Misunderstanding "I'll give you a ring"💍, linguistics professor looking TIGHT 😎, this newsletter takes a dub 🏆

Welcome to the latest instalment of English in Progress, the newsletter that keeps you updated on the English language. Fresh in your inbox every first Friday of the month. (Ish!)

My name is Heddwen Newton. I am a translator and English teacher and for the past weeks have been a run-after-small-children-er as my young family has been enjoying the summer break.

No AI was used in the writing of this email newsletter. Every article was selected, read and summarised by a human being, namely me.

Best of the month

Cultural and language misunderstandings in Ireland

A French woman in Ireland tells of the misunderstandings she faced when first confronted with Irish English and Irish culture, including a rather charming recounting of the time she thought an Irish lad proposed to her just after they met. “We talked about our daily lives and aspirations, whispered sweet nothings, and exchanged our mobile numbers. This is when he rather confidently said to me: "Sound. I'll give you a ring, so." "(I’ll give you a ring = I’ll give you a phone call. Not a wedding ring.) What makes the story extra satisfying is that they did indeed get married many years later.

Reading time: 4 minutes / RTE (Ireland)

Why Barbenheimer is such a good portmanteau

Word blends, or “portmanteau words”, are words that take two meanings and pack them into one. “Motel” is a word blend of motor and hotel; “brunch” is a blend of breakfast and lunch; and so on. This article discusses the linguistics behind why Barbenheimer sunds so much better than “Oppenharbie.”

Reading time: 3 minutes / New York Times (USA)

A genderless pronoun from Baltimore

In the Black English of younger Black people in Baltimore a new gender-neutral pronoun arose in the 2000s. The pronoun is “yo.” Not “you,” but “yo.” Not “yo” in place of “your,” as in “yo books.” Not “yo” as in “Yo! I’m over here!” And not “yo” as in the one appended after a sentence to solicit agreement: “That sure was loud, yo!” This “yo” is a straightforward, gender-neutral third-person pronoun: “Yo was tuckin’ in his shirt.” John McWhorter makes the point that things like this mean non-standard varieties of English should be cherished and indeed looked up to.

Reading time: 3 minutes / New York Times via DT Next (USA)

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Gen-Z slang of the month

Here are some of my favourite new-ish slang words. Slang is difficult to track. I currently make use of “the craziest Gen Z slang terms you ever heard” type lists on Buzzfeed-type platforms. If anyone knows of a better source, please let me know! (Click on the word to see where I got it from.)

to be ratio-ed - when a reply to a post on social media gets more likes than the original post, that original post was ratio-ed (On Urban Dictionary since 2020)

dub (take a dub, get a dub, earn a dub) - win, be successful. Short for double-u, the text response for “win” (On Urban Dictionary since 2016)

L (take an L, such an L, giant L) - to lose, you lost, loser. Used in text and speech when someone fails at something. (On Urban Dictionary since 2009)

purr - saying “purr” is a way to express approval or contentment of something. (On Urban Dictionary in this sense since 2021. I think. Not sure if it is short for “period” (as in “full stop”) or if it refers to the sound a cat makes. I think it used to be the first and now it’s the second?)

to simp - to allow the other person to always get what they want, often used in terms of a relationship (On Urban Dictionary as a verb since 2020)

sneaky link - having a rendez-vous with someone without anyone else knowing (On Urban Dictionary since 2020)

W - text response when something good happens, short for “win” (On Urban Dcitionary since 2009)

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Great classroom reads

The hidden cost of having an accent

A great discussion of accent bias by Valerie Fridland for people who do not know much about it. Also includes tips on how to reduce accent bias in institutional settings.

Reading time: 5 minutes/ Psychology Today (USA)

Which language might take English’ place as the world language?

General predictions point to English remaining the world’s lingua franca for the next decade or so, but what will happen after that? This South-African article could be a good prompt for a class discussion.

Reading time: 6 minutes/ Daily Maverick (South Africa)

Should we avoid phrases that reinforce racist connotations?

This article features recommendations such as avoiding phrases that link negativity with blackness and positivity with whiteness like “black mood”, “dark times” or “whiter than white”. Another example: avoid “wealthy elite” and rather say “the powerful few” as the former phrase can trigger antisemitism and feed the conspiracy theories of far-right white nationalists. A possible class discussion prompt for very brave English teachers.

Reading time: 3 minutes / The Guardian (UK)

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World Englishes - vocab

The different varieties of English as spoken all around the world are known to academics as “World Englishes”. In this section, I highlight some words and terms from the richness of the English-speaking world that came to my attention in the past month. Click on the word to get to an article that will usually list more words from the English variety in question.

bazzer - Cork (Ireland) slang for haircut

brick - Georgia (USA) English for time. “I haven’t seen you in a brick.”

catawampus - southern USA English for skewed, diagonal, or not in its proper position

Joe Blake - Australian rhyming slang for snake

to lay out - Californian English for to sunbathe

mans - multicultural London English (UK) for “I”, also “man” or “mandem”; “I almost missed the train, but mans made it anyway”

Noah’s Ark - Australian rhyming slang for shark

pre-funk - Washington (USA) English for “pre-function”, a get-together before leaving for a sports game

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Linguistics and business

Remote work is a lot more popular in English-speaking countries, and nobody knows why

A fun head-scratcher this month: why is remote work so much more popular in English-speaking countries? The article itself points tentatively to performance management culture, but then I’d expect countries like Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands to be higher than they are. A mystery!

