It will probably not surprise the reader to see me claim that France and French are both sociopolitical abstractions. France is, like all states, an abstraction, and it is hard to point to physical manifestations of France the state. But we understand that states are a bundle of related institutions with (mostly) shared goals. These institutions give rise to our impression of the Fifth Republic, though at other times in history conflict between these institutions gave rise to revolution. But currently the defining institutions share a sufficient alignment that we can usefully talk as if they are one. This is not so different from the i-language perspective on languages. Each individual “French” speaker has a grammar projected by their brain, and these are (generally speaking) sufficiently similar that we can maintain the fiction that they are the same. The only difference I see is that linguists can give a rather explicit account of any given instance of i-French whereas it’s difficult to describe political institutions in similarly detailed terms (though this may just reflect my own ignorance about modern political science). In some sense, this explicitness at the i-language level makes e-French seem even more artificial than e-France.
Category: Sociolinguistics
Stop being weird about the Russian language
As you know, Russia is waging an unprovoked war on Ukraine. It should go without saying that my sympathies are with Ukraine, but of course both states are undemocratic, one-party kleptocracies and I have little hope for anything good coming from the conflict.
That’s all besides the point. Since the start of the war, I have had several conversations with linguists who suggested that the study of the Russian language—one of the most important languages in linguistic theorizing over the years—is now “cringe”. This is nonsense. First, official statistics show that a majority of Ukrainian citizens identify as ethnically Russian, and that a substantial minority speak Russian as a first language (and this is probably skewed by social-desirability bias). Secondly, it is wrong to identify a language with any one nation. (It is “cringe” to use flag emojis to label languages; just use the ISO codes.) Third, it is foolish to equate the state with the people who live underneath them, particularly after the end of the kind of mass political movements that in earlier times could stop this kind of state violence. It is a basic corollary of the i-language view that children learn whatever languages they’re sufficiently exposed to, regardless of their location or of their caretakers’ politics. The iniquity of war does not travel from nation to language to its speakers. Stop being weird about it.
O in truncated compounds
English uses stump compounds formed by taking (roughly) the first syllable of two (or three) words and adjoining them. This is the presumably the process behind real-estate neologisms like Soho (< South of Houston) and Noho (< North of Houston), truncated brand names like HoJo (< Howard Johnson, a hotel chain), and nicknames for celebrities like BoJo (< Beau Johnson) and FloJo (< Florence Griffith Joyner). One strange property of these compounds—documented in an unpublished paper I presented with Laurel MacKenzie at an LSA meeting many years ago—is that when such compounds contain an orthographic <o>, it is almost always pronounced with the GOAT vowel (e.g., American English [oʊ]) even when that is unfaithful to the underlying pronunciation. Thus Soho is [ˈsoʊ.hoʊ], not the more faithful [ˈsaʊ.haʊ]. And, the second syllable of Samohi, a stump compound for Santa Monica High School, is presumably read […moʊ…] even though it stands in for [ˈmɑ.nɪ.kə].
(h/t: Laurel, of course.)
Grapholinguistics talk
Here are slides from a talk, coauthored with Richard Sproat, given at the Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century conference, on how we talk about writing systems in speech and language processing. We will try to get this into archival form soon.
X moment
A Reddit moment is an expression used to refer to a certain type of cringe ‘cringeworthy behavior or content’ judged characteristic of Redditors, habitual users of the forum website reddit.com. It seems hard to pin down what makes cringe Redditor-like, but discussion on Urban Dictionary suggests that one salient feature is a belief in one’s superiority, or the superiority of Redditors in general; a related feature is irl behavior that takes Reddit too seriously. The normal usage is as an interjection of sorts; presented with cringeworthy internet content (a screenshot or URL), one might simply respond “Reddit moment”.
However, Reddit isn’t the only community that can have a similar type of pejorative X moment. One can find many instances of crackhead moment, describing unpredictable or spazzy behavior. A more complicated example comes from a friend, who shared a link about a software developer who deliberately sabotaged a widely used JavaScript software library to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine. JavaScript, and the Node.js community in particular, has been extremely vulnerable to both deliberate sabotage and accidental bricking ‘irreversible destruction of technology’, and naturally my friend sent the link with the commentary “js moment”. The one thing that seems to unite all X moment snowclones is a shared negative evaluation of the community in the common ground.
