Are linguists leaving Twitter? 🏃🏼♀️ What does "Asian" mean? 🌏 Accents and social mobility in the UK 🧗🏻
Welcome to English in Progress, the bi-weekly newsletter that keeps you updated on the English language. Fresh in your inbox every other Wednesday.
I missed my last publication date due to stomach flu (life with little children involves A LOT of stomach flu), so this issue is going to be longer than usual.
Accents
Research report “Speaking Up” by UK social mobility foundation The Sutton Trust has made waves in the UK due to some of its findings. The BBC has chosen One in four have accents mocked at work as its headline, and The Guardian captioned its piece as Bias against working-class and regional accents has not gone away.
In an unrelated article, Alexander Baratta wrote a piece for The Conversation on why James Bond will probably always have an RP accent.
Just to add some non-UK-English accent content, I’d like to share this amazingly detailed map of American accents and dialects that I recently found. Accessing it via a large screen is advisable!
Minor spat about the word “Asian” in late October
Rishi Sunal is the new Prime Minister of the UK. Many newspapers, mostly UK-based, headlined him as “the first Asian prime minister”, causing this response from Asian-American comedian Ronny Chieng:
The difference between the UK and the US understanding of “Asian” was discussed by Lynne Murphy back in 2006. Murphy is an American linguist in the UK who compares the two English variants professionally. Both she and Ronny Chieng make the point that in UK English, when Asian is used to refer to a person, culture or cuisine, it is most usually referring to someone or something South Asian (i.e. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) whereas in the US, Asian typically refers to people/things from East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.).
A linguist Twitter exodus?
As The Man Without a Plan wreaks havoc on Twitter, many scholars are deciding to leave the birdsite and move to Mastodon, a non-profit social media platform that looks a bit like Twitter from the outside, but is very different on the inside. Mastodon has different servers with different names, that function a bit like the “gmail.com” or “outlook.com” part of an email address. Many linguists are moving to the new server lingo.lol, though some can be found on scholar.social, scicomm.xyz, or on a server that is local to them.
I myself have set up shop @heddwen@lingo.lol, see you there, maybe ;-)
World Englishes at the OED
The influential Oxford English Dictionary has launched a page that serves as a hub for the content and resources related to World Englishes on its site.
This is excellent news, and important, but also fun: you can click through on the resources to see words like “ambo” (ambulance) for Australian English, “sambaza” (to share or send something) for East African English, or “trapo” (a seemingly corrupt politician) in Phillipene English. The entries can be viewed without an OED membership.
New words
Cambridge has observed the following new words, among others:
milestone anxiety - a condition in which someone feels frightened or very worried because they have not achieved the same things in life as other people of the same age
centennial - someone who was born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s
nepo baby - the child of an actor, a musician etc. who achieves success because of their famous parent
wearapy - the activity of wearing particular clothes as a form of therapy, with the clothes chosen to make the wearer feel happy or comforted etc.
GOAT - abbreviation for Greatest Of All Trips: used to refer to or describe the best, most expensive, most adventurous etc. holiday that someone has ever taken
Collins has added to its dictionary, among others:
demisexual - experiencing sexual or romantic attraction to another person only after having formed a deep emotional bond with them
gender non-conforming (GNC) - relating to a person or people who do not conform to the socially and culturally defined norms associated with a specific gender
Word of the Year
Collins Dictionary has proclaimed “permacrisis” to be the Word of the Year 2022. The definition reads “an extended period of instability and insecurity, esp one resulting from a series of catastrophic events”
Other Words of the Year coming soon, watch this space!
Odds and ends
Linguist Elaine Vaughan has written a piece about the characteristics of Irish English, which she studies professionally.
Linguist Ben Zimmer discusses “zombie” as an adjective for the Wall Street Journal (paywall, the first click let me read the article, but it went up at the second time)
This Slate article on the origins of “barefoot and pregnant” taught me the wonderful (or awful, depending on your perspective) British proverb: “Keep her well-shagged and poorly shod and she’ll not wander far.”
The 16th of October was Dictionary Day. Collins Dictionary celebrated with a list of fun words for word-lovers, like “Elucubration” - the act of reading, studying or working intensively by candlelight, particularly on a literary composition
I liked this article on why AI will never fully capture human language. An excerpt:“novel-writing cars and chatbots designed for “natural language processing” simply do not command language at all. Instead, they perform a small subset of language competency—a fact that is often forgotten when the technology media focuses on sensational claims of AI sentience. Language, as it lives and breathes, is far more complicated.”
At the same time, here’s some new AI that can explain any uploaded scientific or scholarly paper in plain English. It’s called “Explainpaper”.
And finally, here’s a good summary of a study that has shown that cognitive research has an English bias, by Rohitha Naraharisetty on The Swaddle
New Books
An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words For How You Feel, From Angst To Zwodder, by Susie Dent
An A to Z list of fun and interesting English words that convey emotions, written for a general public.
Lexicographer Susie Dent is pretty famous in the UK and beyond for appearing in the trivia game show “Countdown” and the spin-off comedy game show “8 out of 10 cats does Countdown”. (You can watch clips on YouTube, but beware of the comedy timesink!) Her podcast on lexicography and etymology “Something Rhymes with Purple” is popular across the globe, and if you didn’t feel bad for not knowing her yet, she also has a whopping 1.1 million followers on Twitter.
The Art of Verbal Warfare, by Rik Smits
“A funny and fascinating exploration of our reliance upon swear words, insults, and the artfully placed expletive” This TLS reviewer found the book a bit too long and unfocused, but full of interesting anecdotes and titbits.
Why Is This a Question? Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask, by Paul Anthony Jones
Writer and language blogger Paul Anthony Jones, better known on the Twittersphere as Haggard Hawks, has a book out called “Why Is This a Question? Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask”.
Talking in Clichés, The use of Stock Phrases in Discourse and Communication, by Stella Bullo and Derek Bousfield
An academic work on the role and nature of clichés in communication and interaction from Cambridge University Press. The author’s blog post would suggest that this book is less dry than other academic works.
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