Posted on

Standardisation of languages – life or death?

Hello and happy summer! (And happy winter to those of you in the Southern Hemisphere!)

In previous posts we’ve thrown around the term ‘standard’, as in Standard English, but we haven’t really gone into what that means. It may seem intuitive to some, but this is actually quite a technical term that is earned through a lengthy process and, as is often the case, it is not awarded easily or to just any variety of a language. Today, I will briefly describe the process of standardising a variety and give you a few thoughts for discussion1. I want to stress that though we will discuss the question, I don’t necessarily think we need to find an answer to whether standardisation is “good” or “bad” – I don’t think either conclusion would be very productive. Still, it’s always good to tug a little bit at the tight boundaries we often put around the thought space reserved for linguistic concepts.

The language bohemian™, at it again.

There are four processes usually involved in the standardisation of a language: selection, elaboration, codification, and acceptance.

Selection

It sure doesn’t start easy. Selection is arguably the most controversial of the processes as this is the step that involves choosing which varieties and forms the standard will be based on. Often in history we find a standard being selected from a prestigious variety, such as the one spoken by the nobility. In modern times this is less comme il faut as nobility don’t have monopoly on literacy and wider communication anymore (thankfully). This can make selection even trickier, though: as the choice of a standard variety becomes more open there is a higher need for sensitivity regarding who is represented by that standard and who isn’t. Selection may still favour an elite group of speakers, even if they may no longer be as clear-cut as a noble class. For example, a standard is often based on the variety spoken in the capital, or the cultural centre, of a nation. The selection of standard forms entails non-selection of others, and these forms are then easily perceived as worse, which affects the speakers of these non-standard forms negatively – this particularly becomes an issue when the standard is selected from a prestigious variety.

In my post about Scots , I briefly mentioned the problem of selection we would face in a standardisation of Scots as a variety which has great variation both within individual speakers and among different speakers (e.g. in terms of lects). Battling this same tricky problem, Standard Basque was mostly constructed from three Basque varieties, mixed with features of others. This standard was initially used mainly by the media and in formal writing with no “real” speakers. However, as more and more previously non-Basque-speaking people in the Basque country started to learn the language, they acquired the standard variety, with the result that this group and their children now speak a variety of Basque which is very similar to the standard.

Elaboration

Standardisation isn’t all a prestigious minefield. A quite fun and creative process of standardisation is elaboration, which involves expanding the language to be appropriate for use in all necessary contexts. This can be done by either adapting or adopting words from other varieties (i.e. other languages or nonstandard lects), by constructing new words using tools (like morphology) from within the variety that’s becoming a standard, or by looking into archaic words from the history of the variety and putting them back into use.

When French was losing its prestige in medieval England, influenced no doubt by the Hundred Years’ War, an effort was initiated to elaborate English. During the Norman Conquest, French had become the language used for formal purposes in England, while English survived as spoken by the common people. This elaboration a few hundred years later involved heavy borrowing of words from French (e.g. ‘government’ and ‘royal’) for use in legal, political, and royal contexts (and from Latin, mainly in medical contexts) – the result was that English could now be used in those situations it previously didn’t have appropriate words for (or where such words had not been in use for centuries)2.

source

Codification

Once selection and elaboration have (mostly) taken place, the process of codification cements the selected standard forms, through, for example, the compilation of dictionaries and grammars. This does not always involve pronunciation, although it can, as it famously does in the British Received Pronunciation (usually just called RP), a modern form of which is still encouraged for use by teachers and other public professions. Codification is the process that ultimately establishes what is correct and what isn’t within the standard – this makes codification the sword of the prescriptivist, meaning that codification is used to argue what the right way to use the language is (y’all know by know what the HLC thinks of prescriptivism).

When forms are codified they are not easily changed, which is why we still see some bizarre spellings in English today.  There are of course not only limitations to codification (as with the spelling example)– there is obvious benefit for communication if we all spell certain things the same way or don’t vary our word choices too much for the same thing or concept. Another benefit, and a big one at that, is that codified varieties are perceived more as real, and this is very important for speakers’ sense of value and identity.


Codification does not a standard make – most of you will know that many varieties have dictionaries without having a standard, Scots being one example. Urban Dictionary is another very good example of codification of non-standard forms.

Acceptance

The final process is surely the lengthiest and perhaps the most difficult to achieve: acceptance. It is crucial that a standard variety receives recognition as such, more especially by officials or other influential speakers but also by the general public. Speakers need to see that there is a use for the standard and that there is a benefit to using it (such as benefiting in social standing or in a career). Generally though, people don’t respond very well to being prescribed language norms, which we have discussed previously, so when standard forms have been selected and codified it does not necessarily lead to people using these forms in their speech (as was initially the case with Standard Basque). Further, if the selection process is done without sensitivity, some groups may feel they have no connection to the standard, sometimes for social or political reasons, and may actively choose to not use it. Again, we find that a sense of identity is significant to us when it comes to language; it is important for us to feel represented by our standard variety.

What’s the use?

Ideally, a standard language could be seen as a way to promote communication within a nation or across several nations. Despite the different varieties of Arabic, for example, Arabic speakers are able to switch to a standard when communicating with each other even if they are from different countries far apart. Likewise, a Scottish person can use Standard English when talking to someone from Australia, while if the same speakers switched back to their local English (or Scots) varieties, they wouldn’t necessarily understand each other. Standardisation certainly eases communication within a country also, and a shared standard variety can provide a sense of shared nationality and culture. There is definitely a point in having a written standard used for our laws, education, politics, and other official purposes which is accessible for everyone. On the other side of this, however, we find a counterforce with speaker communities wanting to preserve their lects and actively opposing using a standard if they can’t identify with it.

