'Bakery' = 'baked goods' in Dublin!?!?

Well, at the Dublin airport at least. I changed planes there on the way to England (and then Scotland), and bought a quick cup of coffee at this place:

Anybody know offhand whether Irish English has this usage generally?

Dialect maps in everyday (German) life

In Berlin right now, en route to Leipzig for a conference and I did what you do in Berlin early on Sunday morning when your hotel room isn't ready yet ... headed to a bakery for a cup of coffee and a pastry.

I'm sitting and sipping and look up and lo and be-freakin-hold, what do I see on the wall, but a giant dialect map of words for 'roll' in German. It looks pretty homemade, but not quite and the place (Kamps) is a chain, so I'm wondering if this is a staple in their franchises?

Bakery

Luanne von Schneidemesser starts her fine chapter of Wisconsin Talk (the chapter is called 'Words used in Wisconsin') with a story of her daughter finding out, in the Pacific Northwest, that people didn't get the use of the word bakery to mean 'baked goods' rather than the place those goods are made. This is one of those terms that walks around in the open with no hint of stigma and sometimes surprisingly little awareness that it's a regional form. Stumblerette passed along this example from the local paper …

http://www.americandialect.org/

The American Dialect Society has finished a major webpage update, here. Might be worth calling attention to the student membership and there's a nice plug for the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Check it out.

British dialects in the news

Here's a nice piece on contemporary language and dialect issues in Britain, by leading sociolinguist Paul Kerswill and published in the Sun. We've said a little about dialect and the British show EastEnders here in the past (here), but this is about a reality show, The Only Way is Essex, or TOWIE.

I haven't seen the show and don't know enough about British dialects today to have anything to say anyhow, but maybe some readers can comment on Kerswill's analysis? Sure looks to me like a good example of laying out language variation and change stuff for a lay audience.

Slab-Z: More DARE in the news

Yup, that's the range of the alphabet covered in the last volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Joan Hall, who's leading the charge on to Z, has an excellent piece in the new Newsweek, which you can read here. She alludes at the end to the already-anticipated electronic version.

I'm holding my breath already.

American Speech issue on Accommodation

The new issue of American Speech is out, a special issue, co-edited by Wisconsin's own Tom Purnell together with Malcah Yaeger-Dror of Arizona. Below is part of the Table of Contents (the full ToC and abstracts are available from the links in there, obviously). If you count Purnell's work on African-American English in the Upper Midwest, this one issue shows you how rich this region is not only linguistically but now in terms of the research being done here on local varieties.

ACCOMMODATION TO THE LOCALLY DOMINANT NORM: A SPECIAL ISSUE
THOMAS C. PURNELL and MALCAH YAEGER-DROR
American Speech 2010;85 115-120
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/85/2/115?etoc

ACCOMMODATION TO THE LOCAL MAJORITY NORM BY HMONG AMERICANS IN THE TWIN CITIES, MINNESOTA
RIKA ITO
American Speech 2010;85 141-162
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/85/2/141?etoc

NORTHERN CITIES MEXICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH: VOWEL PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION
REBECCA V. ROEDER
American Speech 2010;85 163-184
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/85/2/163?etoc

By the way, if you have access to American Speech, you should also check out the "Teaching American Speech" section. Michael Adams, the current editor, has done an exemplary job of building the journal as a scholarly outlet and as something that serves the broader community.

It's a good time to be a linguist working in the Upper Midwest, I think.

Eurovision, Lena Meyer-Landrut, English, and accents

This came in yesterday:

Hi Mr. Verb,
Love the blog. I just wanted to point out something interesting that you might want to discuss on the blog. The Eurovision contest winner from Germany, Lena Meyer-Landrut, has an incredibly strange accent when she sings. Perhaps someone could look into it. It sounds partly Australian, partly American, but she never sounds like a German singing English. Whatever it is, I think alot of people (including myself) find it really annoying. Perhaps this is something for the blog....

Here is a clip of her famous song that won the Eurovision thing.

Enjoy!
Larry Linguist

Well, first off, thanks Larry. Yup, that sounds pretty much unlike any dialect of English I know. Sounds very affected, and plenty of singers do that. Of course she's a German high schooler and who knows what coaching she's had and how this got created. I haven't heard her interviewed in any language. How does she talk?

Second, it turns out that her language is a whole nother issue for some people in Germany. One of our contributors tells me that the Verein Deutsche Sprache is complaining bitterly about her 'embarrassing' Germany by singing in English. This link gives their argument, pretty lame I think, that singing in German leads to better results.

