On Signifer and Signified, Depiction and Endorsement, and Why Dapper Laughs and Friends Are Complete Tossers

(My laptop got stolen. This is annoying for a couple of reasons, most saliently to this blog because I lost about a dozen posts in various states of completion (along with a load of other stuff that I really should have backed up as well - come back, The Cloud, all is forgiven…). In some ways, though, it's sort of liberating. I'm now back to a clean slate and free to write about whatever I fancy without thinking I should really be using one of the things I've had festering on my hard drive for longer than is probably good for any of us.)

A big thing in the UK in the last couple of weeks has been the rise and fall of a moderately popular Vine user calling himself Dapper Laughs who ended up with his own TV show on ITV 2 (a secondary channel of one of our old commercial terrestrial channels that I can't remember ever consciously watching). His schtick was basically to cat-call and otherwise abuse women in marginally socially acceptable ways and… Hang on, I don't think there was an and. That was it. I mean, I spent half an hour looking through his Vines trying to work out what the fuss was about and honestly didn't really get why he was called a comedian in his Twitter bio, other than that his name had "Laughs" in it. It just seemed to be six-second snatches of some guy being a dick to strangers, which I know some people would laugh at but probably wouldn't call comedy. But I digress.

When the Internet heard of the fact that a well-established national TV channel (sorry, can't quite bring myself to call ITV well-respected) was giving a platform to this guy, a lot of people were fairly unhappy about it, to put it mildly. There were articles in online papers and people tweeting a petition to ask ITV to cancel the show (called Dapper Laughs: On The Pull, just in case you weren't cringing hard enough to rupture something before), in light of which (coupled with its star's attempt to release a charity single to help the homeless while mocking them backfiring spectacularly) the channel announced a few days ago that the show would indeed not be returning, and Daniel O'Reilly, the real name of the man starring in the videos, appeared on a news show saying that he had retired the character going on the recent public reaction to it.

To which I say, fair enough. In the interests of full disclosure, I signed the petition. I end up signing a fair number of petitions opposing the oppression of various societal groups. The thing is, I've seen people around the usual places (Facebook, Twitter, The World Away From A Keyboard) saying that they don't see what the harm was in Dapper Laughs' TV show considering his creator has since said that his character was a deliberate stereotype, and that the censorship of comedy like this is a mark of encroaching social fascism on the part of the PC Brigade (or their Internet counterpart, Social Justice Warriors). I think this raises some general points, so as I'm sure you've been missing I'm going to launch into some conceptual rant stuff.


Signifying Nothing [link]

I think the core issue here is whether the depiction of a behaviour should be judged in the same way that the behaviour itself is. This is the basic problem of creative censorship, which has a lively history going back at least as far, for example, as the Marquis de Sade, whose output delights in trying to disgust the reader in pretty much any way it can think of. I don't want to go into detail, but pretty much any remotely taboo behaviour you can think of is probably described in gory detail somewhere in there.

Semiotics (from Greek sēmeîon, "sign") is the study of the relationship between symbols and meanings. With an opener as woolly as that you can probably imagine it covers a huge amount of thought, so any single-sentence description will be extremely cursory at best. The reference in the first part of the title is to Ferdinand de Saussure's take on this by dividing language (in whatever form) into symbols and what they mean, which translated literally from the French is signifier and signified. (I don't think that’s a very helpful translation, as we aren't nearly so happy to mess around with participles as French is. Oh well.) This doesn't seem like such a revolutionary concept when stated as basically as that (and especially after the intervening hundred years or so of sociological work that you've probably been passively exposed to even if you don't take an interest in it).

The important part is the idea that symbol and meaning are separable. This is something that is actually fairly uncomfortable considering the fact that we consider meaning as expressed through language as something fixed by default. You give someone your word with the implication that it's trustworthy. You quote someone in their own words in order to express what they mean as fully as you can. A large swathe of the Abrahamic religions is that fundamental truths about the world are expressed in the word of God. Misquoting or quote mining is a particularly big deal because using someone's own words against them feels like an unnatural and vicious thing.

But it's true. While we frequently think of language as primarily a means of self-expression, it's really at root a means of communication (just as we like to think of ourselves as individual actors rather than single members of society - not that either pair can't be true at the same time, of course). If you have a language spoken by one person, and no-one else has the capacity to learn it natively, that language is considered dead in the water from a linguistic viewpoint. Language is in this way the only perfect democracy that we are ever likely to see - if you say a word has one meaning, and every other speaker of your dialect says another, then after you the word's meaning will have changed, as it has changed on countless other words before (random example - soon used to mean immediately until people used it enough that it got worn down to the current meaning).

What's this got to do with Dapper Laughs? Well, consider the material released under that name as a set of symbols (yeah, let's overanalyse it to death, I presume if you've got this far you've got nothing more exciting on). We see depictions of various kinds of misogyny without comment, and then are told outside the material that it's satire. The thing is, without being explicitly told that what we're watching is satire, I don't think it's at all apparent that it is, which is the problem - the usual expectation of satire is that it takes a particular behaviour or mindset and exposes its flaws by engaging with it, twisting it until it snaps under its own weight. So, for instance, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal gradually shows that it's satirical as its horrifying suggestion for how to reduce the overpopulation of the Irish poor and their food shortage (hint: both would be resolved at once) is discussed completely deadpan, with no apparent thought given to the implications of the suggestion other than the logistical problems it would cause, and how they could be solved. We could suggest Voltaire's Candide or Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (even Blackadder Goes Forth, considering what year it is) as other examples where the overblown barbarity, pettiness and stupidity of the characters towards the protagonist and each other is never explicitly challenged by the narrative or the narrator, but the infuriatingly placid tone with which they are described suggests a deep sense of outrage (which in Catch-22 is openly expressed by Yossarian and in Blackadder by Captain Blackadder himself, though both are treated as though they are the ones with the problem). In the case of Sade, the impression I get is that beyond simply wanting to goad a reaction out of the reader (trolling is a art, after all) he's playing with the idea of the Enlightenment making reason overcome the so-called natural order of things by his characters thinking up and indulging in such "unnatural" acts, as well as, like Voltaire in Candide, trying to get the reader to show some critical engagement with the ideas presented (a mix of the socially progressive and the usual shock fodder) rather than simply swallowing vapidly optimistic rhetoric wholesale.

In short, satire is generally expected to pass comment on its target by, well, satirising it. Dapper Laughs doesn't seem to have any sort of ironic distance from the behaviour he's purportedly satirising. The joke seems to be on the women who are being abused; this kind of behaviour is actually so pervasive that but for the camera I don't think many people would be able to tell that this wasn't just some guy walking around and being a tosser. It's true that it's frequently quite hard to tell the difference between the extreme forms of any behaviour or mindset and its satirical imitation, but I'd argue that the lack of any sort of implied distance between the writer and the character kind of makes any claims to ironic imitation fall flat. In the absence of a symbol with an established meaning, the remaining semiotic text remains ambiguous and so open to the simplest interpretation via Occam's Razor, that the guy wandering around and acting like a tosser is, in fact, a tosser.


Noise Pollution [link]

If that was the whole of my problem with Dapper Laughs, I probably wouldn't be writing this post, and I suspect that a lot of people wouldn’t have signed the petition. Whatever the anti-PC Brigade Brigade say, those of us who objected to Dapper Laughs' show didn’t just not have a sense of humour. The tipping point as suggested in the body of the petition (i.e. that ITV should #canceldapper) was that the previous questionably-satire was put on national television.