So, a thought for discussion I want to leave with you today: Do you think the process of standardisation essentially kills language, or does it it keep it alive? An argument for the first point is that standardisation limits variation3 – this means that when a standard has been established and accepted, the varieties of that standard will naturally start pulling towards the standard as its prestige and use increases. However, standardising is also a way to officially recognise minority varieties, which gives speakers an incentive to keep their language alive. It is also a way to ease understanding between speakers (as explained earlier), and in some cases (like Basque), standardisation gives birth to a new variety acquired as a first language. As I said from the start, maybe we won’t find an answer to this, and maybe we shouldn’t, but it’s worth thinking about these matters in a more critical way.

Footnotes

1 I’ve used the contents of several courses, lectures, and literatures as sources for this post. The four processes of standardisation are credited to Haugen (1996): ‘Dialect, language, nation’.

2 In fact, a large bulk of French borrowings into English comes from this elaboration, rather than from language contact during the Norman Conquest.

3 On a very HLC note, historical standardisation makes research into dialectal variation and language change quite difficult. The standard written form of Old English is based on the West Saxon variety, and there are far fewer documents to be found written in Northumbrian, which was a quite different variety and has played a huge part in the development of the English we know today.

 

Posted on

That’s just bad English!

Hi there!

If you’ve read my mini-series about Scots (here are parts 1 and 2) you are probably more aware of this particular language, its history and its complicated present-day status than before. With these facts in mind, wouldn’t you find it un-intuitive to think of Scots as “Bad English”? In this post, I want to, in a rather bohemian way, explore the problematic idea of Bad English. That is, I want to challenge the often constraining idea of what is correct and what is deviating; once again, we will see that this has very much to do with politics and power1.

We have seen that Scots clearly has a distinct history and development, and that it once was a fully-functioning language used for all purposes – it was, arguably, an autonomous variety. However, during the anglicisation of Scots (read more about it here) English became a prestigious variety associated with power and status, and thus became the target language to which many adapted Scots. This led to a shift in the general perception of Scots’ autonomy, and today many are more likely to perceive Scots as a dialect of English – that is, perceive Scots as heteronomous to English. This means that instead of viewing Scots features, such as the ones presented in my last post, as proper language features, many would see them as (at best) quirky features or (at worst) bastardisations of English2.

As an example of how shifting heteronomy can be, back in the days when the south of (present-day) Sweden belonged to Denmark, the Scanian dialect was considered a dialect of Danish. When Scania (Skåne) became part of Sweden, it took less than 100 years for this dialect to become referred to as a dialect of Swedish in documents from the time. It’s quite unlikely that Scanian changed much in itself during that time. Rather, what had changed was which language had power over it. That is, which language it was perceived as targeting.

When we really get into it, determining what is Bad English gets more and more blurry, just like what I demonstrated for the distinction between language and dialect way back. There are  several dialectal features which are technically “ungrammatical” but used so categorically in some dialects that calling them Bad English just doesn’t sit right. One such example is the use of was instead of were in, for example, Yorkshire: “You was there when it happened”. What we can establish is that Bad English is usually whatever diverts from (the current version of) Standard English, and this brings us to how such a standard is defined – more on this in a future post.

Scots is, unsurprisingly, not the only variety affected by the idea of Bad English. As Sabina recently taught us, a creole is the result of a pidgin (i.e. a mix of two or more languages to ease communication between speakers) gaining native speakers3. This means that a child can be born with a creole as their first language. Further to this, creoles, just like older languages, tend to have distinct grammatical rules and vocabularies. Despite this, many will describe for example Jamaican Creole as “broken English” – I’m sure this is not unfamiliar to anyone reading. This can again be explained by power and prestige: English, being the language of colonisers, was the prestigious target, just like it became for Scots during the anglicisation, and so these creoles have a hard time losing the image of being heteronomous to English even long after the nations where they are spoken have gained independence.

In the United States, there is a lect which linguists call African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), sometimes called Ebonics. As the name suggests, it is mainly spoken by African-Americans, and most of us would be able to recognise it from various American media. This variety is another which is often misunderstood as Bad English, when in fact it carries many similarities to a creole: during the slave trade era, many of the slaves arriving in America would have had different first languages, and likely developed a pidgin to communicate both amongst themselves and with their masters. From there, we can assume that an early version of AAVE would have developed as a creole which is largely based on English vocabulary. In fact, AAVE shares grammatical features with other English-based creoles, such as using be instead of are (as in “these bitches be crazy”, to use a offensively stereotypical expression). If the AAVE speakers were not living in an English-speaking nation, maybe their variety would have continued to develop as an independent creole like those in, for example, the Caribbean nations?

Besides, what is considered standard in a language often change over time. A feature which is often used to represent “dumb” speech is double negation: “I didn’t do nothing!”. The prescriptivist smartass would smirk at such expressions and say that two negations cancel each other out, and using double negations is widely considered Bad English4. However, did you know that using double negation was for a long time the standard way of expressing negation in English? It was actually used by the upper classes until it reached commoner speech, and thus became less prestigious5. This is another example of how language change also affects our perception of what is right and proper – and as Sabina showed us a while ago, language changes will often be met with scepticism and prescriptivist backlash.

