Language Log

For some reason, people from different social groups in different regions all over the world believe that saying (things similar to) "yeah no" and "no yeah" is their special thing.

Matthew Smith, "The scone pronunciation map of Britain", YouGov 8/16/2024:

The debate on whether you should pronounce ‘scone’ to rhyme with ‘gone’ or with ‘bone’ has been going on forever. There is evidence of people making light of the distinction as far back as 1913, with a poem in Punch Magazine:

I asked the maid in dulcet tone,
To order me a buttered scone,
The silly girl has been and gone,
And ordered me a buttered scone.

Neither side looks likely to win the argument any time soon however, with a recent YouGov study of more than 54,000 Britons finding that 51% say they pronounce the word to rhyme with ‘gone’ but 45% saying they pronounce it to rhyme with ‘bone’.

[This is a guest post by Frank Clements]

I saw something about Japanese dialects recently that might interest you. The makers of the Marvel movies are trying to recover the enthusiasm that's been lost due to their more recent films being critically panned and scandals with major actors, so they're introducing the classic Marvel villain Dr. Doom, who is traditionally the main villain of the Fantastic Four (created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee). They've brought back Robert Downey Jr. to play him, even though he's already played Iron Man, and they haven't explained how that is going to work.

From Jeff DeMarco:

The fanfic fourth book in the sāntǐ 三体 ("three-body [problem]") series, translated by Ken Liu has the following sentence:

Women dressed in flowing silk dresses oared elegant barges over the placid waterways, singing folk ditties in the gentle, refined accents of the Wu topolect …

Read the rest of this entry »

"Internet Not Killing Off Dialects within Russian as Many Suppose but Increasing Their Diversity, Moscow Scholar Says",  Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia (6/7/24)

It is widely assumed that the Internet is contributing to the homogenization of languages and killing off both dialects and local variants; but in fact, a Moscow scholar says, a new survey of Russian as spoken in the cities of that country finds that in many places, dialects are unexpectedly expanding.

Ivan Levan, a specialist at the Moscow Institute of the Russian Language at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that he and his colleagues have recently found “about 2,000” new words that vary from city to city and were not recorded in V.I. Belikov and V.P. Selegey’s 2005 work on Languages of Russian Cities (yandex.ru/company/researches/2021/local-words).

[Full disclosure:  the reason I am so consumed by the Arabic vernaculars is because of their own inherent, intrinsic nature, but I must confess that I'm also preoccupied by their comparative parallelism with the Sinitic "topolects".  The workings of both are extremely difficult to comprehend.]

This post is to follow up on VHM's "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6" (5/12/24) and Mark's "Maltese Arabic: Correction?" (5/13/24), plus J.W. Brewer's excellent first comment to the latter.

Mark ends his post thus:  "…it seems entirely wrong to exclude Maltese from a taxonomy of Arabic 'colloquials' or 'vernaculars' (i.e. Arabic languages), purely on the grounds of its borrowings from Italian."  I would not want to do that.

To provide for a more nuanced evaluation of the position of Maltese vis-à-vis the Arabic vernaculars, below I cite several scholarly accounts of the subject and related issues.  Extensive coverage of the history of the languages on Malta is provided.

Britannica

Maltese language, Semitic language of the Southern Central group spoken on the island of Malta. Maltese developed from a dialect of Arabic and is closely related to the western Arabic dialects of Algeria and Tunisia. Strongly influenced by the Sicilian language (spoken in Sicily), Maltese is the only form of Arabic to be written in the Latin alphabet."

That's the bare bones.  As we shall find in the following paragraphs, the complexities of Maltese are far greater than can be told in such a capsule description.

Jichang Lulu briefly alluded to work on languages of Italy in the dialectometry thread (here [the whole comment is well worth reading, as are the comments by Jonathan Smith [here — this one on an earlier thread, here, here, and here] on that post). He also thought that Language Log readers might find of interest some comments in this paper by Mauro Tosco.

