhich mark person) number and tenses)as in the following list of endings forone type of verb (first conjugation) inpresent and perfect tenses:

Presen t Perfect Singular Plural SingularPlural 1st (I) we) :- am-o ama-mus ama-Vl ama-Vlmus 2nd (you) ama-s ama-tisama-visti ama-vistis 3rd (he/she) ama-tama-nt ama-vit ama-verunt

Because Latin words carry on their endsmarkers which show their function)Latin has relatively free word order.Thus 'The girl saw the lord) can betranslated by any of the following:Puella vidit dominum) Vidit puelladominum) Dominum vidit puella) Puelladominum vidit) Vidit dominum puella)Dominum puella vidit. All possibleorders are in theory acceptable) althoughsome are much more usual than others.(However) it should be noted that Latinword order is not entirely free: suchforms as conjunctions and some adverbshave

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specific places in felation to thesentence as a whole or to other wordclasses. ) The way Latin works has ledto the perception that 'grammar) meanssets of endings. The fact that Latin alsohas rules for word ofdef is often ignofed.You cannot jumble completely freely thewords in the Latin sentence equivalent to'John said the girl saw the lord,' althoughthefe are several possible orders. Manylanguages do not have sets of endings on

nouns and verbs like Latin. ModernEnglish has very few in comparison withLatin (and in comparison with OldEnglish). Chinese has none at all.However) we cannot conclude thatEnglish has less grammar than Latin andChinese none at all. English hasreplaced a Latin -like system of endingson nouns and free word order with asystem of few endings and fixed wOfdofder. The fixed word order has theeffect of marking the function of wordsjust as clearly as the use of endings.Consider (a) The girl protected the lordand (b) The lord protected the girl. Theperformer of the action always comesbefore the verb protected) and therecipient of the action always comes

aftef the verb. In (a) we know that thegirl perfofmed the action with just asmuch certainty as in the equivalent Latinsentence. Thus fixed word order inEnglish does the same job as the markingof nominative and accusative on nouns inLatin. Chinese also uses word ordef tomark these functions. Yet other languagesuse particles to mark these functions.Maori has a particle i) which occursbefore the recipient of the action andcontrasts with no particle before the perfOf mer of the action. Thus in Maori 'thegirl) is te kotiro) te ariki is 'the 10fd)and 'pfotected) is ka tiaki) so Ka tiaki tekotiro i te ariki is 'The girl protected thelord) and Ka tiaki te ariki i te kotiro is'The lord protected the girl.) While it is

usual fOf the actor to pfecede therecipient) as in these sentences) it ispossible under some circumstances toreverse the order) as in Ka tiaki i tekotiro te ariki) which still means 'Thelord protected the girl) and cannot mean'The girl protected the 10fd.) Thusparticles afe anothef grammatical deviceparallel to endings and word order formarking such grammatical functions.Since all three means are equivalent) alanguage which uses word

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Language Myths order or particles has agrammatical system equivalent to onewhich uses endings. Latin, which makesextensive use of endings (or inflec-tions), Chinese, which uses word order,Maori, which uses particles andrelatively fixed word order, and English,which uses fixed word order and someinflections all have equivalentgrammatical systems in this regard. Oncewe accept that languages can makesimilar distinctions using different sortsof grammatical devices, it becomesclear that it is very difficult to quantifyhow much 'grammar' a language has, andthus statements like 'Spelitzian hashardly any grammar' or 'Latin has moregrammar than Spelitzian' cannot readily

be supported. You have to consider thekinds of grammatical distinctions alanguage makes, not how it makes them.While all known human languages markbasic distinctions such as the differencesbetween the actor and the recipient of anaction or between statements, questionsand commands, there are still many otherdistinctions which are marked in somelanguages, but not in others. It is not truethat Latin (or any other language) marksall the possible grammaticaldistinctions, and other languages markonly a subset of them. Here I can onlyhint at some of the wealth of differencesin what languages mark. English marks adifference between 'definite' nounphrases and 'indefinite' noun phrases by

(amongst other things) the use of a andthe. Latin does not mark this distinctionat all. Maori makes a distinctionsomewhat similar to that in English, alsothrough articles roughly comparable to aand the, while Chinese makes asomewhat similar distinction throughword order. In this field, then, Latinmakes fewest grammatical distinctions.There are American-Indian languageswhich distinguish between things whichhappened recently in the past and thingswhich happened a long time ago, andbetween things which speakers knowfrom their own experience and thingswhich they've been told. So in theselanguages, I would require a differentform of the verb lose to say in 1996

'England lost to Germany in the semi-finals' and to say in 1996 'The Englishlost the battle of Hastings in 1066.' Andboth of these (which I only knowbecause I have been told so) wouldrequire a

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different verb from 'I lost my game ofScrabble this afternoon,' which I know

from my own experience. Somelanguages, like Maori, have differentpronouns for we when it means 'you thelistener and me the speaker' and when itmeans 'me the speaker and someoneelse, like my mother'. And Fijian, inaddition, has not just singular and pluralpronouns, but singular, dual (for twopeople), trial (for three people) andplural pronouns. European languageshave relatively simple pronoun systems,although they distinguish gender in thethird person, which Maori and Fijian donot. Examples like these show thatlanguage A may have more complexsystems than language B in one area andless complex systems in other areas. Wecannot sensibly quantify the amount of

grammar a language has. All languageshave immensely complex grammaticalsystems. Sometimes when people assertthat a language has no grammar, whatthey really mean is that there is nogrammar book for that particularlanguage. But the rules of a languageexist in the heads of speakers of thatlanguage. We know the rules are therebecause of the way the speakers behave.They use similar structures for similarevents. If you hear the Spelitziansentence for 'Give me some water,' youcan be pretty sure you can use the samepattern for 'Give me some food,' even ifthere are other possible patterns as well.If there weren't any patterns, peoplewouldn't be able to communicate

because they would have no way ofknowing what other people meant to say.You can understand what I say onlybecause you know the same rules I do.That is what it means to speak the samelanguage. Speakers can tell you whethera particular string of words is anacceptable sentence of their language.You, as a speaker of English, know that'Spelitzian isn't a real language' is apossible sentence of English, eventhough I feel confident that you havenever met it before. And you know)equally well, that 'Spelitzian reallanguage isn't' is not a possible sentenceof English. You do not need a grammarbook to tell you this. Your own internalgrammar tells you. A grammar book of a

language contains rules which mirror the

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Language Myths rules speakers use whenthey speak that language. You can workout the rules which must be in the headsof speakers of Spelitzian by observingwhat they say. Suppose the followingwere sentences of Spelitzian:

Mashak Spelitziask op Pat 'TheSpelitzian saw Pat.' Mashak Pat op

Speltiziask 'Pat saw the Spelitzian.'

Trakak Spelitziask op Pat 'TheSpelitzian greeted Pat' Trakak Pat opSpelitziask 'Pat greeted the Spelitzian.'

On the basis of these sentences, wemight deduce the following patterns: theverb comes first, followed by theperformer, followed by the recipient.The recipient always has op in front ofit. We could start to write a grammarbook for Spelitzian by writing downthese rules, although they would almostcertainly need some refinement as we

accounted for other sentences. Everytime we noticed a new pattern whichSpelitzians follow, that would tell usabout a new rule of Spelitzian, and wecould add it to the grammar book. Thatis how grammar books are written. Thusthe existence of a grammar book isirrelevant to the question of whether thelanguage has grammar. A grammar bookcan be written for any language, becauseevery language has grammar. IfSpelitzian is a language, it has a highlycomplex grammatical system, involvingsome combination of devices like wordorder, inflections, particles andintonation. A language without anygrammar is a contradiction in terms.

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MYTH 11

Italian is Beautiful, German is UglyHoward Giles and Nancy Niedzielski

The title of this essay reflects thecommonly held view) at least amongmany English-speakers) that certainlanguages are more aesthetically

pleasing than others. Italian - even forthose who cannot speak the language -sounds elegant) sophisticated and lively.french is similarly viewed as romantic)cultured and sonorous. These languagesconjure up positive emotions in hearers -and perhaps) generally more pleasingmoods in their speakers. In contrast)German) Arabic and some East-Asiantongues accomplish the opposite: theyare considered harsh) dour andunpleasant-sounding. The Englishlanguage is probably somewhere in themiddle) evoking few accolades ofaesthetic merit but few comments of utterdisdain. It undoubtedly triggers feelingsof linguistic and cultural pride when) forinstance) evocative poetry in the

language is being read or when nationalinstitutions (e.g. the language used onnational TV news) are purportedly beingthreatened from outside by otherlanguage groups. Here, then) we havethe first hints that judgments about alanguage variety's beauty are dependenton the nature of the context in which theviews are being expressed and tied tothe fabric of our national and socialidentities) which we take up later. If wedig further) we find that differentvarieties of English are accordeddifferent degrees of pleasantness. Thesounds of British English are coveted incertain North American communities)and speakers of it will be constantlygreeted with exclamations to the effect)

'My) your accent is so delightful. . . dospeak more.) This is often followed bythe caution: 'Never lose that delightfulway of talking,' and in essence)therefore) talk like 'us'. In Britain)studies we have performed have shownthat various accents are considered quite

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Language Myths vulgar (e.g.Birmingham, London Cockney). Indeed,the stronger the accent, the morecontempt will abound. In one famoussociolinguistic survey, a Glaswegian

commented: 'It's the slovenly speech inthe industrial areas that I don't care for -these industrialized cities - I don't likethe accent they have.' On the other hand,British accents from some rural areasare considered 'charming', 'lilting' and'quaint', such as some of the South -Welsh dialects (of course there are manySouth Welsh accents too, such asCarmarthen, which recent studies haveshown to be less folksy) . Despiteanother myth to the contrary, rigidly heldviews of accent pleasantness-unpleasantness are hardly a 'Britishdisease'! In Aus- tralia, a broad accent isconsidered 'vulgar'. In France, a Parisianbrogue is considered more cultivatedthan a French Canadian accent or the

nearer-to-home Breton accent. In theUSA, Appalachian, Texan, certainSouthern and New York accents are anaffront to the ear (at least outside thoseareas) whereas a New England varietyis considered consensually morestandard and comely. Black VernacularEnglish (or the more recent,controversial notion of 'Ebonics') incursthe same fate as the former varieties formany of those who are not African-American (as well as a number whoare). We could continue on to Spain andmost other cultures and the story wouldmostly be the same with their varieties.In sum, most of us have our favorite-sounding languages and dialects. Evensingle sounds, such as the gutturals (e.g.

the glottal stop, as in Cockney 'bottle')and nasality are disparaged. As JohnHoney has commented in his 1989 guideto British pronunciation, 'nl0st peoplewho comment on differences betweenstandard and non-standard accentsbelieve that the basis of their judgmentsis aesthetics - a matter of taste such asdistinguishes a good piece of music froma bad one, a good painting from a daub,a good poem from a piece ofmeretricious verse.' Why then should wehave such well-defined views oflanguage beauty and ugliness? Twocompeting views exist. The first hasbeen called the 'inherent valuehypothesis'. As the term implies,advocates of this position claim that

some languages (and accents of them)are

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Italian is Beautiful, German is Ugly

inherently more attractive than others.Simply put) it has nothing to do withhistorical preferences or socialconditioning) rather) certain ways ofbeing 'nicely spoken) are biologicallywired into us. It is for this reason alone

that certain language forms assumepfestige ovef others. These others couldnot possibly ever gain superiority orbecome 'the standard' since they are tooharsh) vulgar and unpleasant. Lan- guagescholars and historians in the past haveheld strongly to this argument. As one ofthem put it) 'if one were to compareevery vowel sound . . . in standardBritish English . . . with thecorresponding sounds in non-standardaccents) no unbiased observer wouldhesitate to prefer . .. [the former] ... asthe most pleasing and sonorous form. 'Strong words indeed) but why shouldwe - as thinking people - care about thisso-called 'fact of life) Of even nature?The answer is that it has woeful

implications for society) three of whichwe shall highlight. First) too manyspeakers of certain languages anddialects are brought up believing)sometimes via ridicule and abuse) thattheir way of communicating - afundamental aspect of their identity andwho they are - is grossly inadequate.Unfortunately) then) some speakers areembarrassed about how they talk. As oneinformant having a Norwich (England)accent reported) 'I talk horrible.) Thisphenomenon has been called 'linguisticself-hatred). No wonder then that certaineducational institutions denigrate theway certain ethnic minorities and lower-working-class children talk. Suchinstitutions) teachers) and even pafents)

attempt to obliterate this expression ofthemselves to accommodate a 'better'way of talking. This is not meant toindicate that this approach is not wellintentioned - yet we fegard its underlyingvalues as misguided. Second) we haveshown in past reseafch that there is astrong link between the perceivedpleasantness of a language variety andthe apparent intelligibility of what issaid in it. It is important to understandhere that a person's comprehensibility isnot an incontestable 'linguistic fact'.Oftentimes) our views about a dialect(and its speakefs) can color our beliefsabout whether we can understand it andparticularly our willingness to expendeffort after interpreting it. Construing a

particular dialect as) say) 'vulgar' andfeeling discomfort and dissatisfaction

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Language Myths when talking tospeakers of it can unwittingly bias ourperceptions of its intelligibility - hence,ultimately, its worth as a viable form ofcommunication. Third and relatedly,how 'well' we speak can have greatsocial currency. In the initial surveymentioned, one informant claimed that 'ifyou were an employer and somebodycame in to see you with a broad

Glaswegian accent and then another mancame in with an English accent, you'd bemore inclined to give the English manthe job because he had a nicer way ofspeaking.' Likewise, research hasshown, across cultures, that speaking ina way that is consensually agreed uponto be unpleasant would lead to someunfavorable social consequences. Thesemight include when one is beingdiagnosed in a clinic, when givingevidence in court, seeking housing andwhen seeking statusful employment. We,and most language scholars, do notembrace the inherent value hypothesis -we believe it to be a flagrant, yetunderstandable, social myth. Rather, weare advocates of a totally different

position that, together with PeterTrudgill, we have previously labeled the'social connotations hypothesis'. As thisterm implies, we favor a view propos-ing that the pleasantness orunpleasantness of a language variety is atime-honored social convention. Thepleasantness, or otherwise, of a languagevariety (and hence the emotive qualitiesassociated with it) are contingent on thesocial attributes of the speakers of it.Thus, if a social group (such as an ethnicelite or social class) assumes power in asociety, it will take measures to have itsform of communication privilegedthrough the media, education, and soforth. Historically, this comes about in avariety of ways. First, it can be

established overtly through public policyand language laws, as in the case oflegislation across many American statesmaking English the official language.Next, it can be established throughstrategic attempts to obliterate the non-prestige varieties - as happened with'Spanish' languages other than Castilianin the Franco era. Other times, ithappens (arguably far less intentionallyand more covertly over long time-periods) when communities begin toconnote status and aesthetics withspeaking in a societally valued manner.Indeed, the social origins of our viewsabout dialects are deeply

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rooted. Our own developmental studieshave shown that the emotional groundingfor this can be laid down as early asthree or four years of age! Interestinglyalso, we have found that while (non-standard-sounding) children of sixwould laugh and disparage the accentsof prestige speakers, by nine years ofage they had been socialized in toaccepting unhesitatingly just suchprestige forms to emulate. findings from

Italy also echo the inclination forchildren to like non-standard speechuntil they spend time in the schoolsystem. In terms of the socialconnotations hypothesis then, standardBritish English and french are notinherently superior and elegant forms ofcommunication but, rather, are so largelydue to the fact that the Court and otherspheres of social, commefcial andpolitical influence flourished inparticular geographical centers (viz.London and Paris respectively). Hadthey been established in other areas,these very same so-called standardvarieties would have been relativelytrivi- alized, perhaps suffering the samefate as other urban dialects like

Glaswegian. We find, then, that if youwere to survey British people and askthem to fate how pleasant it would be tolive in various cities and regions andthen ask them to rate the pleasantness ofthe accents of these locales, there wouldbe a very high correlation indeedbetween these two assessments. Studieshave even shown that speakers ofprestige language forms are judged morehandsome and physically attractive! Insum, it is the social connotations of thespeakers of a language variety - whetherthey are associated with poverty, crimeand being uneducated on the one hand, orcultured, wealthy and having politicalmuscle on the other - that dictates ouraesthetic (and other) judgments about the

language variety. This is not anuncomplicated equation, of course, andlanguage 'facts' can sometimes swiftlychange - a process that supports thisargument. To illustrate, we offer the'Black is beautiful' or 'Welsh is beautiful'(among many other) movements. Whensubordinate groups in society come toquestion the legitimacy of their inferiorroles in society and attribute these tooppressive and discriminatory measuresof an 'elite' group, they can redefine thebeauty anp importance of their language,accordingly, and sometimes

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Language Myths vociferously. Whetherthe dominant group will feadily accedeto such demands and allied actions andthefeby allow their own languagevarieties to necessarily lose some oftheir aesthetic sway) is anotherinteresting phenomenon that fallssomewhat under the purview of thesocial psychology of intergrouprelations. This is paft of the process ofhow languages and dialects change) dieand are even resurrected. This is not tosay that although there is a strongcorrespondence between the perceivedstatus of a variety and its aestheticvalue) it is a one-to-one relationship. In

one study in the 1970S we found thatwhile the German accent in BritishEnglish was rated as having higher statusthan any regional accents of Bfitainstudied thefein) its rated pleasantnesswas much lower. Here again) howevef)the social connotations hypothesisholds its own. Britons had mixedfeelings in this case. On the one hand)the accent was associated by many withcertain members of that nation)s desiresfor world domination and the atrocitiesand hafdships that attended that move.On the other it was conceded that thisgroup now (ironically also for some)had achieved immense prosperity andeconomic influence. Arguably) aestheticjudg- ments prevailed with the former

image while status judgments inclinedafter the latter. In addition) work in thecontext of the 'gender-linked languageeffect' has shown over a host of studiesthat while the speech and writing ofmales is upgraded in terms ofcompetence and dynamism) it isdowngraded in terms of aesthetics. Whatother insights) as well as reseafch)inform our belief that the title of thisessay constitutes a myth? We and othershave found that judgments of linguisticbeauty are determined in large part bythe larger context in which they areembedded. That is) linguistic aestheticsdo not come in a social vacuum and few)if any) inherent values exist. This can beillustrated in a number of ways. First)

who is speaking the language variety(e.g. an attractive member of theopposite sex or a member of one)s owningroup) and who is doing the judgingcan be critical to outcomes. It may comeas little surprise to know that whenasking Israelis whether Arabic orHebrew is more pleasing) musical orrich) for instance) Jews rate the latter)while Arabs rate the former as higher)both rating their own ingroup tonguepreferen tially.

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In addition, imagine rating thepleasantness of the same (neutral) Italianmessage under three very differentcifcumstances: (a) enjoying gourmetTuscan food and wine whilst beingserenaded by a delightful Verdi aria; (b)doing this 'cold' under survey conditions;and (c) reading a newspaper account ofa supposed Mafia atrocity. Pleasant-ness ratings under (a) conditions wouldbe elevated over those in (b) and mighteven veef towards unpleasantness in thesocial climate of (c). Correspondingly,the 'ugliness' of German might dissipate

rapidly when listening to an engagingMozart opera whilst partaking ofdelicious Swiss-German Emmentalcheese or delicate Austrian torteswashed down with either a first-rateBeerenauslef wine or a remarkableBavarian beef. Research thus shows thatsounds are in the ear of the beholder, tobe variably interpreted and sociallyconstructed, rather than 'out there' assome fact to be objectively measured.As a final example, if an Americanassociates Spanish or Asian languageswith a 'cultural invasion', a threat tojobs, national or linguistic integrity, heor she is much more likely to considerthem ugly languages than if the languagesare associated with long-standing

civilizations, art or fashion. Morepersonally and anecdotally, we haveknown people who have had rigid viewsabout the ugliness of Irish and Australianaccents, undoubtedly due to theprofoundly negative stereotypes (e.g.brash, uncultured) associated withspeakers of these varieties. However,when visiting these countries and findingthe people unexpectedly and extremelyhospitable, generous, fun and quick-witted, not only did their views shiftdramatically in favor of the delight of theaccents, but they were evenaccommodated in our friends' speech!Finally, together with Richard Bourhis,Peter Trudgill and colleagues, we havein a series of studies investigated the

merit of the social connotationshypothesis. As a backdrop, FrenchCanadians have traditionally favored theParisian dialect over local forms ofFrench in terms of elegance andpleasantness, just as the Greeks havefavored the standard Athenian accentover the Cretan variety. The inherentvalue hypothesis would propose thatEnglish-speakers totally unfamiliar witheither French or Greek would sharethese natural preferences. Not so. OurEnglish judges (having, of course, nosocial

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Language Myths connotations associatedwith these sounds) rated thecorresponding standard and non-standard varieties equally favorably. Inanother study, we asked American andCanadian listeners to rate a variety ofBritish regionally accented speakerswhose ratings varied considerably interms of pleasantness for local Britishjudges. While they were obviouslyfamiliar with the language per se (unlikethe previous studies), once again theydid not discriminate the varieties interms of pleasantness. For us, this wasdue to the fact that they had noknowledge whatsoever attending what it

was socially, and stereotypically, to be aspeaker of these accents; Cockney, oneof the most denigrated British varieties,sounded as fine to the Americans as anyother variety. To conclude, we believeviews about the beauty and ugliness oflanguages and dialects are built oncultural norms, pressures and socialconnotations. We could have spread ournet, of course, far wider, to make similararguments about other stigmatizedaesthetic forms, such as the language ofthe elderly, homosexuals, Creoles, andso forth. Yet, and as we have arguedelsewhere, we cannot tell people thattheir aesthetic responses are false; thatwould be unrealistic and counter-productive, as the Ebonics issue in the

United States clearly illustrates. Rather,we should encourage teachers and othersnot to abandon these judgments entirelybut to recognize them for what they are:the result of a complex of social,cultural, regional, political and personalassociations and prejudices. Mostlisteners know of linguistic varieties thatthey do not like, but we shouldappreciate that these feelings are highlysubjective and have no basis in socialscientific fact. In particular, suchfeelings should not be allowed toinfluence teachers', the media's andpoliticians' attitudes and policiestowards children's and others' languagevarieties - the more so since they arelikely to breed linguistic insecurity and

are, in any case, almost certainly notshared by all members of the widerculture. In the classroom, there is a hugeand important difference between the'German is ugly,' statement of apparentfact, and 'I personally find Germanspeech unattractive,' which, even ifbetter left unsaid, is nevertheless arecog- nition of the subjectivity ofresponses due to social connotations.The case for us language scholars is notcut and dried. We, for our

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Italian is Beautiful, German is Ugly part,would wish to continue with moreprogrammatic research to determineprecisely the changing, multidimensionalaspects of aesthetic preference forvarious modes of communication (e.g.written, and new communicationtechnology) that are laid down when,how, where and why and with whatsocial repercussions over time.