Depiction doesn't equal endorsement. It's just a bit of fun, what's the problem? Why do you have to overanalyse everything? If you don't like it, then don't watch it. Language is communication - that means the things you and other people say affect every other person that speaks or is exposed to your language. If I habitually went in for spuriously gratuitous physics analogies, I'd compare it to the fact that every object in the universe exerts a gravitational pull (however small) on every other one. Just because you decide not to consume a particular piece of media doesn't mean it won't be able to affect you or people around you.

One really useful term I've come across since taking an active interest in Internet social justice is the idea of microaggressions. These are small things that make people of a particular non-privileged group feel unwelcome that might sound petty if complained about individually, but which when they occur hundreds of times a day build up a distinctly unhealthy atmosphere. I've mentioned the phenomenon of people using the word gay as a general-purpose insult: people usually protest that they themselves aren't homophobic, or that they think of it as a different word that happens to sound and be spelt the same way, but it nonetheless contributes to the overriding impression that gay equals bad.

If we want it to become socially agreed upon that cat-calling and casual objectification of women in general is unacceptable (that is, that it's not okay to consider women as anything less than people first and foremost with their own agency and autonomy, rather than a collection of publicly owned body parts) anything that promotes the latter should be challenged. Challenged, not banned, note, because we didn't storm into the ITV headquarters (wherever that is, or whether it actually exists as a single physical building) with pitchforks and flaming copies of The Female Eunuch Gender Trouble and demand that Dapper Laughs be cancelled/his head on a plate/both on pain of torching the place. We signed a petition. Online. I think I was sitting in my dressing gown and with a mug of tea at the time. We asked them to cancel Dapper Laughs' show and stated our reasons (it contributes to the idea that dehumanising women is a source of comedy and therefore acceptable) in enough numbers that ITV listened and did so, because as a commercial TV company they depend on the good opinion of their viewers (or, as some have suggested, because the show was bombing in the ratings and they saw an opportunity to take some credit anyway).


In Conclusion…

Depiction doesn't equal endorsement, fine. It does equal normalisation, though, and there are things that we as a society seem finally to be deciding shouldn't be normal. Transgressive humour (à la George Carlin, Jimmy Carr, Eddie Murphy and Frankie Boyle when still good) incorporates the abnormality of its subject matter as part of its humour. Dapper Laughs doesn't seem to have been incorporating anything in particular into his act. He's just been being a complete tosser.

(Hmm, now tosser doesn't sound like a word anymore. I imagine for anyone outside of demotic UK English it probably didn't to start with. Oh well. I'm thinking next time might be a music thing, but I don't know. See yous then!)

On Gender (Linguistic and Otherwise)

(Here we are with more linguistics stuff, but still flavoured with a bit of the old social justice angle. I'm sure you'll cope, right?)

The other day I was looking over Mark Twain's The Awful German Language again - if you've got experience of learning German (or grappling with any other language's different way of doing things) a lot of the narrator's satirical grievances will be painfully familiar. One of his favourites is the fact that the genders of German nouns (i.e. whether they're grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter) frequently have little to do with any quality of the noun itself or what is termed its natural sex (for living things):

"Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print - I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.

To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female, - Tom-cats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body, are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it, - for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, hips, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience, haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay."

This got me to thinking that the topic of gender in language is quite interesting in itself, if you can stand me po-facedly tearing down the preceding...


Time Flies Like an Arrow [link]

The first thing that I thought might be of interest is exactly why it is that linguistic gender is so apparently illogical. Well, with grammar as with people the ultimate answer (that I'm sure someone else has already phrased better than me) is that there usually is a reason why we do things in a certain way, but the reason often makes no sense.

A little gobbet of information that I remember from when people used to send those benign-ish chain emails with mildly interesting but often useless facts (if they were actually facts) was the origins of common phrases. Take, for instance, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite". The part about the bedbugs is evident enough, but (as I was reliably informed by a chain email with a forward header about three times the length of the actual text) the part about sleeping tight refers to people using ropes or buckles to tie a mattress together In Days Of Yore. (On checking it turns out that isn't actually true. Oh well.)

Whether it's actually true or not isn't the point, though. We have a phrase that originally had a clear literal or figurative meaning that has over time lost this - it becomes a single unit of meaning that people say to mean "sleep well" without needing to understand its derivation. People want to understand, though (wanting to make sense of the world is, after all, one of our most fundamental urges) so we end up with folk etymologies like the above where people rationalise a meaning out of thin air. Whether their explanation is historically accurate or not is an entirely secondary concern.

This neatly mirrors the linguistic concepts of synchronic and diachronic meaning. The two words are from the Greek khrónos (time) and the prepositions sún (with) and diá (through), meaning "at the same time" (exactly cognate with the Latin-based contemporary) and "through time". Features that synchronically don't make sense (i.e. you just have to learn them) will clearly, at some point in the past, have made sense, before the language moved on. A classic example is irregular verbs. Diachronically, there's no such thing as an irregular verb: it's just a verb that got left high and dry when the grammatical tide went in. In Semitic languages and in the Indo-European ancestor language it's perfectly reasonable and regular to change the vowel in a verb (or root) to express different meanings; for Modern English, though, a verb going sing-sang-sung (song) rather than play-played-played (play) is a strange remnant to keep an eye on in case it tries something funny.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a synchronic world-view - it is, after all, what 99% of people using a language to communicate will be using. Diachronic analysis is sort of like archaeology in this regard; it's interesting to see how the lie of the land has changed, but the average person living in it doesn't really need to know how it looked thousands of years ago to get by. Actually, we get to see a really interesting version of tectonic plates sliding along each other in the form of analogical levelling.

Analogical levelling is the linguistics manifestation of the rationalising drive I mentioned a minute ago. It's basically where people meet a form they don't recognise and correct it in their heads so that it fits the regular pattern (synchronically speaking), sort of like the adorable phenomenon of eggcorns - people who don't know or remember how to spell a word make a guess that's ingenious in its own way (so eggcorn for acorn, in the feeble position for fetal position and so on). They're nothing new - the term "bridegroom" comes from the Old English brȳdguma meaning "bride's man" (the word guma is cognate with homō in Latin), but when the latter word dropped out of English it was replaced with groom, as though the husband-to-be has to tend to his future spouse like a horse...

A more usual example is the way that strong verbs (verbs of the "sing-sang-sung" variety) have a habit of being strong-armed (ahem) into being weak ones ("play-played-played"). There are lots of verbs that used to be strong but now aren't, and if you've got a writer with a taste for old-fashioned forms you'll probably meet a few of the stragglers. I remember finding to my delight that it used to be thrive-throve-thriven and that colours could be "blent together" (where I would expect thrive-thrived-thrived and blended). Languages change and percolate and it's a lot of fun to watch ("text" seems to be becoming a strong verb - "I tex't her last night").