The durability of the relationship between language and space

Early this year, a really cool report came out from the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA*) in Bonn, Germany. It was done by Oliver Falck, Stephan Heblich, Alfred Lameli & Jens Südekum, and it's called:

Dialects, Cultural Identity, and Economic Exchange

The full report is available here, just scroll down to number 4743. A while back it got some international press, notably this piece in The Economist, including this:

When people migrate within Germany, they tend to go to places where dialects resemble those spoken in their home region 120 years ago.

Here's how the report's conclusion lays this out:

dialects were shaped by past interactions, prior mass migration waves, religious and political divisions, ancient routes and transportation networks, and so forth. Dialects act as a sort of regional memory that comprehensively stores such information. Consequently, language variation is probably the best measurable indicator of cultural differences that one can come up with.

Our findings imply that there are intangible cultural borders within a country that impede economic exchange across its regions. These intangible borders are enormously persistent over time; they have been developed over centuries, and so they are likely to be there also tomorrow.

One key example of dialect patterns is the case of Goslar, illustrated in the map here. (Click to enlarge.) The dialect was shaped by heavy immigration from the southeast (shown by the orange, showing greater similarities between those dialects with Goslar). This pattern was created by 16th c. immigration from Saxony to Goslar by miners.

German dialect maps are often used as examples of beautifully clear regional differences, with big, clean isoglosses stretching across a pretty vast territory. But even within the traditional dialects of German-speaking Europe, enclaves like this are remarkably common. It really underscores what we've come to call "Purnell's Law" here in Madison: Language is local.

The report has good historical depth in terms of earlier political boundaries, migrations and trade routes, etc. and their conclusions about the persistence of old patterns of contact and old boundaries are pretty exciting. In the U.S. the history of English is still relatively shallow. Some work here is considering history in these ways, but there are big opportunities.

*The German name is Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, 'research institute on the future of labor', in case you're wondering how they got 'IZA'.)

Montreal English ... the sociolinguistic news flood continues

Nice report here from the Montreal Gazette on Charles Boberg's work on ethnic and neighborhood differences in Montreal English. It's a good picture of variation and change in English in a bilingual city, showing both geographical and social parameters of differences.

On one point, something must have gotten garbled in transmission:

Unlike most North American cities, Boberg says, Montreal is not a linguistic melting pot where everyone ends up sounding more or less the same.

Is the melting pot view of things really still out there?

But in terms of eastern Canada, rumor has it that there's also a lot of work afoot in Toronto, I think including heritage languages and English dialects.

Image from here.

More sociolinguistics in the news … the AAE Vowel Shift

This piece from the Raleigh Public Record reports on work on African-American English in the capitol of North Carolina by Erik Thomas, Robin Dodsworth and others. Thomas is a leading figure in sociophonetics, including important research on the African-American English Vowel Shift. It's striking how little the AAE Shift has been discussed in the media to date. Here's hoping this is the beginning of a wave of journalism to fill that gap.

Happy Talk like a Yooper Day!

Details here. But the key is figuring out when it is:

In case you've forgotten the rule for the date, it is the day of the first Packer home game after the opening of Wisconsin's deer gun hunt season.

All the blaze orange around the state will stand out nice against the mountains of snow we're supposed to get today and tonight (check it out here).

Image from here — what says 'Upper Midwest' louder and clearer than blaze orange duct/duck tape?

North Carolina /o:/

One of the striking features of Southern (and many Eastern) varieties of US English that is not (yet) a stereotype is sometimes striking degree of fronting of the vowel in boat, no, hope, etc. Wonkette ran this YouTube video earlier today for its obvious political content. But these are plausibly at least mostly actual Tar Heels talking, and they pretty much all use the word 'vote' so that you can hear a good range of tokens from different speakers.




Many readers of this blog probably don't hear such vowels very often. Besides, it's hilarious.

Sarah Palin's accent and American dialects

The Palin-accent wildfire has pretty much burned through the blogosphere at this point, and Mr. Verb seems to be carrying a lit match and a gas can, but his earlier post didn't seem to shed much light. (Typical — he likes questions more than answers.)

Palin's speech from last night is available at npr.org for download and the quality is good, so you can hear easily things and it's good enough for basic acoustic work. Just a few observations. First, she's got the classic western/northwestern features, things that are found elsewhere, but that many of us associate with the region. The first two examples illustrate that, and the next two are Upper Midwestern patterns that people have commented on, including on ads-l.