For more details on how people sociallyevaluate language varieties, see chapter

2 of Howard Giles and NikolausCoupland, Language: Contexts andConsequences (Pacific Grove, CA:Brooks/Cole, 1992); for the inherentvalue versus the social connotationshypotheses, including more details of theexperiments outlined above, see thechapter by Peter Trudgill and HowardGiles, 'Sociolinguistics and linguisticvalue judgements', in Proceedings of aColloquium on the Functionality ofLanguage (Ghent: Studia Scientia,1976).

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MYTH 12

Bad Grammar is Slovenly Lesley Milroy

Like most language myths this one begs anumber of questions) such as thefollowing:

What is meant by 'bad grammar'? Whatis meant by 'grammar)? Can particularsentences of the English languagereasonably be described as 'slovenly' -or 'lacking in care and precision')

according to one dictionary definition?

The quest for answers exposes the mythto critical scrutiny. Newspaper features)letter columns and the mailboxes of theBBC are good places to find complaintsabout bad grammar. A rich harvest maybe gathered if language use becomes thesubject of public debate or if currenteducational policies are focusing onEnglish teaching and testing. In Britainrecently many judgemental remarks havebeen aired about 'Estuary English» thename given to a variety of the languagewhich is spreading both socially andgeographically. Examples of specific

constructions often described as badgrammar can be placed in at least threecategories. The first) exemplified insentences (1)-(3) along with the(presumed) correct form in italics)regularly occur in the speech and writingof educated people.

(1) Who am I speaking to? / To whomam I speaking? (2) Martha)s twochildren are completely different to eachother. / Martha)s two children arecompletely different from each other.

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Bad Grammar is Slovenly

(3) I want to quickly visit the library. / Iwant to visit the library quickly.

Two well-known 'errors' appear in (1),namely the preposition in the sentencefinal position and the nominative form ofthe relative pronoun 'who' rather than theoblique form 'whom' which is pre-scribed after a preposition. In (2) theexpression 'different to' is used ratherthan the prescribed 'different from'; and

in (3) there is a 'split infinitive'. In fact,the 'correct' versions were prescribed assuch relatively recently in the history ofthe language, as part of the flurry ofscholarly activity associated with thecodification of the English language inthe eighteenth century. Since the goal ofcodification is to define a particularform as standard, this process entailedintolerance of the range of choiceswhich speakers and writers had hithertotaken for granted. In earlier centuries allthese 'errors' appeared in highlysophisticated writing; in 1603, forexample, Thomas Decker wrote 'Howmuch different art thou to this cursedspirit here?' Different rationalizationswere introduced to support these new

prescriptions. The model of Latin wasinvoked to argue that a prep- ositionshould not end a sentence, that theinflected form of who should not appearanywhere other than in the subject of thesentence, and that an infinitive shouldnot be split. The reason advanced by onewriter of a popular manual ofcorrectness for preferring 'differentfrom' is that' different to' is illogical,since no one would say 'similar from'.But it is not difficult to construct anequally logical argument in support of'different to', since it falls into a set ofwords with comparative meanings suchas similar, equal, superior, whichrequire to. Not only are prescriptivearguments difficult to sustain, but if taken

seriously they are likely to createproblems. For example, 'Who am Ispeaking to?' is normal in most contexts,while 'To whom am I speaking?' willgenerally be interpreted as markingsocial distance. Thus the real differencebetween these forms is stylistic; both aregood English sentences in appropriatecontexts. Sometimes an attempt to followthe prescribed rules produces oddresults.

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Language Myths (4) A good author needs

to develop a clear sense of who she iswriting for. (5) A good author needs todevelop a clear sense of for whom she iswri ting.

The prescription, which outlaws (4) andyields (5), does not work because it isnot based on a principled analysis of thestructure of English but is a response tocultural and political pressures. By theeighteenth century Britain needed astandardized language to meet the needsof geographically scattered colonialgovernment servants and to facilitatemass education. It did not too muchmatter which of a set of variants

emerged as standard, as long as only onewas specified as such. The prescribedstandard was codified in grammars(such as Robert Lowth's) anddictionaries (the most famous being DrJohnson's). No systematic grammar ofEnglish existed at that time, but Latin hada particular prestige as the lingua francaof scholars throughout Europe; hence theappeal not only to logic but to the modelof Latin to justify particularprescriptions. But as we shall seeshortly, English rules are very differentfrom Latin rules, though equallycomplex; like all Germanic languages,English quite naturally placesprepositions in sentence final position.By 'bad grammar' then is sometimes

meant expressions which are not in linewith even unrealistic prescriptions. Butwhat is grammar? Our myth refers to aprescriptive grammar, which is not asystematic description of a language, buta sort of linguistic etiquette, essentiallyan arbitrary set of dos and don'ts. Twoother kinds of grammar can bedistinguished - a descriptive grammarand a mental grammar. A descriptivegrammar does not set out to legislate oncorrectness but describes how wordsare patterned to form major constituentsof sentences. The distinctive rules ofEnglish which underlie these pat- ternsare acquired by children and learnt byspeakers of other languages but aregenerally taken for granted by

prescriptive grammars. One basic ruleof this type describes how questions areformed in English. Consider thefollowing declarative sentences andtheir corresponding questions:

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( 6) Martha is Peter's sister. (7) Marthais cooking lasagne for dinner tonight. (B)Martha should have cooked lasagne for

dinner tonight. (9) My new flatmate whohas won the Cordon Bleu cookingcontest is celebrating with a partytonight. (10) Martha cooks lasagne everyFriday.

(6a) Is Martha Peter's sister? (7a) IsMartha cooking lasagne for dinnertonight? (Ba) Should Martha havecooked lasagne for dinner tonight? (9a)Is my new flatmate who has won theCordon Bleu cooking contest celebratingwith a party tonight? (loa) Does Marthacook lasagne every Friday?

Sentence (6) makes the rule seemsimple: the verb moves to the beginningof the sentence. However, (7) and (B)contain a complex verb phrase,consisting of a lexical verb and one ormore auxiliary verbs. Lexical verbs canbe identified as dictionary entries andform an almost infinitely large classwhich is constantly being augmented bynew borrowings and inventions:examples are kick, sneeze, vegetate,computerize, shuttle, chortle) debug(some of these words can behave both asverbs and nouns). The set of auxiliaryverbs, however) is sharply limited: itconsists of forms of be (such as is andare); forms of have; forms of do; andmodals such as must, should, might,

could, can) will. As (7) and (B) show,the question-formation rule moves thefirst auxiliary verb to the beginning ofthe sentence. But (9) shows that thisdoes not always work. Simply movingthe first auxiliary verb produces a trulyungrammatical sentence which is not inline with the rules used by any speakerof any kind of English. This kind ofsentence is conventionally marked witha star:

(11) *Has my new flatmate who won theCordon Bleu cooking contest iscelebrating with a party tonight?

To solve this problem we need to modifyour rule; the subject of the sentencechanges places with the next auxiliaryverb) which ends

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Language Myths up at the front of thesentence. The subject of (9) IS shown Initalics:

(12) My flatmate who has won theCordon Bleu cooking contest is

celebrating with a party tonight.

Subjects of sentences can be of differentkinds; they can be single words (she,Martha, flatmates); different sizes ofnoun phrases (my [new] flatmates [fromItaly]). The subject of (9) is rather largeand cumbersome, but we can formulatethe question rule coherently only if werecognize that the subject of (9) is thewhole sequence my new flatmate whohas won the Cordon Bleu cookingcontest and not some part of it. Butcomplicated as this rule has become, itstill needs some fine-tuning. Otherwise,how do we handle a sentence like (10),

which does not contain an auxiliaryverb? For some centuries Englishspeakers have not formed questions inthe manner of Othello ('Thinkst thou r dmake a life of jealousy. . .') by movingthe lexical verb to the front of thesentence. In such cases as (10) we needto supply the appropriate form of do, asshown by (loa). But this also leads us toa yet more complex specification of ourrule. Consider the ungrammatical sen-tence (13):

(13) *Do Martha cooks lasagne everyFriday?

The verb cook in (10) is inflected with -s to mark present tense, and that present-tense marker must attach itself only tothe auxiliary verb do in order to form thefully grammatical question (loa). All theoperations described above are requiredin order to construct a grammaticalquestion. We here use the term'grammatical' in a sense very differentfrom that suggested by the prescriptiveexpression 'bad grammar'. Agrammatical sentence in this moretechnical sense follows the rules of thelanguage as it is used by its nativespeakers. These rules are followedunconsciously and, generally speaking,native speakers do not make mistakes ofthe kind illustrated by (11) and (13).

However, young children take some timeto acquire rules; one three-year-oldasked, 'Did baby cried last night?'Second-language

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learners and speakers with strokes orhead injuries can certainly experienceproblems with the grammar of questions.Although this rule is very much more

complicated than the list of dos anddon'ts which are the focus ofprescriptive grammars becauseknowledge of it is unconscious) manyspeakers who are familiar with therather different rules of prescriptivegrammar simply do not know that itexists. This unconscious knowledge of aset of rules (we have looked at only oneof these) which allows native speakersto produce grammatical sentences andto distinguish grammatical fromungrammatical sentences (we did thiswhen we considered (11)) can bedescribed as a mental grammar.Prescriptive rules are never as complexas properly formulated descriptiverules) and are easily dealt with by

descriptive grammars. For example)different from/to would simply bespecified as options; the split infinitivewould not be an issue since the infinitiveform of the verb is visit) not to visit;'Who am I speaking to?' would beviewed as a normal sentence followingthe rules of English. Sentences like (14)and (IS) are also subject to popularcriticism:

(14) So I said to our Trish and ourSandra) 'y ous wash the dishes.) (15)Was you watching the game when therain started?

Unlike (1)-(6) which are regularly usedby educated speakers and writers) bothof these are characteristic of low-statusspeakers. They were recordedrespectively in Belfast and London)although the grammatical patternswhich they illustrate are foundelsewhere. It is the low social status ofthese speakers) indexed by details oftheir language use) which seems in thiscase to form the basis of negativeevaluation. In such a way is social classprejudice disguised as neutralintellectual commentary) and for thisreason one linguist has described lin-guistic prescriptivism as the last opendoor to discrimination. But note that (14)makes a systematic distinction between

'you' (singular) and 'yous) (plural)similar to many languages of the worldbut lacking in Standard English. Thus)(14) cannot be argued to be in any senselinguistically impoverished (anothercommon rationalization in defence ofprescribed variants). Languages anddialects simply vary

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Language Myths in the meaningdistinctions they encode) regardless oftheir social status. Note that (15) is aperfectly formulated question. Earlier in

the history of English was and were insuch sentences were acceptablealternatives (recall that the process ofstandardization has narrowed the rangeof socially and stylistically acceptablelinguistic choices). But if we askwhether such sentences are 'slovenly)('lacking in care and precision») wemust surely concede that the care andprecision needed to implement thequestion-formation rule is considerable)placing in perspective the triviality ofrequiring were with a plural subject. Letus look finally at two sentences whichseem to be subject to criticism for yet adifferent reason:

(16) Me and Andy went out to the park.(17) it's very awkward/it's difficult mindyou/with a class of thirty odd/occasionally with the second form/you'llget you know/ well we)ll we)ll haveerm a debate/

Neither (16) nor (17) are clearly markedas belonging to a particular region) butbetween them they display a number ofcharacteristics of informal spokenEnglish. Uttered by an adolescent boy)(16) is criticized on the grounds that thewrong pronoun case (me instead of I) isused inside a conjoined phrase.Speakers are so conscious of this Latin-

based prescription that evenlinguistically self-conscious and quiteprescrip- tively minded individualssometimes hypercorrect and use I whereme is prescribed (a particularly largenumber of complaints about thesepatterns of pronoun use are received bythe B B C). Thus Margaret Thatcheronce announced) 'It is not for you and Ito condemn the Malawi economy,' andBill Clinton pleaded) 'Give AI Gore andI a chance.) But a systematic analysis ofEnglish grammar reveals under- lyingrules which permit variation between meand I only within conjoined phrases.Thus) adolescent boys do not habituallysay 'Me went out to the park,' Clintonwould not plead 'Give 1 a chance,' and

not even Margaret Thatcher would havesaid 'I t is not for I to condemn theMalawi economy.) With respect toprescriptive rules) there is often

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such a disparity between what speakersbelieve is correct and what they actuallydo; but descriptive rules are neithersubject to violation nor are they part of

our conscious knowledge of language.Although conversation is often thought tobe unstructured, ungrammatical andslovenly (presumably when judgedagainst the norms of writing or formalspeech), its complex organizational prin-ciples are quite different from those ofplanned spoken or written discourse; itis not simply spoken prose. Transcribedfrom a coffee- break conversationbetween two teachers, (17) is typical ofinformal conversation in its chunks(marked by slashes), which do notcorre- spond to the sentences of writtenEnglish. Also in evidence are fillerssuch as erm, hesitations (marked by fullstops), repairs, repetitions, anddiscourse tokens such as you know, mind

you. Most of these features areattributable to conversation's interactive,online mode of production, and the twodiscourse tokens function as'participation markers', signalling to theinterlocutor that interactionalinvolvement or response is expected.Thus, it hardly seems appropriate todescribe even the apparentlyunstructured utterance (17) as 'slovenly'.So what are we to say in conclusionabout our current myth? 'Bad grammar' isa cover term to describe a number ofdifferent kinds of English expressions.Some are widely used by educatedspeakers and writers but are outlawedby traditional prescriptions which aredifficult to sustain; some appear to

attract covert social prejudice by virtueof their association with low-statusgroups; and some follow the verycharacteristic but still rule-governedpatterns of informal speech. All areperfectly grammatical, providingevidence of a complex body of ruleswhich constitute mental grammars, theunconscious knowledge which speakershave of their own language. Incomparison, the prescriptions whichare recommended as 'good grammar' arerevealed as at best marginal andfrequently as unrealistic and trivial.


For details of the processes andconsequences of prescriptivisffi, seeRosina Lippi-Green, English with anAccent (London: Routledge, 1997)

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Language Myths and James Milroy andLesley Milroy, Authority in Language(London: Routledge, 1985). For ahumorous critique of some commonprescrip- tions see Patricia O'Conner,Woe is I: the grammarphobe's guide to

better English in plain English (NewYork: Grosset/Putnam, 1996). Mentalgrammars are discussed by StevenPinker, The Language Instinct (London:Penguin, 1994) and for a standarddescriptive grammar of English seeSidney Greenbaum, The Oxford EnglishGramlnar (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996).

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MYTH 13

Black Children are Verbally DeprivedWalt Wolfram

Eloquent orators seem to abound inAfrican-American culture. At religiousmeetings) political rallies and othersocial gatherings) speakers demonstratedynamic) effectual discourse. From thepowerful speeches of historic figuressuch as Frederick Douglass) throughWilliam Du Bois) Martin Luther King)Barbara Jordan and Jessie Jackson in theUnited States - and beyond NorthAmerica to renowned African oratorssuch as Kwame Nkrumah) OdumegwuOjukwu and Des- mond Tutu) this

oratorical tradition is regularlypracticed and highly valued. Evenpolitical and social opponents of thesewell-known black orators begrudginglyconcede the power and utility of theirspeaking skills. Quite clearly) verbal artis an integral) pervasive and highlyvalued component of black culture - onboth a public and a personal level. Itsinfluence on popular culture) throughrappers) hip-hop culture and slangexpressions is transparent) but it is morethan that. Its roots are planted deepwithin the oral tradition of the Africandiaspora) and its branches extend topractically every sphere ofcommunicative activity within blackculture. Given such an extensive and

widely recognized oral tradition) it isindeed ironic to find young African-American children described in theeducational literature as 'verballydeprived') 'language impoverished) or'linguistically retarded'. Can these bechildren from the same culture wedescribed above? If so) how can suchcontrasting pictures of languagecompetence arise? And how do wereconcile the conflicting portraits ofverbal richness and linguistic poverty? Ifnothing else) the lesson that emergesfrom the myth of African-Americanverbal deprivation shows how far fromreality perceptions of language ability

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Language Myths may wander. Or howmuch distortion can appear In a languageportrait based on the angle of theobserver. As a backdrop for ourdiscussion, we must admit that there aredifferences in varieties of English whichmay sometimes correlate with ethnicity.Some African-Americans simply do notsound the same as Anglo-Americanswhen they speak. When tape-recordedspeech samples of working-classAfrican-American and working-classAnglo- American are played, listenersidentify with reasonable accuracy

whether the speakers are black or white(about 80 per cent of the time in mostlistener tests based on relatively briefpassages of natural speech) . The basisfor these language differences ishistorically, socially and linguisticallyvery natural and understandable. Whenpeople from different cultures cometogether, the languages reflecting thesecultures mix and adapt. And whengroups are segregated, isolated andexcluded, they maintain and develop indifferent ways, thus enhancing languagedifferences. So far so good - as over6,000 world languages andmultitudinous dialects of each of thesedistinct languages attest. But whendifferent cultural groups are drastically

unequal in their social and interactionalrelationships - and especially when onegroup has been dehumanized incomparison with the other - theenvironment for cultivating myths aboutthese differences is fertile. The endresult of these myths is to provide ajustification for the differential powerrelations between the groups. Mythsabout the language of African-Americanshave, of course, changed as theperspective on the status of blackAmericans has shifted historically, butthere is a common, unifying theme in themythology, namely, the linguisticinferiority principle. According to thisprinciple, the speech of a sociallysubordinate group will always be

interpreted as inadequate by comparisonwith the socially dominant group. Expla-nations may vary, but the principle willbe constant. Thus, when African-American speech is compared with themiddle-class, Anglo- American norm, itwill be considered linguisticallydeficient, although the explanations forthe deficiency may vary. In the days ofslavery, when blacks were institutionallyascribed a status that was less thanhuman, their speech was simply viewedas

1°4

Black Children are Verbally Deprivedthe communicative gibberish of a peopleinherently incapable of imitating thelanguage of the ruling European-American classes. If a group of peopleis considered genetically deficient, whatelse is to be expected from theirlanguage? In various shapes and forms,the myth of genetic inferiority haspersisted to some extent even in present-day society. Thus, there are stilloccasional references to the possiblecorrelation of anatomical differenceswith racial differences, a throw- back tothe genetic basis for languagedifferences among blacks and whites.Myths correlating racial with linguisticdifferences are fairly easy to debunk

logically and empirically. If race weretruly a factor accounting for a dialectdifference, then how would we explainthe fact that African-Americans raised inan exclusively Anglo-American environ-ment will sound indistinguishable fromthose of the surrounding speechcommunity and vice versa? There isindisputable evidence from listeneridentification judgments that speakerswill be identified with the language oftheir socialized community, not theirracial classification. Anatomicallybased explanations, for example, thosebased on lip size, are also easy to reject.For example, there is great diversity inlip size within both the white and blackcommunities, yet no independent

correlation with lip size and speechdifferences exists. White folks who havelarger lips don't necessarily sound black,and blacks with smaller lips don'tnecessarily sound white. Besides, thereis no indication from the world's racesthat lip size correlates in any way withthe choice of particular sounds in alanguage. But entrenched myths aboutlanguage inadequacy are like a jack-in-the-box that keeps springing back up. Sothe exposure of one line of reasoning asobjectively unjustified and illogicaldoesn't mean that linguistic equality willbe attained. If the bottom-line belief isthat one cultural group - and byextension, its language - is inferior toanother, then another line of reasoning

will simply replace the old one.Therefore, when nature is ruled out as apossible explanation for thedistinctiveness of African-Americanspeech, nurture may rise to theinterpretive occasion. Genetically basedmyths have not died out

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Language Myths completely in popularculture, but they have largely beensupplanted by myths related to the socialenvironment. In some respects, thecurrent set of myths tied to nurture is a

more serious threat to the linguisticintegrity of African-American speechthan those based on nature, because theycan be camouflaged in fashionablesocial and educational concern. In theprocess, the explanations for linguisticinferiority don't seem so blatantly racistas their precursors founded in geneticinferiority. But the semblance ofrespectability can actually present amore imposing obstacle to a validunderstanding of black speech thanconspicuously racist statements aboutanatomical differences accounting forlinguistic differences. In order for a mythto be nurtured in an increasinglyeducated society, it should be rooted in'objective fact' and have a common-

sense appeal. The verbal deprivationmyth has done this by relying on theresults of standardized tests and otherformal assessment measures as 'thefacts', then turning to conditions in thesocial environment to explain them. Forexample, the results of standardizedlanguage testing support the conclusionthat 'disadvantaged children of almostevery kind are typically one or twoyears retarded in language development'(Carl Bereiter, p. 196). The problemwith the facts, however, is that theyprovide a distorted picture. The normsused as the basis for testing the speakerswere derived from standard- English-speaking, middle-class Anglo childrenwho speak a dialect different from their

working-class cohorts. Therefore, thetests simply demonstrate a dialectdifference between middle-class,standard dialects of English and otherdialects. No language expert would denythat African-American children whospeak a variety of English different fromthe standard English norms used in themeasuring instruments will scoredifferently from - and lower than - thosechildren who speak the language varietyused as the basis for norming the test. ACanadian French child taking a testnormed on Parisian French or a Spanish-speaking South- American child taking aSpanish test normed on CastilianSpanish spoken in Spain would suffer asimilar fate in their 'objective' test

scores. If standard dialect speakers weregiven a test using normative, uniquelyAfrican-American language structures,they would suffer a

