Language Log

In previous posts about filled pauses, we've seen a consistent and large sex difference: women use (what's transcribed as) "um" somewhat more than men do, and men use (what's transcribed as) "uh" a lot more than women do.  This pattern has been found in two large conversational telephone speech corpora involving a mix of ages and American regions, in a collection of undergraduate speed-dating transcripts, in a collection of undergraduate "tell me about your weekend" interviews, and in a collection of several hundred sociolinguistic interviews collected over a period of four decades in Philadelphia.

There are apparently also effects of age, of region, of time period, of years of education, of Autism diagnosis, and so on. Today I'll add one more geographical data point — young adults from the Glasgow area — and one more variable — friends vs. strangers.

The following photograph appears in this BBC article: "Why is Sanskrit so controversial?"

It is accompanied by this caption: "Muslims in India choose to learn Arabic".

Label on a display at the Nagoya City Museum:

Nathan Hopson reports that he "had a delightfully giggly trip to the ¥100 Shop today."

Among the gems were these three:

1. Pair Bloom (broom), a mini-broom and dustpan set
2. Crash Cashew Nuts (crushed)
3. Q-ban, my favorite. This was actually a whole product line. The shared distinguishing feature of all is their suction cup (吸盤 or きゅうばん [ kyūban]). I guess the only surprise is that they're not called Cubans.

From David Frauenfelder:

Here’s an item from the land of language: the "Latinometer".

Have you seen it? You enter text into the query box, it analyzes how Latinate your English vocabulary is, and then tells you whether you sound “concrete,” educated, pretentious, or mendacious. The more Latin-derived terms in your text, the more likely you are to be a liar.

Your most recent Language Log post scored 53% on the Latinometer, pretentious, and dangerously close to the “You are probably lying” zone.   I still don’t know if the author, a Latin professor, is trying to be ironic.

Somebody needs to do a LL post on this. I find it utterly ridiculous, and I’m a Latin teacher. Or maybe I find it ridiculous because I’m a Latin teacher. I wonder what a linguist would say?

In English-language conversations, older people tend to use UH more often and UM less often. And at every age, men tend to use UH more than women, and women tend to use UM more than men.  These effects are large and robust – they've been documented in at least five independent datasets, from both North American and Great Britain — for details, see the links at the end of this post.

The cited patterns are consistent with two quite different classes of explanation:

• There might be a language change in progress, with older people reflecting the patterns of an earlier time and younger people showing the language of the future, while women are leading the change, as they often do.
• There might be stable gender and life-cycle effects, so that the UM and UH sex and age associations looked the same a few decades in the past, and will look the same a few decades in the future.

And there's an independent question about the functions of the classes of vocalizations that we transcribe as UM and UH:

• Perhaps UM and UH are simply alternative expressions of the same compositional or communicative function — say, two different (classes of) ways of stalling for time in the process of speaking — or alternatively
• perhaps UM and UH have partly or entirely different functions, and it's differences in the frequency of these functions that are associated with age, sex, and so on.

In neither case are the alternatives mutually exclusive — the truth might be some mixture of the two.

Yesterday, Joe Fruehwald looked at UM and UH usage in a dataset with enough time depth that we can tell the difference between a change in progress and a stable life-cycle effect. And he found that the truth seems to be a bit of both.

I was hoping that, after writing "Chineasy? Not", I wouldn't have to concern myself with this pedagogical bugaboo again.  Wishful thinking!  For reasons that escape me, the Chineasy juggernaut continues to rumble forward

Email yesterday from Bill Benzon:

Here's a blog post about a little bit of linguistic detail in a VERY interesting book: Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History.

Do you have any thoughts on that detail?

The post in question is "Reading Macroanalysis 4: On the matter of 'the'", New Savanna 8/13/2014, and the "detail" in question is a cited difference in the frequency of the word the  between a collection of of 19th century British novels and a comparable collection of 19th-century American novels:

Chapter 7, “Nationality” is pretty straightforward. I don’t have much to say about it except for a puzzle that Jockers presents at the beginning. He points out that, because British and American writers have different practices concerning the word the, that word is about 5 percent of the word tokens in his corpus of 19th Century British novels, while it is about 6 percent of the tokens in the American novels.

When I was studying Buddhism at the University of Washington (Seattle) in 1967-68, there were about ten students in my first-year Sanskrit course for Buddhologists and Indologists.  What intrigued me greatly was that there was another beginning Sanskrit course being offered at the same time.  It had many more students than the class I was in and was offered by the Linguistics Department.  The rationale for encouraging (I can't remember if it was actually required) linguistics students to take Sanskrit was that the foundations of the scientific study of language had been laid by Panini, Patanjali, and other ancient Sanskrit grammarians around two and a half millennia ago, so that it would be good to have at least a basic understanding of the roots of the tradition.

Apologies for temporarily turning this into Conversational Filler Log — but I realized that my assertion in this morning's post ("UM / UH geography") about the effects of years of education was based on some analyses that I'd done but never posted.

So here they are: the basic effect is that people with a 4-year college degree or better have a higher UM / (UM+UH) proportion, on average, than people with only a high school education. This interacts as expected with sex and age: at every educational level, women have a higher UM proportion than men do; and in general, younger people of whatever age and educational level have a higher UM proportion than older people (though the number are small for some of the intersected categories, so that the patterns are a bit messier).

From Jack Grieve, a few minutes after we discussed this issue at the 10.30 coffee break here at Methods in Dialectology XV in Groningen:

Attached is a locally autocorrelated map based on the percent of um vs uh (i.e. um/(um+uh)) in a few billion word of geocoded tweets of 2013 (about 40,000 tokens each). Red are areas where "uh" is relatively more common and blue are areas where "um" is more common. quite a clear pattern, and probably the clearest Midland (only?) lexical pattern I've ever found.

Max Pinton sent in this menu and said he "thought it was a refreshing approach":

"The unstoppable march of the upward inflection?", BBC News Magazine 8/11/2014, quoted me referencing Daniel Hirst's idea about a possible Scandinavian origin for the long-standing pattern of default rising intonations in northern England, Scotland, and northern Ireland. In response, Dave Goodwin sent me this interesting note about rising intonations in Devon:

I am a born & bred Devonian in the westcountry of the UK, though neither side of my family are from these parts.  I do not have a traditional Devon accent by when I went off up country to University (over 20 years ago now) one friend there picked me as being from Devon, whilst everyone else was at a loss as to where I was from, other than somewhere in the south.

Having asked how she guessed she said her older brother had been studying at the University of Exeter (in Devon) & she had often visited him, then gave her reason as having noticed the locals round these parts had the inflection, albeit not as over emphasised as the Australians, for example, do.  I had never really noticed it before but started hearing all my friends back home using it as well as a great many of their parents/siblings etc.