What the examples I’ve presented show us is that less prestigious varieties are not necessarily in the wrong, just because they deviate from a standard that they don’t necessarily “belong to” anyway. It can also be argued that, in many cases, classing a variety as a “bad” version of the language in power is just another way of maintaining a superiority over the people who speak that variety. The perception of heteronomy can be a crutch even for linguists when studying particular varieties; this may be a reason why Scots grammar is relatively under-researched still. When we shake off these very deep-rooted ideas, we may find interesting patterns and developments in varieties which can tell us even more about our history, and language development at large. Hopefully, this post will have created some more language bohemians out there, and more tolerance for Bad English.

Footnotes

1While this post focuses on English, this can be applied to many prestigious languages and in particular those involved in colonisation or invasions (e.g. French, Dutch, Spanish, Arabic, etc.)

2Within Scots itself there are also ideas of what is “good” and what is “bad”: Urban Glaswegian speech is an example of what some would call ‘bad Scots’. Prestige is a factor here too – is not surprising that it’s the speech of the lower classes that receive the “bad” stamp.

3 Not all creoles are English-based, of course. Here is a list of some of the more known creoles and where they derive from.

4There are other languages which do fine with double negation as their standard, without causing any meaning issues – most of you may be familiar with French ne…pas.

5Credit goes to Sabina for providing this example!

Posted on

International Women’s Day Special – Some pejorative terms for women and their non-pejorative origin

We at the HLC want to recognise International Women’s Day by doing what we do best – talking language.


Did you know that many of the pejorative terms we have for women, in the English language, weren’t always pejorative? For example, the word ‘hussy’ is an abbreviated form of ‘housewife’ which used to be a neutral female equivalent of ‘husband’, i.e. referring to the mistress of a household. In today’s blog post you may have sighted the infamous “c-word” (you know the one). This word’s original form was mostly used in place names and landscape descriptions, its meaning being something like ‘cleft’. Female terminology undergoing pejoration is not only the case in English, of course; the Swedish equivalent of the c-word originally had the meaning ‘wet meadow land’ – we’re not convinced that these nature descriptions originally had the pejorative meaning they developed once they began to refer to something female.

Not entirely surprising, we find the opposite pattern for male terms: the word ‘boy’, for example, used to be a pejorative term for male servants, which then developed into today’s neutral term. The term which used to refer to young males before ‘boy’ is the word ‘knight’, which developed into meaning ‘boy servant’ before it finally reached the heightened meaning we associate it with today. (Of course, ‘boy’ unfortunately survives as a pejorative term reserved to address certain groups in society).

Words are powerful, so we should choose them wisely.

Posted on

A wanty ken wit Scots is (a want ye tae show me)

This post marks the second part of my series on Scots. In the first part, I briefly outlined the history and present-day status of Scots. If you want a quick catch-up on the history but don’t feel like more reading, I recommend this video by the Angus McIntosh Centre – also available in Scots!

Hello, my lads and lassies! (Sorry, will never do that again.)

Today’s post is about the differences between Scots and English. Rather than give you a lengthy list of all the ways in which Scots differs from English, I will give you some examples and point out keys to identifying some of the more recognisable features of Scots – both historically and today. Consider this your handy guide to recognising the Scots language1.

As this is the Historical Linguist Channel, I will begin by showing you how to recognise Scots in older texts. If this is not your cup of tea, keep reading, there is something for you further down.

Historical Scots

As you may remember from my previous post, Older Scots was quite clearly distinct from English2. When we want to determine whether a piece of historical text is Scots, there are certain features we can look for. I’ll give you an example of this, using lines from a 15th century Scots poem, The buke of the Howlat (lit. ‘The book of the Owl)3.

One straightforward way to find the Scots features of this poem is to look at the spelling, and spelling can to some extent also give us clues about Scots pronunciation4. As an example, see the following line:

To luke out on day lycht
To look out on day light

Here, the <gh>5 spelling in light corresponds to <ch> in lycht. This spelling represents the sound that you might recognise from the ending of the word loch, meaning ‘lake’ (you know, where Nessie lives). If you want to be more technical, this is a voiceless velar fricative: [x]. This sound is still used in many varieties of Scots today.

This next example has more Scots features for us to unpack:

“Quhy is my face”, qȝ6 ye fle, “faʃʃonit ʃo foule,
“Why is my face”, quoth (said) the wretch, “shaped (cf. fashioned) so foully,

The strange long ‘s’, <ʃ>, is believed to sometimes represents the iconic Sean Connery pronunciation of /s/7. The first word begins with <quh->, and the correlating English spelling is <wh->; variations of <qu(h)-> are very typical Older Scots spellings, which only started to disappear in the 16th century once there was more influence from English in Scots writing. Then it was gradually replaced by the English <wh->. We are not quite sure whether this spelling also reflects a certain pronunciation, like /kw/8.

Finally, the spelling of certain word endings can also highlight features of Scots grammar. For example, the word faʃʃonit above, ending in <-it>. This is a suffix which marks past participles and adjectives, and its English equivalent is <-ed>, as in ‘I am old-fashioned’. In The buke of the Howlat we also find a typically Scots <-is> ending marking plural, as in foulis (‘fowls’; English plurals are commonly either marked by <-s> or <-es>). Present tense verbs are also marked with the <-is> ending in Older Scots: where we in English would have he sings, Scots has he singis.

Knowing about these historically Scots features helps us understand the relevance of certain features in modern Scots. It can, for example, help us figure out where certain pronunciations or word orders come from. I’ve so far used terminology which hints that some of these features have changed or disappeared. The influence by English over Scots starting in the 16th century, which I mentioned above, is commonly referred to the anglicisation of Scots (read more about the historical context for this in my last post), and it caused some decline of uniquely Scots features – especially in writing. However, as we shall see below, while some features were lost and some changed, Scots is a survivor and the modern language still uses versions of many distinctive features of Older Scots  as well as modern innovations.