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Black Children are Verbally Deprivedcomparable fate. Of course, when onegroup is economically and sociallydominant over another, differences willalways be interpreted in a way thatsupports the asymmetrical socio-economic, socio- political and socio-educational status quo. In such a

comparative scenario, it is easy to seehow cultural and language differenceswill be interpreted as deficits. So it isjust a matter of explaining why thesedeficits exist. The seeds of languagedeprivation are firmly planted through'facts'; now all that is needed is anexplanation that will allow the principleof linguistic inferiority to be nurturedproperly. Interpretative explanations thatsustain the myth of the linguisticallydeprived black child appeal to theprocess of language learning, the natureof language patterning and the situationsused to demonstrate language capability.With respect to language learning,models of parenting in general andverbal interaction between caretakers

and children in particular are cited assupport for the alleged verbaldeprivation of African-Americanchildren. Some middle-class parentstake a fairly proactive, although highlyselective role in teaching young childrennew words and directly modelingspeech. By the same token, someworking-class parents may not be asproactive in directly modeling languagein this way. Looking at this situation,educational psychologists havemaintained that working-class blackchildren do not get adequate verbalstimulation from their caretakers bycompari- son with their middle-classcohorts and, therefore, they end uplanguage- handicapped. At first glance,

this line of reasoning seems sensible - ifone assumes that parents and caretakersmust playa proactive role for languageacquisition to take place. But as it turnsout, this is a totally erroneousassumption. There is absolutely no basisfor maintaining that language acquisitioncomes through direct parental initiative;in fact, there is a lot of evidence againstit. The capacity for language is a uniqueattribute of the human mind, and there isoverwhelming evidence that all that isneeded for normal languagedevelopment to take place is exposure toa social environment where people uselanguage to interact meaningfully.Anyone who has ever been in a working-class black home knows that verbal

interaction is profuse and productive.Children interact with each other andadults interact with each other

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Language Myths and with the children.Certainly) there is extensive verbalinteraction to provide models forlanguage acquisition) and any claim tothe contrary would be totally absurd.There are a number of different modelsfor interaction in the acquisition ofnormal language. Surveys of languagesocialization across the world)s cultures

indicate that parent-child) adult care-taker-child) and older sibling- and peer-child interactions all work effectively inmodeling the language necessary foracquisition. Regard- less of the model)all children acquiring language have abasic language system by the age of fiveor six) with minor refinements takingplace for another five or six years. Infact) surveys of language socializationmodels in languages around the worldindicate that the parent-child interactionmodel is a minority one. But that's notthe essential point; the important fact isthat there are different socialinteractional models for providing thenecessary input for the stimulation ofnormal language learning. A parent's

proactive role in teaching language maymake the parent feel involved andresponsible) but it has little to do withthe ultimate acquisition of normallanguage. This is fortunate; if it were notso) the vast majority of the world'slanguages would never be acquiredadequately. The myth of languagedeprivation is also supported by amistaken understanding about languagepatterning. There is a popular percep-tion that standard dialects have regularpatterns - the 'rules) of language - andthat structures that differ from these rulesviolate the basic patterns of language.From this perspective) non-standardvarieties involve violations of thestandard dialect but no rules of their

own. This is the grammaticality myth)which holds that any structure not inconformity with standard English normsis designated 'ungrammatical'. Thismyth lumps together cases of trueungrammaticality) where the basicpatterns for forming sentences in alanguage are indeed violated) and socialjudgments about differently patternedlanguage forms. For example) an Englishspeaker uttering a sentence such as dogthe barks would violate a basicsequencing rule of English grammar inwhich articles regularly come beforenouns rather than after them - a case oftrue ungrammaticality for English.However) the grammati-

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Black Children are Verbally Deprivedcality myth holds that sentences such asThey be talking all the time, They didn'tdo nothing to nobody about nothing, andShe nice would be considered as casesof ungrammatical language as well.While these sentences may certainly besocially disfavored, they are rigorouslypatterned. for example, the use of be insentences such as They be talking all thetime Of Sometimes my ears be itchinguniquely marks a 'habitual activity' asopposed to a single-point activity in

African- American Vernaculaf English. Itis figorously constrained in its pat-terning - different from standard Englishbut every bit as patterned as anycompafable structure in the standardvariety. Observations of speakers' useand tests of preferences for sentenceswith be indicate that speakers ofAfrican-American Vernacular Englishwill systematically select be for habitualcontexts such as Sometimes they bedoing it but not for single-time contextssuch as They be doing it right now.Unfortunately, following thegrammaticality myth, this regular pat-terning is not even considefed to be apossibility. Instead, social acceptabilityhas become equated with linguistic

pattefning; thus, a social judgment istranslated into a misguided notion oflanguage organization. No one is sayingthat this structure should be consideredstandard English - just that its linguisticintegrity stands apart from its socialassessment. Some language differencesmay even be interpreted in terms oflogic. Thus, the use of multiple negativessuch as They didn't do nothing, which isused in African-American VernacularEnglish as in many other vernacularvarieties of English, may be interpretedas an indication of a flawed logic system- the logicality myth. In a fanciful appealto formal logical operations in whichnegatives can cancel each other undercertain conditions, it is sometimes

maintained that speakefs who usemultiple negatives lapse into illogicallanguage use. But formal, syllogisticreasoning is quite different ffom thegrammatical manifestations of basiclanguage propositions, includingnegation, where thefe are variedlinguistic manifestations of basicpropositions. In fact, many languagesregularly and exclusively use multiplenegation in certain types ofconstructions. Compare, for example, thefrench sentence Je ne sais rien 'I don'tknow nothing,' the Spanish sentence Nohace nada 'S/he isn't doing nothing,' oreven

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Language Myths older Englishconstructions such as There was no mannowhere so virtuous) where multiplenegatives were the standard norm.Unless one is prepared to say thatFrench) Spanish) the English ofrespected authors like Chaucer and manyother languages of the world are innatelyillogical in their organization) we mustconcede that appealing to logic insupport of the deficiency of African-American Vernacular English is)somewhat ironically) a quite illogicalline of reasoning itself. Similarly) it has

been argued that verbless sentences suchas She nice or The dog brown may beindicative of a cognitive breakdown indenoting relationships of identity. But asit turns out) the juxtaposition of items inthese constructions is a simple variantfor linking predicate constructions)including predicate adjectives such asShe nice or location constructions suchas She in the house. Languages likeRussian) Thai and many others use suchconstructions) since the verb in thesekinds of construction turns out to beredundant. Appeals to logic may have avery strong common-sense appeal, butthe logic of these appeals for languageorganization is fatally flawed. Finally)we should say something about the

perceptions of the 'nonverbal) African-American child. This classification hasbeen made by some educators whoobserved that some African - Americanchildren may say little or nothing whenspoken to by adults under certain kindsof conditions. The typical situation onwhich these conclusions are basedinvolves an adult attempting to elicitconversation in what seems - at least forthe adult - to be a relatively innocuousand non-threatening situation. Butconsider the typical scenario in which afriendly adult sits across from a child inan institutional setting and asks the childsimply to 'tell me everything you canabout the fire engine on the table.) Thesituation is laden with values about

language use) including the value ofverbosity (the more you speak the better)obvious information (there is value indescribing objects that the questioneralready knows about) and consequencesfor providing information (what a childtells will not be held against the child)to say nothing of the asymmetrical powerrelations between the adult stranger andchild in a relatively alien) institutionalsetting. The same child who saysvirtually nothing about the fire engine inthis social situation may) in fact) behighly animated and verbal when playing

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Black Children are Verbally Deprivedwith the fire engine in her home on thefloor with her playmates. Theappearance of nonverbalness is just that- an appearance created by the artificialtesting conditions under which languageis sometimes collected for the purposesof assessment. Given the actual value ofverbal presentation and repartee asdiscussed earlier) the myth of thenonverbal black child is perhaps themost ironic twist of all in the assessmentof African-Americans) language ability.In challenging the myth of black languagedeprivation) I am not trying to say thatthe language of the home and community

is appropriate for the particularizedand socialized uses of language ineducation and other kinds of publicinstitutions. There is an academicregister necessary for carrying outcertain kinds of educational routines)just as there is a language register forcarrying out certain kinds of legalroutines. In fact) there are lots ofdifferent situations and domains forlanguage that call for specializedlanguage uses) and our participation inparticular institutions in societynecessitates that we be familiar with theregisters associated with them. But thesespecialized uses of language havenothing to do with basic languagecapability. In some respects) no myth

about African-Americans seems moreabsurd than the myth of verbaldeprivation. All the evidence indicatesthat black culture is a highly verbalculture which values the developmentof verbal skills. Unfortunately)relationships of social and politicalinequality can lead to the dismissal ofeven the most obvious reality in order tomold language perceptions in conformitywith the inferiority principle. Ratherthan being labeled as verbally deprived)African- Americans ought to be thankedfor contributing to daily conversationwith words) phrases and other mannersof speaking that enrich our language andour lives.


The quote on language disadvantage istaken from Carl Bereiter) 'Academicinstruction and preschool children» inRichard Corbin and Muriel Crosby)Language Programs for theDisadvantaged (Champaign) IL:National Council of Teachers of English)1965). Some of the

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Language Myths contributions ofAfrican-Americans to American speechthrough various phrases are cited inGeneva Smitherman) Black Talk: Wordsand Phrases from the Hood to the AmenCorner (Middleborough) MA: TheCountry Press) 1995). William Labov)s'The logic of non-standard English» inLanguage in the Inner City: Studies in theBlack English Vernacular (Philadelphia)P A: The University of PennsylvaniaPress) 1972) remains a classic articleattacking the language deprivation myth.

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MYTH 14

Double Negatives are Illogical JennyCheshire

Nothing shows why At this uniquedistance from isolation, It becomes stillmore difficult to find Words at once trueand kind, Or not untrue and not unkind. -Philip Larkin, 'Talking in Bed'

An' when they be saying if you good, yougoin' t'heaven, tha's bullshit, 'cause youain't goin' to no heaven, 'cause there ain'tno heaven for you to go to. -fifteen-year-old black youth from Harlem

You won't get nothing for dinner if youdon't come in and clear up your mess. -adult woman from Hackney, East London

It never occurred to me to doubt thatyour work would not advance ourcommon object in the highest degree. -Charles Darwin

There are three types of double negativehere, each of which is from time to timecondemned as illogical. Fowler's Guideto Good Usage claims that the typeillustrated by Darwin's sentence is a'fuzzy error' that occurs when peopledon't know exactly how to handlenegatives. George Orwell said that thefirst kind (not plus a negative adjective)should be 'laughed out of existence'. Butit is the second kind, where there is anegative verb (ain't and won't in theexamples here) and a negative wordsuch as no, nothing or no one, thatarouses the strongest feelings. It was oneof the top ten complaints sent in 1986 to

the BBC Radio 4 series English Nowafter listeners had been invited tonominate

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Language Myths the three points ofgrammatical usage they most disliked.Those who wrote in did more thansimply dislike their chosen items: theysaid that they 'made their blood boil')'gave a pain to their ear') 'made themshuddef) and 'appalled) them. Doublenegatives) it seems) cause a great dealof suffering) so it is worth investigating

the nature of the problem. If you askpeople why they object to doublenegatives) they usually point to logic)where there is a long tradition ofassuming that two people refer tomathematics) where 'minus two minusminus two equals zero,' with the twominuses effectively turning the first partof the equation into 'minus two plustwo.) From these analogies) somepeople argue) it follows that twonegatives in the same sentence must alsocancel each other out) turning there ain)tno heaven for you to go to into there IS aheaven for you to go. In the same way)they say) the two negatives in not untrueshould) according to the rules of logic)mean simply 'true). It is very simple to

show) however) that this is not asensible way to argue. If we really wantto apply the principles of mathematics tolanguage we must also considerutterances where there are not two butthree negatives) like I didn)t givenothing to no one. If two negativescancel each other out) sentences such asthis one are clearly negative) for therewill still be one negative left after twoof them have been cancelled out. Butwhich one is left? Didn't, nothing or noone? Unlike the figures of mathematics)words in language have meaning) so ifwe cancel some of the negatives wechange the meaning of the sentence. Ifwe apply the fules of logic to I didn'tgive nothing to no one) then) should we

decide that the utterance means 'I gavesomething to no one') or 'I gave nothingto someone'? Things get mOfecomplicated still if we consider what theaffirmative version would be: I gavesomething to everyone? I gaveeverything to someone? Of I gavesomething to someone? The problem isthat if we want seriously to apply therules of logic to language) we cannotthink only in tefms of negation. We haveto take account of other distinctions thatare impoftant in logic. Words likenothing) no or no one afe the negativeequivalents of what logicians tefm'universal quantifiers» like everythingand everyone; but they are also thenegative equivalents of 'existential

114

Double Negatives are Illogicalquantifiers' like something and someone.Issues concerning the logical interactionbetween negation and quantificationhave kept philos- ophers busy since thetime of Aristotle and before. When wehave two negatives to deal with, then,the question is not just whether or notthey are illogical, but precisely whichlogical issues are involved and how theyinterrelate with each other and with therest of the utterance. In view of all thesecomplexities, it is fortunate that it is very

rarely appropriate to think in terms oflogic when looking at language use. Wedo not utter phrases like you ain't goingto no heaven in isolation, nor do weponder over the meaning of what ourinterlocutor has said in the way thatphilosophefs do, to decide whether ornot the negative sentence conforms to therules of logic. If we say something that isnegative it is because we want to denysomething that someone has said orimplied to us: fOf example, the youngman in the example from Harlem wasdenying what people had told him aboutgoing to heaven if you're good, as hisprevious remarks make clear. As forpotential problems of ambiguity, theseare very rare in speech because the

person we are communicating with isright there with us. If there do happen tobe any ambiguities about whether wemean something or nothing, or whetherwe really mean to be negative or not, wecan sort out the problem straight away.Ambiguity may be more of a problem inwriting, but a large body of research hasshown that in any case negatives occurfar more often in spoken language thanwritten language. Quite apart from thefact that the context will almost alwaysclarify any possible ambiguity, as soonas you look at the way we use negativesin conversation it becomes obvious thatwe rarely, in fact, work with a simpletwo-way distinction between 'negative'and 'not negative'. I t is necessary to

think this way when programming acomputer: computers need to react tosimple two-way distinctions like'negative' or 'not negative' because theycan't - yet - handle anything morecomplex. Human beings, however, arenot computers. In order to gather someexamples of negative utterances I wentout this morning, on a typically greyLondon day, and said to the first tenpeople I chatted to 'I think it looks likerain today.' Some agreed that it did.

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Language Myths The six who didn't thinkit would rain replied in the ways shownbelow.

Do you think it looks like rain? oh no Idon't think so definitely not, it was likethis yesterday and it didn't rain no no, it'sgoing to be fine later not to me it doesn'twell they didn't forecast rain on theradio this morning no but I wish itwould, then I could go to work by carwithout feeling guilty maybe, maybe not

These responses are typical of the waywe use language. If we want to negate

something that someone has said to us, itis perfectly possible to use a barenegative, saying simply no. More oftenthan not, though, we will do more thanthis. We may hedge our negative so thatit is not too definite (no I don't think so)or we may make the negative veryemphatic (definitely not), perhaps withtwo negatives (no no, or not to me itdoesn't) - which do not, by the way,cancel each other out. We may saywhether our denial is based on our ownopinion (not to me it doesn't), or onsome more justifiable authority, such asthe radio weather forecast, or we mayreveal how we feel about the possibilityof rain (I wish it would). Thepossibilities are endless. Replies can

even be both negative and non-negativeat the same time (maybe, maybe not).Unlike computers, when wecommunicate with each other we do notdeal only in simple two-waydistinctions: there are many otherimportant aspects of meaning that weconvey at the same time as the factualinformation. Phrases such as not untrueand not unkind also reflect our needs, ashuman beings, to go beyond simple two-way distinctions. If you stop and thinkabout it, you will probably agree thatthere are very few distinctions in thereal world that are clearly either onething or the other. Most of the time weare dealing with something in between.A new neighbour, for example, can be

friendly or unfriendly, but there is also aneutral possibility and an infinite numberof graduations

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Double Negatives are Illogical betweenthe two extremes. We can extend theextremes) with a 'very friendly'neighbour or neighbour who is 'notfriendly at all). 'Opposite) meanings arebest seen as forming a continuum ratherthan as being mutually exclusivealternatives; and using two negatives(like not unfriendly) allows us to situate

ourselves somewhere within the middleground but without necessarily sayingexactly where. Many of our conventionalexpressions show that people like tocontrive subtle distinctions evenbetween pairs of words that should)strictly speaking) be mutually exclusive.Take the words alive and dead: if we aredead) then we cannot) in principle) alsobe alive) and there can be no half-waystage. Yet there are well-used phrasessuch as more dead than alive or onlyhalf-alive. Not surprisingly) the onlywords that we don)t treat in thisapparently illogical way are words thatrefer to mathematical principles; anumber like 3 is 'odd) and 4 is 'even»and no one tries to draw any fine

distinctions between odd numbers andeven numbers. This is because here wereally are dealing with the rules ofmathematics. In real life we are not. It isinteresting that people react incontradictory ways to the not untrue typeof double negative. George Orwellobjected that it gives 'bland statementsan appearance of profundity') allowingpeople to sit on the fence) in the middleground between one extreme and theother - which is probably why it is usedso frequently by British politicians. Thesatirical magazine Private Eye has amock diary entry for the British PrimeMinister which is peppered with doublenegatives of this kind. Orwell'ssuggested cure for people who like to

use these double negatives was that theyshould memorize the ludicrous sentenceA not unblack dog was chasing a notunsmall rabbit across a not ungreenfield. Others) however) neither objectnor laugh but see double negatives aselegant. It is considered good style towrite neither. . . nor) as I just did.Erasmus thought that double negativeswere 'graceful' and 'elegant')recommending the use of not ungratefulfor 'very grateful' and not vulgarly for'singularly). In the eighteenth centurysome grammarians warned against usingdouble negatives on the grounds that theywere illogical or in bad taste) but otherswere in favour of them. One Americangrammarian) Lindley Murray) censored

them

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Language Myths

Monday I was not inconsiderably sorryto see all the news placards thismorning. They all had in very big letters"NEW TORY SEX SCANDAL".

-Private Eye) no. 866) 24.2.95) p. 21

Wednesday I do not know whether to bevery not inconsiderably annoyed or quitenot inconsiderably pleased. Thismorning I saw on the hotel's CNN Newsthat no sooner have I turned my backthan the great economic recovery hascome to an end. This only goes to showhow wrong I was to leave Mr Heseltinein charge.

-Private Eye, no. 879, 25.8.95, p. 19

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Double Negatives are Illogical asillogical but then went on to claim thatthey formed 'a pleasing and delicatevariety of expression'. If there isanything illogical about doublenegatives, then, it is people's reactionsto them: some hate them, some lovethem; some, like Murray, both hate andlove them; some people laugh at themwhilst others, like the B B Ccorrespondents, are appalled. Mostpeople, however, happily utter doublenegatives without, we must assume,realizing the emotional havoc they could

be causing and without worrying aboutbeing illogical. They are right not toworry, for two reasons. First, the teststhat linguists use to determine whether ornot a sentence is negative would identifyall the examples at the beginning of thischapter as unambiguously negative,despite the double negatives. Linguistsidentify the principles underlyinglanguage structure by analysinglanguages in terms of their own rules andregularities, recognizing that linguisticstructure does not necessarily follow therules of logic. One such linguistic testfor negation is to try adding a 'not even'phrase to a sentence. For example, wecan say you ain't going to no heaven, noteven if you repent of all your sins - or, if

you prefer, you aren't going to no heaven,not even if you repent of all your sins -but it makes no sense to say you aregoing to heaven, not even if you repentof all your sins. The latter sentence, then,is not negative, but the first two are,despite their double negatives. There areno linguistic grounds, then, for decidingthat the two negatives have cancelledeach other out. Secondly, the system ofnegation in English has never, in anycase, been one in which two negativescancel each other to make an affirmative.On the contrary, in Old English negativestended to accumulate in a sentence,reinforcing each other. Multiplenegatives are also frequent in Chaucerand Shakespeare's work, and in later

writers too.

He forbad aet mon nane faeste boc neleorde. (from Orosius) He forbadeanyone (not) to read (not) any book.

But nevere gronte he at no strook butoon. (Chaucer, Canterbury Tales) But henever groaned at any of the blows exceptone.

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Language Myths I have one heart, onebosom, and one truth And that no womanhas; nor never none Shall mistress be ofit, save I alone. (Twelfth Night lII.i.172-4)

One negative encouraged another, itseems, and most scholars agree that themore negatives there were in a sentence,the more emphatic the denial orrejection. Double negation is found inthe majority of the world's languages: inFrench, for example, I don't wantanything is translated by je ne veux rien,with two negatives, ne and rien. Spanish,

Russian, Hungarian, Arabic and mostother languages of the world follow thesame pattern, which looks very much,therefore, like a natural pattern forlanguage. For English, double negativesare attested in all the dialects, whetherrural or urban, southern hemisphere ornorthern hemisphere; they occur inAfrican-American English and in all theEnglish creoles. It is only in the standardvariety of English that double negativeshave fallen out of favour. As far as it ispossible to tell, their decline seems tohave taken place during the eighteenthcentury. This was the period whengrammarians attempted to establish a setof norms for good usage: in the case ofdouble negatives they tended to share the

views of the BBC listeners, as we haveseen. The development of a specificstyle for formal written prose at that timemay also have encouraged the decline ofdouble negatives, for in writing the riskof ambiguity does exist, since ourinterlocutor is not present and it isimpossible to use intonation or stress tomake our meaning crystal clear. Theeighteenth century was also a time when'polite' society, in Britain at least, wasstriving to develop a 'cultivated' style ofspeech. It became conventional in politecircles to use a detached impersonalstyle, so it would not have beensurprising if their members had strippedtheir speech of the emphasis conveyedby multiple negatives. In the same way,

today, many 'cultivated' speakers favourunderstatement by saying 'rather good'instead of 'very good', and expressdetachment by using the pronoun 'one'where others might prefer to say'!' or'you'. The outcome is that the differenttypes of double negatives have come tobe used by varying groups of people.Those of us who like to reflect on usagetend to notice double negatives whenthey occur

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Double Negatives are Illogical and to

pass judgement on them, but - perhapsunconsciously - our judgements oftenreflect the social associations that thedouble negatives have for us. The notunimportant kind has become typical ofcareful, formal speech: this is the typethat is played on by poets and parodiedby satirists. It gives rise to mixedreactions, as we've seen. The typeillustrated in the Charles Darwin extractoccurs more often in writing than inspeech and does, it is true, requireconcen- tration to sort out the intendedmeaning; this is the type of doublenegation that Fowler claimed to be afuzzy error. The main objections,however, are reserved for doublenegatives of the I don't want nothing

type, which nowadays are used not bypoliticians, potential poet laureates orscientists, but by Harlem youths, LondonEast Enders and other groups in thecommunity whose ancestors escaped thedemands of polite society and theprescriptions of grammarians. Thesedouble negatives represent the survivalof a long-established pattern of negationin English and a natural pattern ofnegation in language generally. Theymight be recognized in this way if ourgreatest play- wrights still used them.But as it is, they are stigmatized. Iconclude, then, with a phrase whichsome readers will find ridiculous butwhich others will see as graceful andelegant: double negatives are, very

definitely, not illogical.


