Languages never “decline” anyway. They change and evolve. People need to realize that language is a living thing. It changes to fit the needs of its users.
Languages never “decline” anyway. They change and evolve. People need to realize that language is a living thing. It changes to fit the needs of its users.
One day, English will get to the level of ULTRA FRENCH (warning: reddit link). More seriously -- and only somewhat relevant to this part of the thread -- Dr. Geoff Lindsey on YouTube has a great...
One day, English will get to the level of ULTRA FRENCH (warning: reddit link).
More seriously -- and only somewhat relevant to this part of the thread -- Dr. Geoff Lindsey on YouTube has a great bunch of videos on the English language. OP, u/ignorabimus, mentioned "gotten" being used in UK more and more and Dr. Lindsey has a video about that.
Following a post pointing out that it is a little annoying to just post a link without any context, I think this is interesting because I have seen lots of people argue that English is being...
Following a post pointing out that it is a little annoying to just post a link without any context, I think this is interesting because I have seen lots of people argue that English is being "degraded" – usually by dialects (e.g. AAVE, MLE) or foreign speakers – however English (perhaps more so than other languages) has always been a dynamic and evolving language (which partially explains its success) adopting the results of other cultures.
Unfortunately I also suffer from this view when it comes to continental Europeans trying to speak English (they often use very strange phrases such as "I did not write the exam very well" when they really mean "I did not do very well in the exam"), but I feel there that the issue is their lack of grammatical mastery (e.g. Germans and word order) does actively impair communication. I think many Europeans also believe this, for example they argue against further adoption of English because they claim that they speak "globish" rather than "English". To be totally fair Europeans generally speak English well (certainly a lot better than native English speakers other languages) and I don't think that Europeans are going to have much effect on the English language (as they don't really write a lot of literature in English, produce culture in English, etc – and the Europeans who do generally have perfect grammar).
I feel like "writing exams" is a thing I've seen in British English, though I could be fabricating that memory. Half the time I see Americans complain about people who speak English as a second...
I feel like "writing exams" is a thing I've seen in British English, though I could be fabricating that memory. Half the time I see Americans complain about people who speak English as a second language it's because those people learned a variant closer to the UK's. The rest of the time it's grammatical idiosyncrasies from a first language or just the fact they have an accent.
Most of the complaints I see about the "degradation" of English are about lack of formality, slang, or dialectal pronunciation
my problems with the "degradation" of the english language are the shifts caused by ignorance or laziness, especially when the shift doesn't add anything to the mix, it's just pointless. examples:...
my problems with the "degradation" of the english language are the shifts caused by ignorance or laziness, especially when the shift doesn't add anything to the mix, it's just pointless.
examples:
-"could of" (people mishearing "could've" and not noticing what the word actually means).
-"begs the question" (which is the name of a logical phallacy. this shift is lazy, based on ignorance, and adds nothing to the language because it's just swapping one word for another, raises the question).
-"i could care less" (people say this is sarcasm, but the context never makes that feel like the right explanation, seems like lazy ignorance to me)
-"eck-cetera" or "expresso" (no, its etcetera, and espresso).
[apologies to ESL folks who are doing their best to learn a challenging language]
It’s curious how a post complaining about language degradation through homophones includes its own misspelling (or maybe it’s a Freudian slip). Perhaps this is a natural phenomenon and not a side...
logical phallacy
It’s curious how a post complaining about language degradation through homophones includes its own misspelling (or maybe it’s a Freudian slip). Perhaps this is a natural phenomenon and not a side effect of laziness?
I dislike when common vernacular defies established rules and logic (e.g. “irregardless”), but even proper English can introduce counterintuitive results (e.g. “inflammable means flammable”).
I suppose Eggcorns exist much in the same way that someone who has only ever read a word can come up wildly incorrect pronunciations when saying it for the first time. These problems affect native English speakers, too (it took me over 30 years to learn the proper pronunciation of “hegemony” and it still doesn’t feel natural to me). The last two examples you give are loan words, so it’s hard to argue it’s English that’s degrading.
An explanation for all this could generously assume it’s not laziness but the language itself that’s inefficient. “Slang” exists because “shortened language” is inefficient. English was not a planned language (as is apparent with how many times people at work are confused by “-teen” and “-ty” numbers like sixteen and sixty), and it continues to evolve to address its own limitations. We may just be running up against various edge cases where the language is inefficient and people come up with their own solutions.
re: phallacy, lol at the self-own there. i agree with all your other points. one of my favorite ideas is that "our language is insufficient to describe our reality."
re: phallacy, lol at the self-own there.
i agree with all your other points. one of my favorite ideas is that "our language is insufficient to describe our reality."
Indeed, the map is not the terrain. I do find it interesting how extensible the English language is due to the multiple sources of influence it has accrued over the centuries. It seems this...
I do find it interesting how extensible the English language is due to the multiple sources of influence it has accrued over the centuries. It seems this flexibility allows it to describe seemingly intangible concepts with its plethora of vocabulary.
I imagine early humans were grasping at straws trying to make the proper phonemes to express their thoughts and feelings. Meanwhile with English, despite its convoluted rules and grammar, gives you the tools to make words like "antidisestablishmentarianism" when the occasion demands it.
There's a paradox of describing color to a blind person, and yet society surmounted a similar problem of naming the colors that can be seen. When you look at the history, the most relevant colors were named first, but that left colors like "orange" approximated as "yellow-red" for centuries in Europe until orange trees were imported from Asia.
There's a similar situation in the world of wine. There are actually very few words to describe the taste of wine that are specific to wine itself. Instead you speak mostly in analogies (e.g. "jammy", "dry", "velvety", "earthy", etc.).
A psychological study shows that having words to describe colors assists in people's ability to discern between colors. I'd like to extend this concept into language's ability to shape perception. That is, words themselves can make someone more aware of a concept (similar to the Baader-Meinhof effect).
Now, what really cooks my noodle is pondering if English's extensibility has fostered societal progress by empowering humans to craft words where the language was previously lacking ("enshittification"/insidification is a relatively new word for a phenomena that's been witnessed on tech platforms for years); or if we're actually being artificially limited due to our constant analogies to describe the ineffable (Ancient Greeks had 6 words for "love", whereas English primarily uses just the one).
Perhaps if we had a word to describe this feeling, I would have a better time understanding it!
It's worth noting that a lot of (probably most, possibly all) languages have this ability to be extended when the situation arises - this is by no means unique to English! German, for example,...
It's worth noting that a lot of (probably most, possibly all) languages have this ability to be extended when the situation arises - this is by no means unique to English! German, for example, uses compound words very extensively, and compounds can be built up on the fly, giving you a lot of flexibility. Also, German uses common prefixes more heavily than in English (for example, entry and exit are two different words in English, but in German they're a common stem with different prefixes - Eingang and Ausgang). These prefixes can be used quite flexibly to modify words relatively subtly.
What you're talking about has been discussed fairly extensively in linguistics, it used to be known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (although I think linguists typically talk about linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism. The weak version (linguistic relativity) is the idea that, as you point out with the colour studies, our perceptions are in part shaped by our language, while the stronger version (linguistic determinism) says that are actively limited or restricted by our language.
Linguists today largely agree that linguistic determinism just isn't true - it simply doesn't hold up. There does however seem to be some evidence for linguistic relativism. So in the case of words for love in English and Greek, it might be possible to make the argument that English speakers differentiate less between different forms of love, but it is very obviously true that English speakers still feel these different forms of love, and can distinguish between them.
Thank you for providing the terms for the concepts I was describing! My amateurish understanding of linguistics limited my ability to elocute on the subject, but it didn’t prevent me from grasping...
Thank you for providing the terms for the concepts I was describing! My amateurish understanding of linguistics limited my ability to elocute on the subject, but it didn’t prevent me from grasping the general concept…which I suppose is an empirical confirmation of linguistic relativism.
I still don't know if insidification is just a mistranscription that happened to accurately describe the situation. I guess I could Ctrl+F the article version.
I still don't know if insidification is just a mistranscription that happened to accurately describe the situation. I guess I could Ctrl+F the article version.