Present-Day Scots

In my last post, I explained the complicated status of Scots in modern Scotland, and hinted about how much variation there is between speakers and regions as well as within the speech of one individual. Scots is not as present in formal writing as it was in its heyday, however Wee Windaes and similar sites give good example of what Scots looks like in such contexts – have a look and see how much you can understand, and where Scots differs from what you’re used to reading.

We also find plenty of good examples of modern, colloquial “Scotticisms”9 in writing, mixed  with some English. A good source of this: Scottish twitter! Reader discretion is advised; the following tweet reproductions contain strong language.

Exhibit A:

Note that the c-word is used very lightly in Scotland, sometimes even replaceable with ‘mate’.

The Scots feature I want to pick out specifically from this tweet is negation: Dinny is used where we would expect don’t if it had been written in only English. This is probably one of the most recognisable Present-Day Scots features, and -ny, or -nae, can be added to most auxiliary verbs where English would have n’t: dinny, hasny, cannae, and so on. This tweeter also uses the instead of to in “the jail” – this is something I’ve noticed Scots speakers do a lot, even saying ‘the day’ rather than ‘today’.

Exhibit B:

This tweeter not only puts into words what we all feel sometimes when we think about the state of the world, but also gives us some more excellent examples of Scotticisms. Here, I want to bring attention to the word yersel (‘yourself’), used twice. A typically Scots pronunciation feature is to not pronounce /f/ in words like self, and here we see it reflected in spelling.

Finally, Exhibit C: The iMessage conversation extract below is attached to a tweet by @jordanjonesxo.

Diverting your attention from the foul language, notice how hink is used for ‘think’. This is, as you would expect by now, reflecting a Scots pronunciation: /h/ where English has /θ/.

I haven’t mentioned all of the Scots features in these tweets – I’m sure you’re able to identify some without my help. Other features that we often see in this form of writing is aw where we expect ‘all’ and fae where we expect ‘from’. The former is an example of Scots “l-vocalisation”, meaning that /l/ is not pronounced at the end of words. The latter is simply the Scots word for ‘from’ – fae, ken (‘know’), wee (‘little’), bairn (‘child’) and mind (‘remember’) are only a few examples of Scots words which are very commonly used in Scots speech today even when mixed with English.

If you have seen or read Trainspotting, written by Irvine Welsh, I’m sure you will be familiar with the above as well as other Scotticisms. The extract below is from the sequel, Porno. See how many Scotticisms, or words and spellings you wouldn’t expect from an English text10, you can find yersells! (Pro tip: It helps to read out loud when you’re not sure what’s going on.)

Welsh, Irvine, “Porno”, Published by Jonathan Cape, 2002, p. 350.

Let us know what you found, tell us your favourite Scots word, and ask us any questions about this post – either by commenting here or on Facebook, or by emailing us (adding Lisa to the subject line will lead it straight to me).

If you now, after all this reading of Scots, want to get a good example of what it sounds like, here are some links (some repeated from earlier in the post):

The Angus McIntosh Centre’s video on the origin of Scots, in Scots.

Listen to the Buke of the Howlat (to the left on the page).

Doric Scots, contrasted with English.

Some more examples of Scots words.

 

Next week, Riccardo will bust the myth that some languages are just essentially harder to learn than others. Nay!, says we at the HLC.

Bye!

Footnotes

1Bear in mind that some of the features I bring up here are not uniform for all varieties of Scots.

2However, we also want to remember that Scots developed from a variety spoken in the North-East of England, and so some of the features described here can sometimes be found in documents from there as well. As always, we need to bear in mind that the boundaries of a “language” is not determined by national borders – see my previous post on languages and dialects.

3This analysis is based on previous work by Dr. Rhona Alcorn, Daisy Smith, Maddi Morcillo Berrueta and myself for the National Library of Scotland’s Wee Windaes website. You can find the complete version here. At Wee Windaes, you can also listen to the poem being read in Scots.

4If you’re particularly interested in mapping sounds to spelling in Scots, I recommend reading about the FITS project.

5This spelling in English used to represent the same [x] sound which is no longer a part of the English phonemic inventory.

6Abbreviations are common in old manuscripts, just imagine writing a whole book by hand! This particular one correlates to some form of ‘quoth’, as seen in the translation.

7The way Sean Connery pronounces his s’s is actually a (mainly Glaswegian) Scots pronunciation feature, which is mostly used by men.
Reference: Stuart-Smith, J., Timmins, C. and Tweedie, F., 2007. ‘Talkin’ Jockney’?: variation and change in Glaswegian accent. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(2). 221-260.

8Suggested in: Lass, R. & M. Laing. 2016. Q is for WHAT, WHEN, WHERE: The ’q’ spellings for OE hw-. Folia Linguistica Historica 37, 61–110.

9I believe this term was coined by A.J. Aitken, if I’m not mistaken.

10Not everything here is straightforwardly Scots, rather a representation of Scottish English, but as I’ve repeated many times by now: It’s complicated!

Posted on

The Scots Leid – The Scots Language

I am very excited to share this post with you, and have been looking forward to it since the dawn of the HLC. Why? This post marks the first part of a mini-series which will tell you the story of the Scots language, its historical and present day status and linguistic elements, while introducing concepts such as language standardisation and the idea of “debased English”. For now, let’s start with a general overview of what Scots is and where it came from. As any essay-boosting student would, I will start with a quote:

“Up until the end of the 18th century largely the entire Scottish population spoke Gaelic […] During the 19th century the English language further dominated the area. It was the language of the church and schools. Essentially all contacts outside of the villages was in English.”