The example from Philip Larkin is takenfrom Laurence R. Horn, A NaturalHistory of Negation (London andChicago: University of Chicago Press,1989, p. 296). There is a section in thisbook devoted to double negation(section 5.1.3, pp. 296-308). Theexample from Harlem comes fromWilliam Labov's chapter 'The logic ofnonstan- dard English' (p. 215), from hisbook Language in the Inner City

(Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1972, pp. 130-96).The chapter 'Negative attraction andnegative concord', in the same book (pp.201-40) gives a detailed linguisticanalysis of double negation and othertypes of negation in English, includingdiscussion of the interrelations betweennegation and quantification. The examplefrom

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Language Myths Charles Darwin isquoted by Otto Jespersen in his classic

work Negation in English and OtherLanguages (Copenhagen: Andr. FredH0st and Son, 1917). Linguistic tests fornegation are discussed by Edward S.Klima, 4Negation in English', in TheStructure of Language: Readings in thephilosophy of language, Jerry A. Fodorand Jerrold J. Katz (eds.) (EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1964, pp.246-323). Further discussion of negationin language and logic can be found inOsten Dahl's contribution, 'Negation', toSyntax: An international handbook ofcontemporary research (Berlin: Walterde Gruyter, pp. 914-23). Gunnel Tottie'sNegation in English Speech and Writing:A variationist study (London: AcademicPress, 1991) gives a detailed analysis of

the quantity and the types of negation thathave been attested in educated spokenand written modern English. For thehistory of double negatives in English,see Daniel W. Noland, 'A diachronicsurvey of English negative concord'(American Speech 66 (1991), pp. 171-80); and for a brief history of negation inEnglish generally, see Jenny Cheshire's'English negation from an interactionalperspective', in The Socio- linguisticsReader, Volume 1, edited by PeterTrudgill and Jenny Cheshire (London:Arnold, 1998). The role of politenessand delicacy in determining the form ofstandard English grammar is discussedin Laurence Klein's chapter '''Politeness''as linguistic ideology in late-

seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England', in Towards a StandardEnglish 1600-1800, Dieter Stein andIngrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.)(Berlin and New York: Mouton deGruyter, 1993, PP.3 1 -5 0 ).

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MYTH 15

TV Makes People Sound the Same J. K.Chambers

We sociolinguists often find ourselvesdiscussing changes that are taking placein the speech communities around us.The changes themselves are usuallycrystal clear - for example) dived isbeing replaced as the past-tense form bydove) as in the case study I discussbelow. And the way those changes arebeing realized - actualized) we usuallysay - in the speech of the community isalso quite clear in most cases. Usingmethods that are by now well tested) wecan discover the frequency of innovativeforms like dove in the speech of twenty-year-olds and contrast that with itsfrequency in the speech of fifty-year-

olds or eighty-year-olds) as I also do inthe case study below. We can comparewomen with men) or people fromdifferent neighborhoods) or people ofdifferent social and occupational status)sifting through the evidence until we areconfident we know who is leading thechange and where it is heading. But it isoften much more difficult for us topinpoint the reasons for the change - itsmotivation. The reasons behindlinguistic changes are almost alwaysvery subtle. The number of possibilitiesis enormous) taking in such factors asmotor economy in the physiology ofpronunci- ation) adolescent rebellionfrom childhood norms) grammaticalfine- tuning by young adults making their

way in the marketplace) fads) fanciesand fashions) and much more. All thesethings operate beneath consciousness) ofcourse) making their detection evenharder. You can)t see them or measurethem; you can only infer them. Besidesthat) linguistic change is mysterious atits core. Why should languages change atall? From the beginning of recordedhistory (and presumably before that)people have been replacing perfectlyserviceable norms in their speech withnew ones. Why not keep the

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Language Myths old, familiar norms? Noone knows. All we know for certain isthat language change is as inevitable asthe tides. So, very often we are forced toadmit that the motivation for a change isunclear, or uncertain, or undetectable.We can often point to trends - sometimeseven to age-old tendencies (again, as inthe change of dived to dove below) thatsuddenly accelerated and became thenew norm. But exactly why that tendencytoward change arose and, more baffling,exactly why it accelerated at that timeand in that place is a very difficultquestion, one of the most resistantmysteries of linguistics. Knowing allthis, we are perpetually surprised to findthat very often the people we are

discussing these linguistic changes with- our students, colleagues in otherdepartments, audiences at lectures,newspaper reporters, dinner-party guests- know exactly why the changes aretaking place. It's because of television,they say. It's the mass media - the moviesand the radio, but especially thetelevision. Television is the primaryhypothesis for the motivation of anysound change for everyone, it seems,except the sociolinguists studying it. Thesociolinguists see some evidence for themass media playing a role in the spreadof vocabulary items. But at the deeperreaches of language change - soundchanges and grammatical changes - themedia have no significant effect at all.

The sociolinguistic evidence runscontrary to the deep-seated popu- larconviction that the mass media influencelanguage profoundly. The idea thatpeople in isolated places learn to speakstandard English from hearing it in themedia turns up, for instance, as apresupposition in this passage from a1966 novel by Harold Horwood set in aNewfoundland fishing outport:

The people of Caplin Bight, whenaddressing a stranger from the main-land, could use almost accentlessEnglish, learned from listening to theradio, but in conversation among

themselves there lingered the broadtwang of ancient British dialects that thefishermen of Devon and Cornwall andthe Isle of Guernsey had brought to thecoast three or four centuries before.

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TV Makes People Sound the Same Thenovelist's claim that the villagers couldspeak urban, inland middle-classEnglish - presumably that is what hemeans by 'almost accentless English' -from hearing it on the radio is purefantasy. It is linguistic science-fiction. A

more subtle fictional example, this oneset in the apple-growing AnnapolisValley in Nova Scotia, will prove moreinstructive for us in trying to get to theroots of the myth. In a 1952 novel byErnest Buckler, The Mountain and theValley, the young narrator observescertain changes in his rural neighbors.His description of those changes ischaracteristically grandiloquent:

And the people lost their wholeness, thevalid stamp of their indigenousness . . .In their speech (freckled with currentphrases of jocularity copied from theradio), and finally in themselves, they

became dilute.

Here, the author does not claim that themass media are directly responsible forthe dilution of regional speech. He does,however, conjoin the two notions. Thedialect is losing its local 'stamp', hesays, and incidentally it is 'freckled' withcatch-phrases from the network sitcoms.Beyond a doubt, mass communicationdiffuses catch-phrases. At the furthestreaches of the broadcast beam one hearsechoes of Sylvester the Cat's 'Sufferin'succotash', or Monty Python's 'upper-class twit', or Fred Flintstone's 'Ya-bada-ba doo'. When an adolescent says

something that his friends consider unusually intelligent, the friends might lookat one another and say, 'Check out thebrains on Brett' - although the speaker isnot named Brett. That line is a verbatimquotation from the 1994 film PulpFiction. Or they might complimentsomeone and then take it backemphatically: 'Those are nice mauvesocks you're wearing - NOT!' Thatphrase originated on an Americantelevision program, Saturday Night Live,in 1978, but it went almost unnoticeduntil it came into frequent use in onerecurring segment of the same showtwelve years later. From there, itdisseminated far and wide in a juvenilemovie spin-off called Wayne's World in

1992. Once it gained world-widecurrency, other media picked it up,charting its source and tracking itscourse and spreading it even further. But

12 5

Language Myths its very trendinessdoomed it. It was over-used) and acouple of years later it was a fadingrelic. Such catch-phrases are moreephemeral than slang) and mOfe self-conscious than etiquette. They belong forthe moment of their currency to the mostsuperficial linguistic level. Unlike sound

changes and grammatical changes) theselexical changes based on the media areakin to affectations. People notice themwhen others use them) and they knowtheir SOUfce. And they apparently takethem as prototypes for other changes inlanguage. If the mass media canpopularize words and expressions) thereasoning goes) then presumably theycan also spfead othef kinds of linguisticchanges. It comes as a great sUfprise)then) to discovef that thefe is noevidence for television Of the othefpopular media disseminating Ofinfluencing sound changes Ofgrammatical innovations. The evidenceagainst it) to be sure) is indifect. Mostlyit consists of a lack of evidence where

we would expect to find strong positiveeffects. For one thing) we know thatregional dialects continue to divergefrom standard dialects despite theexposure of speakers of those dialects totelevision) radio) movies and othermedia. The best- studied dialectdivergence is occurring in Americaninner cities) where the dialects of themost segregated African-Americanssound less like their white counterpartswith respect to certain features now thanthey did two or three generations ago.Yet these groups are avid consumers ofmass media. William Labov observesthat in inner-city Philadelphia the'dialect is drifting further away) fromother dialects despite 4-8 hours daily

exposure to standard English ontelevision and in schools. For anotherthing) we have abundant evidence thatmass media cannot provide the stimulusfor language acquisition. Hearingchildren of deaf parents cannot acquirelanguage from exposure to radio ortelevision. Case studies now go backmore than twenty-five years) when thepsycholinguist Ervin-Tripp studiedchildren who failed to begin speakinguntil they were spoken to in common)mundane situations by othef humanbeings. More recently) Todd andAitchison charted the progress of a boynamed Vincent) born of deaf parents

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TV Makes People Sound the Same whocommunicated with him by signing, atwhich he was fully competent frominfancy. His parents also encouraged himto watch television regularly, expectingit to provide a model for the speechskills they did not have. But Vincentremained speechless. By the time he wasexposed to normal spoken intefcourse atage three, his speaking ability wasundeveloped and his capacity foracquiring speech was seriouslyimpaired. He had not even gainedpassive skills from all the televised talk

he had heard. Finally, the third kind ofevidence against media influence onlanguage change comes from instances ofglobal language changes. One of the best-studied global changes is the intonationpattern called uptalk or high risingterminals, in which declarativestatements occur with yes/no questionintonation. This feature occurs mainly(but not exclusively) in the speech ofpeople under forty; it is clearly aninnovation of the present generation.Astoundingly, in the few decades of itsexistence it has spread to virtually allEnglish-speaking communities in theworld; it has been studied in Australia,Canada, England, New Zealand and theUnited States. Its pragmatics are clear: it

is used when the speaker is establishingcommon ground with the listener as thebasis for the conversation (Hello. I'm astudent in your phonetics tutorial?), andwhen the speaker is seeking silentaffirmation of some factor that wouldotherwise require explanation before theconversation could continue (Our high-school class is doing an experiment onphotosynthesis?). Its uses havegeneralized to take in situations wherethe pragmatics are not quite so clear (asin Hello. My name is Robin?). So weknow how it is used, but we do not knowwhy it came into being or how it spreadso faf. Many people automaticallyassume that a change like this couldnever be so far-reaching unless it were

abetted by the equally far-reachingmedia. But nothing could be further fromthe truth. In fact, the one social contextwhere uptalk is almost never heard is inbroadcast language. To date, uptalk isnot a feature of any newsreader Ofweather analyst's speech on any nationalnetwork anywhere in the world. Moreimportant, it is also not a regular, natural(unselfconscious) feature of anycharacter's speech in sitcoms, soapoperas, serials or interview showsanywhere in the world. Undoubtedly

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Language Myths it soon will be, but thatwill only happen when televisioncatches up with language change. Notvice versa. Another telling instancecomes from southern Ontario, the mostpopulous part of Canada, wherenumerous changes are taking place instandard Canadian English and many ofthem are in the direction of north-easternAmerican English as spoken just acrossthe Niagara gorge. The assumption ofmedia influence is perhaps to beexpected because of the proximity of theborder on three sides and also becauseAmerican television has blanketedOntario since 1950. But closerinspection shows the assumption iswrong. One example of the changes is

dove, as in The loon dove to the floor ofthe lake. The standard past tense wasdived, the weak (or regular) form.Indeed, dived was the traditional form,used for centuries. But in Canada (andelsewhere, as we shall see) dovecompeted with it in general use in thefirst half of this century, and now has allbut replaced it completely. The progressof this grammatical change is graphicallyevident in Figure 1, which shows theusage of people over seventy at the left-hand end and compares it with youngerpeople decade by decade all the waydown to teenagers (14-19) at the right-hand end. These results come from asurvey of almost a thousand Canadiansin 1992. People born in the 1920S and

1930S - the sixty- and seventy-year-oldsin the figure - usually said dived, butpeople born in succeeding decadesincreasingly said dove. Since the 1960s,when the thirty-year-olds were born,about 90 per cent say dove, to the pointwhere some teenagers today have neverheard dived and consider it 'baby talk'when it is drawn to their attention. Thenewer form, dove, is unmistakablyAmerican. More than 95 per cent of theAmericans surveyed at the Niagaraborder say dove. In fact, dove has longbeen recognized by dialectologists as acharacter- istically Northern US form. InCanada, it had been a minority formsince at least 1857, when a Methodistminister published a complaint about its

use in what he called 'vulgar' speech. Isthe Canadian change a result oftelevision saturation from America?Hardly. The past tense of the verb diveis not a frequently used word, and so thepossibility of Canadians hearing it oncein

128

100 90 80 70 Q) 60

0

bO 50 c Vi :J

40 30 20 10

TV Makes People Sound the Same

o

70-79 60-69 50-59 40-49 30-39 20-2914-19 Age

Figure 1: Percentage of Canadians whouse dove rather than dived

American broadcasts is very slim) letalone hearing it so frequently as tobecome habituated to it. More important)there is evidence that dove is replacingdived in many other places besidesCanada. For example) students in Texasnow use dove almost exclusively)whereas few of their parents and none oftheir grandparents used this (formerly)Northern form. The fact that theselanguage changes are spreading at thesame historical moment as theglobalization of mass media should notbe construed as cause and effect. It maybe that the media diffuse tolerancetoward other accents and dialects. The

fact that standard speech reaches dialectenclaves from the mouths ofanchorpersons) sitcom protagonists)color commentators and other admiredpeople presumably adds a patina ofrespectability to any regional changesthat are standardizing. But the changesthemselves must be conveyed in face-to-face interactions among peers. One ofthe modern changes of even greatersocial significance than the mediaexplosion is high mobility. Nowadays)more people meet face to face acrossgreater distances than ever before. Thetalking heads on our mass mediasometimes catch our attention but theynever

1 2 9

Language Myths engage us in dialogue.Travelers, salesmen, neighbors andwork-mates from distant places speak tous and we hear not only what they saybut how they say it. We mayunconsciously borrow some features oftheir speech and they may borrow someof ours. That is quite normal. But it takesreal people to make an impression. Forus no less than for Vincent.


I previously discussed the influence ofmass media and other post- modernfactors on language change in'Sociolinguistic dialectology' (inAmerican Dialect Research, DennisPreston (ed.), Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins, 1993, especially pp. 137-42). Detailed explanations of the socialmotivations for linguistic change may befound in my book SociolinguisticTheory: Linguistic variation and itssocial significance (Oxford: Blackwell,1995, especially Chs. 2 and 4). The twonovels cited are Tomorrow will be

Sunday, Harold Horwood (Toronto:Paperjacks, 1966) and The Mountainand the Valley, Ernest Buckler (Toronto:McClelland and Stewart, 1961).William Labov's observation of dialectdivergence despite intensive mediaexposure comes from his presentation on'The transmission of linguistic traitsacross and within communities', at the1984 Sym- posium on LanguageTransmission and Change, Center forAdvanced Study in the BehavioralSciences. Case studies of the hearingchildren of deaf parents may be found inSusan Ervin-Tripp, 'Some strategies forthe first two years' (in Cognition and theAcquisition of Language, New York:Academic Press, 1973, pp. 261-86) and

'Learning language the hard way', by P.Todd and J. Aitchison in the journal FirstLanguage 1 (1980), pp. 122-40. Thecase of Vincent is also summarized inAitchison's book, The Seeds of Speech(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996, pp. 116-17). Some studiesof uptalk or high rising terminals include'An intonation change in progress inAustralian English' by Gregory Guy etaI., in Language in Society 15 (1986),pp. 23-52, 'Linguistic change andintonation: the use of high risingterminals in New Zealand English'

13°

TV Makes People Sound the Same byDavid Britain, in Language Variation andChange 4 (1992), pp. 77- 104 and 'Theinterpretation of the high-rise questioncontour in English' by Julia Hirschbergand Gregory Ward, in Journal of Prag-matics 24 (1995), pp. 407- 1 2. Mystudy of dove replacing dived isreported with several other currentchanges in 'Sociolinguistic coherence ofchanges in a standard dialect', in Papersfrom NW A VE XX V (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).The study of dived and dove in Texas isby Cynthia Bernstein in 'Drug usageamong high-school students in Silsbee,

Texas' (in Centennial Usage Studies, G.D. Little and M. Montgomery (ed.),Tuscaloosa: University of AlabamaPress, 1994, pp. 138-43).

131

MYTH 16

You Shouldn't Say 'It is Me' because'Me' is Accusative

Laurie Bauer

In order to understand the objectionexpressed in the title) we first have tounderstand the word 'accusative).'Accusative) is the name of a case - sowe also need to understand about case.Once that has been clarified) we need tounderstand a little about Latin) becausethe objection to It is me is based onLatin grammar. Then we need to askwhether English grammar is like Latingrammaf in the felevant ways. Finally)we need to ask why the grammar of Latinis taken to be the model of 'good)grammar by some people. Let us begin

with the notions of 'case) and'accusative). There are many languages(though modern English is not one ofthem) where nouns have endings to showthe roles they play in sentences. Thesediffefent endings are called 'cases).Since we shall need to make reference toLatin later) let us consider what happensin Latin (though the notion of case inanother language is discussed in Myth19: 'Aborigines Speak a PrimitiveLanguage»). A noun like agricola)'farmer') has this form if it is the subjectof the verb) the person or thingperforming the action of the verb (forexample in agricola laborat) 'the farmerworks»). However) a different form isused as the direct object of the verb) the

person Of thing undergoing the action ofthe vefb (for example) puella agricolammonet) 'the girl warns the farmer,'literally 'girl farmer warns»). The formending in -a is called the nominativeform of these nouns. The form ending in-am is called the accusative form. TheEnglish names of these cases areborrowed from the Latin. These are justtwo of the six case forms that nouns havein Latin) but we needn)t worry about thevocative) genitive) dative or ablativecases here. Not only nouns in Latin havecase endings) but adjectives (which

13 2

You Shouldn't Say 'It is Me' because'Me' is Accusative

we need not worry about here) andpronouns, too. So if you wanted to say'the goddess warns her' (meaning 'thegirl'), for example, you would say deaillam monet (literally 'goddess[nominative] that -one [accusative]warns'). 'She warns the farmer,' bycontrast, would be illa agricolam monet(literally 'that-one [nominative] thefarmer [accusative] warns'). The mainfunction of the nominative case is, as hasbeen stated, to show which noun is the

subject of the verb. One of the mainfunctions of the accusative case is toshow which noun is the direct object ofthe verb. The cases in a language likeLatin are far more important in showingthis than the order of the words, so thatdea puellam monet and puellam deamonet and even puellam monet dea allmean 'the goddess warns the girl.' Thecases show the function of the nouns,independent of their position. This isdifferent from English where thegoddess warns the girl and the girlwarns the goddess mean different things.In English, where there is no casemarking for ordinary nouns, the positionin the sentence shows the function, andso the position is fixed. Although

showing what is subject and what isobject are two of the main functions ofthe nominative and accusative cases inLatin, they are not the only ones. Anotherfunction of the nominative case in Latinis to mark a subject complement. Asubject complement is a phrase like theteacher in sentences such as Miss Smithis the teacher. A subject complementrefers to the same person as the subjectof the sentence (so the teacher is thesame person as Miss Smith, but in thegoddess warns the girl, the girl is not thesame person as the goddess). Subjectcomplements occur only with a small setof verbs like to be (that is, the is in MissSmith is the teacher), to become, and soon. So if you wanted to say, in Latin,

'Flavia is a girl,' you would say Flaviapuella est (literally 'Flavia [nominative]girl [nominative] is'). Now let usconsider whether English has nominativeand accusative cases. It has been statedabove that English nouns do not havecase endings. But English pronounsshow a system similar to that in Latin. InEnglish you say I warn him but he warnsme, using I and he as the subject of theverb and me and him as the direct objectof the verb. We might, therefore,conclude that I, he, she, we, they arenominative

133

Language Myths

case pronouns, and me, him, her, us,them are accusative case. It and you canbe either. If English works in just thesame way as Latin, then we wouldexpect to find It is I and not It is me. Sohow do pronouns in subjectcomplements really work in English? Inthe King James Bible (for instance inMatthew 14:27, Mark 6:50, John 6:20)we find It is I, with the pronoun I in thesubject complement, just as in Latin.However, we need to bear in mind thatthe King James Bible was written in

English that was rather old-fashioned atthe time (1611). In Shake- speare'sTwelfth Night (II.v) Sir AndrewAguecheek uses both me and I in thiscontext within two lines:

MAL VOLIO: You waste the treasure ofyour time with a foolish knight - SIRANDREW: That's me, I warrant you.MAL VOLIO: One Sir Andrew. SIRANDREW: I knew 'twas I, for many docall me fool.

