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Babel No1November 2012
First issue
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The language magazine
Linguistics goes Sci-Fihow to speak Venusian!
Language as evidenceorensic linguistics
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Welcome
In the Biblical story o the tower o Babel,
God punishes his people or their prideby destroying the enormous tower they
have been constructing as a monumentto their own greatness. And as i this
isnt enough, he conounds their singlecommon language, breaking it up into a myriad
o languages and dialects, presumably on thegrounds that this act will make it dificult or
them to organise themselves to perorm suchhubristic acts in the uture. The myth o Babelis designed to explain the number and variety o
human languages. Moreover, it suggests that, orhumans, having many thousands o languages is
much worse than having a single shared language.One thing we do know about the Babel story, then,
is that whoever thought it up was obviously not alinguist. The truth is that while a single common
language might be useul or communication,theres no evidence that it would ever bring about
the harmony that people oten assume it would.The number o Civil Wars ought over the course
o human history is ample proo o that. More tothe point though, the variety o languages spoken
in the world today is endlessly ascinating, so whyon earth would we wish or ewer? Language is
interesting. And languages (plural) are absorbingand intriguing. Why, or instance, does Hungarian
have two words that both mean red? Why doFrench, German, Italian and many other languages
have ormal and inormal second person pronouns(e.g. tu and vous) while English doesnt? What
makes it so apparently easy or children to learnlanguages when adults struggle to do the same
thing? Why does your voice get higher when youreach the end o a phone call? Why do people get
so hot under the collar about so-called correctand incorrect ways o writing? The answers to
these questions can be ound in linguistics, otencalled the scientific study o language. One o the
reasons that language is so ascinating is that itssomething we all share. And just as everyone uses
language, so too does everyone have an opinion
about it. But i we want real answers to questionsabout language then we need the insights o
linguistics. Babel aims to provide these.
In producing this first issue, we hope toencourage language enthusiasts rom around the
world to subscribe or regular quarterly editions(see inside ront cover) starting rom February
2013, in which we will maintain a mix o topicsand styles to suit all tastes. Whilst Babel is written
in English, it will address issues relating to manydierent human languages, including those under
threat o disappearing as well as the worlds major
languages. There will be regular eatures, such asbiographies o inluential thinkers on language(Lives in Language) and explanations o technical
terms (A Linguistic Lexicon) and there will also beeature articles on topics o general interest as well
as regular quizzes and competitions.We are delighted that in this first, pilot
edition, we have managed to persuade someimportant figures in linguistics to contribute their
thoughts on topics close to their interests. We havenumerous contributions rom other well-known
linguists planned or uture editions. See the insideback page or some o these orthcoming eatures
and visit our website to subscribe to the magazine.The University o Huddersfield has providedfinancial and organisational support or this pilot
issue o Babel. We are also very grateul to themany linguists who have supported this venture
by contributing articles and acting as members othe Advisory Panel. Finally, we would like to thank
David Crystal, who has agreed to act as BabelsLinguistic Consultant. David is probably the most
well-known linguist out there in the real worldand we are great admirers o his ability to speak the
truth about language whilst keeping it clear andaccessible enough or non-linguists to understand.
We hope that Babel will emulate these qualities.
Lesley Jeries and Dan McIntyre
Editors
Babel The Language Magazine | November 3
Editorial
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Contents
FeAtures
08 How to speak VenusianPeter Stockwell explores the possibilities o communicatingwith aliens
12 Anything you say may be given inevidencePeter French and Louisa Stevens reveal the realities o lieas a orensic speech scientist
16 The two faces of the dragonDniel Z. Kdr describes politeness practices in Chineseand how they vary rom those o other languages
19 Circles of EnglishMarcus Bridle explains how English has become a globallanguage and how its norms are shiting
reGuLArs02 Editorial
05 Language in the news
06 A linguistic lexicon
22 Reviews
24 Language games
26 Lives in language: Siobhan Chapman
Conac PHONe18 7831
emAiLeditors@babelzine.com
POstBabel MagazineSchool o Music, Humanities and
MediaWest BuildingUniversity o HuddersfieldQueensgateHuddersfield HD1 3DH, UK
W fo BablWe welcome eature articles,shorter contributions, bookreviews and biographies.Please contact the editors i youwould like to write or Babel.
: editors@babelzine.com
W o We welcome your letters thoughwe reserve the right to edit themor length and content and topublish them on our website.Please include contact details(not or publication). Lettersshould not be longer than words.
: editors@babelzine.com
or write to: Letters, Babel,School o Music, Humanitiesand Media, University oHuddersfield, HD1 3DH, UK
EditorsPro. Lesley Jeries
Pro. Dan McIntyre
Linguistic consultantDavid Crystal
Editorial AssistantJane Lugea University o Huddersfield, UK
DesignRichard Honey at dg3
Advisory PanelPro David BritainUniversity o Berne, Switzerland
Pro Michael BurkeUCRA, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Ben Crystal Actor and Writer
Dr Laura Hidalgo DowningAutonomous University o Madrid, Spain
Dr Tim Grant Aston University, UKDr Sarala KrishnamurthyPolytechnic o Namibia, Namibia
Dr Jeremy Scott University o Kent, UK
Pro Peter StockwellUniversity o Nottingham, UK
Pro Peter TrudgillUniversity o Agder, Norway
Dr Lieven VandelanotteUniversity o Namur, Belgium
Pro Katie WalesUniversity o Nottingham, UK
Dr Kevin WatsonUniversity o Canterbury, New Zealand
Dr Laura WrightUniversity o Cambridge, UK
Babel The Language Magazine | November 04
What's inside
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Language
in the newsr.i.P. QueeNs eNGLisHsOCietyFounded in 1972, the Queens Eng-
lish Society has decided to close a-
ter only 22 people turned up to its
annual general meeting and no one
wanted to be on the committee.
This, however, is not a sign that Eng-
lish is deteriorating, according to Paul
Kerswill, Proessor o Sociolinguisticsat the University o York, who wrote
in The Sun newspaper on 7 June 2012
that the QES was ull o people who
were good at heart rather than the
pompous caricatures they some-
times appeared. Nevertheless, Pro.
Kerswill does take the Society to task
or worrying about things that dont
matter, such as words and phrases
that gradually change their meaning
so that people no longer distinguishthem (e.g. owing to vs. due to). What
matters to everyone who really cares
about language, he suggests, is clar-
ity and not clinging to history: The
society is on a particularly sticky
wicket when it says it is against or-
eign words entering the English lan-
guage. English has many more such
loanwords than most languages,
thanks to centuries o inluence rom
Norse, Latin and Norman French.
Lesley Jeries
Read the original story in The Sun:
www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/
features/4359146/Tweets-and-
texting-dont-mean-falling-
standardsjust-that-language-is-
changing.html
David Crystal writes...
Stop Press: There has been a
last-ditch attempt to resuscitate
the Q.E.S. They have appointed anacting chairman and secretary, and
hope to keep it going. We will see...
GOverNmeNtsAPPrOACH tO tHe
PrimAry CurriCuLumiN eNGLisH is COuNter-PrOduCtiveProessor Andrew Pollard rom the
Institute o Education (London) was
one o our specialists appointed to
advise the British Governments min-
ister or Education, Michael Gove, on
the content and style o the primary
school English curriculum. As his blog
post on 6 June 2012 demonstrates, he
does not eel he was listened to as he
responded to the outcome o the re-
view: the approach is atally lawed
without parallel consideration o the
needs o learners. His criticism rests
on the lack o scope in the proposals
or teachers to exercise their judg-
ment in relation to individual pupils:
The skill and expertise o the teacher
lies in building on each pupils existing
understanding and capabilities, and
in matching tasks to extend attain-
ment. The UK governments eortsto return to some mythical golden
age o English education, when eve-
ryone could spell long words and use
the subjunctive tense is, according
to Proessor Pollard, counter-pro-
ductive in relation to the need to
preserve a broad and balanced cur-
riculum and to cater or all children:
in the real world o classrooms the
range o pupil needs is enormous.
These cannot be wished away.
Lesley JeriesRead Andrew Pollards blog post in
full: http://ioelondonblog.wordpress.
com/2012/06/12/proposed-primary-
curriculum-what-about-the-pupils/
Read the original story in The
Guardian: www.guardian.co.uk/
education/2012/jun/12/michael-gove-
curriculum-attacked-adviser
Pro. Andrew Pollard criticisesMichael Gove's wishul thinking
Eds: We are interested to see the
Queens English Society membersdisplaying a realistic acceptance othe changing language, despite their
reputation as die hard traditionalists,whilst the British Government, whichshould be helping primary pupils
succeed in the real world, is clinging tooutmoded models o what constitutes
good English. We regret the act thatexpert panels, having been appointed,were apparently not listened to.
