Who owns English? 🌏 The Irish are calling their mammies "mom" 👩👧👦 AAVE gets the credit it deserves 👏
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.)
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This newsletter gets progressively more academic as you scroll down. Casual readers: stay at the top! Academics: scroll down to get your fix of high-brow linguistics yummies. ;-)
My name is Heddwen Newton. I am a teacher and translator, and… (drumroll please) a podcast guest! Last week was my first-ever appearance on a podcast. The lovely Dan Clayton (EngLangBlog) from podcast Lexis spoke with me about this very newsletter.
I was nervous, and I’m the kind of person who prattles when she is nervous. Also, my already-quite-posh RP accent moves even higher up the poshness scale.
(Excuse me while I go off on a tangent about my accent: I do not come from money. I did not grow up with money. Growing up in the Netherlands, I learned my English from my mother who was 1) from Surrey, 2) born in 1944, and 3) a stickler for grammar and articulation. I dislike my accent and wish I could change it.)
Well, if that doesn’t pique your curiosity enough to listen I don’t know what will! Listen to episode 39 from 37:30 to hear me talk about this newsletter and how I find the articles I feature.
AAVE (African American Vernacular English)
A first look at the upcoming Oxford Dictionary of African American English
Editors and researchers working on a first-of-its-kind dictionary of African American English have given a status update on the project. It is not simply about the words that appear in letters, books, poems and lyrics. It is also about the words that morphed into other pronunciations and evolved to have a veiled meaning, for the safety of Black people. Ten entries included in article.
Reading time: 6 minutes / New York Times (USA, archived)
“Gen Z slang” often originated as AAVE
Sage Howard is happy about the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, as it will give Black English its long-overdue props. She hopes it will spell the end of forced code-switching, and would like to remind “non-Black America that we are, and always have been, the linguistic drip.”
Reading time: 2 minutes / Huffington Post (USA)
Professor sees the word she coined for racism + sexism enter the dictionary
Professor Moya Bailey coined the word misogynoir (“misogyny” + “noir) in 2010 and saw it enter the Merriam-Webster dictionary. “On one hand, I feel very proud that I created something that is useful to people, but also really saddened that it has to be used too much. I’m hopeful for the day where people don’t use it.”
Reading time: 2 minutes / Northwestern Now (USA)
California English teacher makes Gen Z dictionary
A California teacher has gone viral on TikTok after he published a “Gen Z term dictionary” featuring phrases such as “no cap,” “baddie” and “getting sturdy.” He later learns that these kinds of terms are almost always derived from African American English, and responds charmingly, saying it is okay to be ignorant, as long as you are willing to learn.
Reading time: 4 minutes / New York Post (USA)
@NYT_first_said words of the month
Here are the words that stood out to me the most from the @NYT_first_said Twitter account, which tweets words when they appear in the New York Times for the very first time.
bafangool - piss off (also spelled as va fangool, from Italian vaffanculo) Used by Italian Americans and made famous by The Sopranos.
mommune - a community of single mothers living together (from mom + commune)
screensavery - of an image that looks like a screensaver (used to describe scenes in the film “The Little Mermaid”)
solomoon - a solo trip just before or after getting married
stroad - a mix between a street and a road (Really, New York Times? As a 99PI listener, this term is old news to me.)
zythophile - a person who loves beer (from Ancient Greek zûthos, barley beer)
Classroom reads
Who owns English?
As English is spoken by more and more non-native speakers, the world is moving away from British and American standards. (EU Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans also recently spoke about this.)
Reading time: 3 minutes / The Economist (UK, archived)
Don’t complain about “like”; it’s fulfilling a function
In early May, Valerie Fridland was still promoting her brilliant book Like, Literally, Dude; Arguing for the Good in Bad English. In this article she speaks specifically about the word “like”. Take a sentence like (hah!) "I worked for, like, 80 hours." You cannot substitute or delete the like and keep the same meaning.
Reading time: 9 minutes / Entrepreneur (USA)
Next-gen 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.)
boujee - people who enjoy wearing fancy clothes, being affluent and wealthy (from bourgeoisie) (earliest Urban Dictionary entry 2006)
high-key - To be the utmost of something (opposite of low-key) (earliest Urban Dictionary entry 2012)
zillennial - young millenials and old Gen Z-ers. Now in their early and mid-twenties. (earliest Urban Dictionary entry 2020)
Also, check out this brilliant graphic I found on Wikipedia:
English varieties interplay
Is American English taking over in Ireland?
More and more Irish people are calling their mammy “mom” and they are “reaching out” to each other via email. Language writer Stan Carey is the voice of reason: “the effect is modest compared with how much people’s language is shaped by their family and peers. We just notice it more when it differs from our own or from traditional norms.”