The construction It is me was wellestablished by this time and has been

gradually gaining at the expense of It is Iever since. It is met him/ her can befound in the works of great writers ofEnglish such as Christopher Marlowe,Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, CharlotteBronte, Charles Dickens and AldousHuxley, to name but a few. Ironically,perhaps, Latin did not use the equivalentof either It is I or It is me in contexts likethis. When the Latin playwright Plautushas one of his characters ask 'Who is atthe gates?', the answer comes back Egosum ('I am'). In English until the fifteenthcentury, a construction with I am wouldalso have been used. The constructionwas usually I am it (though notnecessarily with the words in thatorder). The same construction is still

used in modern German: I ch bin es(literally 'I am if). It would take us farbeyond this chapter to try to explain whysuch a change should have taken place,but it did. By Shakespeare's time It is mewas frequently heard, even if it is not themajority form in the plays ofShakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe. Bythe eighteenth century this constructionwas common enough for somegrammarians to feel it was worth tryingto discourage it. They pointed to the(supposed) Latin pattern and demandedIt is I. Partly

134

You Shouldn't Say (It is Me' because(Me' is Accusative

as a result of this, both constructionssurvive today, It is I having a distinctlyformal ring to it. Consequently, it is usedespecially by those who are veryconscious of their language use. If aparticular case is used in a constructionin Latin, does it follow that the samecase must be used in the parallelconstruction in English? More generally,does the structure of English (or of anylanguage) have to be the same as thestructure of Latin? The answer is very

clearly 'no'. If you look back at theexamples of Latin sentences givenabove, you will see that puella, forinstance, is translated as 'the girl'. Butthere is no word in Latin correspondingto English 'the' . No one has eversuggested that English should followLatin in this respect and omit everyoccurrence of the word the. English doesnot follow Latin in that grammaticalpattern and need not in others. Orconsider what happens in French. TheFrench equivalent of it is me is c'est moi(literally 'that is me'), and it would betotally impossible to say c'est je(literally 'that is 1'), because je canoccur only as a subject in French. Noteven the French Academie has suggested

that French speakers should say c' est je,even though French derives directlyfrom Latin in a way that English doesnot. French does not follow Latin in thisparticular grammatical pattern. Whyshould English be expected to follow theLatin pattern when French does not?Why don't we say of English that I canonly occur as a subject, as they do inFrench? More generally, it is not truethat all languages have the same set ofgrammatical constructions or patterns. Itis true that there are probably nolanguages without nouns and verbs, nolanguages (except sign languages)without consonants and vowels, nolanguages which do not have verbs withdirect objects. But the number of such

absolute language universals isrelatively small. While there are somelanguages (such as Latin and Zulu)where verbs have to be marked to showwhat their subject is, there are others(such as Danish and Mandarin) wherethere is no such marking. While there aresome languages (like Latin and English)which force you to state whether a maleor a female person is involved when youuse a singular third-person pronoun (i.e.he or she), there are others (for instance,Finnish and Maori) which have no suchrequirements. Matters such as what casewill be

135

Language Myths used for a particularfunction are very definitely in thevariable class and not in the universalclass. Despite that) it is quite clear thatpeople) s view of what English shoulddo has been strongly influenced by whatLatin does. For instance) there is (orused to be - it is very infrequentlyobserved in natural speech today) afeeling that an infinitive in Englishshould not be split. What this means isthat you should not put anything betweenthe to which marks an infinitive verb andthe verb itself: you should say to go

boldly and never to boldly go. This'rule) is based on Latin) where themarker of the infinitive is an ending) andyou can no more split it from the rest ofthe verb than you can split -ing from therest of its verb and say goboldlying forgoing boldly. English speakers clearlydo not feel that to and go belong togetheras closely as go and -ing. Theyfrequently put words between this kindof to and its verb. Why should thepatterns of Latin dictate what isacceptable in English? The reason is tobe found in the role Latin played in thehistory of Western Europe. Latin was thelanguage of the powerful and the learnedin Western Europe for a thousand years.In Italy) Dante wrote a piece c. 1300

praising the use of Italian rather thanLatin. He wrote it in Latin. In France aroyal decree of 1539 prescribed the useof French rather than Latin in the courtsof law. Erasmus) a Dutchman who diedin 1536) wrote entirely in Latin. Englishdid not become the language of the lawin England until the seventeenth century.Against this background) Latin was seenas the language of refinement andeducation into the eighteenth century.The prestige accorded to the churchmen)lawyers and scholars who used Latinwas transferred to the language itself.Latin was held to be noble and beautiful)not just the thoughts expressed in it orthe people who used it. What is called'beauty) in a language is more accurately

seen as a reflection of the prestige of itsspeakers. For parallel comments) seeMyth 4: French is a Logical Language.Because Latin had this prestige) peoplethought that English would gain similarprestige by following the patterns of thelanguage which already had prestige.From a more detached point of view) wecan say that this is making a mistakeabout the source of Latin's prestige.

13 6

You Shouldn't Say (It is Me' because(Me' is Accusative

Latin gained its prestige not from thegrammatical patterns it used but from thespeakers who used the language and theuses to which it was put. The Australianaboriginal language Dyirbal shares manyof the linguistic features of Latin, butdoes not have the same social prestigebecause its speakers do not havepowerful positions and the language isnot used for highly respected functions inour society. If Dyirbal speakers hadsailed around the world and colonizedGreat Britain and held governmentalpower in Britain, then Dyirbal mighthave high prestige - but because of itsuse, not its structures. To sum up, Latin

has (or had; its prestige is waning asfewer educated people use it) highprestige because of the way it was usedfor such a long period of time. Somepeople think that English would beimproved if it followed the patterns ofthis high-prestige language more closely.One such pattern is the use of thenominative as the case of the subjectcomplement. These people think thatEnglish is in some sense 'better' if itfollows Latin grammatical rules aboutsubject complements, and this involvessaying It is I rather than the usual modernEnglish pattern (and the usual pattern ofa number of other languages of WesternEurope) of It is me. To the extent thatsuch people's opinions mold actual

usage, this has now become something ofa self-fulfilling prophecy. But there isanother school of thought which says thatthere is no real point in avoiding thenormal English pattern. People whoadhere to this view - and I am one ofthem - believe that even if languagessometimes borrow patterns from eachother voluntarily, you cannot and shouldnot impose the patterns of one languageon another. To do so is like trying tomake people play tennis with a golf club- it takes one set of rules and imposesthem in the wrong context. It alsofollows that you should not imposepatterns from older versions of the samelanguage as people do when they try toinsist on whom in Whom did you see?

And if anyone asks who told you that,you can tell them: it was me.

137

Language Myths


For a discussion of the variousconstructions, examples of their use and

comments on them, see F. Th. Visser, AnHistorical Syntax of the EnglishLanguage, Volume I (Leiden: Brill, 1963,pp. 236-45).

138

MYTH 17

They Speak Really Bad English DownSouth and in New York City Dennis R.Preston

Imagine this. You have persistent badheadaches. Aspirin and other miracleproducts don)t make them go away. Yourfamily doctor decides it's time to have aspecialist's opinion. He hasn)t said thewords) but you turn the terriblepossibility over in your mind - 'Braintumor!) You appear at the New YorkCity office of Dr N. V. Cramden) BrainSurgeon; you sign in and await thebeginning of the process that will revealyour fate. Cramden approaches andspeaks:

'Hey, how's it goin'? Rotten break, huh?

Ya got a pain in da noggin'. Don't sweatit; I'm gonna fix ya up. Hey, nois! Ovuhheah! Bring me dat whatchamacallit.How da hell am I gonna take care of mypatient heah if you don't hand me demtools? Dat's a goi!. )

You still have your clothes on (it's abrain surgeon's office) right?), so youjust head for the door) stopping at thefront desk and tell the receptionist thatsomeone in the examining room isposing as Dr Cramden. Maybe you neverreturn to your trusted family doctor)since he or she has sent you to a quack.Whatever your decision) you do not

continue under the care of Dr Cramden.Linguists know that language varietydoes not correlate with intelli- gence orcompetence) so Dr Cramden could wellbe one of the best brain surgeons intown. Nevertheless) popularassociations of certain varieties ofEnglish with professional andintellectual competence run so deep thatDr Cramden will not get to crack manycrania unless he learns to sound verydifferent. A primary linguistic myth) onenearly universally attached to

139

Language Myths minorities, rural peopleand the less well educated, extends inthe United States even to well-educatedspeakers of some regional varieties.That myth, of course, is that somevarieties of a language are not as goodas others. Professional linguists arehappy with the idea that some varietiesof a language are more standard thanothers; that is a product of social facts.Higher-status groups impose theirbehaviors (including language) onothers, claiming theirs are the standardones. Whether you approve of that ornot, the standard variety is selectedthrough purely social processes and hasnot one whit more logic, historicalconsistency, communicative expressivity

or internal complexity or systematicitythan any other variety. Since everyregion has its own social stratification,every area also has a share of bothstandard and nonstandard speakers. Iadmit to a little cheating above. I madeDr Cramden a little more of a tough kidfrom the streets than I should have. Thetruth is, I need not have done so.Although linguists believe that everyregion has its own standard variety,there is widespread belief in the US thatsome regional varieties are morestandard than others and, indeed, thatsome regional varieties are far from thestandard - particularly those of the Southand N ew York City (NY C). Pleaseunderstand the intensity of this myth, for

it is not a weakly expressed preference;in the US it runs deep, strong and true,and evidence for it comes from whatreal people (not professional linguists )believe about language variety. First,consider what northern US (Michigan)speakers have to say about the South:

(Mimics Southern speech) 'As y'allknow, I came up from Texas when I wasabout twenty-one. And I talked like this.Probably not so bad, but I talked likethis; you know I said "thiyus" {"this"]and "thayut" {"that"] and all those things.And I had to learn to learn reeeal{elongated vowel] fast how to talk like a

Northerner. 'Cause if I talked like thispeople'd think I'm the dumbest shitaround. 'Because of TV, though, I thinkthere's a kind of standard English that'sevolving. And the kind of thing you hearon the TV is something

140

They Speak Really Bad English DownSouth and in New York City that'sbroadcast across the country, so mostpeople are aware of that, but there aredefinite accents in the South. '

Next, consider NYC, which fares nobetter, even in self-evaluation, as theAmerican sociolinguist William Labovhas shown. Here are some opinions hecollected in the mid 1960s:

'I'll tell you, you see, my son is alwayscorrecting me. He speaks very well - theone that went to [two years of] college.And I'm glad that he corrects me -because it shows me that there are manytimes when I don't pronounce my wordscorrectly. '

'Bill's college alumni group - we have aparty once a month in Philadel- phia.Well, now I know them about two yearsand every time we're there - at awedding, at a party, a shower - they say,if someone new is in the group: "Listento Jo Ann talk!" I sit there and I babbleon, and they say, "Doesn't she have aridiculous accent!" and "It's so NewYorkerish and all!" ,

Such anecdotal evidence could fill manypages and includes even outsiderimitations of the varieties, such as mockpartings for Souther- ners - 'y'all comeback and see us sometime now, ya heah?'

- and the following putative NYC poemwhich plays on the substitution of t- andd-like for th-sounds and the loss of the r-sound (and modification of the vowel)in such words as 'bird':

T'ree little boids sittin' on a coib, Eatin'doity woims and sayin' doity woids.

These informal assessments arebolstered by quantitative studies. Nearly150 people from south-eastern Michigan(of European- American ethnicity, ofboth sexes and of all ages and socialclasses) rated (on a scale of one to ten)

the degree of 'correctness' of Englishspoken in the fifty states, Washington,DC, and NYC. Figure 1 shows theaverage scores for this task. Theseresponses immediately confirm whatevery American knows

141

Language Myths - the lowest ratings arefor the South and NYC (and nearby NewJersey, infected by its proximity to theNYC metropolitan area). Only theseareas score averages below '5';Alabama, the heart of the horrible South,

scores in the '3' range.

\

r

D 2.00 - 2.99

3.00 - 3.99 m 4.00 - 4.99 D 5.00 - 5.996.00 - 6.99 . 7.00 - 7.99 .8.00 - 8.99

..0

(::)

<;;::, "'

,

D

Figure 1: Mean scores of the rankingsfor (correct English' of the fifty states,Washington, DC, and NYC by south-eastern Michigan respondents ((1' =(worst English'; (10' = (best English')

Although it is not the major focus here, itis also clear that the Michiganders doingthese ratings think pretty well ofthemselves; they give their home state aranking in the '8' range, the only area sorewarded. Linguists call such localhubris 'linguistic security'. It is not hardto determine why: Michiganders believeanother interesting myth - that they do notspeak a dialect at all (although, as any

linguist will assert, if you speak a humanlanguage, you must speak some dialectof it, even if it is a bland Michigan one).When Michigan respondents carry outanother task, which asks them to draw ona blank map of the US where they thinkthe various dialect areas are and labelthem, results such as Figure 2 emerge,confirming their local linguistic pride.

142

They Speak Really Bad English DownSouth and in New York City

'D

tb t>

J;/

,..

\ e \ \

\\\\t

\ fc

\.-(

J'

Figure 2: Hand-drawn map of aMichigan respondent's idea of thedialect areas of the US

The respondent who drew Figure 2

places only Michigan in the 'normal'area and, as we would expect from theran kings of Figure 1, impolite things aresaid about the South (although not NYC).If one studies a large number of suchhand-drawn maps, it is possible toproduce a generalized map such asFigure 3. This map shows not onlywhere Michigan respondents draw linesfor the areas of the US but also howmany respondents drew a boundaryaround each one. The most importantthing to note about Figure 3 is thenumber of Michigan respondents whodrew a South - 138 out of 147 (94 percent). Even the home area (which housesthe uniquely correct Michigan speech) isregistered as a separate speech region

by only 90 respondents (61 per cent).The third most frequently drawn area is,not surprisingly, the area which containsNYC (80; 54 per cent). TheseMichiganders seem, therefore, to heardialect differences not as linguists do -on the basis of objective differences inthe language system - but on the basis oftheir evaluation of the correctness of

143

Language Myths

I. South 2. North 3. North-east 4. South-west 5. West

6. Inner South 7. Plains and Mountains 8.Texas 9. New England 10. Midwest

I I. Florida 12. California 13. WestCoast 14. East Coast

N = 147 % I. I 38 94 2. 90 61 3. 80 544. 75 51 5. 60 41 6. 44 30 7. 37 25 8. 3423 9. 33 22 10. 26 18 II. 25 17 12. 25 1713. 23 16 14. 23 16

Figure 3: Generalized map of 147Michigan respondents' idea of thedialect areas of the US

areas. The linguistic South, the areaperceived most consistently as incorrect,quite simply exists for these respondentsmore than any other area. Michigandersare not unique; in other areas where thiswork has been done, a South is alwaysdrawn by the highest percentage ofrespondents - South Carolina 94 percent, NYC 92 per cent, western NewYork 100 pef cent, southefn Indiana 86per cent and Oregon 92 per cent. Only

Hawai'ians recognize another area (theirown) more frequently, and onlymarginally (97 per cent Hawai'i; 94 percent South). Also important to theserespondents is the other place wherethey believe bad English is spoken. A'North-east' (a small area with a focus inNY C) or NY C itself figufes very highin the pefcentages - South Carolina 46per cent, NYC itself 64 per cent,western New York 45 per cent, southernIndiana 51 pef cent, Oregon 75 pef centand

144

They Speak Really Bad English DownSouth and in New York City Hawai'i 57per cent, nearly all of these second-place scores (after the South). A study oflabels on hand -drawn maps, such as theone shown in Figure 2, by fiftyrespondents each from south-easternMichigan, southern Indiana, SouthCarolina and Oregon further confirmsthese stereotypes. The intensity ofrecognition of the South and NYC asseparate speech areas parallels the ideathat they are the regions where the mostincorrect English is spoken. Of thelabels assigned to Southern speech byMichigan respondents 22 per cent arenegative; 36 per cent by Indianarespondents are negative; 31 per cent by

Oregon respondents and even 20 percent by South Carolina respondents.Similarly, the 'North-east' area (whichcontains NYC) fares poorly: 15 per centnega- tive labels by Michiganrespondents; 18 per cent by Indiana; 24per cent by Oregon and a whopping 65per cent by South Carolina. Negativelabels assigned to speech areas overallwere low (13 per cent for Michiganrespondents; 22 per cent for Indiana, 18per cent for Oregon - but 32 per cent forSouth Carolina, a reflection of theirevaluation of much non-Southernterritory for the entire US, e.g. 33 percent for California and 30 per cent forthe Midwest). One South Carolinarespondent identifies everything north of

the Mason-Dixon line with the notation'Them - The Bad Guys' in contrast to thelabel for the entire South: 'Us - TheGood Guys'. Other Southerners note thatNorthern speech is 'mean' or 'rude', andone calls it 'scratch and claw'. Acommon caricature ofNYC speech refersto its 'nasal' quality and its rate (fast).There are labels for Southerners, like'Hillbillies' and 'Hicks', but there are farmore 'linguistic' designations - 'drawl','twang', 'Rebel slang', and manyreferences to speed (slow). Finally,what about a quantitative analysis ofSoutherners' views of the correctnessissue? Figure 4 shows the ratings bythirty-six Auburn University students(principally from Alabama, a few from

Georgia, and South Carolina). NY Cfares even worse here than in theMichigan ratings; it is the only area tofall in the '3' range. Antipathy to NY Cfrom the South is obvious. Other ratingsfor correctness, however, show none ofthe

145

Language Myths

D 2.00 - 2.99

3.00 - 3.99 m 4.00 - 4.99 D 5.00 - 5.99.6.00 - 6.99 . 7.00 - 7.99 .8.00 - 8.99

.$

-

.

Figure 4: Mean scores of the rankings ofthe fifty states, Washington, DC, and

NYC for (correct English' by AuburnUniversity (Alabama) students (ratingsas in Figure 1)

strength and certainty of the Michiganopinions seen in Figure 1. Michiganrespondents consider their speech thebest and steadily assign lower ratingsthe farther South a state is. Imagine aMichigan- der's disdain for anevaluation of correct English which, asFigure 4 shows, rates the territory fromMichigan to Alabama as an undifferen-tiated '5'! These 'eastern' Southernrespondents, however, also find parts ofthe South especially lacking in correct

English, namely the Mississippi,Louisiana and Texas areas just to thewest of them, which they put in the '4'range. Their own areas (rated in the '5'and '6' ranges) are neither fish nor fowl,and they reserve the best ratings (onlyone step up at '7') for Maryland and thenational capital, Washington, DC, bothareas within a more general southernspeech region. Southerners pretty clearlysuffer from what linguists would call'linguistic insecurity') but they manage todeflect the disdain of North-

146

They Speak Really Bad English DownSouth and in New York City erners toadjacent areas rather than suffer theprincipal shame locally. They do not ratethemselves at the top of the heap (asMichiganders do), and they appear toassociate 'correct English' with someofficial or national status (Washington,DC). If Southerners don't find their ownspeech correct, can they find anythingredeeming about it? Figure 5 showswhat these same Souther- ners believeabout language 'pleasantness'.

0 2.00 - 2.99

3.00 - 3.99 mm 4.00 - 4.99 05.00 - 5.99

.6.00 - 6.99 . 7.00 - 7.99 .8.00 - 8.99

-. "

:.

Figure 5: Mean scores of the rankingsfor

leasant English' by Auburn University(Alabama) students ('1' = 'least pleasantEnglish'; '10' = 'most pleasant English')

Here is the neat reversal of Figure 1which did not emerge in Figure 4. Just asMichiganders found their variety 'mostcorrect' ('B'), these principally Alabamastudents find theirs 'most pleasant' (also'8'). As one moves north, a steadydisapproval of the 'friendly' aspects ofspeech (what linguists like to call the'solidarity' aspects) emerges, leavingMichigan part of a pretty unhospitablenorthern area, itself a '4'. There is onething, however, that Michiganders andAlabamians agree on. NYC (and itspartner in linguistic 'grime', nearby New

147

Language Myths Jersey) are at thebottom of the scale for both 'correctness'and 'pleasantness'. (In fact, the '2' inFigure 5 for New Jersey is the lowestaverage rating for any area everassigned in these tests.) In summary,respondents from all over the USconfirm the myth that some regions speakbetter English than others, and they donot hesitate to indicate that NYC and theSouth are on the bottom of that pile.Students of US culture will have littledifficulty in understanding the sources ofthe details of this myth. The South isthought to be rural, backward anduneducated; its dialect is quite simply

associated with the features assigned itsresidents. NYC fares little better. As oneof Labov's respondents told him in themid 1960s, 'They think we're allmurderers.' Just as US popular culturehas kept alive the barefoot, moonshine-making and drinking, intermarrying,racist Southerner, so has it continued tocontribute to the perception of the brash,boorish, criminal, violent New Yorker.Small wonder that the varieties ofEnglish associated with these areas havethese characteristics attrib- uted to them.Like all groups who are prejudicedagainst, Southerners (and New Yorkers)fight back by making their despisedlanguage variety a solidarity symbol, butthere is no doubt they suffer linguistic

insecurity in spite of this defensivemaneuver. Since you now understandthat a belief in the superiority or inferi-ority of regional varieties is simply a USlanguage myth, you can apologeticallyapproach your good old family doctorabout the head- ache problem again. Ofcourse, you are too embarrassed toreturn to Cramden's office, so you askfor another referral and are sent to Dr B.J. ('Jimmy') Peaseblossom. You arerelieved to hear his dulcet tones as heapproaches:

'Bubba, haw's it hangin'? Cain't buy noluck, kin yuh? Yore hay-ud ailin' yuh?

Don't git all flustrated; /' m gonna fixyew up good. Sweetheart! Looka hyeah!Bring me that thayngamabob, wouldja?How kin Ah take keer of 01' Bubbawithout mah thayngs? Thank yuh honey!'

Your headaches turn out to be hangovers.

148

They Speak Really Bad English DownSouth and in New York City


The maps and data are taken from mycollections. Readers who want anintroduction to the folk perceptions ofregional speech in the United States mayconsult my Perceptual Dialectology(Dordrecht: Foris, 1989). A currentsurvey of recent and earlier work in thisarea (including research from theNetherlands, Japan, Germany, Wales,Turkey and France) appears under myeditorship as A Handbook of PerceptualDialectology (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage,1997). The quotations from New

Yorkers are taken from William Labov'sseminal work on NYC speech, TheSocial Stratification of English in NewYork City (Arlington, V A: The Centerfor Applied Linguistics, 1966). Thework on Oregon has been carried out byLaura Hartley and is reported inOregonian Perceptions of AmericanRegional Speech (East Lansing, M I:MA thesis, Department of Linguisticsand Languages, Michigan StateUniversity, 1996). A quantitative methodfor calculating linguistic insecurity isfirst introduced in Labov's work citedabove but refined and extended togender in Peter Trudgill's 'Sex, covertprestige and linguistic change in theurban British English of Norwich' in

Language in Society 1 (1972), pp. 179-95. A good introduction to the techniquesand principal findings of the study oflanguage attitudes (and to the functionsof language for 'status' and 'solidarity')may be found in Ellen Bouchard Ryanand Howard Giles (eds.), AttitudesTowards Language Variation (London:Arnold, 1982).