Reading time: 3 minutes/ Fortune (USA; archived)

Free tool helps workers decipher office jargon

A new free tool allows workers to anonymously query confusing acronyms and other office jargon. Apparently, 60% of workers around the world say they had to figure out workplace jargon on their own, and 40% say they’ve made a mistake at work because they either misused or misinterpreted workplace jargon. (This is not a paid promotion. I think this tool, and the company’s claim that it is very popular, is linguistically interesting.)

Reading time: 3 minutes / Bloomberg (USA, archived)

Thumbs-up emoji ruled as contractually binding in Canada

Reading time: 2 minutes/ Popular Science (USA)

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Guess the World English

Even if the source country of this famous phrase is known to you, do you know what it actually means? Click to find out, you might be surprised!

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Neologisms of the month

The neologisms below were sourced from the Cambridge Dictionary New Words blog, “field X buzzwords”-type lists, and stuff I noticed myself. My admittedly subjective criterion for words to make the list is that they seemed new and interesting to me. Click on the word for my source.

agrivoltaics - the use of the same piece of land to grow crops and to create energy through solar panels

autobesity - the phenomenon of cars getting bigger and heavier year by year

global boiling - a new term for global warming after heat records were broken in July 2023

gorpcore - fashion trend of wearing outdoorsy clothes normally worn on e.g. a hiking trip (GORP stands for “good old raisins and peanuts,” which is basically a kind of trail mix.)

grumpy staying - the act of remaining in a working environment while displaying a persistent and irritable attitude or disposition. An answer to “quiet quitting”.

Oppenheimer moment - the moment a scientist realises the technology they are developing could destroy the world

RINO - recession in name only, a term used by stockbrokers to convey that the economy is more resilient than projected

synthespian - a computer-generated image of a film actor, a virtual actor (credit to podcast Because Language)

table gown - an expensive tablecloth usually made from shiny or sparkling material and highly decorated

toxic feminity - either stereotypical feminity, with characteristics like meekness, emotionalism, passivity and self-sacrifice OR an inappropriate demonstration of female strength, cunning or privilege

wokefishing - pretending to care more than you actually do about social problems such as racism and inequality in order to attract someone you want to have a romantic relationship with

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World Englishes - articles

UK English in American show Succession

The American show “Succession” features American characters using British words and phrases because the show runner Jesse Armstrong is British, and some actors are from the UK or Australia. Plenty of examples of British and American English in this light-hearted article.

Reading time: 3 minutes/ The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

Miami English should be recognised as an American-English dialect

In Miami, more than 60 years of steady immigration from Spanish-speaking countries have heavily influenced the local English’s vowel system, grammatical structure and lexicon. The result is a version of English that is just as worthy of recognition as other widely accepted dialects.

(Note: this piece features a picture of linguistics professor Phillip M. Carter looking like some kind of cooler-than-cool A-list celebrity rock star.)

Reading time: 5 minutes/ New York Times (USA, archived)

Multicultural Toronto English

University of Toronto professor Derek Denis conducted research with his students and found that the Greater Toronto Area has its own multi-ethnolect: Multicultural Toronto English (MTE).

Reading time: 4 minutes/ U of T news (Canada)

Nagaland in India wants to keep teaching in English

In 2020, India mandated that children should be taught in their mother tongue rather than English until they are at least 11 years old (class 5). However, Nagaland has 17 recognised major Naga tribes speaking their own languages with no officially declared common dialect, and would prefer education to continue in English.

Reading time: 4 minutes/ India Times

Collared shirts or collard shirts?

Arnold Zwicky notes a common spelling mistake, where “collared shirt” becomes “collard shirt”. It strikes me as a mistake that would only happen in the States, as “collard greens” (a type of kale) are not familiar to me as a Brit.

Reading time: 2 minutes/ Arnold Zwicky’s blog (USA)

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Linguistics and society

Twitter, tweeting; X, X-ing?

I do wish I could stop mentioning Elon Musk in this newsletter, but Twitter and tweeting have been amazingly productive additions to the English language, and the fact that he is meddling with this boggles my linguist mind. (Linked article is just a basic one from AP.)

Reading time: 5 minutes / AP (USA)

When slang becomes a form of cultural appropriation

Words like “finna” (meaning “about to”, coming from “fixing to”), “woke” (aware of prejudice), and “cap” (lie or exaggeration) are all instances of African American English. When appropriation happens and credit is not given where it is due, this can lead to forgetting the innovation that comes from the Black community. It’s important to educate ourselves about language origins, and understand what we’re saying and where our words come from.