"Measuring languageness:  Fact-checking and debunking a few common myths", DIVE-IN

“Interestingly, the more traditional classifications are marred by purely sociolinguistic analyses – and quite often their accompanying political and ideological underpinnings – the more they are proven wrong when dialectometry is applied.”

(Tosco:  homepage; International Research Group on Contested Languages)

In our perennial discussions on the supposed mutual intelligibility of the countless, so-called "Chinese dialects" of the allegedly monolithic / monolingual Hànyǔ 漢語 ("Sinitic"; my colleague IA calls it "Hannic"), we seldom take into account the actuality of what these innumerable lects sound like on the ground / street.  Let's take a listen to this 4-year-old kid from Tianjin, which is close (70 miles) to Beijing, singing in the local Muttersprache, here.

Is monolingualism a normal, natural, necessary state of affairs for human beings?

Can you imagine a world in which there were only one language?  How is that even possible?

These are questions that come to mind after reading Gina Anne Tam's deeply thought provoking "Mandarin Hegemony: The Past and Future of Linguistic Hierarchies in China", pulse (4/18/24).

Tam begins with a gripping, hard-hitting scene that we at Language Log were already well aware of last fall:  "Speak Mandarin, not Cantonese, even in Macau" (10/31/23).  Here are the opening paragraphs of her article:

At a concert in Macau in the autumn of 2023, Cantopop superstar Eason Chan used an interlude to talk about his songwriting process. Suddenly, shouts from the audience interrupted his soliloquy, as a few fans demanded that he shift from speaking in his native Cantonese, the majority language in Macau, to Mandarin, the Chinese national language. Chan stopped and quickly launched into a multilingual lecture, reprimanding those who deigned to tell him what to speak. In English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Thai, he defended multilingualism for the freedom it grants: ‘I love speaking in whatever way and language I want’ (Huang 2023).

The same as Gideon, the legendary LetThemTalkTV presenter of this edifying video, as a child I too was deeply puzzled by how some of these famous American actors sounded so British.

Here I present a digest of four scientific linguistics papers from the latter part of the month of January, 2024 to show that our field is very much alive in diverse subfields at the beginning of the new year.

"The Semantics, Sociolinguistics, and Origins of Double Modals in American English: New Insights from Social Media." Morin, Cameron et al. PLOS ONE 19, no. 1 (January 24, 2024): e0295799.

"The Nobel literature prize goes to Norway’s Jon Fosse, who once wrote a novel in a single sentence"

…

While Fosse is the fourth Norwegian writer to get the Nobel literature prize, he is the first in nearly a century and the first who writes in Nynorsk, one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language. It is used by just 10% of the country’s 5.4 million people, according to the Language Council of Norway, but completely understandable to users of the other written form, Bokmaal.

Guy Puzey, senior lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, said that Bokmaal is “the language of power, it’s the language of urban centers, of the press.” Nynorsk, by contrast, is used mainly by people in rural western Norway.

“So it’s a really big day for a minority language,” Puzey said

An educated person will have all four levels of speech.

The more highly educated they are, the higher up the scale their language capacity will go, though they may not be familiar with some of the argot of the lower levels.

Of course, all four levels are language, but that is possible because "language" has two meanings:  a generalized, abstract sense that comprises all human speech and writing, and the officially recognized speech and writing of a nation / country / gens — a politically united group of people.

A topolect is the speech / writing of the people living in a certain place or area.  It is geographically determined.

A dialect is a distinctive form / style / pronunciation / accent shared by two or more people.  To qualify as the speaker of a particular dialect, one must possess a pattern of speech, a lect, that is intelligible to others who speak the same dialect.  As we say in Mandarin, it's a question of whether what you speak is jiǎng dé tōng 講得通 ("mutually intelligible") or jiǎng bùtōng 講不通 ("mutually unintelligible").  If what two people are speaking is jiǎng bùtōng 講不通 ("mutually unintelligible"), then they're not speaking the same dialect.