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MYTH 18

Some Languages are Spoken MoreQuickly than Others Peter Roach

We all make judgements about howquickly someone is speaking, but it is notat all easy to work out what we basethese judgements on. Speakers of somelanguages seem to rattle away at highspeed like machine-guns, while otherlanguages sound rather slow andplodding. We find the same when welisten to dialects of our own nativelanguage - within English, for example,it is a familiar cliche that cowboys inWesterns (usually set in Texas orneighbouring states) speak slowly, with

a drawl. English rural accents of EastAnglia and the South - West are alsothought of as slow-speaking, while urbanaccents such as those of London or NewYork are more often thought of as fast-speaking. However, impressionisticjudgements about such things are oftenunreliable. Ilse Lehiste, who has studiedvery many languages, wrote, 'Whetherthere are differences in the rates ofspeech of speakers with differentlinguistic backgrounds is not wellknown' (Lehiste, p. 52). More recently,Laver has written, 'The analysis ofphenomena such as rate is dangerouslyopen to subjective bias. . . listeners'judgements rapidly begin to loseobjectivity when the utterance concerned

comes either from an unfamiliar accentor (even worse) from an unfamiliarlanguage' (p. 542). Can we establishscientifically that there really arecharacteristic differences in speakingspeed? There are, it seems to me, threepossibilities:

(1) some languages really are spokenmore rapidly, and some more slowly,than others as a natural result of the waytheir sounds are produced. (2) we get theimpression that some languages arespoken more quickly than others becauseof some sort of illusion.

150

Some Languages are Spoken MoreQuickly than Others (3) in somesocieties it is socially acceptable orapproved to speak rapidly, and in othersslow speaking is preferred.

1. Measures of speaking in differentlanguages

We need to look for appropriate ways tomeasure how quickly someone is talking.

We are used to measuring the speed atwhich someone can type, write or takeshorthand dictation in terms of howmany words per minute are taken down.Some adjustment usually has to be madeto penalize someone for going so quicklythat they make a lot of mistakes. Inmeasuring speech, we can do the samething - we can give someone a passageto read, or a speaking task such asdescribing what they did on their lastholiday, and count how many words theyspeak in a given time. However, inspeech it makes a big difference whetheror not we include pauses. If I want towork out how long it took me to cyclesomewhere, I might make a note of mytimes both including and excluding rest

stops that I made on the way. In a similarway, most studies of speaking havefound it necessary to make two differentmeasurements of the rate at which weproduce units of speech: the rateincluding pauses and hesitations, and therate excluding such things. The termsusually used are speaking rate andarticulation rate (Laver). Both are highlycorrelated with perceived speech tempo,according to van Bezooyen. Tauroza andAllison measured words per minute,syllables per minute and syllables perword in different styles of spokenEnglish and found substantialdifferences. It is quite possible that somelanguages make more use of pauses andhesitations than others, and our

perception of speed of speaking couldbe influenced by this (Ofuka). Incomparing different languages, however,there is a more serious problem: somelanguages (e.g. German, Hungarian)have some very long words, whileothers (e.g. Chinese) have very fewwords of more than one or twosyllables. It has been found that Finnishis faster than English if syllables persecond are measured, but slower ifwords are counted, since Finnish wordstend to be longer than English words.Much depends, of course, on how wedefine what a word is (Palmer, pp. 41-8). This inter-language difference could

15 1

Language Myths

have a serious impact on the accuracy ofour measurements, and for this reasonmany investigators have chosen insteadto measure the number of syllablesspoken in a given amount of time. Thisusually results in a syllables-per-secondmeasurement, and at this more detailedlevel of measurement it is usual toexclude pauses. This is not the end toour problems, however: althoughcounting syllables is likely to be a much

more reliable way of comparingdifferent languages for speaking rate thancounting words, we should bear in mindthat different languages have verydifferent syllable structures. Many of theworld's languages do not use syllableswith more than three or four sounds,while others allow syllables of manymore sounds. In English, for example,the word 'strengths' Istrel)8s1 containsseven sounds; the six-syllable Englishsentence 'Smith's strength crunchedtwelve strong trucks' (containing thirty-two sounds) would take much longer tosay than the six-syllable Japanese phrase'kakashi to risu' which contains twelvesounds. So if a language with arelatively simple syllable structure like

Japanese is able to fit more syllablesinto a second than a language with acomplex syllable structures such asEnglish or Polish, it will probably soundfaster as a result. Dauer (personalcommunication) has found that Greekand Italian are spoken more rapidly thanEnglish in terms of syllables per second,but this difference disappears whensounds per second are counted. It seems,then, that we should compare languages'speaking rates by measuring the numberof sounds produced per second, ratherthan the number of syllables. Within aparticular language, it is clear thatspeech rate as measured in sounds persecond does vary quite widely: Fonagyand Magdics measured different

speaking styles and found rates varyingfrom 9.4 sounds (average) per secondfor poetry reading to 13.83 per secondfor sports commentary. But this stillleaves us with a problem. The faster wespeak, the more sounds we leave out.Speaking slowly, I might pronounce thesentence 'She looked particu- larlyinteresting' as Iii lukt p

tIkj

I

li Int

r

stII)/, which contains twenty-seven

sounds but, speaking rapidly, I might sayIii luk p

tddi IntrstII)/, which contains onlytwenty sounds. In theory, then, it couldhappen that in speaking quickly I mightproduce no more sounds per second thanwhen speaking slowly. In order to get ameaningful

152

Some Languages are Spoken MoreQuickly than Others meaSUfe it wouldbe necessary to count not the sounds

actually observable in the physicalsignal, but the 'underlying phonemes' thatI would have produced in carefulspeech. Osser and Peng measuredsounds per second fOf speakers ofJapanese and of American English andfound no significant diffefence betweenthem. Den Os compared Dutch andItalian and found no significantdifference in terms of syllables persecond, though Italian was somewhatslower in terms of sounds per second. Ina feview of measurements of a numberof different languages, Dankovicovaquotes average figures from variousstudies: for German, 5.55 and 5.7syllables per second, for french 5.29,5.2 and 5.7 syl/sec, fOf Dutch 6.1 and

for Italian 6.4. These are all for 'nofmal'speaking rate - in diffefentcifcumstances, of course, rates can vary.I have a recording of a friend who left amessage on my telephone answeringmachine and kept up an average speed ofover 8 syl/sec over a period of about 20seconds. Arnfield and Roach showedrates in English varying between 3.3 and5.9 syl/sec. But, overall, it seems that onthe evidence available at present, thereis no real diffefence between differentlanguages in terms of sounds per secondin normal speaking cycles. How mightwe pursue this question further? Onepossibility would be to make use ofsome of the carefully assembled speechdatabases stored on computer which

have been phonetically labelled.Databases such as EUROM-l (Chan),which comprises speech of six WesternEuropean languages and BABEL (Roachet al:) containing five languages ofEastern Europe, will, when completeand available to researchers, give usvaluable new material. But theexpectation is that these collections ofnormal, unemotional monologues willgive us the same answers as the othersurveys - we will find no differencebetween languages in terms of soundsper second or syllables per second.

2. Speaking rate as an illusion

Our impression of a language beingspoken faster or slower may depend tosome extent on its characteristic rhythm.More precisely, it is said that we areinfluenced by whether a language isperceived to

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Language Myths be stress-timed orsyllable-timed. The distinction wasgiven a detailed exposition byAbercrombie though the idea had been

proposed long before by Pike. Pikerefers to the 'pattering' effect of Spanishspeakers and their 'sharp-cut syllable-by-syllable pronunciation' (p. 37). Mostpeople feel intuitively that there is agenuine rhythmical difference betweenlanguages such as English (classed asstress-timed) and french or Spanish(classed as syllable-timed), and itusually seems that syllable- timedspeech sounds faster than stress-timed tospeakers of stress- timed languages. SoSpanish, french and Italian sound fast toEnglish speakers, but Russian andArabic don't. The theory suggests that insyllable-timed languages all syllablestend to be given equal amounts of time,while in stress-timed languages more

time is given to stressed syllables andless to unstressed. In addition, it is saidthat stressed syllables occur at regularintervals of time in stress-timedlanguages. Unfortunately, many studiesbased on detailed measurement of time-intervals in different languages (e.g.Roach; Dauer) have been unable toconfirm these claims, with the result thatwe are forced to retreat to a weakerclaim: that some languages sound stress-timed and others sound syllable-timed.We may be forced to accept somethingsimilar in answer to our present question- perhaps languages and dialects justsound faster or slower, without anyphysically measurable difference. Theapparent speed of some languages might

simply be an ill usion. One of thequestions raised by this possibility is thedegree to which listeners can detectdifferences of speaking rate in their ownlanguage and in other languages. If itturns out that we are no good at detectingspeed differences in different languages,we will have to conclude that ourjudgements of speaking rate areunreliable. Vaane carried out a studyusing recordings of Dutch (the subjects'native language), Eng- lish, french,Spanish and Moroccan Arabic; thesewere spoken at three different rates. Twogroups of listeners, one phoneticallytrained and the other untrained, had to tryto judge the speed of utterance. Vaanetested the hypothesis that we will be less

adept at judging the speed of a languagewe do not know, and an unknownlanguage is likely to sound faster thanour own language (presumably becauseit 'sounds harder to do'). Her resultssuggest that in fact both trained

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Some Languages are Spoken MoreQuickly than Others and untrainedlisteners are quite accurate in judging therate of speaking for their own languageand also for languages with which theyare unfamiliar, a finding which compares

interestingly with the view quoted fromLaver above. From this we can concludethat the judgements are not based onlinguistic knowledge (such as we use inidentifying words) . We must be usingone or more detectable phoneticcharacteristics of the speech whether ornot we know the language being spoken.Useful though the above findings are,they do not yet bring us an answer to thequestion of whether some languages arespoken more rapidly than others (whensituational and personal factors havebeen taken into account). Vaane doesquote mean syllables-per-second ratesfor the test passages in her experiment,but does not tell us if the inter-languagedifferences are statistically significant.

Interestingly, Dutch comes out with thehighest speaking rate in all threeconditions, though this is not a languagethat most English people would immedi-ately think of as being rapidly spoken.

]. Social and personal factors andspeaking rate

Social factors influence the speakers ofa language in different ways: a numberof anecdotal sources suggest that in somesocieties it is regarded as acceptable orapproved to speak rapidly, while inothers slow speech is preferred. There

is almost certainly an interaction withgender here, with slow speech usuallybeing preferred for males. This wouldmean that, while at normal speakingspeed the sounds-persecond rate for alllanguages may be effectively the same,some languages are characteristicallyusing higher and lower speaking ratesthan other languages in particular socialsituations. In a carefully controlledstudy, Kowal et al. looked at two verydifferent types of speech (story-tellingand taking part in interviews) in English,Finnish, French, German and Spanish.They found significant differencesbetween the two styles of speech (bothin terms of the amount of pausing and ofthe speaking rate) but no significant

difference between the languages. Theyconcluded that the influence of thelanguage is

155

Language Myths negligible comparedwith the influence of the style of speech.Similarly, Barik showed that differencesin tempo between English and frenchwere due to the style of speech, not tothe language. Certainly we are allcapable of speaking faster and slowerwhen we want to. There are variationsin speed associated with the situation in

which the speech is being produced - wespeak more rapidly if we are in a hurry,or saying something urgent, or trying notto be interrupted in a conversation. Wetend to speak more slowly when we aretired or bored. The emotional state of thespeaker at the time of speaking is clearlyinfluential. There seems also to be apersonal factor - some people arenaturally fast talkers, while othershabitually speak slowly, within the samelanguage and dialect and in the samesituation. Research has shown that ouropinion of speakers is influenced bytheir speaking rate: Giles reports that 'apositive linear relationship hasrepeatedly been found between speechrate and perceived competence,' and

Stephen Cowley (personalcommunication) says that in Zulu society,slow speech tempo is a sign of respectand sincerity. Yet another social factor isthe amount of temporal variability,where the alternation between speakingrapidly and speaking slowly may itselfhave considerable communicative value- this has been pointed out by Cowley,who has found very wide tempovariation from phrase to phrase amongItalian speakers in conversational data.While this idea of social determinationof speed seems the most plausibleexplanation, the only way we are goingto be able to test it is by much moreresearch across a wide variety oflanguages and social situations. Let us

hope that this research will be carriedout.

My thanks to Bill Barry, StephenCowley, Jana Dankovicova and Mari-anne Jessen for their advice anddiscussion.


Abercrombie, D., Elements of Genera IPhonetics, Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, 1967. Arnfield, S.,

Roach, P., Setter, J., Greasley, P. andHorton, D.,

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Some Languages are Spoken MoreQuickly than Others 'Emotional stressand speech tempo variation»Proceedings of the ESCA/NA TOWorkshop on Speech Under Stress)Lisbon) 1995) pp. 13-15. Barik) H. C.)'Cross-linguistic study of temporalcharacteristics of different types ofspeech materials» Language and Speech)20) 1977) pp. 116-26. Bezooyen) R.

van) Characteristics and Recognizabilityof Vocal Expressions of Emotion)Dordrecht: Foris) 1984. Chan) D. andothers) 'EUROM: A spoken languageresource for the EU» in Proceedings ofEurospeech 95) Madrid) 1995) pp. 867-70. Cowley) S.) 'Conversationalfunctions of rhythmical patterning» Lan-guage and Communication) vol. 14.4)1994) pp. 353-76. Dankovicova) J ')'Variability in articulation rate inspontaneous Czech speech" unpublishedM.Phil. thesis) University of Oxford)1994. Dauer) 'Stress-timing andsyllable-timing re-analysed» JournalofPho- netics) vol. 11) 1983) pp. 51- 62.Den Os) E. A.) Rhythm and Tempo ofDutch and Italian) Utrecht: Drukkerij

Elinkwijk) 1988. Fonagy) I. andMagdics) K.) 'Speed of utterance inphrases of different lengths) Languageand Speech) 4) 1960) pp. 179-92. Giles)H.) 'Speech tempo» in W. Bright (ed.)The Oxford International Encyclopediaof Linguistics. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press) 1992. Kowal, S')Wiese) R. and O)Connell) D.) 'The useof time in storytelling» Language andSpeech) vol. 26.4) 19 8 3) pp. 377-92.Laver) J.) Principles of Phonetics)Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress) 1995. Lehiste) I.)Suprasegmentals) MA: MIT Press)1970. Of uk a) E.) Acoustic andPerceptual Analyses of Politeness inJapanese Speech) unpublished Ph.D.

thesis) Leeds: University of Leeds)1996. Osser) H. and Peng) F.) 'A cross-cultural study of speech rate» Languageand Speech) 7) 1964) pp. 120-5.Palmer) F. R.) Grammar)Harmondsworth: Penguin) 1984 (2ndedn) . Pike) K. L.) The Intonation ofAmerican English) East Lansing:University of Michigan Press) 1945.Roach) P.) 'On the distinction between"stress-timed» and "syllable-

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Language Myths timed" languages', in D.

Crystal (ed.), Linguistic Controversies,London: Edward Arnold, 1982. Roach,P., Arnfield, S. and Hallum, E., 'BABEL:A multi-language database', Proceedingsof the Australian InternationalConference on Speech Science andTechnology (SST -9 6 ), pp. 351-4.Tauroza, S. and Allison, D., 'Speechrates in British English', AppliedLinguistics, 11, 1990, pp. 90-115. Vaane,E., 'Subjective estimation of speechrate', Phonetica, vol. 39, 1982, pp. 136-49.

158

MYTH 19

Aborigines Speak a Primitive LanguageNicholas Evans

As a linguist who spends much timeresearching Australian Aboriginallanguages, I have often been informed bypeople I have met in my travels that 'Youmust have an easy job - it must be prettysimple figuring out the grammar of sucha primitive language.' If you go furtherand ask your travelling companions overa beer or six why they hold this belief,you encounter a number of sub-myths:

There is just one Aboriginal language.Aboriginal languages have no grammar.The vocabularies of Aboriginallanguages are simple and lack detail;alternatively, they are cluttered withdetails and unable to deal withabstractions. Aboriginal languages maybe all right in the bush, but they can'tdeal with the twentieth century.

I'll deal with each of these individuallybelow. Two of these myths are dealtwith elsewhere in this book, and I shalldeal with those in rather less detail.

So, you can speak Aborigine?

The first white arrivals in Botany Baycame equipped with an Aborigi- nalvocabulary recorded by Captain Cookand others in Cooktown, northQueensland but soon found this was ofno more use in communicating with theowners of the Botany Bay region than aLithuanian phrasebook would be inLondon: Captain Cook recorded theGuugu

159

Language Myths Yimidhirr language(giving us the word kangaroo in theprocess), while the language of theSydney region was Dhaaruk, onlydistantly related. In fact, AboriginalAustralia displays striking linguisticdiver- sity and, traditionally, around 250languages, further subdivisable intomany dialects, were spoken over thecontinent. Many Aboriginal communitieswould prefer to count these dialects asdistinct languages. If we did this, wewould have to elevate this figure toabout 600. Some languages are, of

course, more closely related than others.In Western Arnhem Land, for example,such languages as Mayali and Dalabonare as closely related as English andDutch, so that 'I will eat fish' is ngangundjenj and ngahnguniyan djenjrespectively. Others, such as Ilgar, areonly very distantly related (more distantfrom Mayali and Dalabon than English isfrom Bengali, although Mayali and Ilgarare spoken only a couple of hundred kilometres apart), so that 'I will eat fish' inIlgar is anyarrun yihab. With so manylanguages spoken by a population of atmost three quarters of a million, you caneasily work out that the averagelanguage would only have a couple ofthousand speakers. But, of course,

people's social universes were muchlarger than this. This meant that byadulthood it was normal to bemultilingual; this was made easier by thefact that most people married spouseswith a different language to their own, sothat children grew up speaking both themother's and the father's languages, aswell as other languages theirgrandparents, for example, may havespoken. For example, my Ilgar teacher,Charlie Wardaga, learned Ilgar from hisfather, as well as Marrgu from olderpeople in the area he grew up in, Garigand Manangkari from other relatives,Gunwinygu from one grandparent (andhe took a Gunwin- ygu-speaking wifeand frequently sings at ceremonial

gatherings where Gunwinygu is thecommon language) and I waidja throughliving in the Minjilang community whereit is the dominant language.

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Aborigines Speak a Primitive Language

There's no grammar - you can just chuckthe words together in any order.

In the first difficult weeks when I wasbeginning to learn the Kayardildlanguage of Bentinck Island inQueensland I experienced the usuallanguage-learner's nightmare of failing tounderstand most of what was said. Oneof my more considerate teachers, PlutoBentinck, would help me by repeatingeach sentence, working his way throughall possible orderings of its words:dangkaa bangaya kurrija, dangkaa kurrijabangaya, bangaya dangkaa kurrija,dangkaa kurrija ngada, and so on. Giventhat dangkaa means 'the/a man', kurrija'see( s)', and bangaa 'the/a turtle', howcould he put the words in any orderwithout changing the meaning from 'theman sees the turtle' to 'the turtle sees the

man'? Speakers of a language likeKayardild have this freedom because theidentification of who does what iscarried out by so-called case markers onthe ends of words: the -ya on bangayamarks it as the object of the verb andhence the thing seen, while the -a on theend of dangkaa marks it as the subjectand hence the seer. So while it is truethat words can be put in any order, itdoes not indicate lack of grammar -grammar, as a code for expressingmeaning, can take many forms indifferent languages, and here (as in Latinor Russian) the work is done by wordendings rather than word ordering (seeMyth 10: Some Languages Have NoGrammar). You should be able to work

out for yourself six ways of saying 'theturtle sees the man'; see answer 1 at theend of this chapter. This system of caseendings is so efficient that it allowsparts of sentences to be specific in waysthat aren't always clear in English.Consider the sentence 'The man saw theturtle on the beach.' Who is on the beach- the man, the turtle or both? Kayardildexpresses each of these meaningsdifferently - where it is the turtle on thebeach, the 'associative' suffix -nurru isadded to ngarn- 'beach', and the resultantngarnnurru receives a further -ya to linkit clearly to the object, giving dangkaabangaya kurrija ngarnnurruya (or anyother of the 4 x 3 x 2 possible wordorderings). If it is the man on the beach,

161

Language Myths -nurru is used again,plus -wa to link it with 'man' (a cannotdirectly follow u, so a w is inserted):dangkaa bangaya kurrija ngarrnnurruwa,and the other orderings. And if both areon the beach, a different suffix -ki isused, giving dangkaa bangaya kurrijangarnki, and so forth. Not all grammarsof Aboriginal languages work in thesame way as Kayardild, of course - anymore than English and Russian work inthe same way. For example, Mayali fromWestern Arnhem Land is a

'polysynthetic' language that builds uphighly complex verbs able to express acomplete sentence, such asngabanmarneyawoyhwarrgah-ganjginjeng 'I cooked the wrong meat forthem again,' which can be broken downinto nga- 'I', ban- 'them', marne- 'for',yawoyh- 'again', warrgah- 'wronglydirected action', ganj- 'meat', ginje-'cook' and -ng , , past tense . AustralianAboriginal pronoun systems are in someways more explicit than English as well.The main way of showing number inDalabon from Western Arnhem Land isthrough the pronoun prefixed to the verb.So we find:

biyi kah-boninj man he-went 'The manwent.'

biyi barrah-boninj man they two-went'The two men went.'

biyi balah-boninj man they-went 'Themen went.'

But that is not all. Another way of saying'the two men went' would be biyi keh-boninj. This would be appropriate if themen were related 'disharmonically' - i.e.

in odd-numbered generations, like fatherand son, or uncle and nephew, e.g. be-kokeh-boninj 'they two, father and

162


son, went.' The 'harmonic' form, barrah-boninj, is only appropriate for people ineven-numbered generations, such asbrothers, spouses or grandparents withgrandchildren, e.g. winjkin-ko barrah-

boninj 'they two, grandmother andgrandchild, went.' In a short article likethis we can only scratch the surface, butit should be clear by now thatAboriginal grammars have plenty toengage your analytic powers.