Reading time: 4 minutes / The Independent (Ireland; archived)
Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British accents?
Young Americans talk about their tendency to adopt a fake British accent when stressed or joking around in this fluff piece from the Guardian which would get a failing grade from any linguistics professor.
Reading time: 5 minutes / The Guardian (USA)
“Have gotten” is becoming more usual in UK English
Traditional UK English says “have got” rather than “have gotten”. In a blog post from March (that I missed last month), the estimable Dr Geoff Lindsey does a great job showing that the American “have gotten” is becoming more usual in British English due to its frequent use online. (Of course, Lynne Murphy had already noted this, but we must also give other linguists a chance, Lynne! This also gives me an opportunity to point to Lindsey’s YouTube channel about accents, it’s brilliant!)
Reading time: 4 minutes / englishspeechservices (UK)
Cambridge neologisms of the month
If the lists above didn’t already do it for you, here are the three neologisms from the weekly Cambridge Dictionary New Words blog that stood out to me the most
danger season - a new way of referring to summer because of the increased likelihood of droughts, wildfires and extreme heat caused by climate change
frolleague - a colleague who becomes a friend
mind gym - a place or club where you can go to do classes and have treatments that improve your mental health
And here’s one from the amazing Nancy Friedman, do check out her website about naming, branding and language
promptography - a portmanteau of prompt—an instruction given by a human to an AI tool—and photography.
World Englishes
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.
ace - British English for “awesome”
a Chinese - British English for a Chinese takeout meal
bottle-o - Australian English for liquor shop
to get down from the car - Miami English for to get out of the car (from Spanish "bajar del carro")
knackered - British English for “exhausted, tired, unable to move”
ned - Scottish English for a young troublemaker or foolish person
to pass out - Indian English for “to graduate”
Academia
Warning: most of the links lead directly to a PDF
Research access to Twitter’s API now costs $42,000 a month
As anybody who has done a linguistics course will tell you, Twitter has been an indispensable resource for linguistic research. Since Twitter decided to end free access to its API in February, researchers have been scrambling to find other options. There have even been reports that Twitter is telling researchers they should delete the data they have already gathered.
Reading time: 7 minutes / The Verge (USA)
New book: Englishes in Africa, edited by Mayowa Akinlotan (full PDF)
"This book is different in that it opens a range of other topics of research that erupt when one thinks ‘from Africa’ and considers Englishes as African languages in all their functions. In this sense it is original and could be considered as seminal in a growing field." —Maarten Mous, Professor of African Linguistics, Leiden University
Practical advice on teaching World Englishes in the English classroom
Micheal J Davies has written an essay on the current realities of English teaching and how to integrate Global English “to dispense with or radically alter curricula may be undesirable, if not impossible in most situations. Instead, a blended curriculum is one that would most likely meet the needs of most students in the EFL classroom.”
PHD thesis: Cohesive Relations across English Varieties; a systemic functional linguistics perspective
Looks at British English, Irish English, Philippine English, and Eastern African English. Conversational registers use more co-reference in all four regional varieties, while academic registers use more lexical cohesion.
English variations in ELT: A case of rural schools in North Kalimantan, Indonesia
Students in rural Indonesia learn mostly American English, but are also taught other English variants without really knowing that this is the case.
‘People are already doing it’: Malaysian English language teachers’ perceptions on translanguaging
Translanguaging, mixing the home language with the classroom language (in this case English) is surreptitiously being done in Malaysian English classrooms.
Discourse markers so and well in Zimbabwean English: A corpus-based comparative analysis
Compared to Zimbabwean English, British English uses “well” more often, and “so” more often to imply result.
Study on Chinese Varieties of English in the Era of Online Video
Looks at China English (not Chinese English!) in online videos. Online video can help the acceptance and dissemination of Chinese varieties of English. Fun fact: “add oil” means “go for it” in China English.
Linguistic landscapes tasks in Global Englishes teacher education
Teaching student teachers about World Englishes using something called “linguistic landscapes”
Broadening horizons in the diachronic and sociolinguistic study of Philippine English with the Twitter Corpus of Philippine Englishes (TCOPE)
This guy created a corpus of 27 million tweets amounting to 135 million words collected from 29 cities across the Philippines. I really hope Twitter won’t ask him to give them all back.
“Contemporary standard” English policy and pseudo-diversity among inner and outer circle assistant language teachers in Japan
Japan, together with most Asian countries, has a preference to hire inner-circle native-speaker English teachers despite the trend towards World Englishes. This paper shows that a new policy initiative has done little to improve things.
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As a non-native speaker who learned British English first, then lived in the US, and who now lives in Japan (where English has strangely become my main language), I can only fully agree with the article asking who owns English.