• Low back merger (aka cot/caught merger). She talks about 'sons and daughters' and the /au/ there is a low vowel.
• Tense/lax vowel merger before coda /l/, what's often exemplified with fill/feel being/becoming homophonous.
• Her long or tense mid vowels, /e:/ and /o:/, don't look as monophthongal as they seem to sound to a lot of folks, including me at some points. This is often identified specifically with the whole 'Fargo' thing.
• She often has final devoicing or final fortition, including on -s. Acoustically, it's sometimes even more striking than what we find with Wisconsin speakers we've looked at, and that's saying something. The phrase below is "sons and daughters going". (You only get the beginning of 'going' here.) The 'daughters' has a really devoiced -s on there.

'Sons' is presumably 'passively voiced' due to the following vowel.

But the big question is of course what she sounds like and why. Mr. Verb has already hinted that you get big variability in situations of koine or new dialect formation. In mid-20th c. recordings of Wisconsin speakers, the accents sound all over the map to me, while contemporary recordings from the same areas scream Wisconsin, even specifically eastern or southeastern or western Wisconsin. That is, the Wisconsin accent we know now is very recent, and Wisconsin's (European) settlement is far older than Alaska's.

I don't know the historical demographics of Wasilla, but if the percentage of newcomers is high enough, it could well be that she grew up among those folks, and ended up with an accent that sounds like a thousand or so miles away.

Linguistic/cultural stereotyping in the Upper Midwest: Lutran Air

This was passed along by a contributor, who got it from a colleague.

WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE LUTHERAN AIRLINES IS NOW OPERATING IN MINNYSOTA! ALSO SERVING VISCONSIN, NORDERN MITCHIGEN, NORT & SOUT DAKOTA

If you are travelin soon, consider Lutran Air, the no-frills airline.

You're all in da same boat on Lutran Air, here flyin is a upliftin experience.

Dair is no first class on any Lutran Air flight.

Meals are potluck. Rows 1 tru 6, bring rolls; 7 tru 15, bring a salad; 16 tru 21, a hot dish, and 22-30, a dessert.

Basses and tenors please sit in da rear of da aircraft.

Everyone is responsible for his or her own baggage.

All fares are by free will offering, and da plane will not land til da budget is met.

Now, Pay attention to your flight attendant, who vill acquaint you wit da safety system aboard dis Lutran Air.

Okay den, listen up; I'm only gonna say dis vonce:
In da event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, I am frankly gonna be real surprised and so vill Captain Olson, because ve fly right around two tousand feet, so loss of cabin pressure would probably mean da Second Coming or someting of dat nature, and I wouldn't bodder with doze liddle masks on da rubber tubes--you're gonna have bigger tings to worry about den dat. Just stuff doze back up in dair liddle holes.
Probably da masks fell out because of turbulence which, to be honest wit you, we're gonna have quite a bit of at two tousand feet, sorta like driving across a plowed field, but after a while you get used to it.

In da event of a water landing, I'd say forget it. Start saying da Lord's Prayer and just hope you get to da part about forgive us our sins as we forgive dose who sin against us, which some people say 'trespass against us,' which isn't right, but what can you do?

Da use of cell phones on da plane is strictly forbidden, not because day may confuse da plane's navigation system, which is by da pants all da way. No, it's because cell phones are a pain in da wazoo, and if God had meant you to use a cell phone, He wudda put your mout on da side of your head.

We start lunch right about noon and it's buffet style wit da coffeepot up front.

Den we'll have da hymn sing; hymnals are in da seat pockets in front of you. Don't take yours wit you when you go or I am gonna be real upset and I am not kiddin!

Right now I'll say Grace:

Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest
and let deze gifts to us be blessed.
Fader, Son, and Holy Ghost,
May we land in Dulut or pretty close.

Garrison Keillor made these kinds of stereotypes famous nationally for the Upper Midwest, Norwegians, Lutherans, and Fargo certainly promoted some pieces of the picture.

But note what social association the particular linguistic features have here. The key feature is the 'stopping' or use of d or t for interdental fricatives (the 'th sounds' in words like this or thing.) Depending on where you are in the Upper Midwest, this feature is taken to be a clear sign of German ethnicity (Mary Rose's Stanford dissertation treats such a case in Wisconsin), a sign of Polish identity (you can hear that view in Milwaukee, or find it performed on Saturday Night Live in the da Bears skits that our Wisconsin Englishes folks like so much.) Here, it's religion, with immigrant identity obviously lurking in the background.