Just a few hundred words and you've gotit all

However complicated the grammars,surely the vocabularies are prettysimple? After all, there are no words for'neutron', 'virus' or 'terra nullius', sothat's three down already. Assertions

like this usually take one of two forms -either the languages are supposed tohave a welter of detailed words but beincapable of generalizing, or they arejust said to have very general wordswith too few to be precise. On bothcounts such submyths are wildly wrong.The fine detail and nuanced observationof Aboriginal vocabularies is so greatthat I will only have space to consider afew words for the natural world, thoughone could make similar points withterms for emotions, or smells andfragrances, or ways of moving. Manyplant and animal species had distinctnames in the Aboriginal languages inwhose territories they are found wellbefore they had been recognized as

species by Western taxonomic biology.The Oenpelli python, for example, hashad the long-established Kunwinjkuname nawaran but was only identified asa distinct species in the 1960s,whereupon it received the Linnean nameMorelia oenpelliensis. To get an idea ofthe degree of conciseness and detail inthe biological vocabulary of a typicalAboriginal language, compare theKunwinjku kangaroo terms with theirEnglish equivalents, in the tableoverleaf. In addition to the variousdetailed terms just given, Kunwinjkualso has a general term, kunj, to coverall the macropods, i.e. all kangaroos andwallabies; in English we only have thescientific term macropod to denote this

category. And in addition to thesedifferent

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Language Myths

Linnean and English names

Male

Female

Child

Macropus antilopinus (antilopinewallaroo)

karndakidj kalaba (large individualmale)

karndayh

djamunbuk ( juvenile male)

Macropus bernardus nadjinem djukerre(black wallaroo) baark Macropusrobustus kalkberd kanbulerri wolerrknarrobad (wallaroo) (large male) (juvenile male) Macropus agiliswarradjangkal! merlbbe/kornobolonakornborrh nanjid (agile wallaby)kornobolo nakurdakurda (baby) (verylarge individual)

nouns, Kunwinjku also has differentverbs to describe the different mannersof hopping of these various macropods -kamawudme for the hopping of maleantilopine wallaroo, kadjalwahme forthe hopping of the corresponding female,kanjedjme for the hopping of the wall-aroo, kamurlbardme for the hopping ofthe black wallaroo, and kal- urlhlurlmefor the hopping of the agile wallaby.This focus on identifying macropods bythe peculiarities of their gait isparticularly interesting in the light ofrecent work on computer visionprograms able to identify wallabyspecies, which had far more successdoing this on the basis of their movementthan their static appearance. Quite apart

from finely classifying different entities,vocabularies of Aboriginal languagesoften also show the ecological linksbetween particular plant and animalspecies. For example, the MparntweArrernte language of the Alice Springsarea, where various types of grub are animportant source of food, has a methodof naming grubs after the bushes whereyou can find them: tnyeme 'witchettybush' yields the tnyematye 'witchettygrub', utnerrenge 'emu bush' yields thegrub known as utnerrengatye, and youcan work out for yourself the name of thegrub found in thenge, the ironwood tree(see answers). Sometimes there is noterm in the ordinary language to covercertain more general categories, but

special language varieties learned

164


in adulthood and used under restrictedcircumstances possess the more abstractterms. The most extreme example ofspecial abstract language is found onMornington Island, where second-degreeinitiates, to become full men, had tolearn a special initiation language known

as Demiin, which had only about 200words and hence needed to be highlyabstract. For example, the complexLardil pronoun system, where there arenineteen distinct pronouns in theordinary language, is collapsed to two inDemiin - n!aa 'group containing me - i.e.I or we' and n!uu 'group not containingme, i.e. you, he, she, they'. (n! denotes a'clicked' n-sound, for Demiin also hasspecial sounds not used in the everydaylanguage.)

They might be OK in the bush, but there'sno way they can deal with the modernworld

Languages tend to have the richestvocabulary in those areas in which theirspeakers have been interested longenough to develop specialized terms. Inthe early Middle Ages it was widelybelieved that only Latin had asufficiently sophisticated vocabulary todiscuss law, theology, medicine andscience, but as various nations began touse their mother tongues more widely,each modern European language(English, French, German and so on)soon developed its own terms.Aboriginal languages are at a similarpoint today - they lack many terms, buttheir rich grammars give them the

capacity to develop them when they areneeded. (See also Myth 2: SomeLanguages are Just Not Good Enough.) Itis natural that Aboriginal languagesshould have developed theirvocabularies most in such realms as theAustralian biota and geography,kinship and so on and not in areas thathave not traditionally been a central partof Aboriginal culture - such as financialtransactions, nautical terminology ornuclear physics. However, just asEnglish has responded to the encountersbetween its speakers and the Australiancontinent by coining new terms, such asthe macropod terms we discussedabove, so have speakers of Aboriginallanguages responded

16 5

Language Myths by creating new termsto deal with the proliferation of novelconcepts that contact with Europeansand with late-twentieth-century technol-ogy more generally, has brought. Makingup a new word from scratch is not ausual method of doing this in anylanguage. Instead, the usual threemethods are to build up new words fromthe existing resources of the language forcom- pounding or affixation (e.g.downsize in English), to borrow wordsfrom other languages (e.g. sputnik) and

to extend the meanings of existing words(e.g. surfing the net). Each of thesemethods has been widely employed byAboriginal languages. As an example ofcompounding, Kayardild has created thewords wadubayiinda for 'tobacco', bycompounding wadu 'smoke' with the rootbayii- 'be bitten', literally 'that by meansof which the smoke is bitten', and, for'car', the word duljawinda, literally'ground-runner'. Many languages haveborrowed their words for days andmonths, higher numbers, governmentinstitutions and Western medicine fromEnglish. Often the pron unciations ofborrowed words are changed to thepoint where their original source is notrecognizable: the English word 'hospital'

ends up as wijipitirli in Warlpiri.Extending existing word meanings hasbeen a common solution to the problemof coining new vocabulary forautomobiles. In Kun- winjku, forexample, kun-denge 'foot' also means'wheel', kun-rakmo 'hip' also means'wheel housing', and the term for 'to get aflat tyre' compounds kun-rakmo with theverb belngdan 'to settle, as of mudstirred up in water' to give rakmo-belngdanj 'it has a flat tyre' (literally 'itship has settled'). Combinations ofcompounding and extension of meaningare a common way of dealing with novelconcepts - when a text on nuclearphysics had to be translated intoWarlpiri, for example, a new compound

verb was coined to mean 'cause nuclearfission' by using a root meaning 'hit' andan element meaning 'be scattered'. Thefact that Warlpiri can now be used todiscuss central concepts of nuclearphysics is clear testimony to theadaptability of Aboriginal languages.

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A last word

Linguists would love to have primitivelanguages to study in order to understandhow human language has evolved. But)as I hope to have shown) Aboriginallanguages certainly do not fit the bill - infact) their complexities have played animportant role in linguistics over the lastthree decades in extending our notions ofwhat complex organizing principles canbe found in human languages.

Answers

1. bangaa dangkaya kurrija) bangaakurrija dangkaya) dangkaya bangaakurrija) dangkaya kurrija bangaa) kurrijabangaa dangkaya) kurrija dangkayabangaa 2. thengatye


Good introductory books on Aboriginallanguages are Language and Culture inAboriginal Australia (Canberra:Aboriginal Studies Press) 1993) ColinYallop & Michael Walsh (eds.) ColinYallop's Australian AboriginalLanguages (London: Andre Deutsch)

1982); more advanced but still readableis Robert M. W. Dixon) The Languagesof Australia (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press) 1980); these bookshave many onward references.Macquarie Aboriginal Words (1994),Bill McGregor and Nick Thieberger(eds.) contains sample vocabularies fora number of Aboriginal languages andpointers to more complete dictionaries.Kayardild examples are taken from theKayardild Diction- aryandEthnothesaurus (Melbourne: Universityof Melbourne) Depart- ment ofLinguistics) 1992) and the Kunwinjkuexamples from a dictionary of EasternKunwinjku being prepared by MurrayGarde. You might 'also like to check out

the world)s first fully formattedhypertext dictionary produced by PeterAustin and David Nathan of

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Language Myths the New South Waleslanguage Gamilaraay) on:http://coombs.anu.edu.au:80/WWWVLPages/ AborigPages/LA N G /GAMDICT/GAMF_ME.HTM

168

MYTH 20

Everyone Has an Accent Except MeJohn H. Esling

'I don't have an accent!' wails the friendindignantly. And we are all amusedbecause the pronunciation of theutterance itself demonstrates to our earsthat the claim is false. The speaker whovoices this common refrain believesabsolutely that his or her speech isdevoid of any distinguishing

characteristics that set it apart from thespeech of those around them. Welisteners who hear it are for our partequally convinced that the speaker'saccent differs in some significant respectfrom our own. The key to understandingthis difference of opinion is not so muchin the differences in speech sounds thatthe speakers use but in the nature of'own-ness' - what does it mean to be 'oneof us' and to sound like it? It all comesdown to a question of belonging. Accentdefines and communicates who we are.Accent is the map which listenersperceive through their ears rather thanthrough their eyes to 'read' where thespeaker was born and raised, whatgender they are, how old they are, where

they might have moved during their life,where they went to school, whatoccupation they have taken up, and evenhow short or tall they are, how muchthey might weigh, or whether they arefeeling well or ill at the moment. Thefact is that everyone has an accent. Ittells other people who we are because itreflects the places we have been and thethings we have done. But the construct ofaccent, like so many other things, isrelative. We may only realize that othersthink we have an accent when we leavethe place we came from and findourselves among people who share adifferent background from our own, orwhen a newcomer to our local areastands out as having a distinctly different

pronunciation from most of those in ourgroup - that is, relative to us. The closerwe are to our native place and the morepeople that

1 6 9

Language Myths are there who grew uplike us) the more likely we are to soundlike those people when we talk. In otherwords) we share their local accent.Some countries have one accent which isaccepted as 'standard) and which enjoyshigher social prestige than any other.This is true of RP (Received

Pronunciation) in the UK) of standardFrench in Prance and of many countriesthat have evolved a broadcast standardfor radio and television. We may feelthat this national standard is accentlessand that non-standard speakers) bycontrast) have accents. Nevertheless) ithas to be recognized that standards thathave evolved in the broadcast industryhave their roots in language varietiesthat already exist in distinct socialgroups and their institutions. To use oneparticular group) s accent inbroadcasting is to give that accent awider reach than perhaps it had before)but the accent itself is no 'less) of anaccent than any other) although it mayrepresent groups and institutions with

more political and economic power thangroups whose members use anotheraccent. Our perceptions and productionof speech also change with time. If wewere to leave our native place for anextended period) our perception that thenew accents around us were strangewould only be temporary. Gradually)depending on our age) what job we aredoing and how many different sorts offolks with different types of accentssurround us) we will lose the sense thatothers have an accent and we will beginto fit in - to accommodate our speechpatterns to the new norm. Not all peopledo this to the same degree. Some remainintensely proud of their original accentand dialect words) phrases and gestures)

while others accommodate rapidly to anew environment by changing) amongother things) their speech habits) so thatthey no longer 'stand out in the crowd).Whether they do this consciously or notis open to debate and may differ fromindividual to individual, but like mostprocesses that have to do with language)the change probably happens before weare aware of it and probably couldn)thappen if we were. So when we say) 'Idon)t have an accent,' we really mean)'You wouldn)t think I had an accent ifyou knew who I was and knew where I'dbeen.) It has more to do with acceptance- agreeing to stop listening to the otheras 'other) - than with absolutedifferences in

170

Everyone Has an Accent Except Me thevowels, consonants or intonationpatterns that a speaker uses. At the mostbasic level, we acknowledge that everyindividual will always have somespeech characteristics that distinguishhim or her from everyone else, even inour local community. This is the essenceof recognition - we can learn to pick afriend's voice out of the crowd eventhough we consider everyone in ourlocal crowd to have the same 'accent'compared to outsiders. So what we call

accent is relative not only to experiencebut also to the number of speech featureswe wish to distinguish at a time. Humanperception is categorical. When it comesto placing an accent, we listen andcategorize according to accents we haveheard before. We have a hard timeplacing an accent that we have neverheard before, at least until we find outwhat to associate that accent with. Ourexperience of perceiving the sounds ofhuman speech is very much a question of'agreeing' with others to construct certaincategories and then to place the soundsthat we hear into them. In contemporaryconstructivist psychology, this process iscalled the 'co-construction of reality', inwhich differences can be said not to

exist until we construct them. One resultof these principles is that we canbecome quite attuned to stereotypicalaccents that we have heard onlyoccasionally and don't know very well,while we become 'insensitive' to thecommon accents we hear all around usevery day. The speech of our colleaguesseems 'normal' to our ears, while thespeech of a stranger stands out asdifferent from that norm. So we feel thatwe don't have an accent because of theweight of experience that tells us that weare the best possible example of the'norm'. Details of pronunciation conjureup stereotypes. A few consonants andvowels or the briefest of intonationmelodies cause us to search our

memories for a pattern that matches whatwe have just heard. This is how weplace speakers according to dialect orlanguage group. It is also how wepredict what the rest of their consonantsand vowels and intonational phrasingwill be like. Sometimes we are wrong,but usually we make good guesses basedon limited evidence, especially if we'veheard the accent before. Because we areused to the word order and commonexpressions of our language, a stranger'sexotic pronunciation of a word whichwe recognize and understand can be

171

Language Myths catalogued as foreign,and we may ascribe it to one familiarstereotype or another and predict whatthe speaker's pronunciations of otherwords will be like. In this way, we seeothers as having an accent - because wetake ourselves as the norm or referenceto compare and measure others' speech.It is interesting for the student ofphonetics to observe the various ways inwhich one person's accent can differfrom another's. There are three 'strands'of accent which Professor DavidAbercrombie of the Department ofLinguistics of the University ofEdinburgh for many years taught his

students to distinguish: the very shortconsonant and vowel sounds whichalternate in rapid succession; the longerwaves of rhythmic and melodicgroupings, which we call rhythm andintonation; and the longest-term,persistent features that change very littlein a given individual's voice, which wecall voice quality. Consonants andvowels are the building blocks oflinguistic meaning, and slight changesin their quality inherently carry largedifferences in meaning, which we detectimmediately. Bought, bat, bet, bait is afour-way distinction for an Englishspeaker, but may only be a two-waydistinction for a Spanish or Japanesespeaker. Differences in vowels can make

dialects of English incomprehensibleeven to each other at first. An Americanpronunciation of 'John' can sound like'Jan' to a Scot; and a Scots pronunciationof 'John' can sound like 'Joan' to anAmerican. Consonants are also criticalin deciding the meaning of a word. TheAmerican who asked if she could clearaway some 'bottles' was understood bythe pub owner in Scotland to have said'barrels', not only because of the vowelbut also because the d-like pronunciationof the t-sound is almost exactly like thed-like pronunciation of the rolled r inScots. Again, it is the speaker generatingthe utterance who thinks primarily interms of meaning and not in terms of thesounds being used to transmit that

meaning. It is the hearer who musttranslate the incoming speech soundsinto new, meaningful units (which weusually call words) and who cannot helpbut notice that the signals coming in arepatterned differently from the hearer'sown system of speech sounds. Confusionover the meaning of a word can onlyhighlight these differences, making thetranslation of meaning more difficult andmaking each participant in theconversation feel

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Everyone Has an Accent Except Me

that the other has an accent. Theimpression is therefore mutual. Anothermeaningful component of accent isintonation or the 'melody' of speech.Differences in the rises and falls ofintonation patterns) and the rhythmicbeat that accompanies them) can be assignificant as differences in the melodiesof tunes that we recognize or in the beatof a waltz compared to a jig. One of thecharacteristics of the Americancomedian Richard Prior's ability toswitch from 'white talk' to 'black talk) isthe control of the height and of the rising

and falling of the pitch of the voice.Even more rapid timing of these risesand falls is an indication of languagessuch as Swedish and languages such asChinese which have different tones) thatis) pitches that distinguish wordmeanings from each other. Pitch canhave the greatest effect on ourimpression of an accent or on our abilityto recognize a voice. Our mood -whether we are excited or angry or sad -can change the sound of our voice) as thetempo of our speech also speeds up orslows down) so that we may sound likea different person. Voice quality is theensemble of more or less permanentelements that appear to remain constantin a person)s speech. This is how we

recognize a friend)s voice on thetelephone even if they only utter asyllable. Some voices are nasal; otherslow and resonant; others breathy; andstill others higher pitched and squeaky.Presumably) the better we know aperson) the less we feel they have anoticeable accent. Naturally) however)if they didn)t have a distinguishableensemble of accent features) we couldn)ttell their voice apart from otherpeople's. Travelers to a foreign countryoften experience an inability to tellindividual speakers of a foreignlanguage apart. As it once did in ournative language) this ability comes withpractice) that is) with exposure. Thereason is that we need time to

distinguish) first) to which strand ofaccent each particular speech gesturebelongs and) second) which speechdetails are common to most speakers ofthat language and which belong only tothe individual. Unless the individual'sspeech stands out in some remarkableway) we are likely to perceive thecollection of common) group traits first.Much of our perception of accent couldactually be visual. Hand and facialgestures which accompany speech couldcue a listener that

173

Language Myths the speaker comes froma diffefent place) so that we expect theperson to sound different from our norm.If we expect to hear an accent) weprobably will. Sooner or later)wherever they live) most peopleencounter someone from another place.A stranger from out of town) a foreigner)even a person who had moved away andreturned. But even in the samecommunity) people from different socialgroups Of of different ages can bedistinguished on the basis of theirspeech. One of the intriguing linguisticaspects of police work is to locate andidentify suspects on the basis of theiraccent. Often) this technique comesdown to the skill of being able to notice

details of speech that other observersoverlook. Sometimes) an academicapproach such as broadcasting a voiceto a large numbef of 'judges) ovef theradio or on television is necessitated. Inthis case) an anonymous suspect canoften be narrowed down as comingfrom, a particular area or even identifiedoutright. Computer programs are alsohaving moderate success at verifyingindividual speakers on the basis of theiraccent. These techniques are sometimescalled 'voiceprints» implying that eachindividual is unique) but as with humanlisteners) success may depend on howmuch speech ffom the individual can beheard and in how many contexts. One ofthe most popular characterizations of the

notion of accent modification has beenGeorge Bernard Shaw) s Pygmalion)revived on stage and screen as My PairLady. The phonetician) ProfessorHiggins) is renowned for tracing thecourse of people) s lives from theiraccents) and Eliza Doolittle) at theopposite extfeme) while probably awareof different accents and able to identifythem to some degree) appears at firstquite unable to produce speech inanything other than her local-dialectaccent. The transformation of Eliza)explained in sociolinguistic terms) isthe apparent result of heraccommodation to a new social milieuand her acceptance of a new role forherself. In terms of constructivist

psychology) she co-constructed a newreality - a new story - for her life andleft the old story behind. Thetransformation had its physical effect(she was no longer recognized in herformer neighborhood) as well as itslinguistic realization (her accent changedto suit her new surroundings). We allleave parts of the speaking style of ourearly years behind) while we adopt new

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Everyone Has an Accent Except Me

patterns more suited to our later years.Whether we change a lot or a littledepends on individual choices within aweb of social circumstance.


The play) Pygmalion (New York:Penguin Books) 1951) by GeorgeBernard Shaw is well worth reading andrereading. Failing that) a viewing of thevideo of My Pair Lady provides atongue-in-cheek (perhaps literally) spoof

of both undersensitivity andoversensitivity to accent. TheEncyclopedia of Language andLinguistics (Oxford: Pergamon Press)1994) contains a wealth of informationon accent) pronunciation and thecomponents of speech that make upaccent. The entry on 'Accent' by J. M. Y.Simpson is particularly useful. For moredetails on one of the most famous of alllocal accents) see Dennis Preston'schapter on American Speech.

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MYTH 21

America is Ruining the EnglishLanguage John Algeo

America is ruining the English language- everyone knows that. We have heard itfrom early days right up to the present.We have heard it from English men andEnglish women) of course) but fromAmericans as well - self-confessedlinguistic vandals. We have heard it fromthe famous and the obscure. So it mustbe true. But in what does the ruinationlie? How are Americans ruining

English? In the early days) Britishtravelers in the American colonies oftencommented on the 'purity) of the Englishspoken in the new world. It wasn)t untilthe American impertinence of 1776 thatAmericans seem to have begun ruiningEnglish. Yet) as early as 1735) a Britishtraveler in Georgia) Francis Moore)described the town of Savannah: 'It isabout a mile and a quarter incircumference; it stands upon the flat ofa hill) the bank of the river (which theyin barbarous English call a bluff) issteep.) The Americans had taken anadjective of nautical and perhaps Dutchorigin) meaning 'broad) flat and steep»to use as a noun for the sort of river bankthat hardly existed in England and for

which) consequently) earlier Englishhad no name. In 1995) in much the samevein as the comment 260 years earlier)His Royal Highness the Prince of Waleswas reported by The Times ascomplaining to a British Councilaudience that American English is 'verycorrupting). Particularly) he bemoanedthe fact that 'people tend to invent allsorts of nouns and verbs and makewords that shouldn)t be.) By this timethe barbarous use of bluff for a steepbank had been civilized by beingadopted into the usage of themotherland) but doubtless if the Princehad lived about nine generations earlier)he would have agreed with FrancisMoore that bluff was a word that

shouldn)t be.