Rooting About [link]

The way this ties in to the synchronically arbitrary distribution of genders in some languages that mark them is (as you might have guessed) that it relates to the original form of the word. In Indo-European languages (basically most Western ones, the top half of India, and Iran) the gender of a noun mostly just depended on what vowel the word used in its stem. Here's some words in Latin with their genders attached:

Noun	Stem	Gender	Meaning
annus	annō	masculine	"year"
bellum	bellō	neuter	"war"
mēnsa	mēnsā	feminine	"table"
spēs	spē	feminine	"hope"
gradus	gradū	masculine	"step"
genū	genū	neuter	"knee"

You can see that the stems in O and U are masculine or neuter (more on which later) and the ones in A and E are feminine. This useful system still survives more or less intact in Italian and Spanish - in Italian il ragazzo is "boy" and la ragazza is "girl", and the equivalent el chico and la chica works the same in Spanish. In French, however, a lot of Latin roots got really chopped up, especially at the ends (they still don't like pronouncing the letters at the ends of words). The Latin word for water is aqua, which pops up in Italian as acqua and Spanish as agua. The French version is eau! (pronounced /o/) It keeps its underlying feminine gender despite the fact that that useful -a ending went AWOL quite a while ago. So if eau is feminine, does that mean that château (castle) will be too? Unfortunately not. The root is castellum, neuter O stem, so because the masculine and the neuter have merged it means it's masculine. Confused yet? We get a lifeline in the fact that some French feminines that used to end in a consonant and an -a still have an -e on the end: so port (a sea port) is masculine and comes from portus (masculine U stem), but porte (door, gate) comes from porta and the -e shows that it's feminine.

What this comes down to is that when you learn a French word you learn it with the article welded on - la porte, le port, le château etc. (The elision in L'eau means you usually get a little (f.) afterwards.) Same with German - der Hund, die Hand, das Fenster and so on. I promise you that the original Proto-Germanic forms had gender-marking endings (der Hund comes from *hundaz, for instance), but they dropped off and anyone who can't accept that it's Just A Thing You've Got To Learn will either never get very far in German or write a hilarious satire of people who think that way.


Typecasting [link]

If you're keeping score at home, you might have looked up at the end of that section and thought, "So, you said that gender was arbitrary because it's traditional, and then you said it's really that way because of old vowel stuff which is also... arbitrary." Very perceptive of you, dear reader - might I invite you to cast your gaze back up the page to where I said that there's usually logic behind most things in languages and in life, but that the logic frequently makes no sense?

If we put the word gender under the microscope, we see that it comes from the Latin genus, which means type, or family. It in turn comes from the same creating root that produces (hoho) generate, general, oxygen, photogenic, gonads, polygon, kin, king and so on. Basically, it just means "type". In the Eurocentric sphere I and a lot of people I know move in, we get used to the idea of there being two or at most three genders, relating male, female and objects (we still distinguish he/she/it in English, even if grammatical gender hasn't been a thing since Old English); outside of that there are languages that have much wider classification systems.

The canonical example is the Australian Aboriginal Dyirbal language, which has four classes/genders:

I	-	Animate objects, men
II	-	Women, water, fire, violence
III	-	Edible fruit and vegetables
IV	-	Everything else

The second class was used for a title for a linguistics book by Lakoff (as Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), because who in their right mind would pass on such a gift of a phrase?

There are languages that have even more classes (a Wikipedia page I consulted for this mentions that "... the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light"), and if you saw my previous pontification on language learning you might remember that Mandarin and a lot of East Asian languages have a similar system of over a hundred classifiers (set count words) that you use with nouns. Others (like Basque and some South Indian languages) have just a two-tier animate/inanimate system.

It turns out that Indo-European used to be one of the latter group. Going back this far involves a certain amount of speculation, so pack spare asterisks (they mark we-don't-have-any-direct-written-evidence-but-we're-pretty-sure reconstructions), but most research suggests that originally there were only the O stems (like annus/bellum) and equivalents. This would be why the masculine and the neuter share so many endings: they're originally one pattern. The idea goes that the neuter plural in -a (think the of stuff like millennium having the plural millennia) was taken as a collective and so an abstract (like lots of true things collectively being "the truth").

The innovation (in the linguistic sense of a grammatical feature suddenly appearing) came when these abstract neuter plurals were reanalysed as singulars with an A stem, which hadn't existed before (there's quite a lot of debate over whether Proto-Indo-European originally even had an A sound). And guess what, presented with this new category which represented abstract, "other" things, people decided to apply it to women.


You Are What You Speak [link]

Think about that for a minute - since before recorded history, women have been intrinsically marked as "different" in the language group that has the most native speakers in the modern world. We still see the repercussions of this all the time when the masculine is used for concrete, strong things and the feminine for delicate, abstract ones, when male is the default option when gender is unspecified or mixed. Now, in languages that have grammatical gender this is less jarring - in Russian, for instance, "person" is chelovyék, which is a masculine noun, so it sort of makes sense that if you're not referring to any person in particular you would use the masculine. This isn't always the case, though - in French the word for person (personne) is feminine (ends in an -e!), so in phrases that explicitly use the word the person will be feminine; however, if you have an unspecified person (like quelqu'un, meaning "someone") it's still masculine.

Some languages manage to have separate, native words for male, female and human. Classical Greek has ánthrōpos for a person in general, the stem andrós for "male", and gunaikós for "woman". This is where you get the terms misanthropy (using the root miséō, "I hate") for a general loathing of mankind, misogyny for woman-hating, and the recently coined "misandry" for hatred of men. (The validity of the latter as a concept is something I haven't got the time or the patience to take on here.) In fact, in older English man was gender neutral: this is why you frequently come across "man" used as a synonym for "humankind" (e.g. This is one small step for man...). We've already seen one of the words used for male (guma), and there's also the word were (cognate with Latin vir, also "male", root of words like "virility" and "virtue") which survives in "werewolf".

As a useful sidenote, this is an example of synchronic and diachronic usage in action. I've heard people defend the use of man for "humanity" in contemporary English because of its etymological basis as a non-gendered term. However, I think this is to ignore the synchronic reading that reinforces on a deep level the idea that women don't matter, or that men are somehow more integral to humanity, because the word man is no longer ungendered in the way it once was. It's sometimes hard for people unfamiliar with social justice work to grasp first time the effect that subtle so-called micro-aggressions like these have on the oppressed party; each is small enough that drawing attention to it opens the complainer to accusations of being petty or demanding, but the combined effect of all these tiny hostilities is a climate where the oppressed party is made to feel belittled and unwelcome. What, you defend your use of "gay" as an insult because you don't actually actively hate gay people? Regardless of your intentions, it still enforces on whatever level the concept that "gay" equals "bad".

There's a seductive idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that states (in its strongest form) that you can't think of something you can't express in your language. The idea in that original form has several flaws that have been pointed out, but the core idea that how you talk affects how you think is a pervasive one. Words are power - that's the idea behind a whole host of things, from NLP to prayer and mantras to magic. Even if we reject the strong form of the hypothesis, I think it's still valid to recognise this interplay. Does the fundamental grammatical otherness of women cause or result from their marginalisation by society?

We call heterosexual people straight, even if it's largely no longer socially acceptable to call people who aren't bent. But at every turn, our language tells us that being straight is correct - the root rect means straight itself, as does right. Do you know right from wrong? Roots beginning wr- in English involve an idea of turning or twisting (wrap, wrist, wriggle, write, wreck...) so we're still hammering away at the straight vs bent dichotomy. A ruler is the one who keeps the country on the straight and narrow, and hopefully defends their subject's rights. People who aren't telling the truth are lying, the opposite of right is left, which is also abandoned (the Latin word for "right" is dexter, giving dexterity, but for left it's sinister!). These are all connected etymologically.

You might be wondering about the validity of slamming people over-relying on diachronic analysis only to pull out a great heap of word derivations myself, but what I wanted to show is that certain biases are very deeply woven both into our languages and our psyches. If you describe someone as straight it can mean that they are a law-abiding citizen (or have become one) rather than a crook (itself from crooked). Tell me then that there's nothing wrong with not being straight, even though you have many more positive associations for straight than for gay, lesbian, bi etc. We've got a lot of work to do.