Her Ladyships Guide to theQueens English by Caroline
Taggart is published byNational Trust Books.
www. carolinetaggart.co.uk
Babel The Language Magazine | November
Language news
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The linguistic lexiconAto
ZIn each issue well be defining
some o the commonterminology that linguists
use to describe language.Well start at the beginning.
A is or
Accent Your accent is the way that you pronounce your particular dialect. In English, orinstance, the Yorkshire accent diers rom the Birmingham accent. Your accent canindicate where you are rom, what social class you belong to, how educated you mightbe, and so on. Inevitably, people make value judgements about accents. It used to be thecase that newsreaders on the BBC all spoke Received Pronunciation (RP), the so-calledQueens English. Nowadays, its common to hear the news being read in a wide rangeo accents, rom Yorkshire to Geordie to Scouse. But although its no longer strangeto hear people on TV speaking Standard English with a regional accent, it would beunusual to hear someone speaking a regional dialect using RP. And while its still thecase that we judge people on the accent they speak, no accent is any better or worsethan another in communicative terms.
Anaphora Anaphora describes the practice o reerring backwards in language. For example, inthe ollowing sentence, the pronoun he reers anaphorically to the noun phraseThe unhappy linguist:
The unhappy linguistsaid that he was going to drown his sorrows.
Anaphora is a orm o grammatical cohesion and anaphoric reerence is a cohesivedevice. The unction o cohesion is to avoid undue repetition. But anaphora is nota solely text-based phenomenon. Research in cognitive linguistics has suggestedthat anaphoric pronouns reer back not only to linguistic antecedents but to mentalrepresentations o specific entities. This makes sense. Ater all, spoken language hasbeen around or much longer than written language.
Alveolar Put your tongue behind your ront teeth. Now move it back slightly. The lattishplatorm that your tongue is touching is your alveolar ridge. I you run your tonguerom your ront teeth backwards, you should be able to eel the alveolar ridge and thesharp corner which takes your tongue urther up into your palate (roo o the mouth).The alveolar ridge is the most common place or articulating consonants in English(/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, /n/, /l/, /r/) and many other languages too. You make use o your alveolarridge when you produce alveolar sounds like /d/ (as in dog) and /t/ (as in ten). Try it.You should eel that your tongue is resting against your alveolar ridge when you beginto pronounce these words. It will move away rom the ridge as soon as youve madethe /t/ or /d/ sounds. Alveolar consonants are produced using the alveolar ridge asan articulator. The dierence between the sounds at the same place o articulationis achieved by doing dierent things with the tongue and other articulators i.e.
changing the manner o articulation.
Babel The Language Magazine | November 06
Linguistic lexicon
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Ambiguity Ambiguity can occur at any level o language. For instance, i we hear someone saythe nuthatch is a neckless bird, it is our knowledge o the world that tells us we cannotbe hearing the nuthatch is a necklace bird, because on the whole human beings do notwear birds around their necks. This, then, is a phonological ambiguity arising rom thesimilarity o sounds (not spelling) in the words neckless and necklace. Lexical ambiguityalso occurs at the level o the word, with homonyms like bank and wave needing theircontext to make clear which meaning is intended. I made my way over to the bankis likely to imply a river bank i the context is all about a river trip in a boat but couldimply a high street bank i the context is one o a busy city street. More interestingly,perhaps, there are ambiguities that arise out o the grammar itsel. Subordinate clausesare particularly prone to ambiguity:
Lucy told the girl that Dave was bringing
Here, the ambiguous section is the girl that Dave was bringing. It could be a singleelement o the sentence orming the direct object o the verb told (i.e. the girl is theperson that Dave was bringing to the event), in which case you could replace the wholething with a single pronoun: her. The other possibility is that the girl is the indirectobject o told and that Dave was bringing is the beginning o a subordinate clauseorming the direct object. The remainder o the sentence is likely to make clear whicho these interpretations is the right one:
Lucy told the girl that Dave was bringing to wrap up warm.
Lucy told the girl that Dave was bringing warm clothes
Anti-language Our pockets were ull o deng, so there was no real need rom the point o view ocrasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy himswim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by our, nor to do theultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smeckingo with the tills guts. This is Nadsat, an anti-language spoken by Alex, the teenagenarrator o Anthony Burgesss classic novel A Clockwork Orange. Anti-languages
are essentially extreme social dialects and arise among subcultures as a marker odierence rom mainstream society. The term was coined by the linguist M. A. K.Halliday. Anti-languages have distinct vocabularies though are usually based on thegrammar (i.e. structure) o a parent language. Nadsat is a mixture o English, Russian,some German, cockney rhyming slang and invented words, though the grammar isEnglish.
Apposition Have you ever played the card game Happy Families, in which the first person tocomplete a set o cards with members o the same amily is the winner? This gamedefines the characters on each card by their job (or in the case o the women andchildren, by their relationship to the man o the amily this is a very old game!). So,you have Mr Bones the Butcher, Mrs Chip the Carpenters Wie, Miss Snip the Barbers
Daughter and so on. The way that these characters are named is known as apposition.The term is used to reer to two words or phrases (usually, but not always noun phrases)which reer to the same thing or person and have the same grammatical role. So, i anewspaper reports Mr Cameron, the British Prime Minister, arrived in Washingtontoday, then the two ways o reerring to David Cameron are both the subject othe sentence and are thereore in apposition to each other. To orm a grammaticalsentence, you only need one or other o these phrases. The reason or them both beingthere is usually explanatory, in case readers dont know who Mr Cameron is or who iscurrently the British Prime Minister. Now that youre an expert, spot the apposition inthe first sentence o this definition
Articulator Lips, teeth, tongue, alveolar ridge, hard palate, sot palate, uvula, glottis these are allarticulators. Articulators are organs o speech. We use them to obstruct the low o airthrough the vocal tract, thereby changing the manner o articulation o consonants(see the entry or alveolar or an example.
Babel The Language Magazine | November 07
Linguistic lexicon
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How to speakLearning a oreign language is dificultenough but how would you manage i youhad to communicate with extra-terrestrials?P socwll explores the problems andpitalls o intergalactic communication.
It has recently become apparent
that there are billions o planetsorbiting stars in the universe, and
millions o those are Earth-like,in the so-called Goldilocks zone
where water is liquid and the landis temperate. O those millions o planets,
a ew million will have sustained the
conditions or lie, and o those perhapsmany thousands will have orms o liethat have begun to shape their own planet
and maybe travelled to nearby moons and
other worlds. In order to be able to do this,these aliens will almost certainly have
had to develop language in some ormor another. So the question or our own
deep uture is: are we prepared to speak tothem? How can we reassure them about
our presence, convince them that we are
conscious and intelligent too, and sharewith them our history and culture? Wewill need to develop a xenolinguistics.
Babel The Language Magazine | November
Feature How to speak Venusian
08
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Venusian
The problem o aliencommunication has a long
history in science fiction, ocourse. Mostly, the aliens
conveniently spoke English orour benefit, claiming to have
learned it rom receiving ourtelevision and radio broadcasts.
I this was the case, the firstwords they would have heard
would have been either thecoronation o George VI in 1937
with its commentary in whatwas then only just becoming
known as BBC English, or morelikely (because the broadcastingsignal was stronger) Adol Hitler
addressing the Nuremburg
rallies in 1934-5. These alienswould need to be only 77 light-years away, which means they
could live in any o the 70 orso solar systems within that
compass, and they are rightnow presumably trying to learn
demagogue German. We canexpect a reply by 2089.
SF writers have imaginedmore remote aliens too, who
were able to speak English eitherby telepathy or by universal
translator machines. Both othese technologies rest on the
assumption that our consciousthought is raw and untouched bylanguage so your pure thoughts
can be rendered into anylanguage as long as the machine
knows the right algorithm ortransorming thought into
vocabulary and syntax. Thoughthis idea is not a million miles
rom some versions o theoreticallinguistics o the last 50 years,
unortunately the universal
translator is impossible.The machine would not
only need to know things like
your words or table, person,and cat, but also how you
dierentiate these objectsrom processes like running,
eat, jumped, and why youtreat abstractions like liberty,
evolution, and light more like
the first group o nouns thanthe second group o verbs. There
are somewhere around 6600languages on our planet, and
maybe ten times that manylanguages which have ever
existed here, and there are manyways in which they carve upthe world in terms o objects,
processes, circumstances, whospeaks where and when, and the
allowable order o words. And,remember, all o this diversity
has happened within the samespecies: we are all roughly a
metre and a hal high, scaoldedcontainers o hot liquid under
pressure, with most o oursensing parts at the ront and
sides o our heads. We see in a
small spectrum and are blind
to inrared, ultraviolet, gammaand radio waves; we only have
5 types o taste, very indistinctsmell capacities, crude nerve-
bunches or touch. Most weirdly,
we communicate using the samebody-parts with which we eatand breathe!