17 6

America is Ruining the EnglishLanguage

The Prince concluded: 'We must act nowto insure that English - and that, to myway of thinking, means English English -maintains its position as the worldlanguage well into the next century.' Hisconcern seems to be as much

commercial as merely ethnocentricallyaesthetic, the English language being oneof England's most popular exports, alongwith gossip about the escapades of theRoyals. The Prince, after all, was onlydoing his bit to keep the English peckerup. One way Americans are ruiningEnglish is by changing it. Many of us,like Francis Moore and Prince Charles,regard what is foreign to us as barbarousand corrupt. We owe the term barbarousto the Greeks; they pitied the poorforeigner who could only stammer 'bar-bar' and hence was a 'barbaros'.Barbarians are simply those who do nottalk as we do, whether they areoutsiders, Yanks or fellow countrymenand countrywomen whose style we do

not admire. The journalist EdwinNewman is a linguistic prophet whosees the language style of his fellowAmericans as deadly. In 1974 hevaticinated in a book called StrictlySpeaking, which was subtitled WillAmerica be the Death of English? In it,he too objected to the invention of allsorts of nouns and verbs and words thatshouldn't be. In particular he objected toverbosity and euphemism as bad style. Anumber of Americans bemoan the balefulinfluence of their fellow citizens on thehealth or integrity of the language, butonly a few, like Edwin Newman, havebeen able to make a career of it. InEngland, on the other hand, a perceptionthat America is ruining the language

pervades the discourse of the chatteringclasses. Indeed, a fair number of Britishintellectuals regard 'new', 'distasteful',and 'American' as synonymous. Aknowledgeable British author com-plained about the supposedly Americanpronunciation conTROVersy and wassurprised to hear that the antepenultaccent is unknown in the States, being arecent British innovation. Theassumption is that anything new isAmerican and thus objectionable ondouble grounds. Change in language is,however, inevitable, just as it is in allother aspects of reality. Particularchanges will be, in the eyes of oneobserver or another, improvements ordegenerations. But judgments of what is

beautiful or ugly, valuable or useless,barbarous or elegant, corrupting orimproving are highly personal andidiosyncratic ones.

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Language Myths There are no objectivecriteria for judging worth in language)no linguistic Tables of the Law) noarchetypical authority called 'TheDictionary» though there are wannabeauthoritarians aplenty. On the otherhand) no one is required to like all orany particular changes. It is) in the great

Anglo-American tradition) our God-given right to have our own opinions andto take it or leave it when it comes tostyle in couture) diet) entertainment)religion and language. We need not beequally enthusiastic about catsuits andmuu-muus) macro- biotics and hautecuisine) grunge rock and Philip Glass)the World Wide Web andMTV) bank andbluff, or conTROVersyand CONtroversy.We don)t have to like particularchanges) or even the fact of changeitself. But a language or anything elsethat does not change is dead. Theeighteenth-century hope that a languagecould be 'fixed) - that is) improved) orchanged in a way some self-appointedlinguistic judge would approve of until it

reached a state of perfection and thenpreserved so that it would not thereafterdegenerate or change in a way the judgedisliked - was a chimera. It was anillusion based on misunderstandingsabout the nature of language) values andhuman nature. The earliest English wecan catch sight of in manuscripts of theseventh century was the product ofmillennia of change. We can onlyreconstruct its earlier history backthrough stages we call Anglo- Frisian)Germanic) Indo-European and maybeeven Nostratic and Proto-World. Duringthe recorded history of English) thelanguage has changed from somethingquite incomprehensible to a present-dayEnglish speaker) which we call Old

English (Hw

t! We Gar-dena in geordagumtheodcyninge thrym gehyrdon) tosomething equally incomprehensible tomany of us) computerspeak (Somememory resident programs steal toomuch of the CPU to work with anasynchronous download). During itsroughly thirteen centuries of recordedhistory) English has diversified in manyways. Any two varieties of a languagebecome increasingly different from eachother when their speakers do notcommunicate with one other but morealike as those who use them talk amongthemselves. That is the way languageworks. British and American started to

become different when English

178

America is Ruining the EnglishLanguage speakers first set foot onAmerican soil because the colonistsfound new things to talk about and alsobecause they ceased to talk regularlywith the people back home. Thecolonists changed English in their ownunique way, but at the same timespeakers in England were changing thelanguage too, only in a different wayfrom that of the colonists. As a result,

over time the two varieties becameincreasingly different, not so radicallydifferent that they amounted to differentlanguages, as Italian and french hadbecome a millennium earlier, butdifferent enough to notice. Thedifferences between American andBritish are not due to Americanschanging from a British standard.American is not corrupt British plusbarbarisms. Rather, both American andBritish evolved in different ways from acommon sixteenth-century ancestralstandard. Present-day British is nocloser to that earlier form than present-day American is. Indeed, in some wayspresent-day American is moreconservative, that is, closer to the

common original standard than ispresent-day British. Some examples ofAmerican conservatism versus Britishinnovation are these: Americansgenerally retain the r-sound in wordslike more and mother, whereas theBritish have lost it. Americans generallyretain the 'flat a' of cat in path, calf,class, whereas the British have replacedit with the 'broad a' of father. Americansretain a secondary stress on the secondsyllable from the end of words likesecretary and dictionary, whereas theBritish have lost both the stress andoften the vowel, reducing the words tothree syllables, 'secret'ry'. Americansretain an old use of the verb guess tomean 'think' or 'suppose' (as in Geoffrey

Chaucer's catch-phrase 'I gesse').Americans retain the past participleform gotten beside got, whereas theBritish have lost the former. (The Britishoften suppose that Americans use onlygotten; in fact they use both, but withdifferent meanings: 'I've got a cold' = 'Ihave a cold' and 'I've gotten a cold' ='I've caught a cold'). Americans haveretained use of the subjunctive in whatgrammarians call 'mand- ative'expressions: 'They insisted that heleave,' whereas the British substitutedfor it other forms, such as 'that he shouldleave' or 'that he left'. On the other hand,the British are more conservative thanAmericans

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Language Myths in other ways. Thus theycontinue to distinguish atom (with at-sound) and Adam (with a d-sound),whereas Americans typically pronouncethe two words alike, with a flap soundthat is more d- than t-like. Similarly, instandard British callous and Alice donot rhyme, whereas they usually do instandard American, both having aschwa. So too, the British have differentstressed vowels in father and fodder,whereas Americans pronounce thosewords with the same first vowel. The

British have retained an old use ofreckon in the sense 'think' or 'suppose' inserious discourse, whereas that use inAmerica is old- fashioned or rural, acomic marker of 'hick' talk. The Britishhave retained the term fortnight, whereasAmericans have lost it. The British haveretained the primary meaning of corn as'grain', whereas Americans havechanged it to 'maize' (the image manyAmericans have of 'Ruth amid the aliencorn' being both anachronistic andectopic). The British have retained theinversion of have with its subject inquestions: 'Have you the time?' whereasAmericans use the auxiliary verb dowith it: 'Do you have the time?' Onbalance, it is hard to say which variety

of English, American or British, is themore conservative and which the moreinnovative. A lot depends on how youlook at the question. It is clear that theBritish are keen on (Americans wouldsay 'fond of') the pluperfect, whereasAmericans prefer the simple past:British 'He had left before they arrived'versus typical American 'He left beforethey arrived.' But it is less clear whichusage should be regarded as older. Is theAmerican preference a degeneration ofthe tense system? Or a preservation ofthe English of the Anglo-Saxons, whohad little truck with complex tenses?Both American and British have changedand go on changing today. Among recentinnovations in British English, in

addition to the pronunciation ofcontroversy already cited, are suchvocabulary novel- ties as gazumping andgazundering, Essex man and EstuaryEnglish, toy boy, and redundancy for'sacking' or 'firing' (a bureaucraticeuphemism fit to exercise the spleen of aBritish Edwin Newman). Paralleling theAmerican retention of the mandativesubjunctive ('They insisted that heleave') is a British innovative use of theindicative in such expressions: 'Theyinsisted that he left,' which in Americanuse could

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America is Ruining the EnglishLanguage

only be a statement of fact ('Theyinsisted it was a fact that he had left') .British speakers have also beenextraordinarily fertile in expanding therange of use for tag questions. Tagquestions are little bobs at the end ofsentences that can turn them intoquestions, or sometimes into somethingelse. The basic tag questions are generalEnglish, shared by British andAmerican: informational: 'You don'twear glasses, do you? (I'm not sure, but

think you don't. Am I right?) inclusive:'It's a nice day, isn't it?' (It obviously is -I'm not really asking, but just makingpolite remarks so you can join in theconversation. ) emphasizing: 'I made abad mistake, didn't I?' (This is asoliloquy. I'm not talking to anybody butmyself and don't expect an answer to therhetorical question. It's the verbalequivalent of underlining. ) The last ofthe above types is more characteristic ofBritish than of American use, but thenext two are distinctively British and arerelatively recent contributions of BritishEnglish to the rhetorical inventory ofimpoliteness: peremptory: 'Is the teaready?' 'The water has to boil, doesn'tit?' (Everybody knows you can't make

tea without boiling hot water, and youcan see that the water has not come to aboil yet, so stop bothering me withidiotic questions.) antagonistic: 'Itelephoned you this morning, but youdidn't answer.' 'I was in the bath, wasn'tI?' (The reason I didn't answer was that Iwas in the bath, and it was a greatannoyance having you phone at that time;if you had any sense and consideration,you would not have called then. [Nevermind that the caller could not possiblyknow all that - I was annoyed at the timeand I'm even more annoyed now at whatI perceive to be a complaint when I amthe one who was put upon.]) BothAmericans and the British innovate inEnglish pronunciation, vocabulary and

grammar. British people, however, tendto be more aware of Americaninnovations than Americans are ofBritish ones. The cause of that greaterawareness may be a keener linguisticsensitivity on

181

Language Myths the part of the British)or a more insular anxiety and henceirritation about influences from abroad)or the larger number of Americanspeakers and their higher prominence infields that require innovation) or

perhaps the fact that present-dayAmericans have cultural rootlets allover the world and so are less aware ofthe British Isles. Perhaps Americans doinnovate more; after all) there are four tofive times as many English speakers inthe United States as in the UnitedKingdom. So one might expect) on thebasis of population size alone) four tofive times as much innovation inAmerican English. Moreover)Americans have been disproportionatelyactive in certain technological fields)such as computer systems) that arehotbeds of lexical innovation. It iscurious and remarkable that the presentstate of affairs was foreseen with greataccuracy by John Adams) who in 1780)

even before it was obvious that theAmerican Revolution would succeed)wrote:

English is destined to be in the next andsucceeding centuries more generally thelanguage of the world than Latin was inthe last or French is in the present age.The reason of this is obvious, becausethe increasing population in America,and their universal connection andcorrespon- dence with all nations will,aided by the influence of England in theworld, whether great or small, forcetheir language into general use.

So is America ruining the Englishlanguage? Certainly) if you believe thatextending the language to new uses andnew speakers ruins it. Certainly) if youbelieve that change is ruin. Certainly) ifwhat John Adams foresaw wasruination.

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Index

Abercrombie, David 172 ablative 79 -

80 Academie Francraise 135 accusative79-80, 132-4 afeared 70 aggravare 1alphabets see scripts alternative 1American Revolution 176, 182 analytic54 Appalachians 66 -76 Arabic 39, 53,85, 90, 120, 154 Arawak 39 Aristotle115 article 56, 82 Austen, Jane 134awful 2, 7

Bacon, Francis 66, 68 Bantu languages50 B B C 94, 100, 113, 120 beauty oflanguage 12, 28-9, 85-93, 136, 177Bhutto, Benazir 45 Bible 68, 134 bluff176 Bogarde, Dirk 61 borrow 6borrowing (see loan words) Bronte,Charlotte 134

Bushman languages see Khoisanlanguages

case 79-80, 94-95, 100, 132, 161 changein language 1, 90,178 as inevitable 8,72, 124, 177 as undesirable 1, 77reasons for 104, 123, 178 - 9 views of17 - 18 Chaucer, Geoffrey 68, 69, 71,110, 119, 179 Chinese 41- 2, 53, 81, 82,135, 15 1 , 173 Chomsky, Noam xvChurch, Roman Catholic 9 Cicero 10, 14clarity 23 - 3 1 classroom language 43,44, 47 - 8, 75 Clinton, Bill 100codification 95, 96 collective noun 64compound 11, 166 conjunction 78

consonant 33-4, 172 doubling 34 voicedv. voiceless 36 controversy 19, 177converse terms 6 Cook, Capt. James 159corn 180

183

correctness 63, 14 2 -9 creole 56, 92,120 Crystal, David 16, 19

Dalabon 160, 162 Danish 135 DanteAlighieri 12, 136 Darwin, Charles 113,] 21 dative 79-80 Decker, Thomas 95

declension 79 definiteness 82 Defoe,Daniel 134 Deliverance 70 Demiin 165derivation 54 Descartes, Rene 29Dharuk 160 Dickens, Charles 134dictionary 3, 96 differen t from/to 94 - 5discrimination on grounds of languagexvii, 65, 99 disinterested 2-5, 7 doublenegative 109-10,113-22 Douglass,Frederick 103 dove 1 2 3, 128 - 9Dravidian languages 50 Dryden, John66, 71 Du Bois, William 103 Dutch 50,153, 154 Dyirbal137

Ebonics see English, African- AmericanVernacular education and spokenlanguage 63 Education Act 59, 60-1

language denigrated in 87 language usedin 10, 111

Index

system 74 tertiary 60-1 Elizabeth I 66,67, 71 English passim affixes 4 African-American Vernacular 86, 92, 109, 120American, 40, 42, 45, 1 2 7, 128, 153,17 2 American v. British 32, 85, 176 -82 Appalachian 66-76, 86 as an officiallanguage 88 Australian 91, 127 bad 139- 49 Belfast 99 Birmingham 85borrowing in 14 British 45, 64, 127Canadian 127, 128 - 9 Cockney 85, 9 2

codification of 95, 9 6 compared withother languages 50 East Anglian 150Estuary 94 Glaswegian 85, 88, 89 indecline 15-22,58-65,176-82 Irish 40, 91London 99, 15 0 New York 86, 139-49,150 New Zealand 42, 45, 46, 127Norwich 87 Old (Anglo-Saxon) 13, 38,69, 81, 119, 178 pronunciation ], ]6, ]9,54, 63, 85, 17 2 , 177, 179-80 replacingLatin 11, 165 rhythm 154 Scottish 40, 172 Southern (U S) 139-49

184

South- West (U K) 150 speed of 155

spoken 63, 100 standard 63, 75, 87, 96,99, 106, 109, 120 structures of 1, 52, 53,54, 55, 81, 82, 109 syllables 152 Texan86, 129, 150 use of 9, 12 Erasm us,Desideri us 117, 136 Eskimo (see alsoGreenlandic) 39 Esperanto 52 ethnicity87, 88

Fanagalo 54- 5 feminism 47 Fijian 83Finnish 56, 135, 151, 155 Flintstone,Fred 125 fortnight 180 Fowler, HenryW. 113, 121 French as a source ofEnglish words 37, 38, 39 as clear andlogical 23 - 31 Breton 86 Canadian 86,91 compared with other languages 52connotations of 85 lacking compounds

11 Old 2 Parisian 86, 91 puns 28replacing Latin 11, 165 rhythm 154speed of 153, 155 structures of, 51, 55,10 9, 120, 135 vocabulary 27

Index

French Revolution 30 functions ofspeech (informative v. facilitative) 45funny 8

Garig 160 gay 18 gender grammatical51, 55, 83, 135 sex 41- 9, 90, 155

genetic origins of linguistic differences105 genitive 89-80 German comparedwith other languages 50, 52, 54connotations of 29, 85, 91 speed ofutterance 153, 155 structures of 26, 51,55, 134, 151 vocabulary 7, 11, 12, 51Germanic languages 50 gotten 179government 64 grammar acquisition of54 bad 16, 94, 9 6 book 83-4, 9 6definition 77 descriptive 96 learnt earlyin acquisition 51, 63 lessons 58 mental83-4, 9 6 , 99 part of linguisticknowledge 51, 53-6, 77 prescriptive 95,96 tests 64, 107 grammatical differencesbetween languages 82, 135 - 6grammaticality 108-9

18 5

Greek Classicaln, 24, 25, 38, 39, 177Modern 91, 152 Greenlandic 54Gunwinygu 160 Guugu Yimidhirr 159-60

Hagege, Claude xv Hakluyt, Richardharmonic v. disharmonic relationships162 - 3 Harris, Joel Chandler 21Hawaiian 53 - 4 Hebrew 37, 90hesitation 151 high rising terminal 127Hollywood 70 holp 68-70 homograph36 homonym 5, 37 homophone 36Hopkins, G. M. 59 Hottentot languages

see Khoisan languages Hungarian 120,151 Huxley, Aldous 134

I v. me 16, 100, 132-8 Ilgar 160 imply5-6 impoverishment 99 inadequacy ofdialects 87 Independent, The 64 Indo-European 2, 178 infer 5-6 inferiority,linguistic 9-14, 104-7, 140, 148infinitive, split 95, 136 inflection 54, 56,82 initiation language 165

Index

insecurity, linguistic 92, 146, 148intelligibility 87 interpersonal function45 intonation 78, 17 2 , 173 Irish 52Italian 11, 12, 29, 85, 9 1 , 15 2 , 153,154, 156 I waidja 160

Jackson, Jesse 103 James I 71 Japanese4], 53, 15 2 , ]53, 17 2 Johnson, Samuel21, 96 Jonson, Ben 134 Jordan, Barbara103 journalism see media

Kayardild 161, 166 Kentucky 66-76Khoisan languages 53-4 kilometer 19King, Martin Luther 103 Kunwinjku163-4, 166

Labov, William xv, 17, 126, 141, 148language as a self-regulating system 8,19 Lardil165 Larkin, Philip 113 Latin asa high prestige language 96, 136-7, 16 5as a low prestige language 10-11, 14 asa source of English words 1, 2, 14,37,38as a source of English grammar 95, 100,136 current uses 9

186

structures of 26, 79-81, 82, 132, 134,135, 161 vocabulary development 14

learn 6, 70 legislation on language 89lend 6 lexical < -e> 36 literacy 59-63functional 59, 61 loan words 10, 14, 30,97, 166 logic 23-31,109-10,113-22,140look-and-say 61 Lounsbury, Thomas 15Lovelace, Richard 68 Lowth, Robert 96

macropods 160, 164 Major, John 118Managkari 160 Mandarin see ChineseMaori 9 -10, 13, 56, 81, 82, 83, 135Marrgu 160 Marlowe, Christopher 66,134 mathematics 114, 117 Mayali 160,162 me see I meaning change in 1- 8extension 166 socially negotiated 7-8media 15- 22 , 62, 69-70, 74, 85, 12 3-31, 170 mentalese 26 Milton, John 37

mini- 18 Mitterrand, President F. 25morals and language 58, 60 morpheme34- 5, 37, 54 Mparntwe Arrernte 164Murray, Lindley 117

Index

M ussolini, Benito 62 My Fair Lady 174

National Curriculum 58 New Statesman62 New Zealand 10 Newton, Sir Isaac11 nice 1- 2, 7 Nkrumah, Kwame 103nominative 79-80, 95, 13 2 -4 non-

standard varieties 64, 87, 89, 9 2 , 109,140 North Carolina 66-76 Norwegian50 noun 77, 135, 176 number 80, 162

object, direct 80, 132, 135, 161Observer 59, 61, 62 official language10, 88 Ojukwu, Odumegwu 103 Ontario128 orthography see spelling Orwell,George 20, 113, 117 Ozarks 66-76

parental role in language acquisition107- 8 participation markers 101particle 78, 81, 82 passive 26 pasttenses of verbs 27, 68-9, 180 pause 151perfect 27, 80 person 80 phoneme 53,

153 phonics 61 pidgin 54 - 6 Pinker,Steven 26 Plautus, Titus M. 134

187

pleasantness of speech 85 - 93, 147Polish 50 polysynthetic 162 prefix 78present 80, 98 Press-Herald (Lexington)70 Prince of Wales 176-7 Prior, Richard173 Private Eye 117 - 8 pronoun 77, 165dual 83, 162 inclusive 83, 165 harmonic163 interrogative 137 personal 132- 8,162 relative 95 second person 52 trial83 Pulp Fiction 125 Pygrnalion 174Python, Monty 125

quantifier, universal and existential 114 -15

racism 64, 106 Ralegh, Sir Walter 66reckon 180 related languages 50, 58,160 rhythm 154, 172 Rivarol, Antoinede 23-4, 26, 28, 30 Romansh 11-12 R P(Received Pronunciation) 170 rules ofgrammar 16, 77, 83, 9 6 -8, 108 of usage51-2 written v. spoken 64 Russian 12,50, 52, 110, 120, 154, 161

Index

Saturday Night Live 125 schwa 37, 180Scotsman 18 scripts 33, 53 security,linguistic 142 self-hatred, linguistic 87sex see gender sexism 43, 64Shakespeare, William 16, 64, 66-76, 98,120, 134 Shaw, George Bernard 174Shipley, Jenny 45 Sidney, Sir Philip 68silent letters 35, 38, 53 Slavic languages50 slovenliness 86, ] 00-1 social class64, 87, 88, 99 social confidence 47social connotations 88, 92 solidarity 147South Africa 54 Spanish 29, 88, 9 1 ,109, 120, 154, 155, 17 2 speaking rate v.articulation rate 15 1 speed ofarticulation 145, 15 0 -8, 173 spelling32-40,52-3,58,61-2 standard

variety/language 29, 63-4, 75, 8

9 2 , 95, 96, 100, 108, 140, 170 status44- 5, 75, 88, 90, 99 stereotyping 29, 85,9 1 , 145, 148, 171 Stevenson, Adlai 21stress-timing v. syllable-timing 154 style95, 135 subject 80, 97- 8, 132, 135, 161subject complement 133 subjunctive179, 180 suffix 78 Swedish 39, 50, 52,54, 173

188

Swift, Jonathan 59 Switzerland 11-12syllable 53, 152 Sylvester 125 synonym

4, 8 synthetic 54

tag question 181 Tamil 50 Tarzan 55 taskorientation 45 Tatar 50 teach 6television (see also media) 10, 85, 1 23- 31 Telugu 50 Tennessee 66-76 tense80, 98 Thai 11 0 Thatcher, LadyMargaret 17, 45, 100 Times 18, 176Turkic languages 50 Turkish 53 Tutu,Desmond 103

ugliness see beauty Ulster Scots 71Uncle Remus see Harris, Joel Chandleruninterested 2- 5 uptalk see high risingterminal

Index

Vaugelas, Claude Favre de 23 verb 77,135, 176 auxiliary v. lexical 97 verbaldeprivation 103-12 Vietnamese 54Vincent 126-7 vocabulary 16, 51creation 13-14, 97, 166 size 51, 163- 5spread 124 vocative 79 - 80 voicequality 172, 173 voiceprint 174 vowel33, 172 long and short 34, 35 obscuresee schwa

Warlpiri 166 Waugh, Evelyn 20 Wayne's

World 125 Welsh 52 West Virginia 66-76 wimp 18 word class 77 word order267, 80 -1, 133 writing systems seescripts

Xhosa 50

Zulu 50, 135, 156

!X66 53

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