This post is already long enough, but if you're interested in what a female-centred language would look like, the constructed language Láadan was explicitly designed by a woman (author and linguist Suzette Haden Elgin) to cater to women. I don't know of any native speakers of it, but it would be fascinating to hear the effect that the language had on their world-view.


In Summary...

What I've been interested in exploring is the way that arbitrary linguistic categories like gender work, are preserved, and perhaps influence their speakers' thought processes. I think if it was more felt that gender is at root a social construct (the usual distinction is that sex is the physiological distribution of chromosomes and reproductive organs, and gender is the rest) we might be able to be less rigid in our definitions of what it "means" to be male or female (or indeed, to be neither, or both). In a sense Mark Twain is right to be astounded that mouths are male and hands are female in German - the truth is that there is really no good reason for any set of characteristics to be thought of as fundamentally or exclusively masculine or feminine.

Beyond the general physiological tendencies of male people toward higher muscle mass and female people to a higher hip-to-waist ratio it seems more useful to me to consider people primarily as, well, people, with different physical and mental characteristics arising from this rather than from their adherence (or lack of it) to one or another vestigial mental box. I don't mean that I think that gender should be eradicated from people's individual identity, just that I don't think it's helpful to consider someone as primarily defined by their gender. After all, we could as well be classed as edible plants but for a few historical coincidences...

(Hooray for deconstructing things. Join us next week as the foray continues...)

On the Hardest Language in the World

(It's a question that I see asked a lot in language learning communities online, so I thought I'd give answering it a go. Ditto the number of languages I "know".)

If the content of the stuff I've already put up here isn't enough of a clue, my area of specialisation is languages. My degree is in Modern Languages, but my interests include Classics and Linguistics as well. (It would look a bit funny not putting capital-L-linguistics next to Classics, but I don't normally see any need to capitalise. Classics as in Latin and Greek rather than things that are considered classic is a useful disambiguation. We hope you feel less ambiguated.)

My degree is, specifically, in French and Russian, but one of my hobbies is gaining acquaintance with new languages. A few years ago I made a list of all the languages that I'd like to be familiar with; it comes to around thirty. Thirty languages? I hear you exclaim, How the hell are you supposed to learn thirty languages? All things considered, I don't think it's such an unreasonable goal. Here's why.

Dot-to-dot [link]

Languages don't exist in isolation. Well duh, I imagine you'd say (looks like you're in for a lot of ventriloquising - sorry about that). But what I mean is, languages exist in clumps (or rather clades) - a language that exists on its lonesome from its particular line is quite a rare occurrence. Let's take English: English is a Germanic language that has been radically reshaped by its long contact first with the native Welsh-related Brythonic (back when it was Anglo-Saxon, leaving us with such relatively unusual features such as the continuous/progressive aspect, i.e. I am saying vs I say) and then with French and Latin, resulting amongst other things in our staggeringly varied vocabulary (once your language gets a taste for filching other people's words it will usually go out of its way to do so, resulting in today's English speakers using loans from Arabic, Urdu and Indonesian together without a second thought: The admiral's on the bamboo veranda. A few too many glasses of punch, I reckon. He's asking for ketchup? I'll make some coffee...).

As a Germanic language, English is clearly related to German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian (don’t forget Scots!) etc, as you can tell from the fact that knowing English you can probably grok Hast du meinen Vater gesehen? Wir waren neben dem Marktplatz even if you haven't studied German. Similarly, Germanic is just one branch of the Indo-European, the language family that most of the languages of India and Europe are descended from (duhoy). If you take a list of the core vocabulary of a language (kinship terms, body parts, pronouns and irregular verbs, common plants and animals and so on) you get a Swadesh list (named for their originator, American linguist and McCarthy victim Morris Swadesh) - if you compare them across the IE languages the common base is clear. Take the number "one". One reconstruction of the original Proto-Indo-European language root is *óynos: this gives rise to the Latin ūnus and derived Romance languages like French un, Italian/Spanish uno (Italic), German eins, Old English ān (Germanic), Lithuanian víenas, Russian odín, Polish jeden (Balto-Slavic), Persian yak, Sanskrit éka, and derived languages like Hindi ek, Punjabi ika (Indo-Iranian).

I don't mean to hit you over the head with sudden tidings of Indo-European reconstruction (even though it's seriously cool, being what the linguistic community was mostly up to in the 19th century, including famous names like The Brothers Grimm and Ferdinand de Saussure) - my point is that languages are a lot more interconnected than you might expect. Just knowing English gives you a head-start on cognates (shared roots) in German and Romance languages, not to mention that a lot of loan words these days are flooding in from English, despite what self-appointed regulatory bodies like the Académie française have to say about it.

My language list is organised around this idea: for each language branch, I (somewhat arbitrarily) picked two modern languages and one ancient. So for Italic, I had Latin, French and Italian, and for Balto-Slavic Russian, Polish and Old Church Slavonic (the Slavic equivalent of Latin). I also inserted Lithuanian into the group there, partly because the Lithuanians of my acquaintance usually take a pretty dim view of being grouped with the Slavs (they're Balts), and partly because Lithuanians (and neighbouring Latvians) are the IE version of the coelacanth. Language change just doesn't seem to have appealed to them from roughly the same era as Sanskrit onwards, making them lots of fun for the philologically-inclined. But I digress (more than usual).

The thing is, adding the other two corners to the each language group is nowhere near as much work as the first one was. You find that instead of starting from scratch with each new language, you can flick switches on what you already know and slot it into the new one. Learning the grammar of Italian, for instance, if you've got French, is largely working out how to turn your French into Italian forms. So avoir (have) goes j'ai, tu as, il a in French, and in Italian avere goes io ho, tu hai, lui ha. (Actually, you don't need the personal pronouns in Italian - this linguistic switch is called being pro-drop). I also get the feeling that the fact that English has branched so far away from the other Germanic languages makes us overestimate the distance between members of the same branch in general. (Might also explain our reticence to class Scots as a separate language, if we're going on English vs German as our benchmark!) 

School's Out Forever [link]

Another thing that I think puts people off is their memories of enforced languages at school. I've already pontificated on the difference between child- and adult-level learning, but in case you missed it or don't have the strength to look at it again, my idea is that learning stuff voluntarily as an adult is in a different league to learning as a child. Your increased attention span, enthusiasm and access to materials (if you grew up before the Internet was properly a thing, which I'm hoping for the sake of my self-image is the case) mean your bored, school-age self being force-fed verb tables doesn't stand a chance.

Do you have an interest? Look at your language's Wikipedia pages on the subject. Browse news articles and blogs. Hook up with some native speakers, online or in person via stuff like Couchsurfing or Facebook. Do language exchanges - if you have native or near native-level English (which I imagine you must do to persevere through this lot), you're made for life as far as languages to teach people go. Everyone wants to improve their English: talk in English for an hour, and in return talk in your native's language for an hour afterwards. That way, you're both getting roughly the same out of the experience. Also, having an agreed-upon time when you do your Talking In Each Other's Native Languages means that you won't need to bug each other with language questions at other times - which, should you have any kind of interaction with your exchange partner at all outside of your sessions, should be a weight off the nerves of everyone involved.

Depending on how niche your language is, you can probably find a fair amount of free stuff online just devoted to teaching people your language. Why? People love sharing. A thing my mum told me as an awkward preteen about making conversation was this: People love talking about themselves. Sharing the intricacies of your own language and culture to a wider audience is wonderful - I love telling people about the North and my relation to it, just as Harmut clearly loves telling people about German and Germany on his ace language pages. (This and others are on my list of useful online language resources, by the way, so if you know any good ones please let me know - I plan to write some introductory stuff myself.)