The quote above comes from a language sciences textbook by a Swedish author1 (the translation is my own). I’m gonna leave it with you for now, and by the end of this post it will hopefully become clear why the statements above are not only problematic, but also plainly wrong!

So, what do we mean when we talk about the Scots language? When hearing the name, some assume it’s another name for Scottish Gaelic (usually pronounced Gallic) , others that it’s a name for the variety spoken in Scotland which is “essentially English” with some lexical differences. As I will probably write about Scots again outside of this blog series (I may be a one-trick pony), I figured it was appropriate to outline as simple as possible (it’s not in any way simple) what the Scots language is, isn’t, and what it has been. I am not going to give any absolute answers, because they can be somewhat political, but will try to keep this series nice and diplomatic, and highly linguistic2.

How far back to begin? I think it is best for everyone if I leave pre-Celtic out of this. I can even do without outlining what we know of the Picts, right? I think we should start in the Dark Ages, when the Gaels, also called the Scotti, migrated to Scotland from Ireland. This people and their language, an ancestor variety to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, dominated Scotland for quite some time. In the Middle Ages, there was a shift to a variety referred to as Inglis, deriving from Northumbrian Old English. Inglis was not called so for very long, but soon became Scottis (in the early 16th century) and finally Scots. Scots became the common language of the Scottish lowlands (and northern islands, but slightly later), while Gaelic remained the language of the highlands.

Map of Scotland, 1595. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland3.

The shift from Gaelic to Inglis/Scots began in the Scottish burghs established in Southern Scotland in the 12th century (hint: Edin-burgh). These burghs became  melting pots for various languages, and the main contributors were locally spoken Northumbrian/Anglian (i.e. varieties of Old-Middle English), Northumbrian/Anglian from south of the English border, Anglo-Norman, Gaelic, Scandinavianised English from the previous Danelaw area, and Flemish spoken by merchants from the continent. All of these lovely ingredients came together to form the tasty casserole we call Older Scots. Now, Scots periodisation is not a done deal, and I will tactfully avoid the issue by referring to everything Scots between 1100 and 1700 as Older Scots. I’ll have to refer you to the footnotes4 for more information about this, we need to stay on the ball.

After this rather lengthy intro, we now arrive at the core of what I want to be known by the end of this post: Scots was a historically distinct variety, spoken in the Scottish lowlands, which was used for all functions and purposes for several centuries; it was the language of literature, parliament, legal texts etc., etc. Essentially, Scots and English were two distinct varieties, and recognised as such! It was not until the late 16th century that things started to change. First, strike one, during the Scottish Reformation (1540) the bible was only available in English, making English the language of religion. Then, strike two, King James VI of Scotland became King James I of Scotland and England after the death of Elizabeth I – this event is called the Union of the Crowns (1603) – which made English the language of the royal court.

King James the VI of Scotland and I of England and Scotland.5

The third strike came in 1707, the Union of Parliaments, when Scotland became part of the United Kingdom and thus English became the language of parliament. By this time, Scots lost its status as a language for formal use, and essentially became degraded, in the public view, to a vernacular, “uneducated” dialect used by the working class and rural populations. The final blow came with the Education Act of 1872, which required only English to be spoken and taught in schools6.  

Does this mean that Scots is gone? Of course not, but the status of Scots as a language is a complicated issue. To properly explain what present-day Scots is we would need to dive back into the debate of what constitutes a language. In recent decades, Scots has received a lot of attention and activism; many Scots speakers want to see their variety receiving official language status, they want justification for the marginalisation of their language and some seek standardisation of Scots. What complicates this matter is that spoken Scots is used by different people from different geographical areas and demographic groups, without a unifying standard variety for several centuries, so it has become a highly mixed variety with very different dialects and sociolects under its spectra. If we were to attempt standardisation, would the urban Glasgow speech “win”, or the rural Aberdeenshire Scots? Or, would we construct a standard like what was done with Basque? Further, it has become increasingly difficult to determine where Scots ends and Scottish English (i.e. English with a Scottish accent) begins, especially since most speakers mix their speech with elements from both varieties and change their speech depending on context.

We can now establish that the quote from the Swedish textbook is problematic mainly because (i). Gaelic was not the language of all of Scotland before 1700, and (ii). It’s controversial to claim that Gaelic was overtaken by English, rather than Scots (and that this happened as late as the 19th century). Finally, I recommend all to visit the National Library of Scotland’s Wee Windaes website for more information about Scots literary history in particular, and to get a better idea of what Scots looks and sounds like (the whole website is in Scots). I have tried very hard to not make this too lengthy and too specific, and I hope I did not lose any essential details in the process. While this post was mostly meant as a general overview of the history and terminology surrounding Scots, the next post in the series will be dedicated to the linguistic distinctions between Scots and English.

To be continued.

Footnotes

1I will leave this author anonymous – it is not my place to shame anyone, this person cited someone else and this may not be their area of expertise.

2I want to give a huge shout out and many thanks to the people teaching the Scots courses at the University of Edinburgh who taught me all of this stuff: Dr Rhona Alcorn, Dr Joanna Kopaczyk, Dr Warren Maguire and Dr Benjamin Molineaux. Anything uncited is credited to their lectures, I owe it all to them!