Country (dead)naming
Current events reminded me of an ongoing Discourse about how we ought to refer to the country Ukraine in English. William Taylor, US ambassador to the country under George W. Bush, is quoted on the subject in this Time magazine piece (“Ukraine, Not the Ukraine: The Significance of Three Little Letters”, March 5th, 2014; emphasis mine), which is circulating again today:
The Ukraine is the way the Russians referred to that part of the country during Soviet times … Now that it is a country, a nation, and a recognized state, it is just Ukraine.
Apparently they don’t fact-check claims like this, because this is utter nonsense. Russian doesn’t have definite articles, i.e., words like the. There is simply no straightforward way to express the contrast between the Ukraine and Ukraine in Russian (or in Ukrainian for that matter).
Now, it’s true that the before Ukraine has long been proscribed in English, but this seems to be more a matter of style—the the variant sounds archaic to my ear—than ideology. And, in Russian, there is variation between в Украине and на Украине, both of which I would translate as ‘in Ukraine’. My understanding is that both have been attested for centuries, but one (на) was more widely used during the Soviet era and thus the other (в) is thought to emphasize the country’s sovereignty in the modern era. As I understand it, that one preposition is indexical of Ukrainian nationalist sentiment and another is indexical of Russian revanchist-nationalist sentiment is more or less linguistically arbitrary in the Saussurean sense. Or, more weakly, the connotative differences between the two prepositions are subtle and don’t map cleanly onto the relevant ideologies. But I am not a native (or even competent) speaker of Russian so you should not take my word for it.
Taylor, in the Time article, continues to argue that US media should use the Ukrainian-style transliteration Kyiv instead of the Russian-style transliteration Kiev. This is a more interesting prescription, at least in that the linguistic claim—that Kyiv is the standard Ukrainian transliteration and Kiev is the standard Russian transliteration—is certainly true. However, it probably should be noted that dozens of other cities and countries in non-Anglophone Europe are known by their English exonyms, and no one seems to be demanding that Americans start referring to Wien [viːn] ‘Vienna’ or Moskva ‘Moscow’. In other words Taylor’s prescription is a political exercise rather than a matter of grammatical correctness. (One can’t help but notice that Taylor is a retired neoconservative diplomat pleading for “political correctness”.)
Words and what we should do about them
Every January linguists and dialectologists gather for the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America and its sister societies. And, since 1990, attendees crowd into a conference room to vote for the American Dialect Society’s Word Of The Year (or WOTY for short). The guidelines for nominating and selecting the WOTY are deliberately underdetermined. There are no rules about what’s a word (and, increasingly, picks are not even a word under any recognizable definition thereof), what makes a word “of the year” (should it be a new coinage? should its use be vigorous or merely on the rise? should it be stereotyped or notorious? should it reflect the cultural zeitgeist?) or even whether the journalists in the room are eligible to vote.
By my count, there are two major categories of WOTY winners over the last three decades: commentary on US and/or world political events, or technological jargon; I count 14 in the former category (1990’s bushlips, 1991’s mother of all, 2000’s chad, 2001’s 9-11, 2002’s WMD, 2004’s red state/blue state, 2005’s truthiness, 2007’s subprime and 2008’s bailout, 2011’s occupy, 2014’s #blacklivesmatter, 2016’s dumpster fire, 2017’s fake news, 2018’s tender-age shelter) and 9 in the latter (1993’s information superhighway, 1994’s cyber, 1995’s web, 1997’s millennium bug, 1998’s e-, 1999’s Y2K, 2009’s tweet, 2010’s app, 2012’s hashtag) But, as Allan Metcalf, former executive of the American Dialect Society, writes in his 2004 book Predicting New Words: The Secrets Of Their Success, terms which comment on a situation—rather than fill some denotational gap—rarely have much of a future. And looking back some of these picks not only fail to recapitulate the spirit of the era but many (bushlips, newt, morph, plutoed) barely denote at all. Of those still recognizable, it is shocking how many refer to—avoidable—human tragedies: a presidential election decided by a panel of judges, two bloody US incursions into Iraq and the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualities that resulted, the subprime mortgage crisis and the unprecedented loss of black wealth that resulted, and unchecked violence by police and immigration officers against people of color and asylum-seekers.