Edit, nope. Naturally evolved. Good lesson for me to double check sources before spouting off. I'm pretty sure the various sign languages for deaf people were planned/ designed.
Edit, nope. Naturally evolved. Good lesson for me to double check sources before spouting off.
I'm pretty sure the various sign languages for deaf people were planned/ designed.
Do you have any examples? I have some familiarity with sign language linguistics and am unaware of any sign language in widespread use today that could be classified as a conlang.
Do you have any examples? I have some familiarity with sign language linguistics and am unaware of any sign language in widespread use today that could be classified as a conlang.
I am way out over my skis on this topic. Double checking the history I had vaguely remembered, I was wrong. The Gauladet school for the deaf was where american sign language evolved from a mix of...
I am way out over my skis on this topic.
Double checking the history I had vaguely remembered, I was wrong. The Gauladet school for the deaf was where american sign language evolved from a mix of previous sign languages, but no one designed it. Families with deaf people evolved sign language. My bad.
If you want to learn more about this sort of thing, look into Nicaraguan sign language! While other sign languages do usually have some planning behind them at Deaf schools like Gauladet (though...
If you want to learn more about this sort of thing, look into Nicaraguan sign language! While other sign languages do usually have some planning behind them at Deaf schools like Gauladet (though not enough to be really considered conlangs as you recognize), Nicaraguan sign language literally did just arise from students with no other way to communicate naturally creating their own new sign language -- it's a classic example used in a lot of linguistics classes bc you don't see languages developing pretty much from scratch like this much.
Even the wikipedia page for constructed languages admits there are not many global speakers. Esperanto may have been the biggest, but after its relative lack of adoption over the decades, I assume...
Even the wikipedia page for constructed languages admits there are not many global speakers. Esperanto may have been the biggest, but after its relative lack of adoption over the decades, I assume it's relegated to the realm of arcana along with other oddities like Klingon and Tolkien's elvish languages.
Esperanto has no chance of being widely adopted, but the number of speakers it has dwarfs any other constructed language. There are even a handful of native speakers (usually children of people...
Esperanto has no chance of being widely adopted, but the number of speakers it has dwarfs any other constructed language. There are even a handful of native speakers (usually children of people who met at Esperanto conferences) which is cool. It's definitely still a pretty niche hobby, but compared to most conlanging it's super successful.
Klingon has a much smaller speaker base but ongoing interest in Star Trek gives it a lot more fans than most other conlangs. There was a famous example of a guy who spoke it with his infant son for fun and he did start to acquire some Klingon until he got bored of it.
Tolkien's Elvish languages actually don't have enough vocab to be spoken. They had to hire a guy to coin new words for the movies for this reason. Anyone who says they can speak Tolkien's Elvish languages is telling on themselves as a result.
There have actually been linguistics papers looking into this as something more complex than that. This paper is one example (sorry for thr imgur link, it's the one I had on hand). The thing about...
"could of" (people mishearing "could've" and not noticing what the word actually means).
There have actually been linguistics papers looking into this as something more complex than that. This paper is one example (sorry for thr imgur link, it's the one I had on hand).
The thing about language is that it's pretty much impossible to distinguish whether changes happen due to "ignorance or laziness" or not. Even amoung the ones you cite -- the switching of consonants in "et cetera" (and also in "ask"), which is known as metathesis, and the addition of a consonant in "espresso" isn't necessarily due to either. It's a common type of sound change across languages. You might argue they're due to them being easier to produce and that means they're due to laziness but that's a weird take. Their association with ignorance or laziness is because they're more common among people who are stereotyped as lazy and ignorant, not the other way around.
Adding value judgments to language changes like this isn't effective in stopping those changes from happening and only succeeds in making some people feel superior to others for their "better" English.
You're free to think so, but given that it's published in a linguistics journal and linguists as a rule are against prescriptivism (which whining about "could of" is a prime example of), it seems...
You're free to think so, but given that it's published in a linguistics journal and linguists as a rule are against prescriptivism (which whining about "could of" is a prime example of), it seems unlikely that this was his rationale rather than academic interest in the construction.
The first two of those are interesting, simply because sometimes accentally and tonally they're quite easy to get wrong. "Could of" actually can't be said in my native accent, it just doesn't work...
The first two of those are interesting, simply because sometimes accentally and tonally they're quite easy to get wrong.
"Could of" actually can't be said in my native accent, it just doesn't work with how we talk. But it does just five miles down the road where they use it as common as much.
"Could of got a sausage batch" works for them. It doesn't for me lot, weird... But sometimes it's not laziness. It's just accental. But I know what you.
Though my wife has a great phrase "Don't judge a person for saying a word they may only have read", sometimes I wonder if we should just be more compassionate towards each other with how we speak.
I think sometimes it's almost could-a or could-duh. Which is closer to "could of" but isn't really have or of. If we are being honest sausage batch is probably going to cause more confusion that...
"Could of" actually can't be said in my native accent, it just doesn't work with how we talk. But it does just five miles down the road where they use it as common as much.
I think sometimes it's almost could-a or could-duh. Which is closer to "could of" but isn't really have or of.
If we are being honest sausage batch is probably going to cause more confusion that could of!
I hear the former a lot, it's the weird way many of us say "have". In fact parts of the East Midlands are known for contracting just about any word. "Chizzit?" as in "how much is it?" or...
I hear the former a lot, it's the weird way many of us say "have". In fact parts of the East Midlands are known for contracting just about any word. "Chizzit?" as in "how much is it?" or "Shudawudacuda" - "Should've, Would've, Could've"
If we are being honest sausage batch is probably going to cause more confusion that could of!
Warwickshire mate. It might be Shakespeare's county, but they're all savages.
The map of names for a bread roll is one of my favourite maps of the UK. That link goes to one of the better ones but it's still incomplete. I could add at least 2-3 more to that list without...
The map of names for a bread roll is one of my favourite maps of the UK. That link goes to one of the better ones but it's still incomplete. I could add at least 2-3 more to that list without really thinking much.
The basic rule for pronunciation where I live in Norfolk is "take the first phoneme from the word, and the last, and sometimes a random one from the middle". I once went to Saxmundham in Suffolk and asked a local how they pronounce the name of their town. In Norfolk it would likely be sax-um but he looked at me like I was mad and said Sax-mund-ham. I'm not from Norfolk originally but even after 25 years here I still struggle to understand very local people.
I love how angry we all get over it. We get so vexxed at each other for daring to call it something, but it's also hilarious when you go somewhere and go "I want a sausage... thing, what do you...
I love how angry we all get over it. We get so vexxed at each other for daring to call it something, but it's also hilarious when you go somewhere and go "I want a sausage... thing, what do you call it?" to anyone. Generally we get the jist, but it's so frustrating sometimes.
The basic rule for pronunciation where I live in Norfolk is "take the first phoneme from the word, and the last, and sometimes a random one from the middle". I once went to Saxmundham in Suffolk and asked a local how they pronounce the name of their town. In Norfolk it would likely be sax-um but he looked at me like I was mad and said Sax-mund-ham. I'm not from Norfolk originally but even after 25 years here I still struggle to understand very local people.
Aye, East Mids has similar. "Les-tah", "Pee-tah-brah", "Norf-ants." not to mention the sheer insane levels of weird words each small areas has for different things. I used some of them in Australia recently and just had this poor Aussie lass stood there dumbfounded what I'd asked.
I'm not from Norfolk originally but even after 25 years here I still struggle to understand very local people.
That's because you're not family. Everyone is related to everyone else by blood up that way! ha.
Yeah, us ESL folks pick those up from natives usually. It's hard to stuff those up if most of one's language acquisition is based on written language. That said, aligning spelling and...
[apologies to ESL folks who are doing their best to learn a challenging language]
Yeah, us ESL folks pick those up from natives usually. It's hard to stuff those up if most of one's language acquisition is based on written language. That said, aligning spelling and pronunciation of the English language would help the natives to be less confused. And us ESLers to produce fewer wrong ad hoced pronunciations.
