My friends, family, and acquaintances all know that there are two things in life that I care -- and TALK -- about most: jewellery and language. I am sure this bores everyone a whole lot, but the topic of language, at the very least, should be of immediate interest to everyone. It is an essential part of being human and at the root of many issues and problems that concern us.
First off, though, I'd just like to clarify a few things about dialects and language in general. (I feel at least a little qualified to do this because I minored in lingusitics at uni and my specific area of research for a special project my final year was dialectology.) Human language is split up into units called "languages." Languages are made up of different varieties. Regional varieties of a given language are called "dialects." There is a kind of human language we call the French language and there are many regional varieties (dialects) of French, for instance, Parisian French (the Standard) and Quebecois, the dialect of French spoken in Quebec.
Even those briefest and simplest of definitions are subject to much debate and give rise to great controversy. How do we define what is a language and what is a dialect? Two ideas, "mutual intelligibility" and political boundaries, come into play.
1) Danish speakers can understand Swedish, for the most part. Denmark and Sweden are separate countries. Danish and Swedish are separate languages.
2) Chinese is a language. Mandarin and Cantonese are two dialects of Chinese, but are not mutually intelligible.
Why are Danish and Swedish considered separate languages? Why are Mandarin and Cantonese dialects of the same language?
A second controversial topic is outlined in the example I gave for dialect. How is the standard determined? Why is Parisian the standard version of French that we learn in school? Why not Quebecois? Or, closer to home, why do we traditionally revere the English of Dan Rather and revile the speech of the natives of Alabama? I'd love to hear what people think about this.
Finally, I want to leave you with an example of language betraying community sensibilities (or lack thereof). Many people bemoan what is seen as today's politically correct culture. In my 25 years there have been some pretty marked changes in how we talk about sensitive topics. We used to say "handicapped" to describe someone confined to a wheelchair. Now we say "disabled," but there is a push to change that to "differently-abled." We used to say "Indian" for someone from the First Nations. Then we said "American Indian." Then we said "Native American." The New York Times says "American Indian" still, as far as I know. In Canada, we say "Native" or "First Nations" or "Aboriginal." In Florida, "eskimo" is acceptable when talking about natives of the far north. In Canada, it is generally taboo. We try to tailor our language and neutralize discriminatory terminology. We make room for acceptance (at least that's the idea) and attempt to revise our thinking through our speech. How far along is cultural sensitivity in other places? How do we compare these things, anyway? Is it offensive that our Scottish relatives go out for Chinese food and describe it as a "wee chinkee"? Are they wrong to say that? How about this...
Back in 1999-2000 I was living in Germany. We had a number of familiar US products available and my host family, in particular, were big fans of McDonald's. Just like in the US, McDonald's is constantly coming up with new deals, new prices, and new products to keep the Germans coming in to their stores. And, yes, they do have something called a Royale (with cheese). While I was there they introduced -- for a limited time only! -- a special sandwich with Asian flair called...
"Chicken McFu"
I kid you not. That struck me as both offensive and incredibly funny. And then I started seeing the billboards. There is a stereotype of Asians speaking Western languages that involves them confusing the sounds "l" and "r." There is a perfectly reasonable phonetic explanation for this problem, which I won't go into now. Suffice it to say that the Germans have noticed this quirk as well. Three of the Chicken McFu billboards read as follows
"LIESIG"
"GLOSS"
"SUPEL"
Each of these words is misspelled. In each, the "l" replaces the correct "r." They should read "riesig" ("huge"), "gross" (big), and "super" ("super").
I was absolutely scandalized seeing these things out on the Autobahn and pasted on the walls of the bus station. Again, what do YOU guys think? Does this reflect poorly on the Germans? Could you see an American firm getting away with this? (Abercrombie and Fitch tried something similar a few years back with a shirt that advertized a Chinese drycleaner: "Two Wongs can make it white".)
ETA: I haven't mentioned lexical variation at all (eg, "coke" vs. "pop" vs. "soda"), but if you are interested in that topic and are a NATIVE speaker of NORTH AMERICAN English, check out this survey: http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/linguistics/faculty/boberg/survey.htm . That's a project my former prof and advisor runs with his sociolinguistics classes and he can always use more data.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
Yay! I was hoping you would post on this topic!
I was lamenting just last night that our guest bloggers rarely post, but I should've known you couldn't resist this one!
Chicken McFu IS offensive AND funny, and I kinda wish we had them in the US, but I doubt they would get away with it. As far as the A&F shirt, as long as it said Chinese drycleaner and then the punchline, rather than just drycleaner and the punchline, it seems a little less offensive - but maybe I'm a racist and a bigot.
I never understood how anyone could confuse the L and R sounds until I lived in Asia. Now I occasionally find myself making that half-l half-r sound that is one of the letters in the Korean alphabet!