In an episode o Star Trek(Darmok), Captain Jean-Luc
Picard and an alien Tamariancaptain are marooned together
on a barren planet wherethey are stalked by a monster.
They find that they cannotcommunicate with each otherat all, though Picards universal
translator machine renders theindividual words accurately:
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,Shaka, when the walls ell. Ater
much trial and error in extremecircumstances, it becomes
apparent that the Tamarianscommunicate metaphorically
by citing parallel instances rom
their own cultural history, so thelatter phrase above is a metaphor
or ailure, and the ormer phraseis the same testing situation
that Picard and the alien findthemselves in. The universal
translator doesnt work because itcan never know the entire history
and culture o the alien language,even though it can decode the
individual meaning o the wordsand syntax (somehow!).
Even so, the sciencefictional xenolinguist has a
relatively easy job learninglanguages like Klingon or
Ladan, since like some oEarths languages they still
divide perception o the worldup into objects and processes(roughly, nouns and verbs).
In Darmok, an episode o Star Trek: TheNext Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picardis aced with an alien who is only able tocommunicate metaphorically.
Babel The Language Magazine | November
Feature How to speak Venusian
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The Star Trek language oKlingon was invented by linguist
Marc Okrand who up-ended themost common human syntax o
subject-verb-object (SVO) intothe Klingon word-order OVS.
However, once you have learnedthe guttural vocabulary or
chicken ate I and worked out theparticles to attach to words to tell
you which is which (I is subjectwhere me is object in the English
remnants o this similar system),then you pretty much have it.
Klingon could be a long-lostEarth-like language, and againinit is not surprising because the
Klingons are humanoid even i
they are unnecessarily aggressiveto the point where they arehardly likely to have survived
as a species in the first place.Ladan is a language invented
by Suzette Haden Elgin in hernovel Native Tongue, in which a
uturistic group o women inventtheir own eminine language
to express their worldviewas women. Similarly to its
masculine opposite Klingon,Ladan alters syntactic order to
the uncommon-Earthly VSO,and it has some interesting
peculiarities o grammar, butotherwise it is learnable (even
by men) and human. Klingonsounds rough and Germanic
to English-speakers, Ladansounds euphonious like native
American or Chinese speech; butboth exist or poetic eects or to
mark alienness and so are at leastpartly amiliar.
The xenolinguist acedwith languages such as these is
in roughly the same position asgenerations o anthropologists
living with discovered peoples,isolated communities or losttribes: you just have to work
out the rules and words, butsince you share a human body
and condition (and planetaryenvironment and local physics),
your task is possible. More
strange orms o language have
been imagined in science fictionto stretch our capacities. Thomas
Mores 16th century Utopianis transcribed at the end o his
book, and a rudely englishedtranslation is supplied: the
Utopian passage has ewer wordsand is thus more economical, but
it still looks a bit like Latin. It isimpossible, though, to identiythe meanings o any words in
Utopian, and the text gesturestowards the unknowable
ideal: living in your real 1516Europe, you are too ignorant to
understand it.Even more advanced
versions o uturistic evolvedpost-humans (in Dan Simmons
Ilium series or Alastair ReynoldsRevelation Space series)
communicate in superastmachine language (which you,
mere old-style human, alsocannot understand). In the
galaxy-spanning Culture o IainM. Banks, you might be able to
speak a basic orm o Marain(M1), which is nevertheless
complex, subtle and beautiul,but altered humans, other aliens,
and the artificial Minds that are
embodied in Ships or Orbitals
speak ar more complex dialectso the language right up to
M32 which is encrypted to aninsanely paranoid level accessible
only to the military intelligence
Minds working in SpecialCircumstances.
As a post-human, you mightcommunicate by combining
traditional mouth-createdsounds with loating images
and icons called picts (in GregBears Eon universe). These add
shapes and colours to allow moresubtle expressions o political
shading, commitment andemotion than we can articulate.
Most undamentally, our bodiesdo not have the cranial implants
or projection and perceptionequipment to be able to engage
in this sort o language. So asa xenolinguist you are going
to need either a lot o remedialtechnology to overcome your
disabilities, or some serious bodymodification.
Nevertheless, with an
appropriate cyborgisation(Charles Stross) or a new seto body chops (L.E. Modesitt),
you would at least be able tocommunicate with the post-
humans. And even modifiedpost-humans presumably
still retain some ancestralsense o their earlier physical
condition that remains in theway their language works, justas our languages are still highly
dependent on the things thatas early humans we needed
the most: we understand timeand complex relationships
still basically in terms o space(Summer is coming, Its getting
late, My riends are very close);we understand things that are
not there as significant absentobjects; we are provoked by
things that are dierent aster
than we notice things that aresimilar. We are still basicallysmart apes.
Thomas Mores Utopia, an
idealised republic whoseinhabitants speak Utopian,a language strangely similarto Latin.
Feature How to speak Venusian
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All human and post-human languages are thus
undamentally representational.A word or a stretch o
discourse stands or a thing ora phenomenon or a process,
either out in the world or inyour imagination, that you
want to package up and send
to another person who willknow what youre talking about.
What i a species had a non-
representational language?Jonathan Swits academicians
had devised such a literallanguage, but they had to carry
every object that they wanted toreer to around with them in a
large sack. And they would havehad a problem having an abstract
conversation, communicating anemotion, or even just planning
their dinner.In Embassytown, China
Miville describes the Arieki, arace o creatures that have bodies
but whose edges are ill-definedand in lux. However, it is in
their extreme language distancerom the human visitors that
the novel oers an insight orthe xenolinguist. The Arieki
can only communicate i theyare convinced that there is an
intention behind someonesspeech, and since they seem
to have doubled minds and to
speak simultaneously with theirmouths and stomachs, theysimply do not hear any human
speaking to them in anything
other than noises. They donteven believe we are individually
conscious. The humans onArieka have genetically cloned
Ambassador couples whose
twin minds and ability to speaksimultaneously convince theArieki that they are persons.
The Arieki have a unique
identity between language andthought that means they cannot
conceptualise a lie. This alsomeans that deception, fiction
and metaphors are completelyalien to them, though they can
eel a thrilling sensation whenconronted by a simile however,
the simile cannot be spokenbut must be represented by a
particular person or object. TheArieki would split a rock to create
a particular figure o speech, orempty a house o all its urniture
and then put it back again toexpress another. And humans or
them become embodied similesor examples: the man who swimswith fishes every week, the boy
who was opened and closedagain, the girl who ate what was
given to her. O course, as soon asthe humans teach the Arieki how
to lie, the result is catastrophic orthe Host population on the planet.
What, though, i yourprospective conversational
partner was not in act romsome Earth-like planet, not even
rom somewhere cold and barren
Peter Stockwell is Proessor oLiterary Linguistics at the University
o Nottingham. His most recentbooks include Introducing EnglishLanguage (Routledge, 2010) and Texture:
A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading(Edinburgh University Press, 2009).With Sara Whiteley, he is currently
editing The Cambridge Handbook ofStylistics (Cambridge University Press,
orthcoming).
Fn o o
BooThe Poetics of Science Fiction by Peter Stockwell(Longman, 2000)
From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languagesedited by Michael Adams (Oxord University Press,2011)
tvDarmok is episode 2, season 5 oStar Trek:The Next Generation (original transmission, 30September 1991)
like Mars or hot and toxic likeVenus? What i they were not
humanoid at all, or not bodiedlike us in any way, and thereore
experienced their world in acompletely dierent manner?
What would the language oloating balloon creatures in the
upper atmosphere o a gas giantlike Jupiter or Saturn sound /
look / eel / smell like? Whatwould the language o hive-
mind species with no sense oindividual consciousness be like?
Would at least all carbon-basedlieorms like us have a similar
language eature (such as us andthem, me and other, or figure
and ground) that is dierentrom silicon-based, hydrogen-based, gaseous or metallic orms
o lie? Venusian is a relative walkin the carbon-dioxide park; now,
xenolinguist, you have your workcut out.