3Accessed at: http://maps.nls.uk/index.html
Copyright terms: http://maps.nls.uk/copyright.html

4A.J. Aitken (i.e. the forefather of modern Scots linguistics, one might say (and this one does say)) is responsible for the traditional periodisation used. However, Joanna Kopazcyk makes very good points regarding why this periodisation is not ideal, and I’ll refer you to her article for those arguments:
Kopaczyk, J. (2013). Rethinking the traditional periodisation of the scots language. In R. M. Millar and J. Cruickshank (Eds.), After the Storm: Papers from the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster. University of Aberdeen.

5Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/use-this-image.php?mkey=mw03416

6This act, of course, also had severe effects for Scottish Gaelic.

Posted on

Too much linguistics, too little time

Hello, it’s me, Lisa, again. I just couldn’t stay away! This week, I have been given the challenging task of outlining the subfields of linguistics1. The most common responses I get when I tell people I study linguistics are variations of “What is that?” and  “What can you do with that?”. This leads me to explain extremely broadly what linguistics is (eh, er, uhm, the science of languages? Like, how they work and where they come from…. But I don’t actually learn a language! I just study them. One language or lots of them. Sort of.), and then I describe various professions you can have from studying linguistics. What all of those professions have in common is that I can do none of them, since they are related to subfields of linguistics that I haven’t specialised in (looking at you forensic and applied linguistics). My own specialties, historical linguistics and syntax, lead to nothing but long days in the library and crippling student debt, but let’s not dwell on that.

Linguistics is a minefield of subdisciplines. To set the scene, look at this very confusing mind-map I made:

Now ignore that mind-map because it does you no good. It’s highly subjective and inconclusive.  However, it does demonstrate how although these subfields are distinct, they end up intersecting quite a lot. At some point in their career, linguists need to use knowledge from several areas, no matter what their specialty. To not wear you out completely, I’m focusing here on the core areas of linguistics: Phonetics and phonology (PhonPhon for short2), syntax,  morphology, and semantics. I will also briefly talk about Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics3.

Right, let’s do this.

Phonetics and Phonology

Let’s start with the most recognisable and fundamental component of spoken language: sounds!

The phonetics part of phonetics and phonology is kind of the natural sciences, physics and biology, of linguistics. In phonetics, we describe speech production by analysing sound waves, vocal fold vibrations and the position of the anatomical elements of the mouth and throat. We use cool latinate terms, like alveolar and labiodental, to formally describe sounds, like voiced alveolar fricative (= the sound /z/ in zoo). The known possible sounds speakers can produce in the languages of the world are described by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which Rebekah will tell you all about next week4.

The phonology part of phonetics and phonology concerns itself with how these phonetic sounds organise into systems and how they’re used in languages. In a way, phonetics gives the material for phonology to build a language’s sound rule system. Phonology figures out, for example, what sounds can go together and what syllables are possible. All humans with a well-functioning vocal apparatus are able to produce the same sounds, yet different languages have different sound inventories; for example, English has a sound /θ/, the sound spelled <th> as in thing, while Swedish does not. Phonology maps these inventories and explains the rules and mechanisms behind them, looking both within one language and comparatively between languages.

Speaking of Rebekah, she summarised the difference between Phonetics and Phonology far more eloquently than I could so I’ll quote her: “Phonetics is the concrete, physical manifestation of speech sounds, and phonology is kind of the abstract side of it, how we conceptualize and store those sounds in our mind.”

Syntax (and morphology, you can come too)

Begin where I are doing to syntax explained?

Why this madness!, you may exclaim, post reading the above sentence. That, friends, is what it looks like to break syntax rules; the sentence above has a weird word order and the wrong inflections on the verbs. The same sentence obeying the rules would be: Where do I begin to explain syntax?

Syntax is one of my favourite things in the world, up there with cats and OLW Cheez Doodles. The syntax of a language is the rule system which organises word-like elements into clause structures based on the grammatical information that comes with each element. In plain English: Syntax creates sentences that look and sound right to us. This doesn’t only affect word order, but also agreement patterns (syntax rules make sure we say I sing, she sings and not I sings, she sing), and how we express semantic roles5. Syntax is kind of like the maths of linguistics; it involves a lot of problem solving and neat solutions with the aim of being as universal and objective as possible. The rules of syntax are not sensitive to prescriptive norms – the syntax of a language is a product of the language people actually produce and not what they should produce.

Morphology is, roughly, the study of word-formation. Morphology takes the smallest units of meaningful information (morphemes), puts them together if necessary, and gives them to syntax so that syntax can do its thing (much like how phonetics provides material for phonology, morphology provides material for syntax). A morpheme can be an independent word, like the preposition in, but it can also be the -ed at the end of waited, telling us that the event happened in the past. This is contrasting phonology, which deals with units which are not necessarily informative; the ‘ed’ in Edinburgh is a phonological unit, a syllable, but it gives us no grammatical information and is therefore not a morpheme. Languages can have very different types of morphological systems. English tends to separate informative units into multiple words, whereas languages like Swahili can express whole sentences in one word. Riccardo will discuss this in more detail in a few weeks.

Semantics (with a pinch of pragmatics)

Semantics is the study of meaning (she said, vaguely). When phonetics and phonology has taken care of the sounds and morphology and syntax have created phrases and sentences from those sounds, semantics takes over to make sense of it all – what does a word mean and what does a sentence mean and how does that interact with and/or influence the way we think? Let’s attempt an elevator pitch for semantics: Semantics discusses the relationship between words, phrases and sentences, and the meanings they denote; it concerns itself with the relationship between linguistic elements and the world in which they exist. (Have you got a headache yet?).

