Technology and language change

Roman Jakobson – Russian Linguist – 1949 – “Continual language change is natural

and inevitable, and is due to a combination of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic

factors.”

Using your A3 paper, write down as many technological changes which may have affected language.

As you listen to David Crystal, add to your sheets, and reflect on his commentary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2XVdDSJHqY

Language changes as technology changes…The industrial revolution brought in a whole

new sequence of changes, but since then, there has been relatively small change to language as a whole. Listen to Crystal’s summative commentary on what we have learned so far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6_NdZDkcaY

David Crystal suggests (from 11:30)Most people have a bidilectal speech pattern.

Break down the work and try to work out what it means. Bidilectism – where people use both standard English and their own non-standard regional dialect. Either can be used in a variety of situations.

Crystal suggests due to the globalisation of English, we may, in time evolve into a tridelectal pattern. What could this mean?

Bidilectalism has converged over recent years into…Text speakA multi-modal format of communication which

incorporates slang, regional dialects, emoticoms, and punctuation as pictorial rather than grammatical effects.

I don’t think we speak in text speak on a day to day basis, and acronyms such as LOL and ROFL are now no longer part of people’s idiolect. However, technology is the major contributor to many of the new entries to the OED each year.

An extract from the Oxford English Dictionary Online update. Picture this. You’ve just uploaded a selfie to your favourite social media

website using your phablet when your FIL (that’s your father-in-law) shares asupercut of a srsly mortifying twerking session. You immediately unlike his page because there isn’t an emoji capable of expressing your desire to vom:apols, but it’s time for a digital detox. Research by the Oxford Dictionaries team shows that these terms have been absorbed by popular culture, hence their inclusion in the latest ODO update.

Technology remains a catalyst for emerging words and is reflected in new entries including MOOC (‘massive open online course’: a course of study made available over the Internet without charge to a very large number of people);bitcoin (a digital currency in which transactions can be performed without the need for a central bank), and the compound Internet of things (a development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity). Other technology-related words added in this update includeclick and collect, BYOD (‘bring your own device’), and hackerspace

Does the OED have a prescriptivist or descriptivist attitude?Discuss

Slang has a very short use by dateAs we watch this clip think about:

Why does Slang have a short shelf life?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwNQf08Kxsw

Slang is: an informal nonstandard variety of speech characterized by newly coined and rapidly changing words and phrases.

Standard English is: the variety of English that is generally accepted as the model for the speech and writing of educated speakers

Is one better than the other? Think about work on power completed last year!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6_NdZDkcaYListen to Crystal (from 8:30 about slang) Is he

from the school of prescriptivism or descriptivism?

John Humphreys is from another school of thought…Welsh bornRadio and TV presenter9 oclock newsMastermindThe Today ProgrammeRadio 4 and radio 3From wikipedia: He became a pupil at 

Cardiff High School (then a grammar school), but he did not fit into the middle-class environment there.[3]

 He was an average pupil and left school at the age of 15 years to become a teenage reporter on the Penarth Times.[1][3] He later joined the Western Mail.

Read the following extract. Why are his views so strong, and to which school of thought does he belong?

John Humphreys I H8 txt msgs.It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago.They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.This, I grant you, is a tall order. The texters have many more arrows in their quiver than we who defend the old way.Ridicule is one of them. "What! You don't text? What century are you living in then, granddad? Need me to sharpen your quill pen for you?"You know the sort of thing; those of us who have survived for years without a mobile phone have to put up with it all the time. My old friend Amanda Platell, who graces these pages on Saturdays, has an answerphone message that says the caller may leave a message but she'd prefer a text. One feels so inadequate.(Or should that have been ansafone? Of course it should. There are fewer letters in that hideous word and think how much time I could have saved typing it.)The texters also have economy on their side. It costs almost nothing to send a text message compared with a voice message. That's perfectly true. I must also concede that some voice messages can be profoundly irritating.My own outgoing message asks callers to be very brief - ideally just name and number - but that doesn't stop some callers burbling on for ten minutes and always, always ending by saying: "Ooh - sorry I went on so long!"But can that be any more irritating than those absurd little smiley faces with which texters litter their messages? It is 25 years since the emoticon (that's the posh word) was born.It started with the smiley face and the gloomy face and now there are 16 pages of them in the texters' A-Z.It has now reached the stage where my computer will not allow me to type the colon, dash and bracket without automatically turning it into a picture of a smiling face. Aargh!

The linguist’s view on language changeJean Aitchison,Professor or English language and communication at Oxford University.

She suggests there are three metaphors she uses to describe language change…

Damp-spoon syndromeLike leaving a dampspoon in the sugar bowl, language changes because people are lazy and cannotbe bothered to use the correctterminology and standard English.Is this a prescriptivist or descriptivist thought process?

Crumbling Castle View Language is a thingof art and beauty andshould be preserved.

implies that the language of English was gradually and lovingly assembled until it reached a point of maximum splendour at some unspecified time in the past. Yet no year can be found when language achieved some peak of perfection, like a vintage wine.

Infectious Disease assumptionBad poor language is caught like a disease

from those around us and we should fight it; but unlike a disease, people chose to pick up the language they use.