The Arieki have a uniqueidentity between languageand thought that meansthey cannot conceptualisea lie. This also means thatdeception, fiction andmetaphors are completely
alien to them, though theycan eel a thrilling sensationwhen conronted by asimile.
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Feature How to speak Venusian
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The jobdescription
orensic speechscientist
probably meanslittle or nothing,
even to the keenest an odetective fiction and act. This
is largely because most o thework undertaken in a orensic
speech laboratory is not to helpsolve live crimes. Rather, the
point at which police oficers,prosecutors and deence lawyers
usually enlist a orensic speechscientist is when the police
consider the puzzle to have beensolved and their chase finished.
In other words, the exciting partis over; the suspect has been
arrested and charged, and wehave entered the long weeks
and months o meticulous and
invisible case preparation andchecking. Bundles o papers,
lab-based analysis o exhibits,pre-trial court hearings it
cant exactly compete withSherlock Holmes, Miss Marple
or Lewis. Nevertheless, thework orms an important part
o judicial process, and has beeninstrumental in securing a good
many convictions and, indeed,acquittals. Famous cases in
which this type o evidence hasfigured include the International
War Crimes Tribunal trialor genocide o the ormer
Yugoslavian President SlobodanMilosevic, the prosecution o the
Yorkshire Ripper hoaxer JohnHumble, and that o the Who
Wants to be a Millionaire? gameshow raudster Major Charles
Ingram.In the UK alone orensic
speech scientists act in around
500 600 cases per year.These all into a number o
categories, all o which involvethe examination o recordings
o speech or the consideration ospeech related matters.
The major category o workis orensic speaker comparison.
In the UK, evidence rom thiskind o analysis has been used
in criminal trials or around45 years, the first case having
being heard in the WinchesterMagistrates Court as long ago as1967. The task entails comparing
the voices in criminal recordingswith those o known suspects.
Criminal recordings here reersto a wide and catholic array o
material. They may be abusivemessages or death threats
let on a victims voicemailacility, recordings o hoax
calls made to the emergencyservices, raudulent telephone
calls to financial institutions,or conversations between
Anything
you say maybe given in
evidence It may not be as glamorous as CSI butlanguage analysis is an important parto many court cases. Peter French andLouisa Stevens describe the work othe orensic speech scientist.
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major drugs importers, peopletrafickers or terrorists in cars,
lats and business premises thathave been bugged by the police
or security service. The ubiquityo mobile telephones has resulted
in many violent crimes beingrecorded. Victims or bystander
witnesses to robberies, rapesand murders oten dial 999
and the voice o the criminal isrecorded over the open line in
the background o the call. Innearly all other countries the
criminal recordings are veryoten telephone intercepts (wiretaps). The UK, while allowing
call interception to take place on
a warrant rom the Home Ofice,currently restricts the use othose recordings to investigative
purposes (Regulation oInvestigatory Powers Act, 2000).
As they cannot be used inevidence, they are not submitted
or speaker comparison tests.The reerence recordings
with which the criminal voicesare compared are in most cases
those o police interviews withthe suspects. Until the mid-
1980s, someone suspected obeing the voice in a criminal
recording would be asked toprovide a voluntary voice sample.
Needless to say, many did not.However, the enactment o the
Police and Criminal EvidenceAct (1984) required all police
interviews to be recorded.This resulted in suspects
automatically providing voicesamples simply as a by-product
o the interview procedure.Almost overnight, the volume
o orensic speaker comparisonwork rose exponentially.
So how is it done? The mostprevalent method comprisesa combination o two types
o tests: auditory-phonetic(analytic listening) and acoustic
(computer-based). The auditory-phonetic tests involve intensive,
repeated listening and draw
heavily upon the skills and eartraining gained rom a university
education in phonetics. Onedeconstructs the speech
and listens selectively and
individually to its componentparts. For example, the voicequality (timbre) is examined
in accordance with categoriesencoded in the Vocal Profile
Analysis Scheme developed byProessor John Laver and his
colleagues at the Universityo Edinburgh. This involves
checking the comparability othe criminal recording and the
suspects recording against 38
dierent voice quality settingsand assigning them a score oneach. Some o the settings relate
to activity within the larynx(e.g. creaky voice, breathy voice),some to muscular tension (e.g.
tense/lax vocal tract) and othersto supralaryngeal settings (e.g.
tongue orientation, nasality).One also listens to intonation
the rise and all o the pitch
o the voice across utterances,to speech rhythm and tempo(the latter may be measured
and averaged in terms osyllables per second), and to the
pronunciation o consonant andvowel sounds; here one has the
assistance o the InternationalPhonetic Alphabet, an extended
system o symbols and diacriticalmarks that enable the analyst to
capture the fine grained nuanceso pronunciation.
The acoustic tests arecarried out using specialised
sound analysis sotware. Theyinclude examinations o voice
pitch. This is measured asundamental requency, which
equates to the rate o vocalcord vibration. Other acoustic
tests involve examining theresonance characteristics o
consonants and vowels usingsound spectrograms. Here the
analyst can visualise the speechon a computer screen and take
detailed measurements rom theacoustic signal.
The process o ullyanalysing and comparing
one sample against anothermay take in the region o 15
hours, and many people willno doubt be surprised to find
that it is not nowadays donewholly automatically and
with instantaneous results.Automatic speaker recognition
(ASR) sotware is available and
its accuracy and reliability are
very good, though not perect,when processing high quality
recordings. The recordings that
arise in orensic cases, havingpoorer sound quality (televisionor music in the background,
people distant rom themicrophones, people speakingsimultaneously, etc), pose
particular problems or ASR.Our view is that it may be used
in cases where the recordings areo suficient quality, but as an
addition to the types o testingdescribed above, rather than as a
stand-alone replacement. We arenot quite up with CSI yet!
The way in whichthe conclusions o speaker
comparisons should be expressedis a hotly debated matter, with
alternative rameworks beingproposed and deended by
dierent camps. However,experts are unanimous in the
view that the evidence should
never be seen as definitive, i.e.a criminal trial should not be
th aophonc nolnn, pa lnng an awhal pon h ll an a annggan fo a n caon nphonc. On conc h pchan ln lcl an nall o coponn pa.
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brought on the basis o orensicspeaker comparison evidence
alone. Indeed, the proessionalassociation responsible or
overseeing and advising on workin this area (the International
Association or ForensicPhonetics and Acoustics) has
in its Code o Practice a clausestipulating that members
should make clear, both in theirreports and in giving evidence in
court, the limitations o orensicphonetic and acoustic analysis.
Again, the guys in CSI have theedge on us!
One o the main
limitations o the speaker
comparison testing concernsthe lack o population statistics.So, although one might be able
to say that a certain consonantpronunciation, a particular voice
quality eature or speech habitwas ound in both the criminal
and suspect recording, thereis a lack o demographic data
that would allow one to say justhow many other people in the
population might also sharethose eatures. In the UK there is
a very high degree o social andregional accent dierentiation.
This contrasts with countrieslike the USA and Australia where
dierentiation is much lower.The problem high dierentiation
causes or orensic speakercomparison is that many o the
aspects o speech one examinesare highly accent specific, and
or these eatures a single set ogeneral reerence population
statistics would be o little use,and could, in act, be highly
misleading. One would needrepresentative background data
or each social and regionalvariety, the collection o whichwould be an impossible task,
and the inormation would inany case have limited shel-lie
by virtue o the act that speechpatterns are in a constant state
o change.
A second major area o work
or orensic speech scientists isthe determination o the content
o evidential recordings (whatwas said? as opposed to who said
it?). Sometimes the task is very
general and comprehensive andinvolves the transcription o anentire recording. Many poor
quality recordings are initiallysubmitted or enhancement, i.e.
digital sound processing toremove noise intererence or
raise the level o the conversationrelative to background sound.
Police oficers and lawyers otenhave very high expectations o
enhancement technology (were
back to CSI again!). However, inreality, the improvements it canbring to speech intelligibility are
generally rather limited. Ondiscovering this, the instructingparty will oten ask that a
transcript is prepared by theorensic speech scientist, who has
advantages over the layperson.First, s/he can make a study rom
the clearer areas o the recording
o the pronunciation patterns othe people involved. This mayassist with resolving what was
said in the less clear areas.Second, s/he has available high
quality replay and listeningacilities. The speech analysis
sotware rom which thematerial is played back allows the
transcriber to delineate andzoom in on small sections o
speech single words, syllables orjust individual consonants and
vowels or multiple repetition.Third, s/he has time and
patience, the importance owhich cannot be underestimated.