Haha, I think it's funny your examples include Latin and Italian misspellings as a reason for the degradation of English. But yes I agree. Your examples have nothing to do with language changing...
Haha, I think it's funny your examples include Latin and Italian misspellings as a reason for the degradation of English.
But yes I agree. Your examples have nothing to do with language changing and adapting to the requirements of the users, what they are is simply being wrong.
Writing exams is 100% Britiish English. In American English that sounds like you are the teacher/prof making the exams, but it really means you are the student taking the exams (writing the...
Writing exams is 100% Britiish English. In American English that sounds like you are the teacher/prof making the exams, but it really means you are the student taking the exams (writing the answers on the exam).
If you want someone to blame, blame Cambridge Assessments International Examinations :) They are kinda the last vestige of the British Empire (they also kinda suck, lots of grading issues and problems with the "international" part of their name when it comes to course content).
"writing exams" and other weird phrases can be a result of people translating sentences from their native languages to English a bit too directly. For example, in polish, "pisać egzamin"...
"writing exams" and other weird phrases can be a result of people translating sentences from their native languages to English a bit too directly. For example, in polish, "pisać egzamin" translates to "to write an exam" if you translate word after word, but what it really means is "to take an exam".
Another example that comes to mind is "making photos", since in polish it's "robić zdjęcia", and "robić" means "to make" (or "to do", depending on context). But the way you actually say it in English is "taking photos". This is actually a mistake a made myself a few years ago.
I think in the end it just comes down to people not using English enough in practice to know that, compared to their native language, certain phrases use a word that means something else on its own to convey the same information.
I love that mainland Europeans tend to say "making" a photo - it's not just Polish, I've heard it from Germans, Spaniards and Italians too. It's so much more evocative of what I think photography...
I love that mainland Europeans tend to say "making" a photo - it's not just Polish, I've heard it from Germans, Spaniards and Italians too. It's so much more evocative of what I think photography is - or at least should be. I don't think it's a mistake at all, I think it's an improvement and I use it myself.
Yeah I'd just fabricated a memory and conflated it with "sitting" exams rather than "taking" them. In my experience, it's not just practice it's just thinking in both languages to different...
Yeah I'd just fabricated a memory and conflated it with "sitting" exams rather than "taking" them.
In my experience, it's not just practice it's just thinking in both languages to different degrees and pulling the wrong word from the file folder in the brain. Less practice means the wrong word gets pulled more often, but even fluent multilingual people will have those moments.
I lived in London for ~15 years and never encountered the phrase "writing an exam" in the context of sitting one so I assumed that it isn't used. I've always though the main differences between UK...
I lived in London for ~15 years and never encountered the phrase "writing an exam" in the context of sitting one so I assumed that it isn't used.
I've always though the main differences between UK and US English are mostly a few spelling things such as dropping "u"'s (as in colour), using z instead of s (but even in UK English both are common), and British English generally has more complex spellings. The most infuriating differences are using "gotten" instead of "got" and the use of "off of" which Americans love for some reason. Then of course there are the accent/pronunciation differences.
My only real complaint about UK vs US English is that Australians borrow terms from each in a way that seems designed to minimize clarity. For example, Australians borrowed "chips" from the...
My only real complaint about UK vs US English is that Australians borrow terms from each in a way that seems designed to minimize clarity. For example, Australians borrowed "chips" from the British and "chips" from the Americans, so now both fries and crisps are called chips.
Entirely possible I've fabricated it after reading far too much of the genre that would now be called dark academia. It's perhaps "sitting" that I was thinking of as we'd say "taking". Love a good...
Entirely possible I've fabricated it after reading far too much of the genre that would now be called dark academia. It's perhaps "sitting" that I was thinking of as we'd say "taking". Love a good false memory.
There are definite britishisms, and I noticed things my Indian professor said that matched my PBS Britcom exposure to British English rather than Americanisms. But tbh I couldn't come up with any example two decades later.
'Doing the needful' is a phrase so old it feels grammatically wrong. But apparently it's perfectly cromulent Victorian era English. Just happened to survive in India.
But tbh I couldn't come up with any example two decades later.
'Doing the needful' is a phrase so old it feels grammatically wrong. But apparently it's perfectly cromulent Victorian era English. Just happened to survive in India.
You know what's really frustrating about reading things like this? Coming from somewhere that isn't London. English has a whole plethora is accents that come with a equally huge literary library...
You know what's really frustrating about reading things like this? Coming from somewhere that isn't London.
English has a whole plethora is accents that come with a equally huge literary library of collequal terms that only locals can understand. These things change on an almost mile by mile basis in substantial parts of the United Kingdom (much to the amusement of anyone who isn't from here.)
But those accents are also derided in the capital. I'm from the East Midlands, we talk very fast and we've got a lot of working class terminology that's riddled inside the things I say. But I've been passed over for jobs, I've been criticised in big business and I've had folks take the piss... Just because of my accent.
The irony being most Londoners / Southerners barely speak "The King's English" and yet throw some serious shade at anyone who isn't them.
English is a wonderfully weird language (I also speak German) that is almost so modular that entire words can be replaced and you still know what someone means by context alone.
On the grammatical side, my favourite is hearing any European speak English. There's also one like the example given above and it's actually lovely to hear. Mistakes get made, I've butchered German endlessly because of the Die, Der, Das, Den... Anathama that they've refused to sort out (and that Turks have decided is stupid and now everything is "die").
Often you hear about the death of English from right wing loons as well, when realistically it's just not true. I'm from a city where multiculturalism is alive and well and folks speak every language you've never heard of, but then they're usually better than natives at English! I adore hearing folks speaking my native tongue when they're in our nation, but I don't begrudge anyone disregarding it's stupid word rules for their native language ha.
I speak using RP, but I agree that the accent discrimination is very unfortunate and should stop (unfortunately class/regional inequality seems pretty engrained into the British psyche). I do find...
I speak using RP, but I agree that the accent discrimination is very unfortunate and should stop (unfortunately class/regional inequality seems pretty engrained into the British psyche). I do find that as a practical matter it can be quite tough for me to understand people with very strong regional accents, but that's probably down to lack of exposure.
I think German is better in this regard because I don't think there's as much accent discrimination in German-speaking countries – and (at least among younger Germans) all Germans generally speak using a standard pronunciation. The obvious exception is Switzerland where office heirarchy in different cantons seeks to rank people on which Swiss-German dialect they speak, and then where you come from (weirdly in the Swiss heirarchy Germans are quite disliked – a friend of mine was told by some Swiss 'liberal' friends that "having the number of Germans we have in Switzerland is like having millions of Turkish immigrants in Germany").
This is not super accurate imo. There is absolutely regional variation in pronunciation throughout Germany even within Standard German -- I live in Berlin and have definitely heard people speak...
I think German is better in this regard because I don't think there's as much accent discrimination in German-speaking countries – and (at least among younger Germans) all Germans generally speak using a standard pronunciation.
This is not super accurate imo. There is absolutely regional variation in pronunciation throughout Germany even within Standard German -- I live in Berlin and have definitely heard people speak with such regionalisms here, and we're probably the city with the fewest people who grew up here in Germany. And that's without even touching on descendants of immigrant communities like the Turkish people.
More notably, there are tons of regional languages throughout Germany and these are generally stigmatized similarly to how certain dialects are in the UK, if not more so. There's absolutely a difference in how Germans perceive someone speaking Sächsisch or something compared to the same person speaking standard German. If anything imo the fact that younger Germans err towards speaking standard German with as few regionalisms as possible is a symptom of stigma against regional varieties (and I think you see a similar trend among young people in the US and UK as well).
Allow me to contradict you here a bit. I'd attribute the shift among younger generations away from dialects more to interconnectedness than stigmatization. You just pick up more standard german as...
