Language Log

John McWhorter on Talk of the Nation, "DEA Call For Ebonics Experts Smart Move", 9/6/2010. (Download mp3 here.)

Jak King writes:

Are there rules in English for making adjectives from countries, or are the assignments random?  I have found a number of standard adjectival endings (-ese, -(i)an, -ish, -i, -er). There are also some singularities (French, Greek, Monegasque) and some where the adjectival form is the same as the country name (Hong Kong, New Zealand).

How is this worked out, or who decides?

James McElvenney comes to the defense of Andrew Herrick ("Linguistic border security", Fully (sic) 8/16/2010).

Shorter version: Herrick argued that Americanisms are polluting the clear pool of Australian English, and bringing social ills like mugging in their wake ("With American lingo, we've imported toxic US culture", The Age, 8/6/2010); I suggested that Herrick was prejudiced, illogical, and deluded ("'America's toxic culture' invaded Oz — in words?", 8/6/2010); McElvenney presents evidence that Herrick was not entirely deluded.

Suzanne Kemmer sent along this example from a web forum:

I read on the internet that this means he mightened get along with another rabbit. [emphasis added]

I don't think that I've seen this before.

Adam Kilgarriff, writing at the Macmillan Dictionary Blog:

An idea that has been provoking widespread interest in applied linguistics circles in the last few years is ‘English as a Lingua Franca’, ELF for short. There are now many circumstances where non-native speakers of English, of different language backgrounds, all accomplished English speakers, work together or do business in English. There are often no native speakers present, and even if there are, it is not clear that their perspective on the language has any special status. Communication can successfully be achieved, in English, without reference to the native speaker, and the ELF research agenda is to explore ELF and see if it has linguistic characteristics that set it apart as a distinct variety of English.

Thanks to several commenters on our recent most-a-thon ("Most", 7/31/2010; "Most examples", 7/31/2010; "Most and Many", 8/1/2010), I've learned about an interesting literature on the semantics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics of most, which I think is worth collecting in one place for those unexpectedly unobsessive readers who don't repeatedly scan and cross-classify the comments on this kind of Language Log posting sequence.

These publications provide a variety of (mostly perceptual) evidence for the view that most really does mean "more than half", while offering a greater variety of theories about the strategies that (different sorts of) people use to determine whether this is true in particular cases.

According to the Guardian,

The Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand has admitted that the voice that gave the world the 1977 Euro-punk anthem Ça Plane Pour Moi was not his. Roger Jouret, the man behind the Plastic Bertrand persona, had previously denied that he was not the singer on the record. But in an interview with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, he admitted it had been another singer – and laid the blame at the door of his former producer, Lou Deprijck. His admission came a day after a linguist commissioned by a judge concluded that the singer's accent did not match the voice on the record.

Janet Randall wrote:

I am faced with a query from someone at a pretty high level at Public TV who is objecting to an employee's use of the preposition "acrosst".  I looked for some dialect information about this variant of "across" but haven't been able to find it on language log, or anywhere else, without spending more time than I have, so I thought you might know of a post on the log, or know who might know whether this is regional, etc.

Contamination can happen with any surface that touches meat, like a counter top, she says. "There's nothing special about these bags than anything else that can become contaminated," she says.

[from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128105740&sc=tw June 25, 2010 ]

Yesterday's Doonesbury:

There are a variety of factors that are believed to be involved in the establishment and maintenance of the language varieties that are commonly called "dialects". Among these are substrate or contact influences, patterns of initial settlement, group identity, and patterns of communication. Some of these factors, such as settlement patterns, mainly re-distribute existing variation in geographical and social space. But others, such as patterns of communication, affect the way that innovations arise and spread.

The rise of internet-based social media offers new pictures of such patterns of communication, and a few months ago, I came across an interesting analysis of the geography of Facebook friend links: Pete Warden, "How to split up the U.S.", 2/6/2010.

Earlier I posted a video of UK football commentator (and former Hull striker) Dean Windass recapping some play in a Premier League match between Everton and Portsmouth. It had been posted on Today's Big Thing under the headline "Soccer Reporter Invents New Kind of English," and I referred to Windass as "wildly disfluent." But a few of our British commenters said that beyond some comic stumbling over the name of presenter Jeff Stelling, Windass was speaking in a manner that would be perfectly comprehensible to a listener familiar with the Hull dialect of Yorkshire and with the relevant footballer lingo. Ian Preston provided a very helpful transcript, the highlight of which is the colorful expression, "He sends Jagielka for a pie" — glossed by Ian as "he jinks so as to send [Everton player Phil Jagielka] the wrong way."

I noted in the comments that "for me, 'He sends Jagielka for a pie' has all the magic and mystery that 'Terwilliger bunts one' had for Annie Dillard's mother." I was referring to a passage in Dillard's memoir An American Childhood, which is worth reproducing here as a reminder of the opacity of sports-talk to non-initiates on both sides of the pond.

[This is a guest post by David Bamman.]

It took me a while to really make sense of Twitter. For the longest time, it was (to me) the stomping ground of 14-year-olds and Ashton Kutcher, each issuing a minute-by-minute feed of their lives. Around the time Twitter arrived, however, I had just had a breakthrough on YouTube's enormous popularity – it was only after watching a dozen different videos of the Super Mario Brothers theme song performed a dozen different ways that I finally got it: I may not care about cats playing the keyboard or wedding parties dancing down the aisle, but somebody does, and without a distribution system for people to broadcast whatever their hearts felt like, I never would have had my life improved by that kid with the beatboxing flute or the one with the double guitar.

So I waited for a similar breakthrough with Twitter. It came, at long last, after I realized that it was exactly what I first thought it was: 14-year-olds (and Ashton Kutcher) chronicling the minutiae of their lives. It is colloquial language, constrained by 140 characters: everyday conversations about waiting in line at the grocery store, your flight just landing at ORD, what to do this Saturday night, "omg did u see hr dress?" In spurts it is, of course, much more than that, as its use during the protests of the 2009 Iranian election proved, but in its unmarked use, it's the language of how millions of people across the world talk to their friends.