By the way, the v for w thing would be characteristic of various immigrant communities, but seems to have passed out of even folk stereotype for most of Wisconsin, as far as I know.

"The first computer that speaks Viennese"

Hardly, of course, but that's what the story says. Readers who know German might still enjoy this link — A well-known Austrian actor, Hanno Pöschl (pictured on the left, image from here), has given his voice to science, or at least donated samples for use on "the world's first computer that speaks Viennese." If you scroll down a little on that link, you can hear the contrast between Pöschl actually speaking and Pöschl's synthesized voice.

Aside from being cute, it's a little reminder that speech recognition has to be able to deal with real-world linguistic variation in sounds, and it's even nice to have synthesized voices in varieties we prefer to speak/hear. Still, let's not think too much about how far this computer is from 'speaking', let alone producing actual Viennese.

Another accent quiz

Finally, back to the truly trivial! (Comments continue to come in on opacity, and that may mean more serious talk in the future, but … .) Here's yet another on-line American accent quiz.

They're using some pretty reasonable questions, to the extent there is a 'reasonable' here. But note this:

7. Do you think the word "on" rhymes with "dawn" or with "don"?

• dawn
• don
• Well, I don't think don and dawn sound any different in the first place so on would obviously rhyme with both

There's a widespread fourth option they don't note: For some Southerners — and it's VERY salient to people here in the Upper Midwest — on rhymes with Doan, so with tense long /o:/ rather than either of what people think of as the low/back pair. They've got tons for Southern in other parts of the quiz, so maybe they skipped it.

Regional stereotyping

A contributor has passed on one of those regional stereotype emails he'd just gotten from a colleague. It's about the South, with the predictable heavy focus on language. A couple of samples:

• Southern women know their cities dripping with Southern charm:
• Chawl'stn
• S'vanah
• Foat Wuth
• N'awlins
• Addlanna

• A Southerner knows that "fixin" can be used as a noun, a verb, or an adverb.
• In the South, y'all is singular, all y'all is plural.

As the person who passed it along said:

Calling fixin' an adverb is just people not understanding lexical categories, I imagine, and I know fixins as a noun, but not usually a fixin'. A shame they missed what's distinct about the southern verb. And singular y'all exists, but isn't common. I don't think of it as common in r-less regions and this person is putting on the r-less airs in a big way.

The thing closes with useful advice, at any rate:

• And to those of you [note continuity error: should be all y'all] who are still having a hard time understanding all this Southern stuff, bless your hearts, I hear they are fixin' to have classes on Southernness as a second language!
• And for those who are not from the South but have lived here for a long time, all y'all need a sign to hang on y'alls front porch that reads "I ain't from the South , but I got here as fast as I could."

By the way, that's Florence, Kentucky, not any of the ones in South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, leaving aside the ones that aren't clearly outside of y'all territory.

The Vowel Wars rage on …

I've blogged about it forever, but the anti-Wesconsin crew is out again, here, in the local Madison media. What's currently the last comment, by maggieg, nails it:

Different parts of the country pronounce different letters and/or words differently than what we are used to here in our state. To them, the way they pronounce Wisconsin is correct according to its spelling. I suggest that the person(s) upset about the way it is pronounced start paying attention to the different speech patterns around the country. The individuals who say Wisconsin differently than we natives do are not trying to be offensive, it is what they grew up with … .

Hurrah, a reasonable point!

Now, let's get a little more detailed (sorry for those who don't know about the Northern Cities Shift and such — you can read earlier posts on that). I'm still waiting for somebody out there to note that in southeast Wisconsin, [ɪ] lowering is part of a robust regional pattern. Interesting little sociolinguistic issue attached to this: Will we get a lexical exception here on the state name, while other high front lax vowels continue to lower? So, will we hear Wisconsin but whiskers showing up as wheskers? Or is this a sign of growing resistance to the Northern Cities Shift? Some people seem to be thinking that NCS is pretty fractured here anyway, so the latter seems possible.

David Brooks does sociolinguistics?

It's been a busy day, but can't let it pass without noting that ever-flailing NYT columnist and famed neuroendocrinologist David Brooks has now ventured into what I think is probably sociolinguistics:

The less educated speak the dialect of struggle; the more educated, the dialect of self-fulfillment.

(The on-line version lacks a period at the end.)