Probably the clearest example of this is the 2018 WOTY, tender-age shelter. This ghoulish euphemism was not, in my memory, a prominent 2018 moment, so for the record, it refers to a Trump-era policy of separating asylum-seeking immigrants from their children. Thus, “they’re not child prisons, they’re…”. Ben Zimmer, who organizes the WOTY voting, opined that this was a case of bureaucratic language backfiring, but I disagree: there was no meaningful blowback. The policy remains in place, and the people who engineered the policy remain firmly in power for the forseeable future, just as do the architects of and propagandists for the Iraqi invasions (one of whom happens to be a prominent linguist!), the subprime mortgage crisis, and so on. Tender-age shelter is of course by no means the first WOTY that attempts to call out right-wing double-talk, but as satire it fails. There’s no premise—it is not even in the common ground that the US linguistics community (or the professional societies who represent them) fervently desire an end to the aggressive detention and deportion of undocumented immigrants, which after all has been bipartisan policy for decades, and will likely remain so until at least 2024—and without this there is no irony to be found. Finally, it bespeaks a preoccupation with speech acts rather than dire material realities.
This is not the only dimension on which the WOTY community has failed to self-criticize. A large number of WOTY nominees (though few outright winners) of the last few years have clear origins in the African-American community (e.g., 2017 nominees wypipo, caucasity, and 🐐, 2018 nominees yeet and weird flex but OK, 2019 nominees Karen and woke). Presumably these terms become notable to the larger linguistics community via social media. It is certainly possible for the WOTY community to celebrate language of people of color, but it is also possible to read this as exotificiation. The voting audience, of course, is upper-middle-class and mostly-white, and here these “words”, some quite well-established in the communities in which they originate, compete for novelty and notoriety against tech jargon and of-the-moment political satire. As scholars of color have noted, this could easily reinforce standard ideologies that view African-American English as a debased form of mainstream English rather than a rich, rule-governed system in its own right. In other words, the very means by which we as linguists engage in public-facing research risk reproducing linguistic discrimination:
How might linguistic research itself, in its questions, methods, assumptions, and norms of dissemination, reproduce or work against racism? (“LSA Statement on Race”, Hudley & Mallison 2019)
I conclude that the ADS should issue stringent guidance about what makes expressions “words”, and what makes them “of the year”. In particular, these guidelines should orient voters towards linguistic novelty, something the community is well-situated to assess.
How "uh" and "um" differ
If you’ve been following the recent discussions on Language Log, then you know that there is a great deal of inter-speaker variation in the use of the fillers uh and um, despite their superficial similarity. In this post, I’ll discuss some published results, summarize some of the Language Log findings (with the obvious caveat that none of it has been subject to any sort of peer review) and explain what I think it all means for our understanding of the contrast between uh and um.
The function of uh and um
The vast majority of work on disfluencies (which include fillers like uh and um as well as repetitions, revisions, and false starts) assumes that uh and um are functionally equivalent, substitutable forms. But Clark and Fox Tree (2002) argue that they are subtly different. They claim that uh serves as signal minor delays and um signals major delays. The evidence for this is straightforward:
- Um is more often followed by a pause than uh.
- Pauses after ums tend to be longer than those occurring after uhs (though Mark has failed to replicate this in a much larger corpus, and I am inclined to defer to him).
- Um is more common than uh in utterance-initial position, the point at which speech planning demands are presumably at their greatest. [1]
From these results, though, it is not obvious that uh and um are qualitatively different. This has not prevented people (myself included) from making this jump. For example, Mark speculated a bit about this for the Atlantic: “People tend to use UM when they’re trying to decide what to say, and UH when they’re trying to decide how to say it.” This is plausible, but the evidence for differential functions of uh and um is lacking.
Intraspeaker differences in uh and um
Gender effects
The first—and probably most robust—finding, is that female speakers have a higher average um/uh ratio than males. This pattern was found in several corpora of American English available from the LDC (1 2 3). It also reported in a recent paper by Acton (2011), who looks two American English corpora. A higher um/uh ratio in females was also found in two corpora of British English. The first looks at data from the HCRC map task and the second at the conversational portion of the British National Corpus (BNC). The latter was earlier the subject of a study by Rayson et al. (1997), who found that that er (the British equivalent of uh) [2] was the one of the words most strongly associated with male (rather than female) speakers; the only word more “masculine” than uh was the expletive fucking.