For a good, clear qualityrecording (which we would be
unlikely to be asked totranscribe) one can estimate a
ratio o 8:1 transcription time torecording time, i.e. one minute o
speech will take eight minutes totranscribe. For the poorestquality recordings we are asked
to deal with, the ratio may be ashigh as 180:1. This is not work or
those who need high levels ostimulation.
In other cases, thedetermination o content is
much more localised and highlyocussed. This task is reerred
to as questioned or disputedutterance analysis. Here one
is examining perhaps just anunclear phrase or even a single
word, which potentially hashigh evidential significance or
the case. It may be subject tocompeting interpretations by
prosecution and deence. Pastcases o this kind include one
involving a covertly recordedconsultation o a doctor who
had a heavy Greek accent. Theissue was whether he said to a
drug addict to whom he wasprescribing synthetic codeine
tablets you can inject thosethings or you cant inject those
things. In another case, a speakero Urdu/Punjabi accented
English had been interviewed
by police on tape about theunexpected death o his gay
lover. He initially insisted that nosexual activity had taken place
between them immediately priorto the death (the police eared
sado-masochistic activitiesthat may have gone too ar) but
then, at a later point, appearedto say that the man had gone to
sleep and died ater wank o.I correct, this signalled a highly
significant change o story. Wewere asked to veriy this hearing
o the words. At first it appearedcorrect, but ater very close and
detailed analysis they transpiredto be one cough, and thereore
o no evidential significanceat all. In cases such as these
one seeks clear and relevantreerence speech rom the person
concerned. This is analysed
phonetically and acoustically toestablish, or example, how theypronounce particular vowels
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and consonants. The patterns
ound are brought to bear ininterpreting the questioned
utterance and determiningwhich o the competingalternative hearings is likely to be
correct.Not all the work involves
recorded speech. In a minority ocases we are asked to evaluate the
earwitness evidence o lay people.These may involve crimes where
the witness or victim did notseen the perpetrators ace but
claims to have recognised him/her by voice. Masked robberies
and rapes are cases in point. Herethe work involves assisting the
police with setting up a voiceline-up, the auditory equivalent
o a visual identification parade,which must be constructed in
accordance with Home Oficeguidelines. In other cases,
it may involve establishingwhether a witnesss claim to have
recognised a voice is a realisticone, given the prevailing acoustic
conditions (e.g. echoey subwaywith trafic passing overhead),
and in the light o what is known
rom relevant experimentalresearch studies. It may alsoinvolve carrying out sound
propagation tests at a crime scenein order to asses the credibility o
a witnesss claim to have heard arelevant event (Could Mrs X in
her sitting room have heard thewords she claims to have heard
screamed through the wall romthe lat next door?).
Finally, one has toremember that the examinations
and testing, whatever theirnature, are only part o the job.
The other part involves goingto court to give expert evidence.
This happens in around 5% o thecases in which one acts, and the
skills required are very dierentrom the lab-based ones. One
needs to be able to express in aclear way and without cutting
too many corners what areoten highly complex linguisticand acoustic findings to a panel
o jurors who have had noprevious exposure to the subjects.
We shall always remember asenior orensic scientist who,
when asked about where he haddeveloped his renowned skills
at communicating with juries,replied that it was during his
experience in a previous career.He had been a schoolteacher.
Proessor Peter French is Chairman o JP French AssociatesForensic Speech and Acoustics Laboratory, York, and
Honorary Proessor in the Department o Languageand Linguistic Science at the University o York wherehe undertakes postgraduate teaching and supervisesPhD research. He has analysed recordings in more than
5,000 police investigations and legal cases rom countriesthroughout the world.Email: jp@jprench.com
Louisa Stevens is a Director o JP French Associates ForensicSpeech and Acoustics Laboratory, York, and a TeachingFellow in the Department o Language and Linguistic
Science at the University o York where she lectures on theMSc course in Forensic Speech Science. She undertakesresearch on anatomical, perceptual and acoustic aspects o
voice quality and appears as an expert witness on voice andspeech matters in major criminal trials.Email: lcs@jprench.com
Fn o o
Forensic speech science is one branch o the widerarea o orensic linguistics. Find out more aboutthese areas through the ollowing resources:
Boo
Forensic Phonetics by John Baldwin and PeterFrench (Pinter, 1990)
The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguisticsedited by Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson(Routledge, 2010)
OnlnThe website o J P French Associates is atwww.jprench.com
The website o the University o Yorks orensicspeech science research group (linked to J P French
Associates) includes details o numerous researchprojects: www.york.ac.uk/language/research/
orensic-speechDetails o the University o Yorks MSc course inorensic speech science can be ound atwww.york.ac.uk/language/prospective/postgraduate/taught/orensic-speech-science
Visit the website o the International Associationor Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics to find outmore about this subject: www.iapa.net/index.htm
Aston Universitys Centre or Forensic Linguisticscombines research and investigative practiceas well as oering training courses in orensic
linguistic analysis: www.orensiclinguistics.netWatch Dr Tim Grant (Aston University) talk aboutorensic linguistics generally:www.youtube.com/watch?v=Foqk1uJz31I
Louisa Stevens and Proessor Peter French
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Politeness in everyday terms can be assimple as holding a door open for someone
or saying please and thank you. But inlinguistics the term politeness refers to
the language techniques involved in
maintaining relationships,achieving goals and conveyingand negotiating identity.
Here, Dniel Z. Kdrdiscusses and challenges
the common view thatpoliteness practices in
Chinese are different fromthe strategies used in other
languages.
Althoughlinguisticpoliteness itsel
is a source oambiguity,
perhaps oneo the most conusing areas
within the field o politenessresearch is linguistic politeness
in Chinese. When oreignersstudy the Chinese language
they oten find themselves in asomewhat awkward situation
as the Chinese are represented,and oten represent themselves,
in two entirely dierentstereotypical ways: either
traditionally polite or direct andpragmatic. And there is a certain
truth behind this stereotype.In certain contexts the Chinese
apply sel-denigrating and other-elevating honorific expressions
(see box), which look akin tothe more renowned Japanese
honorifics, as well as strongly
ritualised and ormal language.However, in the vast majority oeveryday interactions Chinese
language usage is not onlyvoid o old-ashioned honorific
expressions and other traditionalorms, which might be amiliar
to many readers rom historicaland martial art films, but also
lacks communication strategiesthat westerners would define
as the basic norms o politenessbehaviour. In a restaurant,
especially when one is part o agroup o guests who are requent
visitors to the place, one is likelyto be served as royalty. But when
buying ood in the street, thevendor may resort to an abrupt
What do you want?. And thisambiguity is not confined to non-
native speakers: both oreignersand natives may be treated withextreme deerence in certain
situations and practically ignoredas aceless entities in others.
While it is tempting to brushaside Chinese language usage
as simply exotic, the increasingglobal importance o China
means that understandingChinese language usage and
behaviour is a must, especially
Politeness in ChineseWhen Obama hosted Hu
Jintao in 11, he bowedsolemnly as he shook
hands with the leader othe Chinese State. The USPresident probably imaginedthat he was being progressiveby accommodating himselto what he imagined astraditionally Chinesebehaviour, but he hadblundered badly.
Politeness in East Asiaby Dniel Z. Kdr
and Sara Mills.
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i one wants to avoid blunders oexoticising East Asian people, as
happened with the US President,Barack Obama recently.
When Obama hosted HuJintao in 2011, he bowed solemnly
as he shook hands with theleader o the Chinese State. The
US President probably imaginedthat he was being progressive by
accommodating himsel to whathe imagined as traditionally
Chinese behaviour, but hehad blundered badly. Far rom
eeling lattered by Obamashumble bow, the Chinese leaderis more likely to have elt a
measure o contempt because in
contemporary Chinese culture, inthis specific setting where leadersrepresent the aces o their
nations, a bow is potentially not asign o neutral politeness but is
a non-verbal communication oweakness.
So how can we give areliable picture o the two
aces o Dragon, withoutalling into the trap o making
overgeneralisations? A recentresearch project by Yuling Pan
and I has revealed, that norms opoliteness or normative politic
behaviour as linguistic politenessresearchers would put it do
not apply to every interactionalcontext in Chinese society. In
order to avoid representing theChinese in an exotic light, it is
important to clariy that this isa tendency, which is subject to
geographical and social variation,rather than being a rule. Perhaps
even more importantly, it isnot so much the case that the
Chinese are polite in somecontexts and rude in others.