A Hero with a Thousand Faces [link]

I'm sure you’re happy that speaking a particular language is a perfectible skill. You can get better at it. But you know what? So is learning a new language, full stop. As I've gone through the motions of acquainting myself with each new language, I've noticed that the same steps keep appearing:

New Language Checklist

1. Work out what sounds are present in the language, and how they interact.
2. Work out how the sounds are written down.
3. Become familiar with the most common forms - greetings, a general idea of how words are used, common irregular words, common vocabulary (the last two overlap).
4. Gradually widen the core to include more vocabulary and more nuance, the more specific nuts and bolts of grammar and usage.

(Compare it to learning new instruments - there's only so many chords and scales that people use, you just need to learn how to produce them. And if it's an instrument in the same family as one you already know, it's all the easier. Not instantaneous mastery, but a good leg up.)

The concept that Chomsky and co. put forward is that people are fundamentally all saying the same sorts of things - they just express them differently. We are united by our humanity - like many great theoretical conclusions, you could have asked anyone in the street and they'd probably have told you exactly the same thing. People on the opposite side of the world from you are interested in having enough to eat and a place to sleep, in looking after their families and making something of their lives. They have the same size and shape brain, a similar pair of eyes and lungs and kidneys. Their larynges contract and vibrate columns of air just like yours, and their ears receive airborne packets of information as yours do. Their voices and brains and minds make different use of the same raw materials, but it would be a poorer world if we required everyone to talk, think and dream in exactly the same way as we do. And with modern technology, they are no longer even a single world away from you. We live in exciting times - here's hoping we don't screw it up.

The Twain Meet [link]

Let's take English and Mandarin as examples of languages that are traditionally thought to be distant and difficult to learn for each other's native speakers. Like most Chinese languages and others nearby, Mandarin has lexical tone - this means that when you learn a word, you have to learn which of four tones it has (five if you include the unmarked neutral tone). English speakers also make use of tone, but to express intonation.

The intonation on the word Well in each of the following phrases (in my UK English, at least) roughly approximates each of the four tones:

1.	Weeeeell, I dunno, it's a fairly big favour...	("high level" mā)
2.	Well? What did she say?	("rising" má)
3.	Well?! Are you going to open it, then?	("dipping" mǎ)
4.	Well! If that's how it is, then I quit!	("high-falling" mà)

(Also like music, tone contours are mapped out on a five-point scale - this coincides with the musical idea that the pentatonic scale is the natural range of the human voice, used as it is in most folk songs and guitar solos.)

Mandarin and the other Chinese languages are also united in their use of Han characters. I grant you, they are tough. You apparently need between 3, and 4,000 characters to be able to get by; but this is ignoring the fact that most characters are made up of a combination of other, simpler characters. There are 214 basic radicals, and a character is usually made up of a radical and a suffix that indicates how it was pronounced in Middle Chinese (unfortunately rarely any indication of how it's pronounced now). So the simplified character 妈 (pinyin mā) means "mother" - it uses the woman radical (on the left) 女 (nǚ) and used to rhyme with 马 (mǎ, horse). In this case we're lucky and the rhyme still works - though the tone is different. You can see how the woman radical is a simplified drawing of a woman - on Memrise they use animations and mnemonics ("The Chinese mother is expected to work like a horse for her family") along with spaced repetition to great success.

But wait a second - isn't English spelling largely based on conventions from Middle English? Doesn't the root in reading and they had read a book come out, even though it doesn't sound the same? I think it's a fair comparison. Basically, when you learn a Mandarin word, just as when you were first learning to write English words, you have to learn the spelling and pronunciation separately. There's also the matter that where Mandarin has lexical tone, English has lexical stress: They import an import has a rare English stress-based minimal pair (pair of items that differ only in one feature, showing that there is a conscious contrast based on the feature) - the Mandarin examples I cited give a tone-based one (mā vs mǎ), which are as about as common as voicing-based minimal pairs in English (like bet vs pet). If you don't know a word's tone in Mandarin, you don't know the word. As English speakers we have to get used to paying attention to diacritics in words (which English seems to be allergic to), but once we know the rules of the game in that regard we're golden. (Mandarin nouns also have associated measure words - a bit like knowing that it's a parliament of rooks, but used all the time, and with a limited number of about 150. A bit like learning a word's gender in other IE languages, but with logic still attached!) There's also the bonus that Mandarin's grammar almost entirely analytic - no learning of irregular verbs required, for instance. It's almost like only having so much room for grammar in their heads people in this case can't be bothered!

That's basically it, really: learning languages is a lot easier if you force yourself to be flexible and open. There will be sounds that you don't normally make (so I recommend getting to grips with IPA shenanigans so you don't get stuck with pasty approximations), and some that you do make, but are said slightly further in or out of your mouth, or with stronger or weaker aspiration, or with a different emphasis style. You need to make yourself listen, and listen carefully. If you've got a tame native speaker to really work over your pronunciation it'll do you no end of good. You have, too, to be humble enough to let yourself be corrected if you make mistakes, which you will do, because that's how you learn a second language. For my money, starting your acquaintance with a new language is like meeting someone new: you should be doing at least as much listening as talking, if not more.

"So How Many Languages Do You Know?" [link]

Christ, I hate that question. When I was living in France and going to a lot of Couchsurfing meet-ups, I found the best answer was, Not enough. I quite like the analogy of languages as people: what would you say if someone said, So how many people do you know? (I warned you you'd be being ventriloquised some more, reader, I'm sorry about that. It's dreadfully rude of me.) I imagine you'd probably ask what kind of "knowing" the person asking you meant. Know enough to have a conversation with? Know enough that you would acknowledge each other in the street? Know enough that you could turn up on their doorstep in the middle of the night utterly distraught, and they would let you in, make you a cup of tea and not ask more questions than you wanted to answer? Know enough to sleep with? Know enough to share your body with? Know enough to fall out and argue with because you both know the other could be better than you're being? Know enough that their heartbeat answers yours, that your lives are intertwined? Know enough that your children will know them as they know you? Know enough that you will be remembered together with them and could wish for nothing more?

I have a casual acquaintance with around fifteen or sixteen languages. I have native English and fluent French and Russian, although not at anything like the level I really should have by this point. About two thirds of the rest I can read more or less with a dictionary and have stilted conversations in; I've found that fluency (in the sense of not needing to translate your thoughts into the language consciously) is a transferable skill - I've had conversations in Ancient Greek, though my reconstructed pitch accent is often met with slight bewilderment.

I've found another useful image is that of planting trees. When you're still getting to grips with the first three steps outlined above, you're digging; when you're onto the fourth step, it's planted, and you're watering; when you achieve fluency (which is nothing like an end point, just as getting to know someone well isn't) your tree is in bloom. If you neglect it, it can wilt, but with more watering and care it should come back into flower. I don't think that you can aim to get to a native or near-native level in much more than one language beyond your own: I find that each new language that I meet makes me appreciate the beauty of my own all the more, the rich soil that I've spent my life with and know as I know myself.

In Summary...

Sorry, did you still want to know which language is objectively the hardest to learn in the world? It's your second language, the one that you slave over in school for hours and hours to what feels like no progress. After that it's more or less plain sailing - so long as you've got the spare afternoons and know how to pitch your mast. Individual languages are only subjectively hard if you’re coming at them from far away and don’t know the ropes.