Allow me to contradict you here a bit. I'd attribute the shift among younger generations away from dialects more to interconnectedness than stigmatization. You just pick up more standard german as time goes on, as it's kind of the "lingua franca" of public life. As a result, the often extremely local dialects -where terminology and pronunciation might differ from one village to the next- simply wash out into what is essentially accents. That is, most younger people can't be localized simply by the words they use, but more by very broad patterns of pronunciation. You might be able to identify a northerner by "moin" and "nech", a easterner by their "saxon" accent, that kind of thing. You might be able to identify where they're from, but generally there's not a lot of stigmatizing involved. Save for maybe eastern accents, which are stereotyped as uneducated and backwater, for obvious (and misplaced) historical reasons. But whether someone speaks with a bavarian, swabian, rhineland or northern accent, or whether their standard german is immaculate is usually immaterial to just about anyone.
In any case, the regional dialects themselves are quite clearly dying out. My dad essentially learned standard german as a second language from first grade onwards, always translating to dialect in his mind in class. I can't really speak that dialect, and can merely understand it enough to communicate with my grandparents. My kids will probably never really learn it. As those dialects disappear, their associated accents will too.
Another interesting observation in relation to this is: Media. English media plays a lot with accents even when it is not "lore appropriate", just for the stereotypes. In a fantasy or sci-fi setting, you'll often find people speaking dialects like US southern, or scottish, or what have you, simply because those dialects are associated via their stereotypes with the fictional people in question. A conservative, isolated, brutish people of dwarves might speak scottish because that evokes the "right" associations. That same thing wouldn't work in German, and is not translated in any way in german dubs of english movies. Gimli speaks standard german, and not bavarian! Because there's just not that much "meaning" conveyed by it. It's a bit of a shame too, considering playing with most dialects/accents in german media wouldn't invoke negative stereotypes but simply give "flavor" and identity to different people without harm. Maybe don't make the backwater people speak Sächsisch though...
I honestly don't think this contradicts much of what I said -- I do think it's true that stigma is not the only factor at play here, but I think it's a big factor among others. It definitely plays...
I honestly don't think this contradicts much of what I said -- I do think it's true that stigma is not the only factor at play here, but I think it's a big factor among others. It definitely plays a huge part in why regional German languages are dying.
I think you're overexaggerating the negative parts of using dialect in media a tad -- while it's possible for it to be used for stereotypes, it's often something that adds a lot to a work, especially when the work is eet in the real world and thus those dialect differences are a reflection of something real. I've often been frustrated by German dubs failing to account for this when it does impact the work in an important way, even when the dub is otherwise great.
What I meant to express in my comment -not sure if it came across- is that the associations of status with dialect are much weaker than in the english sphere. There is no "working class" dialect,...
What I meant to express in my comment -not sure if it came across- is that the associations of status with dialect are much weaker than in the english sphere. There is no "working class" dialect, nor are there particularly relevant stereotypes of status associated with most dialects - Sächsisch notwithstanding. In my experience, People don't give up their dialect because it evokes negative associations, but because they just aren't in touch with "their" dialect much anymore. I mean, sure, the 3 septuagenarians at the pub who play Skat every night still speak Platt. But their children work in an office environment with people who don't speak Platt, or at least not their version of it. And thus their children again don't really learn it from birth. Most people are more proud of their dialect than ashamed of it, and I'm sure that's not just survivor bias. Granted, that's probably different among regions. I can imagine that the negative stereotypes about ex-GDR'ers drive people away from Sächsisch and related dialects. But I don't think that's what drives this development in the west german states. People like their own dialect, and those of others, for the most part. They just get in the way of actually communicating.
And as for movies, would you mind reading my previous comment again? I'm confused where you got the negative parts of dialect in media. My point was more describing that dialect in dubs is not usually done; guessing at the reasons for that (lack of strong "semantic"/status associations) and opining that it's a shame that it's not done more. Was it the scare quotes? I was trying to use those to clarify that I don't necessarily believe in the mentioned stereotypes; though I can appreciate their utility as a storytelling device.
My wife has commented that my accent slides, depending on who I talk to. If I'm talking professionally, she says it's formal, straight to the point and very articulated. If I'm talking to my mates...
I speak using RP, but I agree that the accent discrimination is very unfortunate and should stop (unfortunately class/regional inequality seems pretty engrained into the British psyche). I do find that as a practical matter it can be quite tough for me to understand people with very strong regional accents, but that's probably down to lack of exposure.
My wife has commented that my accent slides, depending on who I talk to. If I'm talking professionally, she says it's formal, straight to the point and very articulated. If I'm talking to my mates in the pub? I'm my East-Midlands self. I've noticed it myself sometimes, but the grief I've had for my accent really does suck.
Doesn't help that my family is Irish and my wife is an Aussie. BRING ON THE MESS OF AN ACCENT.
But the grief people get will always be there. Non-southern accents are almost universally percieved as 'working class' or 'poorer' even in traditionally working class areas like the Docklands or SE-London. It's bananas when you really think hard about it.
I think German is better in this regard because I don't think there's as much accent discrimination in German-speaking countries – and (at least among younger Germans) all Germans generally speak using a standard pronunciation.
Can't comment on this I'm afraid. I think I know very central German? I've had an eyebrow raised in Berlin and Munich over my pronunciation of some terms. Which is brilliant, because then they just talk English at me ha.
The obvious exception is Switzerland where office heirarchy in different cantons seeks to rank people on which Swiss-German dialect they speak, and then where you come from (weirdly in the Swiss heirarchy Germans are quite disliked – a friend of mine was told by some Swiss 'liberal' friends that "having the number of Germans we have in Switzerland is like having millions of Turkish immigrants in Germany").
Can we disregard the Swiss language aspects of German entirely? I gave that a try a few years ago and was just confused. It's Belgian... without the Dutch influence!
The Swiss can be (not all, but some) very xenophobic. Not hostile, but very "You're not from round 'ere are ya?" types. I guess when you've never really aligned beyond your own borders and stayed as neutral is humanly possible for years... it becomes second nature.
Code switching is something that many many english speakers who work or socialize in certain more preferred contexts do if they were not raised as members of the in group....
Code switching is something that many many english speakers who work or socialize in certain more preferred contexts do if they were not raised as members of the in group.
I'm glad you were aware. When I learned that phrase it made sense of something I was already familiar with, but it made more sense knowing the name for it and that it was common to many linguistic...
I'm glad you were aware. When I learned that phrase it made sense of something I was already familiar with, but it made more sense knowing the name for it and that it was common to many linguistic outsiders.
Yes this is really strange. I remember a few years ago talking to someone about her experience teaching debating at economically disadvanted schools in London. Most of the people running workshops...
But the grief people get will always be there. Non-southern accents are almost universally percieved as 'working class' or 'poorer' even in traditionally working class areas like the Docklands or SE-London. It's bananas when you really think hard about it.
Yes this is really strange. I remember a few years ago talking to someone about her experience teaching debating at economically disadvanted schools in London. Most of the people running workshops struggled because they were very well off and sounded very posh (one of the unfortunate side effects of going to private school I suppose) – they generally recruit people who have won things on the school/uni debating circuit. She fit into this category, but came from Yorkshire which made it a lot easier for her to mesh with them because they didn't realise that she had a really posh Yorkshire accent.
The Swiss can be (not all, but some) very xenophobic. Not hostile, but very "You're not from round 'ere are ya?" types. I guess when you've never really aligned beyond your own borders and stayed as neutral is humanly possible for years... it becomes second nature.
Yes the Swiss are super xenophobic (in the German-speaking part), although I wouldn't say they're really any more racist that people in the north of England for example. To be fair, they don't care as much if you have a degree, speak German (with a more Swiss accent is ideal) and are economically productive.
Close friend of mine is from my neck of the woods and went to private school. He is much higher regarded in our profession because of his accent. We even tested it a few years ago, people respond...
Yes this is really strange. I remember a few years ago talking to someone about her experience teaching debating at economically disadvanted schools in London. Most of the people running workshops struggled because they were very well off and sounded very posh (one of the unfortunate side effects of going to private school I suppose) – they generally recruit people who have won things on the school/uni debating circuit. She fit into this category, but came from Yorkshire which made it a lot easier for her to mesh with them because they didn't realise that she had a really posh Yorkshire accent.