Instead, as the analysis o a largeresearch database has revealed,there are at least two major
types o normative behaviourin Chinese society. The first
type can be described as themode o deerence. The second
can be labeled as a normative
lack o politeness mode, which
is somewhat unusual roma western perspective. The
lack o politeness in certainsettings should thereore not
be interpreted as a breach o
norms. Such behavior is notimpoliteness, as we mightinitially think, or the simple
reason that it is the norm.This duality originates
in an important gap betweenthe way in which in-group
and out-group relationshipsare traditionally perceived by
many Chinese. In-group (nei inChinese) settings necessitate
the observance o the norms o
proper language usage because
in-group relationships arelasting ones in Chinese minds.
As anthropological research hasillustrated, in Chinese society
the building o networks
(guanxi) has prevalence overindividualism: obtaining alucrative job, getting into a good
school or being elected into aleading role all tend to happen
through networking abilitiesrather than on the basis o purelyindividual skills. Out-group (wai)
contexts, on the other hand,do not usually necessitate any
attempt to orm interpersonalrelationships, and consequently
it does not make much sense toapologise or stepping on someones ooton a crowded bus in which everyone stepson each others eet.
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Honorifics are words or expressions used toconvey esteem when addressing or reerringto someone. They can be as simple as Mr orMrs or as complex as Your Imperial and RoyalMajesty. In Monty Pythons RereshmentRoom at Bletchley sketch, the compre, KennyLust, goes somewhat overboard with thehonorifics when introducing the entertainmentor the evening:
You know, once in a while it is my pleasure, andmy privilege, to welcome here at the refreshmentroom, some of the truly great internationalartists of our time. And tonight we have one suchartist. Ladies and gentlemen,someone whomIve always personally admired, perhaps moredeeply, more strongly, more abjectly than everbeore. A man, well more than a man, a god, agreat god, whose personality is so totally andutterly wonderul my eeble words o welcomesound wretchedly and pathetically inadequate.Someone whose boots I would gladly lick cleanuntil holes wore through my tongue, a man whois so totally and utterly wonderul, that I wouldrather be sealed in a pit o my own filth, thandare tread on the same stage with him. Ladiesand gentlemen the incomparably superiorhuman being, Harry Fink!
Honorifics work mainly by elevating thestatus o the person addressed (as in MyRight Honorable Friend) or by denigrating thestatus o the speaker (as in the Monty Pythonexample above). What is particularly interesting
about Chinese is that the honorific system issocially diverse. This means that, historically,a commoner would denigrate himsel using adierent honorific than a high ranking person.For example, a commoner might use xiaoren(this worthless person) while an oficialmight use xiaoguan (this worthless oficial).And a Buddhist monk might choose pinseng(poor monk). These would not only indicatehumbleness but would also display the dierentsocial ranks o their speakers. Because o this, inhistorical hierarchical Chinese communication,
speakers could not use the honorific vocabularyo other social classes.
normative politeness does notapply in such settings. This is not
surprising i one considers thelarge density o population, and
consequently the vast numbero out-group encounters, in
Chinese society. To illustratethis with a simple but authentic
example, it does not make muchsense to apologise or stepping on
someones oot on a crowded busin which everyone steps on each
others eet.What makes the duality
o Chinese linguistic politenessand its lack even more complexrom a western perspective
is that even within in-group
relationships, where the normso polite language usage apply,these norms tend to dier rom
their western counterparts. Inwestern cultures polite language
usage is generally associated withthe value o equality. However,
this is not the case in Chinesesociety, which traditionally
perceives human relationshipsas predominantly hierarchical
ones. Because o this perception,in conversations in which there
is a power dierence betweenthe interactants, the powerul
party can usually aord to ignorepolite behaviour without being
interpreted as impolite in astrict sense.
The two aces o the Dragonraise plenty o challenges or
uture research. Inquiries intoChinese politeness are not only
dificult due to the large number
o native speakers o Chinese,but also because Chinese
politeness and impoliteness arein a complex state o ideological
and linguistic transition. Ater
the opening o the country inthe 1970s, the state ideologyo Communism has in recent
decades intermingled withrevived Neo-Conucian ideals,
as well as contemporary westernideologies which have been
imported into China. Thisideological mixture not only
results in a large social andgeographical diversity in the
ways in which individuals and
groups perceive proper Chinesepoliteness, but also inluencesactual language usage.
The aim or uture researchis to bring us closer to the
intriguing (non-)polite aspectso Chinese language use, hence
making Chinese communicationmore understandable or thewestern spectator.
Fn o o
BooPoliteness in Historical and Contemporary Chinese by Yuling Pan andDniel Z. Kdr (Continuum, 2011)
Politeness in East Asia edited by Dniel Z. Kdr and Sara Mills(Cambridge University Press, 2011
Onln
Explore the study o linguistic politeness through the website o theinternational Linguistic Politeness Research Group:http://research.shu.ac.uk/politeness
Dniel Z. Kdr is Proessor o English
Language and Linguistics at theUniversity o Huddersfield. His recentresearch on East Asian politeness
includes the co-authored bookPoliteness in Historical and ContemporaryChinese (Continuum, 2011) and the
edited volume Politeness in East Asia(Cambridge University Press, 2011).
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Circles of EnglishAs the Englishlanguage
continues itsglobal spread,Marcus Bridleconsiders howthe norms oEnglish areshiting.
English is requently
described as aglobal language,
but perhaps weshould use the
plural Englishesrather than the singular noun. I
you travel rom region to regionin the USA, UK and Australia,
you can hear shits in accentand changes in dialect which,
whilst still being identifiablyEnglish, can sound like a oreign
language. Now that Englishhas spread around the world,
there are ever more varieties Englishes to be heard.
One o the most inluentialways o describing the global
spread o English was put
orward in 1990 by Braj Kachru,now Jubilee Proessor oLiberal Arts and Sciences at the
University o Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. Kachrus modeldescribes the global development
o English using a series o everexpanding concentriccircles.
The inner circle comprisesthose countries where English
is the native language (ENL)and includes the UK, Australia,
Canada, New Zealand and theUSA. These countries map the
spread o the original diasporaso English speakers, taking the
language to new lands as a resulto an expanding British Empire.
The inner circle is seen as norm-providing, setting the boundaries
o what counts as English. Thereare, o course, variations in
English across these countries. In
the USA, or example, you mightwell embarrass yoursel i you
turned up dressed as Superman
or a party described as ancy
dress. Fancy dress in Americasimply means ormal clothes
with underpants most definitelyunderneath the trousers. And
while were on the subject opants, in the UK, walking around
wearing nothing else would mostlikely be greeted with gasps o
horror. In America, where pantsare trousers, you have nothingto worry about. But despite
such minor lexical and syntacticdierences between these
varieties there is, a large amounto overlap. British English and
American English are not nearlyas dierent as is oten claimed.
The second or outer circlecomprises those countries, like
Nigeria, India and Singapore,where English is widely spoken as
a second language (ESL). A quick
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cross reerence between a map dated around 1920and a list o ESL countries shows that the majority
o these were once part o Britains global empire.These are the territories in which English was
introduced as the oficial language by the rulingpowers o the time. In these norm-developing
countries, non-native speakers adopted (or wereorced to adopt) English in order to become
involved with the trade and inrastructure o thecolonies. These are the countries where, today,
English is firmly entrenched in the cultural,political and social systems o the nation. There
are upwards o 300 million ESL speakers and they
may soon outnumber ENL speakers. It is in thesecountries where English diverged and developed.It was a two way process: just as Standard British
English may have undergone several local
modifications in ESL countries, so was it enrichedby imported words khaki, pajamas, bungalow,
bogus, jumbo, okay and zebra as well as bychanges in accent and syntax.
Finally, there is the expanding circle. Thisis by ar the largest o the three and currently
includes almost all the places which arent alreadyin the first two circles. These are the EFL countries,
the countries where English is a oreign languagebut is increasingly seen as essential not just or
survival but also or prospering in the world village.Europe. Japan. South Korea. Latin America. The
Middle East. North Arica. China. Up and downthese countries and continents, in cities and in
remote villages, there are thousands o EFL classesin progress. As you read this article, someone,
somewhere is getting to grips with English or thefirst time. There are Chinese three years olds being
sent to English Club beore they have begun tocomprehend the basics o Mandarin. There are
Kurdish scientists, statisticians and engineersdeveloping their English in order to begin the
development o their newly autonomous nation.Somewhere in Tokyo, there is a salary man or
woman sitting, possibly against their will, in abusiness English class trying to prepare or an 18month branch management placement on the
other side o the world. There are more o theseexpanding circle English speakers than there
are o the inner and outer circles combined. A
The second or outer circlecomprises those countries, likeNigeria, India and Singapore,where English is widely spoken as
a second language (ESL). A quickcross reerence between a mapdated around 19 and a list o ESLcountries shows that the majorityo these were once part o theBritains global empire.