(Got back on topic in the end, eh... Tune in next week for a slight gear change in a more musical direction. While then!)

On My Beef With Eye Dialect (Part Two of Two)

(Welcome back to my beef with eye dialect. Last week we looked at the English class system, my relation to it, and its oppression of dialect deemed nonstandard, drawing parallels with the oppression of minority languages. This week we'll examine the use of eye dialect more in depth and whether any alternatives are still viable in the case of Broad Yorkshire in particular.

Running abbreviations: RP = Received Pronunciation, SE = Standard English, BY = Broad Yorkshire.

Also, content warning: cited NSFW language)


She Sed Wot [link]

Falling back to our eye dialect... First off, there appear to be two similar but conflicting definitions of what we mean by eye dialect. One is the use of phoneticised spellings of standard pronunciation (as in the heading), the other is using phoneticised spellings to indicate non-standard diction. The two senses combine in their design of othering the speech recorded, and by extension the speaker, often in order to make fun of them. After all, attacking what is different from you is the basis of a lot of lazy humour. You could compare this to someone altering or distorting their voice while telling a joke for a character - the one who gets the teller's natural voice is always the one who is treated with the most respect within the joke, if the teller is not the narrator themselves.

For example, here's a joke about Mancunians (inhabitants of Manchester) and Scousers (inhabitants of Liverpool):

In a maternity unit there is a shortage of labels, so the midwife goes out into the corridor and tells the three new fathers (a Manc, a Scouser and a Nigerian) there that they'll have to go in and pick up out their children by family resemblance.

The Manc goes in first, and comes out with a baby. The baby's black. The Nigerian guy says, "Excuse me, mate, I think that baby's mine." The Manc says, "Sorry, man, I didn't want to take any chances - one of them's a Scouser!"

When I heard that joke, the person telling it did an approximation of a Mancunian accent on the last line - that's part of the joke. The Nigerian man's line they delivered in their natural speaking voice, the same as the rest of the narration. He's a straight man, the voice of reason, the one we agree with. We're meant to laugh at the Mancunian (and by extension the Liverpudlian as well). (It's important not to discount potential racism informing the person (who wasn't a person of colour) deciding not to do an impression of a Nigerian person, but I think this sympathetic straight-man aspect is also decisive.)

We might suggest the same with eye dialect: you don't write in eye dialect yourself; to do so would be a sign that you aren't educated (and thus are unable to make the distinction). Eye dialect becomes a way to mark a character's speech and thereby thoughts as substandard and open to derision. Dickens (never afraid to stoop for a cheap laugh) does this all the time with his working class characters; any number of butcherings of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) in white authors' works throughout American history have served a similar purpose.

An interesting case relating to BY is in Barry Hines' novel A Kestrel for a Knave (set in Barnsley). Throughout the novel the working class characters' dialogue is written in dialect (Billy says Alarm's gone off tha knows, and Gi'o'er! That hurts! [short for give over, meaning stop it]), the more well-to-do characters (and the narrator) speaking SE. In the Penguin Modern Classics afterword, when talking about adapting the book for the film Kes, Hines says that he wrote the script entirely in SE, and the cast translated it back into BY for filming. He also mentions that he regrets writing with dialect and would rather the dialogue were all in SE.

These two details, I feel, reinforce the interpretation of eye dialect (or in Hines' case, of written dialect at all) as othering by its very nature - the writer and the cast, both speakers of BY, have no need of it; so we are left to assume that the inclusion of the novel's dialect is for the benefit of outsiders not familiar with BY, even though it seems (in its author's eyes) to demean the characters who speak it.

Pure Written Dialect [link]

I think Hines' discomfort with the idea of written dialect is telling. English other than SE is stigmatised to the extent that it is denied the legitimacy of being written down even by its native speakers. To non-linguists, "accent" and "dialect" are things that happen to other people - if you have an accent, or, worse, speak in dialect, it is a mark of being uneducated. Linguists point out in vain that it is impossible not to have an accent or not speak in a dialect, because these terms have been co-opted into the oppressive narrative of aggressive linguistic normativity. For the record, accents differ on how words are pronounced, and dialects differ in terms of words and constructions used. The line between isn't always very definite, but it has been observed that in the face of increased social and popular mobility the traditional dialects of UK English have tended to be replaced by more-or-less SE spoken with a particular accent. This coincides with the far end of my mixed dialect continuum outlined above. I would also argue that the demotion of dialects to "accents" is a common, self-fulfilling weapon in their erasure.

It doesn't have to be like this, though. It is famously said that the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy - just like the dividing line between different species of the same genus becomes harder to see the closer you look, at what point a dialect becomes a separate language has historically been more a matter of politics than of taxonomy. The different "dialects" of Modern Arabic and Chinese are divergent enough that they are often unofficially termed separate languages; the Romance and Nordic languages are close enough that their individual languages can be classified as different points on a dialect continuum. As the usual rough test for two creatures being of the same species is whether they can interbreed successfully, so the rule of thumb for the dialect/language split is whether two candidates are mutually intelligible, and to what degree.

Take Scots. Debate rages over whether it is a dialect of English or its own language, closely related to English but separate, in the manner of Norwegian's relation to Swedish. As I described above for BY, the situation is complicated by the imposition of SE on the pure form - many Scots themselves appear to consider the language merely substandard English. But thanks to the existence of a literary tradition dating from the Middle Ages and including writers such as Robert Burns there is an established written form of Scots.

Here's the penultimate stanza of Burns' To a Mouse (of which the third and fourth lines have become proverbial in SE) with an SE translation:

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!

But little Mouse, you are not alone, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy!

There are several features that distinguish the Scots original from the English: there are words that are found in archaic SE (thou art, thy, nought), as well as ones that have no direct equivalent in SE (lane, Gang aft agley). There are words that do exist in SE, but that have more consonants than the Scots versions (o', an', lea'e) - in this case the apostrophe is called an apologetic apostrophe, as it is apologising for Scots' divergence. Since the 20th century it is no longer used, so for instance in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting we get passages like Renton's analysis of Jean-Claude Van Damme films from the opening chapter:

As happens in such movies, they started oaf wi an obligatory dramatic opening. Then the next phase ay the picture involved building up the tension through introducing the dastardly villain and sticking the weak plot thegither. Any minute now though, auld Jean–Claude's ready tae git doon tae some serious swedgin. – Rents. Ah've goat tae see Mother Superior, Sick Boy gasped, shaking his heid.

(It's worth noting that some Scots purists condemn Irvine Welsh's writing as hopelessly Anglicised. It's noticeable that the very literate Renton frequently switches between SE and Scots forms - like and here, elsewhere realised as n.)

We can tell from the rhyme scheme in the Burns poem (men rhyming with vain and pain etc.) that even the words that exist in SE and are written exactly the same aren't necessarily pronounced the same. I think this is a key point - in a pure dialect, there is no need to mark consistent pronunciations if they differ from another, because the written form is meant to be read without reference to it.

Writing Tyke [link]

Let's go further with that. There's a lot of dialectal variation within Yorkshire, but around Sheffield (dialectally West Yorkshire), where my family are from, the vowel in goat (using John Wells' lexical set) varies between something like [o:] (like a Spanish o, but long) and [ow] (quite Sheffield - if you've ever heard Sean Bean say O2 you'll recognise the elongated vowel sounds we tend to come out with). I tend towards the latter. Regardless, the underlying phoneme that stays the same across different words in the goat set (old, poke, over etc.) and so wouldn't need to be represented by a different spelling in pure dialectal writing. If it is spelt out somehow (like eauw or something for the latter) it becomes clear that we are in eye dialect territory - a difference is being marked from a standard.