Close friend of mine is from my neck of the woods and went to private school. He is much higher regarded in our profession because of his accent. We even tested it a few years ago, people respond better to his accent. It's really frustrating to experience.
YARKSHIRE. They've got probably the only acceptable "Above the Watford Gap" accent in the north. Anyone else is kind of just derided and passive-aggressively made to change.
Yes the Swiss are super xenophobic (in the German-speaking part), although I wouldn't say they're really any more racist that people in the north of England for example. To be fair, they don't care as much if you have a degree, speak German (with a more Swiss accent is ideal) and are economically productive.
There's a definitely difference between xenophobia and racism. People are quite naturally xenophobic as we're predicated as ensuring that our present tribe is safe and secure, but it can come across as aloof and avoidant. There's a great series of videos about U.S. GI's having to blend in with British locals, and it is SO SO on the nose sometimes. We take time to warm up, we figure folks out and make our assumptions, then we test them. We're a weird bunch on this island.
Regarding AAVE, I’m really glad the article points out “aks” being like “perscription.” Because I say “perscription” and frankly someone saying “prescription” pronouncing the “pre-“ sound would...
Regarding AAVE, I’m really glad the article points out “aks” being like “perscription.”
Because I say “perscription” and frankly someone saying “prescription” pronouncing the “pre-“ sound would likely be as jarring to me as someone saying “aks”.
Definitely something I’ll be working on to be less annoyed by.
If you want to see a linguist's take on "aks" vs "ask", this 9 minute video is fantastic. Long story short, "aks" is much, much older than people generally realise, dating back to the middle ages....
If you want to see a linguist's take on "aks" vs "ask", this 9 minute video is fantastic. Long story short, "aks" is much, much older than people generally realise, dating back to the middle ages.
"Aks" derives from the old English "acsian". It's not a mispronunciation; it's just a very old word that was carried over to North American by colonists and has persisted in poorer populations in...
"Aks" derives from the old English "acsian". It's not a mispronunciation; it's just a very old word that was carried over to North American by colonists and has persisted in poorer populations in the South. (It's not just AAVE that has the word.)
Some etymologists believe that "ask" is actually a metathesis of "aks" because, based on the way English pronunciation has changed throughout history, "ask" would be pronounced as "ash" today, which suggests that "ask" is relatively new.
I think of February and Wednesday a lot too. Very few people pronounce either as they're written (though I wonder if there's a regional accent that does). But that's completely acceptable. That...
I think of February and Wednesday a lot too. Very few people pronounce either as they're written (though I wonder if there's a regional accent that does). But that's completely acceptable.
That doesn't even count British and New England town names. Worcester, Massachusetts always sticks in my mind.
Oh, I thought you referred to both names Worcester and Massachusetts independently as weirdly pronounced geographical names. Which they both are, but Mass not because British. You get the idea.
Oh, I thought you referred to both names Worcester and Massachusetts independently as weirdly pronounced geographical names. Which they both are, but Mass not because British. You get the idea.
English is “successful” because of colonisation rather than being dynamic. In the face of the brutality and ethnic cleansing of that time, surely any language used by the colonisers would have...
English is “successful” because of colonisation rather than being dynamic. In the face of the brutality and ethnic cleansing of that time, surely any language used by the colonisers would have dominated.
I think it's better to look at all the reasons English has become successful rather than trying to find a single most dominant reason. I'd say: The period of British global power / colonisation...
I think it's better to look at all the reasons English has become successful rather than trying to find a single most dominant reason. I'd say:
The period of British global power / colonisation (although I don't think it's a given that this leads to language adoption - when the French ruled England I think only the upper classes spoke French).
The British period immediately joined into an American period of power leading to a prolonged period for adoption.
Both the British and American periods were / are also accompanied by periods of high cultural output.
Increasing globalisation during this time that lead to both an increased need for a common language and a much increased ability for it to spread (mass media and the internet particularly here although starting much earlier with the printing press presumably.)
It's not a fussy language, bad English is often completely understandable in a way in which something like French doesn't appear to be.
Thanks for the interesting article. This gives me another chance to point to a favorite book Because Internet : Understanding the New Rules of Language by linguist Gretchen McCulloch The book has...
Thanks for the interesting article. This gives me another chance to point to a favorite book Because Internet : Understanding the New Rules of Language by linguist Gretchen McCulloch
The book has history, linguistics, sociology, cultural analysis and is frequently funny and always interested and interesting regarding how and why we netizens do what we do and write the way we write.
Anyway, I agree with the author as strongly as possible. Creoles and pidgin speech are fascinating but also slang related to region, industry, new generation, underworld, hobbies and more. It was fun to watch him enumerate the history of the various literary pundits criticizing the decline of language in their time. My favorite example of this is Sam the Eagle from the Muppet show although he doesn't limit himself to criticizing proper or improper use of the English language.
Off topic, but in hindsight for an article from 2019, the opening paragraph mentioning the following is kinda interesting:
Off topic, but in hindsight for an article from 2019, the opening paragraph mentioning the following is kinda interesting:
Should we stock up on canned foods in case the ATMs snap shut? Buy a shedload of bottled water? Hoard prescription medicines? The prospect of everything that makes modern life possible being taken away from us is terrifying.
Languages never “decline” anyway. They change and evolve. People need to realize that language is a living thing. It changes to fit the needs of its users.
You don't understand, we reached "peak English" in [birth year + 18] and it's been declining since!
One day, English will get to the level of ULTRA FRENCH (warning: reddit link).
More seriously -- and only somewhat relevant to this part of the thread -- Dr. Geoff Lindsey on YouTube has a great bunch of videos on the English language. OP, u/ignorabimus, mentioned "gotten" being used in UK more and more and Dr. Lindsey has a video about that.
Following a post pointing out that it is a little annoying to just post a link without any context, I think this is interesting because I have seen lots of people argue that English is being "degraded" – usually by dialects (e.g. AAVE, MLE) or foreign speakers – however English (perhaps more so than other languages) has always been a dynamic and evolving language (which partially explains its success) adopting the results of other cultures.
Unfortunately I also suffer from this view when it comes to continental Europeans trying to speak English (they often use very strange phrases such as "I did not write the exam very well" when they really mean "I did not do very well in the exam"), but I feel there that the issue is their lack of grammatical mastery (e.g. Germans and word order) does actively impair communication. I think many Europeans also believe this, for example they argue against further adoption of English because they claim that they speak "globish" rather than "English". To be totally fair Europeans generally speak English well (certainly a lot better than native English speakers other languages) and I don't think that Europeans are going to have much effect on the English language (as they don't really write a lot of literature in English, produce culture in English, etc – and the Europeans who do generally have perfect grammar).
I feel like "writing exams" is a thing I've seen in British English, though I could be fabricating that memory. Half the time I see Americans complain about people who speak English as a second language it's because those people learned a variant closer to the UK's. The rest of the time it's grammatical idiosyncrasies from a first language or just the fact they have an accent.
Most of the complaints I see about the "degradation" of English are about lack of formality, slang, or dialectal pronunciation
my problems with the "degradation" of the english language are the shifts caused by ignorance or laziness, especially when the shift doesn't add anything to the mix, it's just pointless.
examples:
-"could of" (people mishearing "could've" and not noticing what the word actually means).
-"begs the question" (which is the name of a logical phallacy. this shift is lazy, based on ignorance, and adds nothing to the language because it's just swapping one word for another, raises the question).
-"i could care less" (people say this is sarcasm, but the context never makes that feel like the right explanation, seems like lazy ignorance to me)
-"eck-cetera" or "expresso" (no, its etcetera, and espresso).
[apologies to ESL folks who are doing their best to learn a challenging language]
end old man yelling at clouds rant.
It’s curious how a post complaining about language degradation through homophones includes its own misspelling (or maybe it’s a Freudian slip). Perhaps this is a natural phenomenon and not a side effect of laziness?
I dislike when common vernacular defies established rules and logic (e.g. “irregardless”), but even proper English can introduce counterintuitive results (e.g. “inflammable means flammable”).