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conservative estimate wouldplace the figure at about 1 billion.
These expanding circlecountries are described as norm
dependent, using the innerand outer circles to provide the
so-called correct models oEnglish. From these circles the
rules are laid out, the text bookswritten and the teachers sent.
It is rom these countries thatthe pop music blares, the movies
roll and the advertising lashes.The expanding circle looks to
the inner and outer circles as itsrame o reerence or what good,proper English is. At least, it did.
The norm as laid down
by the inner and outer circlesis becoming increasingly less
normal. The linguist H. G.Widdowson pointed to a late
twentieth century shit romthe distribution o English to
the spread. He saw the originaldistribution o the language as
one which was controlled. Theinner circle handed down English
to the outer circle, insisting
that the grammar remaineduntampered with and the correctlexicon was studied slavishly.
Fn o o
BooWorld Englishes: A Resource Book for Students by Jennier Jenkins(Routledge, 2009)
The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of Non-native Englishes by Braj Kachru (University o Illinois Press, 1990)
The Handbook of World Englishes edited by Braj Kachru, YamunaKachru and Cecil Nelson (Blackwell, 2009)
Marcus Bridleis a tutor in theEnglish Language
Teaching Centreat the Universityo Shefield and
a PhD student atthe University oHuddersfield. He
has taught Englishin Spain and Japanand is currently
researching theapplication o
corpus linguistictechniques in EFLteaching.
Pants or trousers? In the US pants are what the UK would call trousers.Could the hip hop style o wearing low slung trousers revealing underwearbe making a linguistic as well as a ashion statement?
Spread, on theother hand, is
uncontrolled. Itis English shaped
by contact withdierent cultures,
languages and users.It is word o mouth,
digital, o the moment.It is not the language o the
text book and is beyond thepedantic clutches o even the
most zealous prescriptivist. AsEnglish spreads ever outwards,
so the centre loses its controland we find the languagemultiplying into a range o
Englishes. These are not creoles
with strictly developed rules, butimprovisations on a theme.
Consider Japan. Here,
Jenglish, or more properly Eigo-Wasei, has been developing or
a long time. English words areborrowed and manipulated into
the Japanese language. Thesemutated loanwords are then
used by the Japanese when theycome to speak English. Japanese
speakers might say bed-town orsuburb, healthmeter or weighing
scales, ree-size meaning onesize fits all, and the particularly
descriptive new-hal whendescribing a transexual. Whilst
Jenglish, Chinglish, Spanglishand the like are oten the butt o
pejorative remarks, they work.They have meaning or their
users. Wrong as they might seemto those rom the inner circle,
they are adopted wholeheartedlyby the expanding circle and,
these days, spread exponentially
throughsocial media
networks.Which English, then,
should have authority in the EFL
classroom? Is EFL the guardiano some kind o authenticityin English? Should Japanese
students be inormed thatwhen they say baby car they
are wrong and that they mustuse pram instead? Surely, baby
car is just as good, i not better?In the uture, will the role o
the English teacher be entirelyredundant as these divergent
Englishes harmonise into one,homogenous global English?
Or will English teachers findthemselves in a classroommediating between a babble
o mutually unintelligibleEnglishes? Perhaps the uture o
English lies somewhere betweenthe two, where a convenient
global standard is underpinnedby a range o local orms and
where Konglish and IndianEnglish have as much authority
as norms as British andAmerican English.
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Reviews
tHe stOry OF eNGLisH:HOW tHe eNGLisHLANGuAGe CONQueredtHe GLOBeb Phlp GoonQuercus, 7 pages, RRP .
Dan McIntyre on a contentiousaccount of the history of English
Aconventional
history oEnglish goes
something likethis: Germanic
dialects broughtto the British Isles by the Angles,
Saxons and Jutes are theninluenced by the Scandinavian
dialects spoken by the laterViking invaders. Following
the Norman Conquest, thisledgling English language is
then inluenced by French, thelanguage o the new nobility,
and Latin, the language o thechurch. There ollows a period
during which English declinesin prestige, only to rise again as
a result o war with France andthe loss o Normandy. During the
15th century, the language is then
fixed as a direct consequence othe introduction o the printingpress. Early Modern English, or
the language o Shakespeare,then becomes the basis o an
eventual global English onceit is transerred to the New
World and beyond by Britishcolonists and Empire builders.
In his 2005 book, The Stories oEnglish, David Crystal begins
with this standard history beore
proceeding to demolish it onthe grounds that it is maniestlybiased in avour o Standard
written English; by contrast,regional dialects and spoken
language dont get a look in.Given that Crystals book is one
o the ew reerenced in PhilipGoodens The Story o English, it
is surprising that Gooden sticksso rigidly to the conventional
history. The result is a airlylacklustre retelling o the
standard series o events deemedto have aected the development
o English. It is not so much thatGooden is wrong in what he
says, more that his inability tolook beyond the conventional
story results in some grosssimplifications and misleading
impressions. So, or instance,Middle English is covered in
the chapter called ChaucersEnglish while Early ModernEnglish, predictably enough, is
dealt with in a chapter calledThe Age o Shakespeare. These
two writers may well be themost amous exponents o the
English o their respective timesbut to describe Middle English
and Early Modern English solelythrough their work gives a highly
incomplete picture o how thelanguage was developing in these
periods. To be air, the chapter on
Chaucers English does brielycover the work o Caxton and the
Gawain poet. However, readingthe chapter on Shakespeare, one
could be orgiven or thinkingthat Early Modern English was
almost entirely his creation.Elsewhere, Gooden suggests
that the Norman Conquest
was the event that led to theintroduction o French intoEngland (it wasnt: French hadbeen used in the Royal Court
during the reign o Edward theConessor). And when discussing
English overseas, Gooden givesthe highly misleading impression
that there is a language varietycalled Pidgin English that
was then spread around the
world (p.176). Perhaps the mostproblematic claim, though, isthat the pattern o Englishs
development over time hasbeen one o simplification.
While it is true that English hasbecome a language where word
order rather than inlections isresponsible or meaning, this
is a process o regularisation.Whether this means the
language is becoming simpler isvery much a matter o point o
view. No doubt the Anglo-Saxonswould have seen this process very
dierently! For me, the majorissue with this book is summed
up in the title. Despite what thedefinite article suggests, there
is no one story o the Englishlanguage. English is ar too
interesting or that.
Dan McIntyre is Proessor o EnglishLanguage and Linguistics at the
University o Huddersfield.
For me, themajor issue
with this bookis summed up in
the title. Despitewhat the
definite articlesuggests, there
is no one storyo the English
language.
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HOW tO tALk Like ALOCALb s dnArrow Books, 44 pages, RRP
7.
Ella Jeffries on a lively accountof contemporary variation inBritish English.
Eective as a
reerence bookor simply to lick
through, How toTalk Like a Local
is a collection anddescription o regional words
and phrases that have been orstill are in use around the UK
today. These include words wemay consider to be old-ashioned,
such as the endearment chuck,and also words that bear the
markings o a 21st century ador cultural phenomena such as
chav (a young person in trendyclothes and lashy jewellery)
and minging (ugly). Howeverthe addition o some description
o the history and etymology o
the words shows that even theapparently modern dialect wordshave been around longer than
we think (chav, derived rom aRomany word, has been around
or over 150 years). I was struckby how many words I had not
heard o throughout the book, atestimony to both the regional
diversity evidently still existentand the depth o the research
that has gone into the finding
and choosing o these words.A useul eature o this book isound in the links between the
words which mean roughly thesame thing in dierent dialects;
underneath each word is a listo other similar regional words
which can in turn be lookedup in the book. Also, scattered
throughout are lengthierdescriptions o some common
slang names or processes, suchas the many dierent ways tea
making, brewing and pouringare described throughout Britain
(brew, wet, steep, mash, teem,bide and draw). There are also
longer descriptions o some othe specific phonetic eatures o
certain accents, with two-pagesections on How to talk like a
which ranges rom Cockneyto Geordie to Scot (being rom
Yorkshire I elt a section onthis region was lacking!). Thesesections are user-riendly or
non-specialists, providingsounded out letter examples o
the way in which we distinguishthese accents and they include
some words and phrases specificto the region.