Another example would be the vowel in strut. In Yorkshire it's [ʊ], which is the same as the vowel in put (and Wells' foot set, though in many parts of the Yorkshire and the North in general that has [u:], the same vowel as goose). People trying to parody a Northern accent often write things like "fookin'" to indicate /'fʊkin/ (where they themselves would probably say /'fʌkiŋ/), though to me (and people who pronounce Luke and look similarly) that looks like it should be read /'fu:kin/. (This was, by the by, the point that came up in the conversation that sparked this whole rumination.) Drawing the attention of people gormless enough to do this sort of thing to that can earn accusations of being "chippy" (i.e. having a chip on your shoulder), because it's apparently unreasonable to be angry at the eradication of your culture being used as a badly-informed joke.

Anyway. There are features of BY that don't exist in SE, though: the most famous is probably definite article reduction, where the is reduced to a glottal stop, traditionally spelt t' (A were walkin down t'road). There are other reduced forms that don't exist in SE like dun't for doesn't (It dun't matter) and me for my (A've lost me phone again). In pure BY the second person singular pronoun forms are still used (thou realised as tha, thy reducing to thi like me and taking third person singular endings), the reflexive -self of SE is met with forms in -sen (If ever tha does owt for nowt, do it for thisen), and while is used where SE has until (She's workin while five; occasionally causing quite a bit of of confusion), amongst other features.

It's important to note that features such as mesen and gang (from the Burns) are not corruptions of SE forms – they are different forms that have survived from Old English, often longer than their equivalents in SE - take nowt (pronounced /nawt/ most places, but /nowt/ round Sheffield), continuing archaic SE naught, or tha continuing thou. If you’re familiar with German you might recognise  features in Mousie (Mäuschen) and gang (sie ist gegangen). A good example is the present participle: SE playing, BY laikin (same root as LEGO [laik good]). The Old English form was closer to the German spielend – the generalisation of the noun-forming –ing (German –ung) is a hypercorrection that does not cross into most pure dialects.

In any potential pure written BY standard, a decision would have to be made to what level to phoneticise the spelling. We can follow Scots in ignoring sounds that are present in SE but absent in BY (so ow right at the beginning of the first half for SE how, goin for SE going); spelling the equivalent of SE I as A might be accepted (we could argue SE I is a regular pronunciation of the price vowel, so pure BY should be allowed to regularise it to the trap vowel), but the suggestion (as some BY writers have done) of spelling the equivalent of SE weak to and for as ter and fer is more contentious. Do we represent all weak forms in spelling as a rule? To is already an exceptional pronunciation (it doesn't rhyme with toe, after all), but weak for is unresolved. Incidentally, the question of how representative to make an orthography (and whether to make a new breakaway set more representative of reduction) is an established pattern with the likes of Belarusian as compared to Russian.

A Sailed Ship? [link]

All this is really, though, just idle speculation. If BY was to have its own literary tradition (beyond being othered as the speech of uneducated characters), the time to establish it was at the very latest the beginning of the last century. The influence of SE has pulled us too far along the gradient, I fear, for a pure BY to be able to be freestanding. While local pride has grown stronger with the destigmatisation of "regional accents", I very much doubt that there is enough of a foundation left to build on; the pure dialect has to all intents and purposes been erased, just as was desired. In the 19th century nationalising drive many previously minor Slavic languages delved into medieval texts to reclaim words that were definitely not Russian loans, and people began to use them again, but I don't imagine that a parallel situation could ever really arise now that our society seems (with such incredibly positive results, and which I completely support in other regards) to tend towards the communal rather than the individualising. I would love to be proved wrong, of course - though as I'm not a native speaker of pure BY it's out of my hands.

That's the thing that really gets me about eye dialect - it's waving the possibility of having a proper non-Standard literary tradition in the non-Standard speaker's face, and then blowing your nose on it. It's a disgusting distortion of the written word, which used right could be brilliant.

(So there you have it. Join us next week for my answer to a frequently-asked linguistic question - which is the hardest language in the world to learn?)

On My Beef With Eye Dialect (Part One of Two)

(This next one is a two-parter because it's quite long. I also think there's at least some natural division between the first and second halves: in this first part I discuss English social class and its relation to dialect, my slightly complicated status in that regard, and how languages/dialects deemed non-standard are oppressed.)

Now'en, ow yer goin? Or rather, Hi, how are you all? I found myself reflecting on eye dialect recently when it briefly came up in a conversation. (As one of those boringly overeducated people, I find most conversations involving me inevitably tend back to linguistics. Well, when all you've got is a hammer...)

So as it turns out, there are lots of things that I find interesting associated with that particular topic! (Allow me to subject you to all of them in short order...) On a more serious note, it's an interesting jumping-off point to explore my slightly odd but by no means unprecedented class/linguistic status, in the hope that (as I suspect may become more common in the future) there are other people who newly find themselves in a similar position and are wondering what to do about it, and to explore the concept of writing down dialect in general.

Ideas Above One's Station [link]

Here's the deal. Historically in English society (i.e. very roughly from the Reformation to the 19th century), the class division has been Working/Middle/Upper class: the Upper class was the aristocracy (who owned their land and money by inheritance and didn't have to work for or at either of them - aka Old Money), the Middle class was the educated professionals (who had land and money through working for it - aka New Money), and the Working class was the rest of the population (who had neither land, money nor (historically) education, and would work apprenticed trades for little money). Lots of comment has been passed on this three-part division; I'm no specialist on the matter, though if you're interested in an informative observational comic slant on it I'd recommend Kate Fox's Watching the English.

Anyway. Social mobility in this classic framework (let's fix it at, say, the Victorian era to make it sound less hand-wavey) is limited: you need a title to be an aristocrat, and you need an education to be middle class. You can, of course, buy a title (if you're middle class to start with), but you'll be sniffed at as New Money for a few generations; similarly, if a person from the working class suddenly comes into money (the stereotype goes), their lack of social graces and restraint with their money will mark them out as another type of New Money; their offspring (or their offspring's offspring), brought up and educated in a middle class manner, will in all likelihood be accepted, provided they are suitably reticent about their parents' (or grandparents') background.

These old school social climbers have it particularly tough - they'll be looked down upon by the members of the class they want to join, but that pales in comparison to how they'll be despised by the class they're trying to leave behind. It's not hard to imagine why - the people they've grown up with, who have supported and looked after them, are now made to feel as if they aren't good enough, or that the climber thinks that they are better than them. Well into the 20th century "class traitor" seems to have been a stinging insult.

Then, most noticeably starting around the 1960s, things changed. To my mind the most influential factor seems to be the two World Wars fought within fifty years, at devastating cost to the British Empire and all that it encompassed. Huge sections of the adult male population were killed, leaving large vacuums that society instinctively moved to fill. The Old Guard try to stand against the changes as best they can, but they are so depleted, and the post-War economic changes have put enough of the money into the hands of the other classes, that once the children born after 1945 (the Baby Boomers) become a societal force there is little that they can do. Along with increased immigration making the population more culturally diverse as well, English and British society is commonly referred to currently as being in an egalitarian age - indeed, some even talk about being persecuted for being "too posh", sometimes calling this "reverse snobbery". Others claim that we now live in a classless society.