Social class effects
The second finding is that um/uh ratio is correlated with social class: higher status speakers have a higher um/uh ratio. Once again, this was first reported by Rayson et al., who found that erm is more common in speakers with high-status occupations. Mark found a similar pattern in American English using educational attainment—rather than occupation—as a measure of social class.
Age effects
The third finding is that younger speakers have a higher um/uh ratio than older speakers. This was first reported by Rayson et al. (once again, studying the conversational portion of the BNC), who found that that er is much more common in speakers over the age of 35. Similar patterns are reported by Acton, and several Language Log correspondents (1 2 3 4).
Geographic effects
Finally, Jack Grieve looked at um/uh ratio geographically, and found that um was more common in the Midlands and the central southwest. I see two issues with this result, however. First, I don’t observe any geographic patterns in the raw data (ibid., in the comments section of that post); to my eye, the geographic patterns only emerge after aggressive smoothing; this may just be another case of Smoothers Gone Wild. Secondly, the data was taken from geocoded Twitter posts, not speech. As commenter “BK” asks: “do we have any reason to believe that writing ‘UM’ vs ‘UH’ in a tweet is at all correlated with the use of ‘UM’ vs ‘UH’ in speech?” Regrettably, I suspect the answer is no, but there still is probably something to be gleaned from tweeters’ stylistic use of these fillers.
Uh and um in children with autism
Our recent work on filler use in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) might provide us another way to get at the functional differentiation between uh and um. We [3] used a semi-structured corpus of diagnostic interviews of children ages 4-8, and find that children with ASD produce a much lower um–uh ratio than typically developing children matched for age and intelligence. Children with specific language impairment—a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by language delays or deficits in the absence of other developmental or sensory impairments—have an um–uh ratio much closer to the typical children; this tells us it’s not about language impairment (something which is relatively common—but not specific to—children with ASD). We also find that um–uh ratio is correlated with the Communication Total Score of the Social Communication Questionnaire, a parent-reported measure of communication ability. At the very least, individuals who use more um are perceived to have better communication abilities by their parents. At best, use of um itself contributes to these perceptions.
How uh and um differ
To the sociolinguistic eye, the effects of gender, class, and age just described tell us a lot about uh and um. Given that women have a higher um/uh ratio than men, we expect that um is either the more prestigious variant, or the incoming variant, or both. This is what Labov calls the gender paradox: women consistently lead men in the use of prestige variants, and lead men in the adoption of innovative variants. Further evidence that um is the prestige variant comes from social class: higher status individuals have a higher um/uh ratio. Younger speakers have a higher um/uh ratio, suggesting that um is also the incoming variant. This is not the only possible interpretation, however; it may be that the variants are subject to age grading—meaning that speakers change their use of uh and um as they age—which does not entail that there is any change in progress. Given a change in apparent time—meaning that younger and older speakers use the variants at different rates—the only way to tell whether there is change in progress is to look at data collected at multiple time points. While the evidence is limited, it looks like both age grading and change in progress are occurring—they are not mutually exclusive, after all.
Unfortunately, some evidence from style shifting problematizes this view of um as a prestige variant. O’Connell and Kowal (2005) look at uh and um by analyzing the speech of professional TV and radio personalities interviewing Hillary Clinton. If um is the more prestigious variant, then we would expect a higher um/uh ratio in this formal context compared to the more casual styles recorded in other corpora. But in fact these experienced public speakers have a particularly low um/uh ratio. Hillary Clinton produced 640 uhs and 160 ums, for an um/uh ratio of 0.250; in contrast, Mark found that on average, female speakers in the Fisher corpora favored um more than 2-to-1.
So why is Hillary Clinton hating on um? Can an incoming variable be associated with women and the upper classes yet still avoided in formal contexts? Or are we simply wrong to think of uh and um as variants of a single variable? Is it possible that, given our limited understanding of the functional differences between uh and um, we have failed to account for associations between discourse demands and social groups (or speech styles)? Perhaps Clinton just needs uh more than we could ever know.