This book explores anduncovers the dialect variation
that some people believe is dyingout but is evidently still in use
throughout the UK. Personally I
was particularly drawn to wordsrom my native Yorkshire and
ound some that I have neverheard beore (e.g. gobslotch; an
idle ellow), words that I hadntpreviously known were dialect
specific (e.g. ginnel; alleyway)and words that I recognise but
whose meanings I wouldnt
have been able to pin down(e.g. blethered; tired out). Inthe introduction to the book
the point is nicely made thatalthough many words have diedout, the constantly changing
language relects the constantdevelopment o liestyle and
society over the years. With thissentiment in mind, I expected
more terms relecting young
peoples interests and concerns.In order to relect the diversityand constant development o
language, it would have beenuseul to document some o
those words currently in voguetoday which may well become
established dialect words inuture. In a similar vein (this may
be the sociolinguist in me), somereerence to which particular
ages/sexes/social groups usethese words would have made an
interesting addition.
Ella Jeries is a PhD student studying
sociophonetics at the University o York.
In order torelect the
diversity andconstant
developmento language,
it would havebeen useul todocument some
o those wordscurrently in
vogue todaywhich may
well becomeestablished
dialect words inuture.
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th Lngc OlpaSuering withdrawal symptoms rom London
2012?Then why not try a dierent kind o Olympics?
The Linguistics Olympiad movement has branches
around the world and also holds an international
Olympiad each year: you can find out more at
www.ioling.org. The puzzles set or these competitionsprovide ascinating examples o the combination o
logic and linguistic sensitivity that are required to be
successul as a linguist. Heres one that comes rom the
Foundation Level test o the UKs Olympiad in 2012:
sa n AbaAbma is an Austronesian language spoken in parts o
the South Pacific island nation o Vanuatu by around
8,000 people. Careully study these Abma sentences
then answer the questions below. Note that there
is no separate word or the or he in these Abma
sentences:Here are some new words in Abma: sesesrakan
(teacher), mwegani (eat), bwet (taro, a kind o sweet
potato), muhural (walk), butsukul (palm-tree).
Mwamni sileng. He drinks water.
Nutsu mwatbo mwamni sileng. The child keeps drinking water.
Nutsu mwegau. The child grows.
Nutsu mwatbo mwegalgal. The child keeps crawling.
Mworob mwabma. He runs here.
Mwerava Mabontare mwisib. He pulls Mabontare down.
Mabontare mwisib. Mabontare goes down.
Mweselkani tela mwesak. He carries the axe up.
Mwelebte sileng mwabma. He brings water.
Mabontare mworob mwesak. Mabontare runs up.
Sileng mworob. The water runs.
Now, ater that crash course, translate the ollowing
sentences into Abma:
. The teacher carries the water down.
. The child keeps eating.
3. Mabontare eats taro.
4. The child crawls here.
5. The teacher walks downhill.
. The palm-tree keeps growing upwards.
7. He goes up.
Done it? Now try translating these Abma sentences
into English:
. Sesesrakan mweselkani bwet mwabma.
. Sileng mworob mwisib.
. Mwelebte bwet mwesak.
Easy? Check your answers on page 25 oppoosite.
Ludic Linguistics
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AnwWe are grateul to the UK Linguistics Olympiad
or permission to reproduce test materials rom
their website.
. Sesesrakan mweselkani sileng mwisib.
. Nutsu mwatbo mwegani.
3. Mabontare mwegani bwet.4. Nutsu mwegalgal mwabma.
5. Sesesrakan muhural mwisib.
. Butsukul mwatbo mwegau mwesak.
7. Mwesak.
. The/a teacher carries (the) taro here.Or: The/a teacher brings (the) taro.
. (The) water runs down/downwards/downhill.
. He carries (the) taro up/upwards/uphill.
Creativity isnt just or artists.Anyone whos ever made a groan-inducing pun is being creativewith language, and creativity iscommon in language use. RobPopes book Textual Intervention:Critical and Creative Strategies
for Literary Studies (Routledge, 199)introduced a technique or studying textswhich relies on intervention i.e. changing the text. Thistechnique is not only enlightening, its un.
Pope discusses his success in using intervention withstudents in class using well-known statements like Ithink, thereore I am (Descartes) and Smoking candamage your health. The aim is to change one o moreo the words and then to contemplate the significanceo both the new and the original orm. Students mightwell come up with I drink, thereore I am as an ironicand playul version o the amous philosophical phrase.Some o the eects o this are to demonstrate one o theeatures o modern scholarly lie as an undergraduate and
to make us compare this with the image o the thinkerin Descartes version. Intervening in the health warningon packets o cigarettes might lead to something likeSmoking can enhance your sex appeal, which highlightsthe tendency or cigarette producers to use this as theirmarketing strategy.
Send us your best interventions on the ollowing phraserom Hamlet:
to b, o no o b ha h qon
Well reward the winner with a ree one year subscriptionto Babel. There are no restrictions on what you can dowith the phrase, except that the intervened version mustbe recognisably derived rom Shakespeares version. Youmay depart rom his version as ar as you want withinthis general rule and you may wish your version to relectdierences in your lie rom those in Hamlets or tocomment on some aspect o social or political lie.The winner will be chosen by the Editors, whosedecision is final*.
* Babel reserves the right to change the nature o the prize or this
competition.
COmPetitiON
WiNAFreeONeyeArsuBsCriPtiONtOBABeL
Richard Burton as Hamlet: To be or not to be: can you answer the question in our special competition to win a years subscription to Babel: The LanguageMagazine?
Babel The Language Magazine | November 25
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We all
knowthat
what weliterally
saycan be dierent rom what
we actually mean. I anacquaintance tells you Myather-in-law is a dinosaur, you
dont puzzle over why she issaying something blatantly alse;
you accept it as a significant, ifigurative, description. Further,
the dierence between whatwe say and what we mean oten
depends on context. I you sayIts cold here while talking on
the phone to a riend in anothercountry you may just be making
a actual statement; i you say thesame thing while visiting him in
his lat you may well be givinga none too subtle hint that he
should turn up the heating. Oneimportant question in linguistics,
particularly in the disciplineo pragmatics, is whether and
i so how we can explain thesedierences, and here linguists
owe a huge intellectual debt tothe philosopher H. Paul Grice.
Born in 1913, Grice beganhis academic career at Oxord
towards the end o the 1930sduring a major controversy about
the nature o the philosophical
study o language. The schoolo ideal language philosophytook seriously only artificial
and logically perect languages.
Natural language was messyand unruly because it could be
used figuratively or vaguely andalso because, unlike logic, it was
sensitive to our everyday wayso making sense o the world.
I you are told Joan insultedher boss and was fired you are
likely to come away believingthat the two events took place
but also with the impressionthat the firing took place ater,
and probably as a result o,the insulting. But in logic theconjunction o two propositions
doesnt allow us to orm anysuch additional impressions.
Proponents o ordinary languagephilosophy didnt disagree about
the dierences between logic andnatural language, but argued that
this only went to show that logicwas not an appropriate measure
o natural language, which
deserved serious attention romphilosophers in its own right.
Grice was associated with
ordinary language philosophy asit became established at Oxordater the Second World War, but
became uneasy with what hesaw as its over-simplistic reliance
on listing and describing theresources o everyday language.He wanted a more systematic
account o how language works.In Meaning, written in 1947,
he explained the meaning o
what we say in terms o thepsychological concept o whatwe intend to communicate.
Realising that there was stillmuch to be explained about the
relationship between intendedand literal meaning, he worked
during the 1960s on a serieso lectures entitled Logic and
conversation.Grice made two bold
claims. Firstly, both the idealand the ordinary language
philosophers were wrong aboutthe incompatibility o logic and
natural language because theywere ignoring the dierences
between literal and intendedmeaning. Secondly, those
dierences could be accountedor by a coherent set o principles.
Grice distinguished betweenwhat is said on any particular
occasion, something akin toliteral meaning, and what is
implicated. Logic can explain
Lives in language
H. Paul Grice (3-)
Siobhan Chapman explains her ascinationwith a philosopher o language whose workchanged the way we think about meaning.
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what is said, but to give a ullexplanation o intended meaning
we need also to reer to what hestyled the cooperative principle,
a basic eature o human socialinteraction. We generally
expect those we interact with tocooperate in whatever task we
jointly undertake. In the caseo conversation, we interpret
what someone says to us as acooperative contribution i we
possibly can, and do so in relationto particular expectations
about the quantity, quality andrelevance o the inormationwe receive and the manner in
which it is oered. In this way
Grice addressed the debate overlogic and language. What is saidwhen we use the word and, or
instance, can be explained bythe logical unction o joining
together two propositions. I weunderstand urther inormation
to do with sequence andcausality, these can be explained
as conversational implicatures,der