If phonetics is the physics/biology of linguistics and syntax is the maths, Semantics is the philosophy of linguistics, both theoretical and formal. In my three years of studying semantics, we went from discussing whether a sentence like The King of France is bald is true or false (considering there is no king of France in the real world), to translating phrases and words into logical denotation ( andVP = λP[λQ[λx[P(x) ∧ Q(x)]]] ), to discussing universal patterns in linguistics where semantics and syntax meet and the different methods languages use to adhere to these patterns, for example how Mandarin counts “uncountable” nouns.

Pragmatics follows semantics in that it is also a study of meaning, but pragmatics concerns the way we interpret utterances. It is much more concerned with discourse, language in actual use and language subtexts. For example, pragmatics can describe the mechanisms involved when we interpret the sentence ‘it’s cold in here’ to mean ‘can you close the window?’.

Sociolinguistics and historical linguistics

Sociolinguistics has given me about 80% of my worthy dinner table conversations about linguistics. It is the study of the way language interacts with society, identity, communities and other social aspects of our world, and it also includes the study of geographical dialects (dialectology). Sociolinguistics is essentially the study of language variation and change within the above areas, both at a specific point in time (synchronically) and across a period of time (diachronically); my post last week, as well as Riccardo’s and Sabina’s posts in the weeks before, dealt with issues relevant for sociolinguistics.

When studying the HLC’s speciality historical linguistics, which involves the historical variation and change of language(s), we often need to consider sociolinguistics as a factor in why a certain historical language change has taken place or why we see a variation in the linguistic phenomenon we’re investigating. We also often need to consider several other fields of linguistics in order to understand a phenomenon, which can play out something like this:

  • Is this strange spelling variation found in this 16th century letter because it was pronounced differently (phonetics, phonology), and if so, was it because of a dialectal difference (sociolinguistics)? Or, does this spelling actually indicate a different function of the word (morphology, semantics)?
  • What caused this strange word order change starting in the 14th century? Did it start within the syntax itself, triggered by an earlier different change, or did it arise from a method of trying to focus the reader’s attention on something specific in the clause (information structure, pragmatics)? Did that word order arise because this language was in contact with speakers of another language which had that word order (sociolinguistics, typology)?

To summarise, phonetics and phonology gives us sounds and organises them. The sounds become morphemes which are put into the syntax. The syntactic output is then interpreted through semantics and pragmatics. Finally, the external context in which this all takes place and is interpreted is dealt with by sociolinguistics. Makes sense?

There is so much more to say about each of these subfields; it’s hard to do any of them justice in such a brief format! However, the point of this post was to give you a foundation to stand on when we go into these topics more in-depth in the future. If you have any questions or anything you’d like to know more about, you can always comment or email, or have a look at some of the literature I mention in the footnotes. Next week, Rebekah will give us some background on the IPA – one of the most important tools for any linguist. Thanks for reading!

Footnotes

 

1I had to bring out the whole arsenal of introductory textbooks to use as inspiration for this post. Titles include but are not limited to: Beginning Linguistics by Laurie Bauer; A Practical introduction to Phonetics by J.C. Catford; A Historical Syntax of English by Bettelou Los; What is Morphology? By Mark Aronoff and Kristen Fudeman; Meaning: A slim guide to Semantics by Paul Elborne; Pragmatics by Yan Huang; and Introducing Sociolinguistics by Miriam Meyerhoff. I also consulted old lecture notes from my undergraduate studies at the University of York.

2This is of course not an official term, just a nickname used by students.

3We’ll hopefully get back to some of the others another time. For now, if you are interested, a description of most of the subfields is available from a quick google search of each of the names you find in the mind map.

4If you want a sneak peek, you can play around with this interactive IPA chart where clicking a sound on the chart will give you its pronunciation.

5This is more visible in languages that have an active case system. English has lost case on all proper nouns, but we can still see the remains of the English case system on pronouns (he–him–his).

Posted on

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”

Hello HLC readers! I’m Lisa, I’m a Swede (this kind, not this kind, and hopefully never this kind) but I live in Scotland, and I’m here to talk to you about the differences between languages and dialects. Now, the title of this post, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy”, should have made everything clear, so that will be my contribution for today.

Joking!

I’m so not done. The title quote was made popular by the sociolinguist, and Yiddish scholar, Max Weinreich (in Yiddish, with Roman letters: a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot)1. This particular quote has been passed down to me on average once per each course I’ve taken in my four years of studying linguistics, which either tells you 1. Linguists are in serious need of new content, or 2. This is probably important for budding linguists to discuss. Both might be true in some cases, but most of the time 2 is the correct answer. We will need to tread carefully, and I don’t intend to make any political statements, but simply to shine some light on the complexity of the matter which, in fact, is often highly political. One final disclaimer: This is a really difficult topic to summarise. Bear with me.

For some of you reading, the question of what is and isn’t a language is probably something you haven’t thought about a lot. Some of you may think that the distinction is clear-cut; a language is distinct, it’s not similar to or dependent on anything else, and a dialect isn’t. You may even say that dialects are clearly sub-languages, because of the very way we phrase “dialects of a language” to imply that dialects belong to a language and not vice versa. Further, dialects are mutually intelligible (i.e. speakers of different dialects of one language can understand each other), which is not the case with languages. This is not exactly wrong, it’s just overly simplified.

First of all, if mutual intelligibility is a dialect criterion then my native Swedish could arguably be a Scandinavian dialect rather than a proper language – I, like most Swedes, understand Norwegian very well, and to some extent Danish, if spoken slowly (I’m currently working on my spoken Danish comprehension by watching both the Bridge and the Killing… My crime vocabulary is looking pretty solid by now). However, a lot of Swedes would not be thrilled to be told that their language is a dialect, and it does feel counter-intuitive to call it one.