Endnotes
[1] This finding is so robust, it even holds in Dutch, which has very similar fillers to those of English (Swerts 1998).
[2] Note that, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, British er and erm are just orthographic variants of uh and um, respectively. That’s not to say that they’re pronounced identically, just that they are functionally equivalent.
[3] Early studies geared at speech researchers were conducted by Peter Heeman and Rebecca Lunsford. Other coauthors include Lindsay Olson, Alison Presmanes Hill, and Jan van Santen.
References
E.K. Acton. 2011. On gender differences in the distribution of um and uh. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 17(2): 1-9.
H.H. Clark & J.E. Fox Tree. 2002. Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition 84(1): 73-111.
D.C. O’Connell and S. Kowal. 2005. Uh and um revisited: Are they interjections for signaling delay? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34(6): 555-576.
P. Rayson, G. Leech, and M. Hodges. 1997. Social differentiation in the use of English vocabulary: Some analyses of the conversational component of the British National Corpus. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 2(1): 133-152.
M. Swerts. 1998. Filled pauses as markers of discourse structure. Journal of Pragmatics 30(4): 485-496.
More on the Word Gap
Here’s a lovely thinkpiece on the Word Gap. I couldn’t agree more.
(ing): now with 100% more enregisterment!
In his new novel Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon employs a curious bit of eye dialect for Vyrna McElmo, one of the denizen of his bizarro pre-9/11 NYC:
All day down there. I’m still, like, vibrateen? He’s a bundle of energy, that guy.
Oh? Torn? You’ll think it’s just hippyeen around, but I’m not that cool with a whole shitload of money crashing into our life right now?
What’s going on with vibrateen and hippyeen? I can’t be sure what Pynchon has in mind here—who can? But I speculate the ever-observant author is transcribing a very subtle bit of dialectical variation which has managed to escape the notice of most linguists. But first, a bit of background.
In English, words ending in <ng>, like sing or bang, are not usually pronounced with final [g] as the orthography might lead you to believe. Rather, they end with a single nasal consonant, either dorsal [ŋ] or coronal [n]. This subtle point of English pronunciation is not something most speakers are consciously aware of. But [n ~ ŋ] variation is sometimes commented on in popular discourse, albeit in a phonetically imprecise fashion: the coronal [n] variant is stigmatized as “g-dropping” (once again, despite the fact that neither variant actually contains a [g]). Everyone uses both variants to some degree. But the “dropped” [n] variant can be fraught: Peggy Noonan says it’s inauthentic, Samuel L. Jackson says it’s a sign of mediocrity, and merely transcribing it (as in “good mornin’“) might even get you accused of racism.
Pynchon presumably intends his -eens to be pronounced [in] on analogy with keen and seen. As it happens, [in] is a rarely-discussed variant of <ing> found in the speech of many younger Midwesterners and West Coast types, including yours truly. [1] Vyrna, of course, is a recent transplant from Silicon Valley and her dialogue contains other California features, including intensifiers awesome and totally and discourse particle like. And, I presume that Pynchon is attempting to transcribe high rising terminals, AKA uptalk—another feature associated with the West Coast—when he puts question marks on her declarative sentences (as in the passages above).
Only a tiny fraction of everyday linguistic variation is ever subject to social evaluation, and even less comes to be associated with groups of speakers, attitudes, or regions. As far as I know, this is the first time this variant has received any sort of popular discussion. -een may be on its way to becoming a California dialect marker (to use William Labov’s term [2]), though in reality it has a much wider geographic range.
Endnotes
[1] This does not exhaust the space of (ing) variant, of course. One of the two ancestors of modern (ing) is the Old English deverbal nominalization suffix -ing [iŋg]. In Principles of the English Language (1756), James Elphinston writes that [ŋg] had not fully coalesced, and that the [iŋg] variant was found in careful speech or “upon solemn occasions”. Today this variant is a stereotype of Scouse, and with [ɪŋk], occurs in some contact-induced lects.
[2] It is customary to also refer to Michael Silverstein for his notion of indexical order. Unfortunately, I still do not understand what Silverstein’s impenetrable prose adds to the discussion, but feel free to comment if you think you can explain it to me.