Also, I took that survey, and fond myself with two answers for several. I wonder if that's because I grew up in Lake City but my parents were damn yankees? :-)
The [l] and [r] thing does have to do with the fact that they are often two interpretations of the same sound in some languages (two allophones of the same phoneme). It makes perfect sense when you break it down with some facts, like you have noticed :-)
As for the survey, I have two for some. Actually, I have three for at least one. "Cash," "cash register," and "check out." But the first of those three has come about from my being in Canada. The fact that you have yankee parents does make a difference. If you recall, I don't have much of a southern accent. This is partially to do with my parents being yankees, but also because of how I "identify" within/outside of my community.
Also, Stephanie, I don't know the precise details of the A&F shirt...either way, it's extremely questionable. But I still think you're a fine human being.
"Tabarnac," when can we all speak in zeros and ones, so no one will be offended in this age of runaway political correctness! And, being from Texas, my coke of choice is Pepsi with Dr. Pepper and Big Red vying for runner-up in my cola/pop/soda/soft drink beverage cravings. It's also funny that besides having a number of regional language dialects, the U.S. has different regional tastes in pickles (Best Maid/Vlassic/Peter Piper/Mt. Olive/Del-Dixi/etc.), grocery store chains (H.E.B./Kroger/Fiesta/Von's/Ralph's/Piggly Wiggly/Food Lion/etc.), sodas (Big Red, Mr. Pib, Mello Yellow, Barq's, I.B.C. root beer, etc.), well, you get the idea.
BTW, here's a link to an ABC News story of the dying out of an Earth based language every two weeks: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3628706
Tabernak, indeed! Regional variation is fascinating. I hope everyone takes the survey...it's lots of fun and you get to laugh about other parts of the country! The results are searchable by region on that site, too.
People interested in language (in a linguistics kind of way, as opposed to a William Safire kind of way) can check out this terrific blog: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/
A friend told me a few years ago of a big controversy in a south Florida beach town where two Chinese immigrant brothers named Wong wanted to open a dry cleaner with the name 'Two Wongs make it White.' They saw the humor in it, but the general population of the beach town thought it was offensive.
Also, the new(ish) Smithsonian museum on the National Mall is called the American Indian Museum and, naturally, was almost entirely set up and filled with material provided by American Indians.
I think it's worth considering who we're offending with certain words and phrases. To me, "midget" sounds much less offensive and condescending than "little person," but people afflicted with dwarfism are recently calling to be called little people. Is this, then, the better choice?
Also, there's a tanning bed in Kawagoe, Japan, called "Blacky's." I almost fell over.
The question of prescription versus description (and the related question of standards) is an old one. The modern preference for describing how people are, as opposed to how they ought to be, probably gained prominence with the publication of Machiavelli's The Prince in 1532. I'm not sure when someone finally got around to formulating the question in a way specific to language, but it's been around since at least 1885.
Consider Mark Twain's note at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike-County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work, but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
Twain knew that regional English was rich and expressive in its own right, and represented more than the failed attempts of Southern degenerates to speak Standard English.
Perhaps the defining feature of the post-1968 intellectual efforts of the humanities and social sciences has been the problematizing of authority and normative values. From the perspective of contemporary identity politics, the idea of a linguistic standard is a mystification meant to justify or at least obscure certain inequalities in the distribution of power and wealth. In other words, "A language is just a dialect with an army and a navy" (I forget who said that).
I don't fully agree with this. I think a more fruitful view would be to consider the institutional "standard" of a language (for languages like English that lack an instiutional standard, we can take a reasonably equivalent set of conventions) as a generic template or a common "operating system" shared among a certain number of meat computers (=brains). The wider the bandwidth of communication, the more generic or "standard" the system has to be and the more strict its rules become. Group identity (dialects) and individual identity (idiolects) can be cultivated by deviating from the standard. The further one departs from the standard, the more "original" or "local" character one can express, but this is necessarily accompanied by a corresponding decrease in communicative intellligibility. We can't have our cake and eat it, too.
Fortunately, the flow of all this information generates feedback loops and harmonics, eventually resulting in a more or less meta-stable discrete combinatorial system of languages--a tangled hierarchy, rather than a crude continuum. Humans can work to understand and appreciate each other, and this gets easier and easier given sufficient time and incentives like love and money.
Linguistics is still straddlng the fence between the sciences and the humanities. On one side, we have a bunch of new findings in evolutionary and cognitive psychology, chaos and complexity theory, neurobiology, etc. On the other, there's an obsolete hodge-podge of Saussure, Derrida, Marx, Foucault, and Freud (via Lacan). It's an exciting and frustrating time to study language.
Sorry this was so long and tangential. It just kinda came out like that.
Just this: I think I agree.
Actually, I lied. This too: Steven Pinker's new book is out!
Post a Comment