Babel Mag Issue1

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Babel No1November 2012

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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

[email protected]

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.

: [email protected]

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.

: [email protected]

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


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.


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.


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.


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.



09


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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.




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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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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.

12 Babel The Language Magazine | November

Feature Forensic linguistics


13/28

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.




14/28

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




15/28

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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




16/28

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.


Feature The two faces of the dragon


17/28

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.




18/28

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).




19/28

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


Feature Circles of English


20/28

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.




21/28

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.




22/28

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.


Reviews


23/28

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.


Reviews


24/28

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



25/28

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?


Ludic Linguistics


26/28

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.


Lives in language


27/28

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

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