Talking Proper, Like What I Do [link]

How does this relate to eye dialect? I'm getting there. One of the most concentrated class indicators is the use of language. You can probably come up with plenty of examples yourself of words, constructions or pronunciations that are considered "colloquial", "uneducated" or "vulgar". In linguistics this is called proscribed usage (not to be confused with prescribed usage, which is the opposite!). With my Social Justice hat on, I would say that adherence to arbitrary linguistic norms is used as a tool of class oppression; you can find pages and pages of exposition on why (for instance) splitting infinitives or ending a sentence with a preposition or any number of pedantic bugbears are aesthetically, logically or morally wrong, but the truth is there is literally no inherent superiority in any one linguistic construct, and please do quote me on that.

The only fundamental requirement of language as a means of communication is that each party understand what the other is saying. As people like Jakobson explore, there are many more layers communicated in a phrase than what each word literally means in a dictionary (think tone of voice, colloquial vs. non-colloquial (aka register), references to shared culture, poetic quality of the phrase itself etc.) - this is why formal, written English is more long-winded than conversational English: we've only got twenty-six letters and about twelve punctuation marks to get our point across unambiguously, compared to the full range and expressive power of the human voice (not to mention non-verbal cues). Of course, once democratisation via the Internet gets involved, the collective genius of crowd-sourcing comes up with emoticons, but that's another story.

But anyway, the idea of language use as class marker is pervasive - it's commonly cited as the most enduring way to tell someone's class. The educated middle classes are supposed to speak RP (Received Pronunciation, aka BBC English or what most people overseas think of as "a British accent"), the upper classes a distinctively archaic strain of it (sometimes termed U RP, presumably after Nancy Mitford's beloved U and non-U word lists), and the working classes any other local dialect, referred to collectively and somewhat pejoratively as "regional accents". Anyone jumping a class is expected to acquire the native accent/dialect; hence adopting RP is sometimes knocked as "talking posh".

Linguistically, RP can be called the prestige dialect of UK English - it is seen as the standard from which other varieties deviate. Under the language-as-communication idea I set out a minute ago you can see why a standard dialect is needed - otherwise speakers of divergent dialects won't be able to understand each other. This is more or less indeed how standard written English emerged; the problem comes (from an anti-classist perspective) when the standard is valorised over other dialects.

Once-A-Nighters [link]

Here's where I come in. As you can probably tell from my writing style, I've had quite a Classical education, all things considered. I also speak with a Yorkshire accent despite currently being based in the South for my studies, an accent and idiom that I've chosen to retain despite the faint expectation for me to acquire RP. As it happens, at my secondary school (also in the South) I did adopt RP, mainly in a bid to avoid drawing attention to myself, but also to see if I could. At home I would revert to a Yorkshire accent. While at school I could switch accents in the same sentence; I haven't bothered with RP for a few years now, though when showing some non-native friends how to speak RP I found it came back easily enough.

Where I fit into the classical English class system is unclear. By education I'm clearly middle-middle or upper-middle class (going by Kate Fox's subdivisions), but by accent and (apparently) demeanour I identify with my family and my home, broadly working class. In 19th century Russian society there was a group known as the raznochíntsy (singular razonchínets, acute marks stress, pronunciation). The name comes from the words rázny (different) and chin (class, rank), so means something like "other-classers" - the heading for this section comes from an anecdote my Russian tutor told me about one of his classmates coming across the word and reading it not as razno-chinets but raz-nochinets (raz means "once", noch' means "night"), and coming up with the above. Anyway, the raznochintsy were the sons of peasants made good - so they were educated, but not part of the nobility (Russians haven't historically really ever had a middle class). This made them a societal force to be reckoned with because they had the intellectual clout to make themselves heard without the crippling guilt the more progressive nobles inherited. Many ended up in Siberia for their troubles (link to the Decembrists for an example of how welcome dissent was), though not before raising the intellectual fervour that ended with the Revolution.

On a Slide Rule [link]

I find the term quite attractive: I have an education, but I refuse to allow that to negate my Northernness. I am quite capable of speaking RP, but I will not enunciate for your benefit, which is a coded classist way of delegitimising speech you deem nonstandard. (Though if you legitimately didn't hear what I said I'll be happy to repeat it for you.)

I can imagine that some people, on reading the above, would argue that I belong unquestionably to the middle class and am intellectualising my denial. To which I would say, that's pretty damn rude. I personally say that someone's identity is their decision, and people should respect that, even if they would not identify similarly themselves and can't understand why someone would want to.

I choose instead to conceptualise it like so: my identity does not reduce to a single point without further reference. There are people who can describe themselves as Yorkshire without further qualification and feel that that describes them fully, just as there are people who can describe themselves as from a part of London, or on a broader level as English, British, Irish or whatever. I, however, see myself as a point on a line between Yorkshire/working class and middle class. It took me a long time and a lot of distress, but I have come to feel comfortable where I am, and feel no immediate need to justify (in the typographical or rhetorical sense) to either end.

(I should probably mention here that I'm not entirely of English blood; to my mind this doesn't factor overmuch into my cultural and linguistic identity, though.)

Impure Dialect [link]

My idiolect (personal usage), therefore, falls on a similar line between Standard English/RP (the former henceforth SE) and Broad Yorkshire (aka Tyke, likewise BY). Historically (and rarely nowadays in rural and deprived areas) there exist speakers of BY who speak without an awareness of the forms of SE - they are typified as "uneducated", because of the aforementioned equation of the standard/prestige dialect with education.

It is the defining characteristic of educated, non-Standard speakers' idiolect that their diction is informed by two points, not by one. In parallel with my scale of identity above, there is the "pure" dialect at one end, and the standard at the other. Where there is a divergence between pure and standard, the mixed speaker will have to choose one form or another. This is a well-studied phenomenon in linguistics known as code-switching, often examined in bilingual children for maximal differentiation; the choice seems to come down in bilinguals to which language a concept is felt to be easier to express in, or to which language the concept itself is associated with. If you have learnt about a topic in your second language, it may be easier to switch to the second language to discuss the topic - you may not even know the relevant terminology in your first language, even though it is usually the more "natural" to you.

For mixed dialect speakers this choice is coloured by class. Regardless of whether a construct that exists in the pure dialect feels more appropriate in context, the standard form will be preferred. This is a concern quite apart from whether the listener will understand the pure form - if this would not be the case, the choice is straightforward. (Or the pure form can be given glossed.) It must be stressed that this is also separate from concerns of colloquial/non-colloquial register - instances of native pure speakers choosing standard forms over stigmatised pure forms in speech abound, and besides, beyond the concept of possible inappropriate register, colloquial standard usage is rarely stigmatised (outside of the most soullessly pedantic circles, at least). That a dialect is not permitted to exist except for in negative reference to a standard is the essence of its linguistic oppression.

What I contend is the oppression of a dialect bears comparison to the phenomenon of linguicide: the government of a country attempts to exterminate a minority language and replace it with the standard language. You can see the appalling treatment of Insular Celtic speakers by the British and French governments (and that of Native American languages by the nascent United States, or Aboriginal languages in Australia, and the list sadly goes on) as examples of this enforced cultural assimilation; while frequently enforced top-down by state education (in which children speaking the "wrong" language are beaten, for instance), it also, more pervasively, takes root from the bottom up when native speakers tragically see no use in teaching their native language to their children, thereby depriving it of vital new life and them of their cultural heritage.

(And on that cheery note we'll pause. Join us next week for the concluding half, in which I discuss how eye dialect fits into this framework by telling a Manc joke (aw yiss), how dialects/languages can use written tradition to legitimise their way from this linguistic oppression (with reference to Scots), and whether Broad Yorkshire in particular can ever expect to get one.)