On the other hand, there are agreed-upon dialects that are not mutually intelligible. Why are the dialects of, for example, Italian still called dialects, despite speakers of, for example, Emilian and Sicilian not being able to understand each other2 , while Norwegian and Swedish are officially agreed upon to be different languages? Also, what makes people call Catalan a dialect of Spanish (Don’t shoot the messenger!), or Cantonese a dialect of Chinese? Can you see a pattern forming? I’ll spell it out: The term language is most often, but not always, awarded to those “dialects” that have, or have had, official language status in a country, i.e. the dialect of those in power. The term dialect, or lect, is sometimes used neutrally in linguistics to cover both official languages and dialects, but there is  another term which is also used that I like more: variety. Variety is less socio-politically charged, and I use it all the time to avoid having to make a language/dialect distinction when I talk about linguistics.

There are, however, exceptions to the ‘official language’-criterion. If we go back to Spain, for example, no one would argue that Basque is a dialect of Spanish because Basque looks and sounds nothing like Spanish at all (or maybe some would argue this, but could we all agree that this is an unusual opinion?). So, there must be an element of likeness, or similarity, involved. Preferably the variety in question would be a part of the same language family3  – this could be why no one argues the language status of indigenous varieties, like Sami varieties in northern Scandinavia or the various native American varieties like Navajo and Cree.

My take on the issue is this: What people choose to call a language is largely based on four criteria:

  1. Is this variety an official language of a country?
  2. Is the variety distinct in terms of likeness to the official language of that region? Recall what was said above about indigenous languages.
  3. Is this variety considered an example of how that variety should be spoken, i.e. a standard variety, that also has sub-varieties (dialects) that diverge from that standard? An example: British English has a standard, sometimes called BBC English, or RP, but also a plethora of quirky dialects like Geordie, Scouse, Scottish English, Brummie, etc., all still considered to be English.
  4. Does it have an army and a navy?
  5. I jest.
  6. The real number 4: Is the variety standardised? Can we study it with the help of grammars and lexicons? Is it taught in schools? (Language standardisation is a whole topic of its own, which we will come back to in a later post.)

We can see that the term language is strongly connected to the status a variety has in a nation, it is a term that is awarded or given. When we attempt linguistic distinctions between languages and dialects, things get confusing really quickly. Is differing syntax, for example word order differences, more distinguishing than differing vocabulary? Norwegian and Danish have largely similar vocabularies, but very distinct pronunciations, so how does that factor in when we determine whether they are distinct languages or dialects of one variety? How much is the mutual intelligibility due to close contact, rather than actual similarities4 – do I understand Norwegian well because I grew up a couple of hours from the border to Norway, or because Norwegian and Swedish are so similar?

It is also relevant to talk about the historical perspective (after all this is is the Historical Linguist Channel). To throwback to Rebekah’s post last week, we know that English has changed a lot since the Anglo-Saxon times. We all tend to agree that Latin is one language distinct from Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian, but we also know that these languages all originate from Latin. What about English then? Old English and Present Day English look different enough that we could happily call them distinct languages, but what about Early Modern English? When do we say a variety has diverged enough from its parent language to be considered a language in its own right? Is my grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt, a part of my immediate or extended family? Well, that often depends on my relationship to my great-aunt, which brings us back to the subjectivity of the question.

The point I’m trying to make with these confused ramblings is that the term language cannot be defined linguistically, but is a wholly social and political term. The people of Montenegro generally refuse to recognise their variety’s similarity to Serbian, despite the varieties being largely indistinguishable – they speak Montenegrin. Knowing the history of the region though, we might be able to see where the Montenegrians are coming from, why it feels important for them to distinguish themselves as a people through their language5 . When we discuss what a language is, it’s important to keep in mind what the term means for the people who use it. Our language is tightly connected to our sense of identity; this is one reason why we’re so reluctant to see it changing or being used in a way we perceive as wrong (throwback to Sabina’s and Riccardo’s posts). The term dialect is somehow seen as inferior to language, and thus the terminology becomes a much larger issue than any linguistic definitions we can make.

Related to this issue are topics like standardisation (mentioned above), minority languages, and the idea of debased English. The latter two are also upcoming topics. In future posts, I will be addressing a variety that is my special interest, Scots 6, which is particularly affected by the issues discussed here. Scots is a Germanic variety spoken in Scotland, which is closely related to English but is still distinct from English (much like Swedish and Norwegian). First, however, I will be back next week to outline the main disciplines that fall under the umbrella of linguistics.

Footnotes

1He didn’t utter the quote first though, but an auditor in one of his lectures said it to him. I recommend reading about the situation on Wikipedia.

2Ask Riccardo about this issue and your evening entertainment is sorted.

3“Language family” is the name given to a group of languages which share an ancestor. We will dedicate more time to this topic at a later point. Meanwhile, you may admire this beautiful Indo-European and Uralic family tree.

4These and other questions are addressed by linguistic typologists, who try to map the languages of the world, categorise them and determine their relatedness.

5This fact was brought to my attention by a student from Montenegro during the course Scots and Scottish English, taught by Dr. Warren Maguire at the University of Edinburgh. A lot of the discussions we had in that course have provided background for the arguments and questions presented here.

6The Angus Macintosh Centre for Historical Linguistics have made brilliant videos explaining the history of Scots, in both Scots and English. I strongly recommend watching these!