Reading time: 8 minutes/ Honi Soit (Australia)

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New books

Borrowings in Informal American English

By Małgorzata Kowalczyk. What do 'bimbo,' 'glitch,' 'savvy,' and 'shtick' all have in common? They are all expressions used in informal American English that have been taken from other languages. This pioneering book provides a comprehensive description of borrowings, based on a large database of citations from thousands of contemporary sources, including the press, film, and TV.

Linguistic Fingerprints: How Language Creates and Reveals Identity

We divulge all sorts of information about ourselves and our identity through language. Level of education, gender, age, and even aspects of our personality can all be reliably determined by our vocabulary and grammar. To those who know what to look for, we give ourselves away every time we open our mouths or tap on a keyboard. But how unique is a person's linguistic identity? Can language be used to identify a specific person? To identify--or to exonerate--a murder suspect? According to author Roger J. Kreuz the answer to all these questions is yes.

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Academia

Warning: many links lead directly to a PDF

We don’t say “Denmark English”, so why do we say “China English”?

This article attempts to answer scientifically a question which I would personally have put down to just one of those funny quirks of English. Why doe we usually use the adjective of a country to refer to the variant of English spoken there (Danish English, American English), but then in some rare cases we don’t (Botswana English, Fiji English, China English). (And of course poor New Zealand, which just doesn’t have an adjective!) I love the tables, and I agree with the author that we should start saying “Chinese English”. (And New Zealand needs to get itself an adjective.)

46 teams of researchers were asked to answer the same research question in human speech production

46 teams of speech researchers were asked to analyse speech production data to answer the same research question. Teams had to decide on measuring (a) where (b) how and (c) what in the speech signal, and then (d) statistically analyse the extracted measurements. There were 2860 different approaches (that's a conservative estimate), the variation could not be predicted by researchers’ beliefs or experience.

English learners should be made aware of Global Englishes

Gareth Humphreys of Sojo University, Japan, makes the point that too many English-as-a-foreign-language courses still focus on American or British English and do not make learners aware of World Englishes or English as a Lingua Franca.

A Global Englishes perspective on written corrective feedback

Discusses the problems associated with Written Corrective Feedback on work by English-as-a-foreign-language students from a Global Englishes perspective and suggest broadening the notion by removing the ‘corrective’ emphasis to encompass a focus on language use

A spirited thesis on English in India

This master’s thesis by a design student (?) about English in India from a postcolonial perspective is surprisingly good and worth a read if you want to feel fired up for change.

English words of Korean origin

This study offers an overview of contemporary translingual English words derived from Korean such as skinship, fighting, chimaek, and examines their unique characteristics.

Japanese academics’ perspectives on the benefits and drawbacks of writing and publishing in English

Most influential academic journals are published in English, and therefore a mastery of the language is necessary to ensure engagement with the international scientific community. There is debate in the literature as to whether the dominance of English might lead to the marginalization of contributions from academics for whom English is a second language. However, the 11 Japanese academics interviewed for this article do not, on the whole, believe that current standards need to be revisited.

The choice between “they were hit” and “they got hit” does not depend on your dialect, but on the semantics of the sentence

The choice between “they were hit” vs. “they got hit” and “they were interested” vs “they got interested” is called the BE:GET-passive alternation. On the basis of the International Corpus of English, this is the first investigation to use mixed modelling for this passive alternation in world Englishes. Overall, the findings reveal that regional differences are far less important than language-internal constraints; “get” tends to be used more when the subject is human, and “be” when the subject is inanimate, no matter where the speaker is from.

The choice between “will” and “be going to” to mark future tense does not depend on your dialect, but on if you are speaking or writing

This paper presents the first large-scale multivariate analysis of future-time reference variation in eight different world Englishes. Will maintains its strongest foothold in written English, in declarative sentences, main clauses (particularly apodoses), with third-person and particularly inanimate subjects. Be going to, by contrast, is particularly favored in spoken English, in interrogative sentences, subordinate clauses and protases, and with first- and second-person subjects.

Pronunciation features of Polish English: errors or features of a new variety?

Some pronunciation features diverging from the established norm are not necessarily mistakes – they can be indicators of language change in progress, signs of a new variety. As language learners become more proficient, they become language users – users of a given variety. This study aimed to analyse the phonetic features of Polish English as understood to be a World English variety. The study begs the question: where is the line between an error in pronunciation and a feature of a new language variety? What should teachers correct and what should they accept? (This one was extra fun for me because I made just about the same case in my master’s thesis on Dutch English :-) )

English teachers in the MENA region are ready for change

The MENA region (Middle East and Northern Africa) needs to update its English teaching to be ready for the fourth industrial revolution (big societal change due to advances in technology and AI). Findings show that teachers are ready and willing, but often working with outdated technology.

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And finally…

If you are currently writing/ reviewing your syllabus for the coming school year, why not direct your students to a very useful monthly newsletter I happen to have heard of that collects and summarises news about English language change and World Englishes? It is free and always will be.

The url to give people is englishinprogress.substack.com

Source: phdcomics.com

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Guess the World English bird hint:

This island nation starts with a J. Answer here.

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