I suppose Eggcorns exist much in the same way that someone who has only ever read a word can come up wildly incorrect pronunciations when saying it for the first time. These problems affect native English speakers, too (it took me over 30 years to learn the proper pronunciation of “hegemony” and it still doesn’t feel natural to me). The last two examples you give are loan words, so it’s hard to argue it’s English that’s degrading.
An explanation for all this could generously assume it’s not laziness but the language itself that’s inefficient. “Slang” exists because “shortened language” is inefficient. English was not a planned language (as is apparent with how many times people at work are confused by “-teen” and “-ty” numbers like sixteen and sixty), and it continues to evolve to address its own limitations. We may just be running up against various edge cases where the language is inefficient and people come up with their own solutions.
re: phallacy, lol at the self-own there.
i agree with all your other points. one of my favorite ideas is that "our language is insufficient to describe our reality."
Indeed, the map is not the terrain.
I do find it interesting how extensible the English language is due to the multiple sources of influence it has accrued over the centuries. It seems this flexibility allows it to describe seemingly intangible concepts with its plethora of vocabulary.
I imagine early humans were grasping at straws trying to make the proper phonemes to express their thoughts and feelings. Meanwhile with English, despite its convoluted rules and grammar, gives you the tools to make words like "antidisestablishmentarianism" when the occasion demands it.
There's a paradox of describing color to a blind person, and yet society surmounted a similar problem of naming the colors that can be seen. When you look at the history, the most relevant colors were named first, but that left colors like "orange" approximated as "yellow-red" for centuries in Europe until orange trees were imported from Asia.
There's a similar situation in the world of wine. There are actually very few words to describe the taste of wine that are specific to wine itself. Instead you speak mostly in analogies (e.g. "jammy", "dry", "velvety", "earthy", etc.).
A psychological study shows that having words to describe colors assists in people's ability to discern between colors. I'd like to extend this concept into language's ability to shape perception. That is, words themselves can make someone more aware of a concept (similar to the Baader-Meinhof effect).
Now, what really cooks my noodle is pondering if English's extensibility has fostered societal progress by empowering humans to craft words where the language was previously lacking ("enshittification"/insidification is a relatively new word for a phenomena that's been witnessed on tech platforms for years); or if we're actually being artificially limited due to our constant analogies to describe the ineffable (Ancient Greeks had 6 words for "love", whereas English primarily uses just the one).
Perhaps if we had a word to describe this feeling, I would have a better time understanding it!
It's worth noting that a lot of (probably most, possibly all) languages have this ability to be extended when the situation arises - this is by no means unique to English! German, for example, uses compound words very extensively, and compounds can be built up on the fly, giving you a lot of flexibility. Also, German uses common prefixes more heavily than in English (for example, entry and exit are two different words in English, but in German they're a common stem with different prefixes - Eingang and Ausgang). These prefixes can be used quite flexibly to modify words relatively subtly.
What you're talking about has been discussed fairly extensively in linguistics, it used to be known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (although I think linguists typically talk about linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism. The weak version (linguistic relativity) is the idea that, as you point out with the colour studies, our perceptions are in part shaped by our language, while the stronger version (linguistic determinism) says that are actively limited or restricted by our language.
Linguists today largely agree that linguistic determinism just isn't true - it simply doesn't hold up. There does however seem to be some evidence for linguistic relativism. So in the case of words for love in English and Greek, it might be possible to make the argument that English speakers differentiate less between different forms of love, but it is very obviously true that English speakers still feel these different forms of love, and can distinguish between them.
Thank you for providing the terms for the concepts I was describing! My amateurish understanding of linguistics limited my ability to elocute on the subject, but it didn’t prevent me from grasping the general concept…which I suppose is an empirical confirmation of linguistic relativism.
I still don't know if insidification is just a mistranscription that happened to accurately describe the situation. I guess I could Ctrl+F the article version.
Re: "phallacy", it's Hartman's Law
What are some planned languages that are in use today?
Edit, nope. Naturally evolved. Good lesson for me to double check sources before spouting off.
I'm pretty sure the various sign languages for deaf people were planned/ designed.
Do you have any examples? I have some familiarity with sign language linguistics and am unaware of any sign language in widespread use today that could be classified as a conlang.
I am way out over my skis on this topic.
Double checking the history I had vaguely remembered, I was wrong. The Gauladet school for the deaf was where american sign language evolved from a mix of previous sign languages, but no one designed it. Families with deaf people evolved sign language. My bad.
If you want to learn more about this sort of thing, look into Nicaraguan sign language! While other sign languages do usually have some planning behind them at Deaf schools like Gauladet (though not enough to be really considered conlangs as you recognize), Nicaraguan sign language literally did just arise from students with no other way to communicate naturally creating their own new sign language -- it's a classic example used in a lot of linguistics classes bc you don't see languages developing pretty much from scratch like this much.
Even the wikipedia page for constructed languages admits there are not many global speakers. Esperanto may have been the biggest, but after its relative lack of adoption over the decades, I assume it's relegated to the realm of arcana along with other oddities like Klingon and Tolkien's elvish languages.
Esperanto has no chance of being widely adopted, but the number of speakers it has dwarfs any other constructed language. There are even a handful of native speakers (usually children of people who met at Esperanto conferences) which is cool. It's definitely still a pretty niche hobby, but compared to most conlanging it's super successful.
Klingon has a much smaller speaker base but ongoing interest in Star Trek gives it a lot more fans than most other conlangs. There was a famous example of a guy who spoke it with his infant son for fun and he did start to acquire some Klingon until he got bored of it.
Tolkien's Elvish languages actually don't have enough vocab to be spoken. They had to hire a guy to coin new words for the movies for this reason. Anyone who says they can speak Tolkien's Elvish languages is telling on themselves as a result.
There have actually been linguistics papers looking into this as something more complex than that. This paper is one example (sorry for thr imgur link, it's the one I had on hand).
The thing about language is that it's pretty much impossible to distinguish whether changes happen due to "ignorance or laziness" or not. Even amoung the ones you cite -- the switching of consonants in "et cetera" (and also in "ask"), which is known as metathesis, and the addition of a consonant in "espresso" isn't necessarily due to either. It's a common type of sound change across languages. You might argue they're due to them being easier to produce and that means they're due to laziness but that's a weird take. Their association with ignorance or laziness is because they're more common among people who are stereotyped as lazy and ignorant, not the other way around.
Adding value judgments to language changes like this isn't effective in stopping those changes from happening and only succeeds in making some people feel superior to others for their "better" English.
That paper feels like someone trying to BS his way out of getting called out for writing "could of."
You're free to think so, but given that it's published in a linguistics journal and linguists as a rule are against prescriptivism (which whining about "could of" is a prime example of), it seems unlikely that this was his rationale rather than academic interest in the construction.
The first two of those are interesting, simply because sometimes accentally and tonally they're quite easy to get wrong.
"Could of" actually can't be said in my native accent, it just doesn't work with how we talk. But it does just five miles down the road where they use it as common as much.
"Could of got a sausage batch" works for them. It doesn't for me lot, weird... But sometimes it's not laziness. It's just accental. But I know what you.
Though my wife has a great phrase "Don't judge a person for saying a word they may only have read", sometimes I wonder if we should just be more compassionate towards each other with how we speak.
I think sometimes it's almost could-a or could-duh. Which is closer to "could of" but isn't really have or of.
If we are being honest sausage batch is probably going to cause more confusion that could of!
I hear the former a lot, it's the weird way many of us say "have". In fact parts of the East Midlands are known for contracting just about any word. "Chizzit?" as in "how much is it?" or "Shudawudacuda" - "Should've, Would've, Could've"
Warwickshire mate. It might be Shakespeare's county, but they're all savages.
The map of names for a bread roll is one of my favourite maps of the UK. That link goes to one of the better ones but it's still incomplete. I could add at least 2-3 more to that list without really thinking much.
The basic rule for pronunciation where I live in Norfolk is "take the first phoneme from the word, and the last, and sometimes a random one from the middle". I once went to Saxmundham in Suffolk and asked a local how they pronounce the name of their town. In Norfolk it would likely be sax-um but he looked at me like I was mad and said Sax-mund-ham. I'm not from Norfolk originally but even after 25 years here I still struggle to understand very local people.
