Ignorance, appropriation, and exoticization

... all wrapped up in one nice package in this morning's New York Times!

It's a little hard to know where to start. Well, let's start with ignorance. The media never gets stuff about language right, so that's no surprise. And in some places it's hard to tell whether it's the journalist or the musician who's saying something stupid (it'd be nice to live in a world where journalists were smart about language but alas). Here's a nice quote:

The last vestiges of some minority languages are preserved as song, and a musical ear can be an advantage in studying the kind of tonal languages prevalent in parts of Asia.

Non sequitur much?

Appropriation just runs through everything these musicians say. The most explicit is a quote from Vivian Fung (who the journalist helpfully tells us is a Canadian):

"It's about finding the parts of the research [on minority languages in China] that speak to me ... and filtering it so that it becomes mine."

Oh Ms. Fung, please take Anthropology 101.

And taking a recording of Ishi and setting it to piano?  Maybe read up on Ishi's story. Maybe read up on what happened to his brain. When I teach about Ishi, all the students are horrified at how he was made into a living museum exhibit. Now, about a century later, he continues to be exploited.

I'm also just so tired of reading things like "these enigmatic utterances" - enigmatic? Oooh, enigmatic and mysterious and inscrutable.

"A work like Mr. James's 'Counting in Quileute' ... is like a time capsule shot into space - except the meaning was already opaque at the time of its sealing." 

I wonder what the Quileutes would have to say about that?

They do give about a paragraph and a half to Greg Anderson's concerns about the ethics of all this, but the composers' responses are supposed to put our minds at ease.

Maybe this is all sour grapes because of the opening paragraph that says:

For the most part, ethnographers and linguists are helpless in the face of the gradual erasure of collective memory that goes along with this loss of linguistic diversity.

That actually raises some complex issues. Calling us helpless implies that we think (or someone thinks) we should have some control but we don't. The reality is that many of us have learned the humbling lesson that language loss or language retention is not up to us; it's up to the people who really do have a claim to these languages - the communities where they're spoken. And I'm not saying we're perfect. I know I've made my share of blunders along these lines. But at least I'm trying to learn to be respectful.

Drinking and dialect

There's a lot of cool research on intoxicated speech and I figured it'd be in the news as progress is made, but I didn't particularly expect it to come like this article called 'Hey, y'all!' Why 'yous guys' accents come back when you're drinking". Here's the quote about the effects of alcohol (and other things):

“We slur our words, and it’s harder to maintain the motor coordination and control needed for effective fine motor execution needed for speech production,” explains Amee Shah, director of Cleveland State University’s Research Laboratory in Speech Acoustics & Perception.

That's surely part of what's going on. Maybe the Wisconsin linguists working on inebriated speech will comment on that. And maybe Shah will have more to say on this ... the piece is so short that it can't really cover much.

But — assuming that we do become more dialectal when we drink — how much of that is about motor control? I know that when people get really upset, their speech can become much more dialectal. (You know who you are.) That's not motor control. What else is at work?  What's worrisome about the way the article presents it is that it really feeds the stereotype that dialect is lazy speech.

"Morphology is the reality TV of language."

Most readers of this blog already know the "morphology is the Poland of linguistics" quip … if not, see here. Now, David Fertig has a book forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press called Analogy and Morphological Change. I've always been a fan of his stuff and this is going to be particularly cool. In contrasting directions of morphological change with articulatorily motivated sound changes, he writes this:

There are arguably no inherent qualities of morphological patterns that play any role in determining speakers' preferences. Speakers simply prefer what they are most familiar with. We might say that morphology is the reality TV of language. It is the domain of dominant patterns that have nothing to recommend them other than their dominance, just as reality shows are the domain of celebrities who are famous for being famous.

Nice. Maybe I dislike reality TV a little less now … and I can't wait to use this book in a class.

A role for media influence in sound change?

One of the most common topics that non-linguists raise with linguists, especially if the subject is language change or dialects, is the effect of mass media: Surely dialects are dying out because of TV, etc.

In response linguists point out on a regular basis is that such influence seems to be heavily restricted: We definitely see the very rapid spread of words (cromulent), turns of phrase (too many to start on, see here) and even interjections (d'oh!) ... to pull examples just from the Simpsons, long a source of serious scholarly attention (and yes, I do mean especially HeiDeas). That kind of pretty superficial stuff aside, leading sociolinguists (like Chambers and Labov, for example) have argued that TV does not have real impact on the basic ways we talk … structural things, like pronunciation.

I had heard a few times about work going on in the UK that examines the issue very systematically and finally got around to looking it. I'm talking about a project from Glasgow, led by Jane Stuart-Smith, described in detail here. This is a quick take and I hope folks will speak up if I've missed key points …

Every good piece of research on language change reveals great new levels of complication and this looks to be no different. Glasgow adolescents who are really engaged with London-based television shows aren't picking up southern accents generally and can't imitate them. But Stuart-Smith and colleagues' …

large-scale, multifactorial statistical analysis reveals robust significant correlations between features of consonant pronunciation ([f] [v] for /θ/ /ð/ and l-vocalization) and opportunities for contact with speakers of Southern English English, specific social practices, and engaging with the popular television show, EastEnders.

They characterize what's going on as ‘linguistic appropriation from the media’, and reasonably conclude that "In fact, it emerges that very little is known about how speakers learn about the accents from speech presented in the media". I'm very curious to see how this progresses … but things are getting more complicated and I like that.