I love how angry we all get over it. We get so vexxed at each other for daring to call it something, but it's also hilarious when you go somewhere and go "I want a sausage... thing, what do you call it?" to anyone. Generally we get the jist, but it's so frustrating sometimes.
Aye, East Mids has similar. "Les-tah", "Pee-tah-brah", "Norf-ants." not to mention the sheer insane levels of weird words each small areas has for different things. I used some of them in Australia recently and just had this poor Aussie lass stood there dumbfounded what I'd asked.
That's because you're not family. Everyone is related to everyone else by blood up that way! ha.
Yeah, us ESL folks pick those up from natives usually. It's hard to stuff those up if most of one's language acquisition is based on written language. That said, aligning spelling and pronunciation of the English language would help the natives to be less confused. And us ESLers to produce fewer wrong ad hoced pronunciations.
Haha, I think it's funny your examples include Latin and Italian misspellings as a reason for the degradation of English.
But yes I agree. Your examples have nothing to do with language changing and adapting to the requirements of the users, what they are is simply being wrong.
Writing exams is 100% Britiish English. In American English that sounds like you are the teacher/prof making the exams, but it really means you are the student taking the exams (writing the answers on the exam).
If you want someone to blame, blame Cambridge Assessments International Examinations :) They are kinda the last vestige of the British Empire (they also kinda suck, lots of grading issues and problems with the "international" part of their name when it comes to course content).
I didn't make it up?! I feel better about this now! Thanks. Google was not helpful and I doubted myself.
"writing exams" and other weird phrases can be a result of people translating sentences from their native languages to English a bit too directly. For example, in polish, "pisać egzamin" translates to "to write an exam" if you translate word after word, but what it really means is "to take an exam".
Another example that comes to mind is "making photos", since in polish it's "robić zdjęcia", and "robić" means "to make" (or "to do", depending on context). But the way you actually say it in English is "taking photos". This is actually a mistake a made myself a few years ago.
I think in the end it just comes down to people not using English enough in practice to know that, compared to their native language, certain phrases use a word that means something else on its own to convey the same information.
I love that mainland Europeans tend to say "making" a photo - it's not just Polish, I've heard it from Germans, Spaniards and Italians too. It's so much more evocative of what I think photography is - or at least should be. I don't think it's a mistake at all, I think it's an improvement and I use it myself.
Yeah I'd just fabricated a memory and conflated it with "sitting" exams rather than "taking" them.
In my experience, it's not just practice it's just thinking in both languages to different degrees and pulling the wrong word from the file folder in the brain. Less practice means the wrong word gets pulled more often, but even fluent multilingual people will have those moments.
I lived in London for ~15 years and never encountered the phrase "writing an exam" in the context of sitting one so I assumed that it isn't used.
I've always though the main differences between UK and US English are mostly a few spelling things such as dropping "u"'s (as in colour), using z instead of s (but even in UK English both are common), and British English generally has more complex spellings. The most infuriating differences are using "gotten" instead of "got" and the use of "off of" which Americans love for some reason. Then of course there are the accent/pronunciation differences.
My only real complaint about UK vs US English is that Australians borrow terms from each in a way that seems designed to minimize clarity. For example, Australians borrowed "chips" from the British and "chips" from the Americans, so now both fries and crisps are called chips.
Could always call them hot chips, for clarity!
Enjoy microwaved crisps.
As a man married to an Aussie, don't worry... Us Brits are winning the fight. Ha.
Entirely possible I've fabricated it after reading far too much of the genre that would now be called dark academia. It's perhaps "sitting" that I was thinking of as we'd say "taking". Love a good false memory.
There are definite britishisms, and I noticed things my Indian professor said that matched my PBS Britcom exposure to British English rather than Americanisms. But tbh I couldn't come up with any example two decades later.
'Doing the needful' is a phrase so old it feels grammatically wrong. But apparently it's perfectly cromulent Victorian era English. Just happened to survive in India.
Born and raised in California, I had never heard it until I saw it online. Same for wilst.
You know what's really frustrating about reading things like this? Coming from somewhere that isn't London.
English has a whole plethora is accents that come with a equally huge literary library of collequal terms that only locals can understand. These things change on an almost mile by mile basis in substantial parts of the United Kingdom (much to the amusement of anyone who isn't from here.)
But those accents are also derided in the capital. I'm from the East Midlands, we talk very fast and we've got a lot of working class terminology that's riddled inside the things I say. But I've been passed over for jobs, I've been criticised in big business and I've had folks take the piss... Just because of my accent.
The irony being most Londoners / Southerners barely speak "The King's English" and yet throw some serious shade at anyone who isn't them.
English is a wonderfully weird language (I also speak German) that is almost so modular that entire words can be replaced and you still know what someone means by context alone.
On the grammatical side, my favourite is hearing any European speak English. There's also one like the example given above and it's actually lovely to hear. Mistakes get made, I've butchered German endlessly because of the Die, Der, Das, Den... Anathama that they've refused to sort out (and that Turks have decided is stupid and now everything is "die").
Often you hear about the death of English from right wing loons as well, when realistically it's just not true. I'm from a city where multiculturalism is alive and well and folks speak every language you've never heard of, but then they're usually better than natives at English! I adore hearing folks speaking my native tongue when they're in our nation, but I don't begrudge anyone disregarding it's stupid word rules for their native language ha.
I speak using RP, but I agree that the accent discrimination is very unfortunate and should stop (unfortunately class/regional inequality seems pretty engrained into the British psyche). I do find that as a practical matter it can be quite tough for me to understand people with very strong regional accents, but that's probably down to lack of exposure.
I think German is better in this regard because I don't think there's as much accent discrimination in German-speaking countries – and (at least among younger Germans) all Germans generally speak using a standard pronunciation. The obvious exception is Switzerland where office heirarchy in different cantons seeks to rank people on which Swiss-German dialect they speak, and then where you come from (weirdly in the Swiss heirarchy Germans are quite disliked – a friend of mine was told by some Swiss 'liberal' friends that "having the number of Germans we have in Switzerland is like having millions of Turkish immigrants in Germany").
This is not super accurate imo. There is absolutely regional variation in pronunciation throughout Germany even within Standard German -- I live in Berlin and have definitely heard people speak with such regionalisms here, and we're probably the city with the fewest people who grew up here in Germany. And that's without even touching on descendants of immigrant communities like the Turkish people.
More notably, there are tons of regional languages throughout Germany and these are generally stigmatized similarly to how certain dialects are in the UK, if not more so. There's absolutely a difference in how Germans perceive someone speaking Sächsisch or something compared to the same person speaking standard German. If anything imo the fact that younger Germans err towards speaking standard German with as few regionalisms as possible is a symptom of stigma against regional varieties (and I think you see a similar trend among young people in the US and UK as well).
Allow me to contradict you here a bit. I'd attribute the shift among younger generations away from dialects more to interconnectedness than stigmatization. You just pick up more standard german as time goes on, as it's kind of the "lingua franca" of public life. As a result, the often extremely local dialects -where terminology and pronunciation might differ from one village to the next- simply wash out into what is essentially accents. That is, most younger people can't be localized simply by the words they use, but more by very broad patterns of pronunciation. You might be able to identify a northerner by "moin" and "nech", a easterner by their "saxon" accent, that kind of thing. You might be able to identify where they're from, but generally there's not a lot of stigmatizing involved. Save for maybe eastern accents, which are stereotyped as uneducated and backwater, for obvious (and misplaced) historical reasons. But whether someone speaks with a bavarian, swabian, rhineland or northern accent, or whether their standard german is immaculate is usually immaterial to just about anyone.
In any case, the regional dialects themselves are quite clearly dying out. My dad essentially learned standard german as a second language from first grade onwards, always translating to dialect in his mind in class. I can't really speak that dialect, and can merely understand it enough to communicate with my grandparents. My kids will probably never really learn it. As those dialects disappear, their associated accents will too.
Another interesting observation in relation to this is: Media. English media plays a lot with accents even when it is not "lore appropriate", just for the stereotypes. In a fantasy or sci-fi setting, you'll often find people speaking dialects like US southern, or scottish, or what have you, simply because those dialects are associated via their stereotypes with the fictional people in question. A conservative, isolated, brutish people of dwarves might speak scottish because that evokes the "right" associations. That same thing wouldn't work in German, and is not translated in any way in german dubs of english movies. Gimli speaks standard german, and not bavarian! Because there's just not that much "meaning" conveyed by it. It's a bit of a shame too, considering playing with most dialects/accents in german media wouldn't invoke negative stereotypes but simply give "flavor" and identity to different people without harm. Maybe don't make the backwater people speak Sächsisch though...
I honestly don't think this contradicts much of what I said -- I do think it's true that stigma is not the only factor at play here, but I think it's a big factor among others. It definitely plays a huge part in why regional German languages are dying.
I think you're overexaggerating the negative parts of using dialect in media a tad -- while it's possible for it to be used for stereotypes, it's often something that adds a lot to a work, especially when the work is eet in the real world and thus those dialect differences are a reflection of something real. I've often been frustrated by German dubs failing to account for this when it does impact the work in an important way, even when the dub is otherwise great.
What I meant to express in my comment -not sure if it came across- is that the associations of status with dialect are much weaker than in the english sphere. There is no "working class" dialect, nor are there particularly relevant stereotypes of status associated with most dialects - Sächsisch notwithstanding. In my experience, People don't give up their dialect because it evokes negative associations, but because they just aren't in touch with "their" dialect much anymore. I mean, sure, the 3 septuagenarians at the pub who play Skat every night still speak Platt. But their children work in an office environment with people who don't speak Platt, or at least not their version of it. And thus their children again don't really learn it from birth. Most people are more proud of their dialect than ashamed of it, and I'm sure that's not just survivor bias. Granted, that's probably different among regions. I can imagine that the negative stereotypes about ex-GDR'ers drive people away from Sächsisch and related dialects. But I don't think that's what drives this development in the west german states. People like their own dialect, and those of others, for the most part. They just get in the way of actually communicating.
And as for movies, would you mind reading my previous comment again? I'm confused where you got the negative parts of dialect in media. My point was more describing that dialect in dubs is not usually done; guessing at the reasons for that (lack of strong "semantic"/status associations) and opining that it's a shame that it's not done more. Was it the scare quotes? I was trying to use those to clarify that I don't necessarily believe in the mentioned stereotypes; though I can appreciate their utility as a storytelling device.
My wife has commented that my accent slides, depending on who I talk to. If I'm talking professionally, she says it's formal, straight to the point and very articulated. If I'm talking to my mates in the pub? I'm my East-Midlands self. I've noticed it myself sometimes, but the grief I've had for my accent really does suck.
Doesn't help that my family is Irish and my wife is an Aussie. BRING ON THE MESS OF AN ACCENT.
But the grief people get will always be there. Non-southern accents are almost universally percieved as 'working class' or 'poorer' even in traditionally working class areas like the Docklands or SE-London. It's bananas when you really think hard about it.
Can't comment on this I'm afraid. I think I know very central German? I've had an eyebrow raised in Berlin and Munich over my pronunciation of some terms. Which is brilliant, because then they just talk English at me ha.
Can we disregard the Swiss language aspects of German entirely? I gave that a try a few years ago and was just confused. It's Belgian... without the Dutch influence!
The Swiss can be (not all, but some) very xenophobic. Not hostile, but very "You're not from round 'ere are ya?" types. I guess when you've never really aligned beyond your own borders and stayed as neutral is humanly possible for years... it becomes second nature.
Code switching is something that many many english speakers who work or socialize in certain more preferred contexts do if they were not raised as members of the in group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
Aye. I'm aware of that. Thanks.
I'm glad you were aware. When I learned that phrase it made sense of something I was already familiar with, but it made more sense knowing the name for it and that it was common to many linguistic outsiders.
Yes this is really strange. I remember a few years ago talking to someone about her experience teaching debating at economically disadvanted schools in London. Most of the people running workshops struggled because they were very well off and sounded very posh (one of the unfortunate side effects of going to private school I suppose) – they generally recruit people who have won things on the school/uni debating circuit. She fit into this category, but came from Yorkshire which made it a lot easier for her to mesh with them because they didn't realise that she had a really posh Yorkshire accent.
Yes the Swiss are super xenophobic (in the German-speaking part), although I wouldn't say they're really any more racist that people in the north of England for example. To be fair, they don't care as much if you have a degree, speak German (with a more Swiss accent is ideal) and are economically productive.
Close friend of mine is from my neck of the woods and went to private school. He is much higher regarded in our profession because of his accent. We even tested it a few years ago, people respond better to his accent. It's really frustrating to experience.
YARKSHIRE. They've got probably the only acceptable "Above the Watford Gap" accent in the north. Anyone else is kind of just derided and passive-aggressively made to change.
There's a definitely difference between xenophobia and racism. People are quite naturally xenophobic as we're predicated as ensuring that our present tribe is safe and secure, but it can come across as aloof and avoidant. There's a great series of videos about U.S. GI's having to blend in with British locals, and it is SO SO on the nose sometimes. We take time to warm up, we figure folks out and make our assumptions, then we test them. We're a weird bunch on this island.
Regarding AAVE, I’m really glad the article points out “aks” being like “perscription.”
Because I say “perscription” and frankly someone saying “prescription” pronouncing the “pre-“ sound would likely be as jarring to me as someone saying “aks”.
Definitely something I’ll be working on to be less annoyed by.
If you want to see a linguist's take on "aks" vs "ask", this 9 minute video is fantastic. Long story short, "aks" is much, much older than people generally realise, dating back to the middle ages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nysHgnXx-o
"Aks" derives from the old English "acsian". It's not a mispronunciation; it's just a very old word that was carried over to North American by colonists and has persisted in poorer populations in the South. (It's not just AAVE that has the word.)
Some etymologists believe that "ask" is actually a metathesis of "aks" because, based on the way English pronunciation has changed throughout history, "ask" would be pronounced as "ash" today, which suggests that "ask" is relatively new.
Oh, that’s interesting!
I think of February and Wednesday a lot too. Very few people pronounce either as they're written (though I wonder if there's a regional accent that does). But that's completely acceptable.
That doesn't even count British and New England town names. Worcester, Massachusetts always sticks in my mind.
Massachusetts is apparently derived from a native American language. Not that that makes he pronunciation any easier.
Ironically I was referring to the city not the state. Since it's not Wer - chess - tur.
Oh, I thought you referred to both names Worcester and Massachusetts independently as weirdly pronounced geographical names. Which they both are, but Mass not because British. You get the idea.
I am so used to Mass that it didn't even register as "weird"!
English is “successful” because of colonisation rather than being dynamic. In the face of the brutality and ethnic cleansing of that time, surely any language used by the colonisers would have dominated.
I think it's better to look at all the reasons English has become successful rather than trying to find a single most dominant reason. I'd say:
There are probably loads more reasons too.
Most French colonies I know of did speak and many still speak the language. But there will always be exceptions.
Thanks for the interesting article. This gives me another chance to point to a favorite book Because Internet : Understanding the New Rules of Language by linguist Gretchen McCulloch
The book has history, linguistics, sociology, cultural analysis and is frequently funny and always interested and interesting regarding how and why we netizens do what we do and write the way we write.
Anyway, I agree with the author as strongly as possible. Creoles and pidgin speech are fascinating but also slang related to region, industry, new generation, underworld, hobbies and more. It was fun to watch him enumerate the history of the various literary pundits criticizing the decline of language in their time. My favorite example of this is Sam the Eagle from the Muppet show although he doesn't limit himself to criticizing proper or improper use of the English language.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sam+the+eagle+best+moments
Off topic, but in hindsight for an article from 2019, the opening paragraph mentioning the following is kinda interesting:
Well. That does highlight how much our perspective changes in a very short time.