Yesterday linguist and political commentator John McWhorter was interviewed on the National Public Radio call-in show Talk of the Nation. His topic was the recent call by the Drug Enforcement Agency to hire “Ebonics translators.” McWhorter supports the move, since it can be difficult for speakers of different dialects to understand rapid, casual speech in Black English.

(Listen here.)

McWhorter generally does a good job describing the relationship between Black English (also know as Ebonics, AAVE, and numerous other labels) and Standard American English. He also mentions his opposition to the use of non-standard dialects in schools (a minority position among linguists* and educational anthropologists**), but is not given much opportunity to make his case.

On the other hand, McWhorter offers clear and factual counter-arguments to a caller who insists that Ebonics should not be recognized or employed since it is not “proper English.” The caller makes a somewhat bizarre claim that Arabic has standard and non-standard dialects, since it is “an actual spoken language,” whereas English is “the primary language here” and brooks no variation.

One point, though, is left a bit unclear. This is, I think, due to time constraints and not Dr. McWhorter’s ability to make the argument. I will presume to expand these parting remarks.

McWhorter: Dialects differ to various degrees. And so there’s Brooklyn English, there’s Black English. If you listen to Jamaican Patois then most of us have a hard time getting any of it except for isolated words. Then you’ve got Dutch. So that’s the way human speech varieties work, and it can be a challenge to bridge the gaps.

For those who understand the linguistic and cultural dimensions of language variation, this is clear enough. As callers’ and web viewers’ comments show, though, many people do not understand how linguists think about variation.

All speakers use language somewhat differently, and languages, including English, can be divided into varieties or dialects. Regional dialects, such as Brooklyn English, are associated with particular places. Social dialects, such as Black English, are associated with groups of people. These dialects differ from Standard English, which is imagined as a variety of English free from regional, social, or other dialect markers. (No one actually speaks “pure” Standard English; it is an ideal.)

A language is said to consist of a range of mutually intelligible dialects. English speakers in Savannah, Georgia, can understand speakers from Brooklyn, New York, even though each may think the other talks funny. Each might struggle to understand a speaker of Jamaican Creole English (a.k.a. Jamaican Patois), but might still think of themselves as each speaking a variety of English.

Dutch, like English, is a West Germanic language, and with abundant patience and good will speakers of the two can sometimes understand one another. Still, for political and cultural reasons, as well as the tenuous mutual intelligibility, the two ways of speaking are thought of as separate languages.

Probably no one would object to government agencies employing Dutch-English translators, nor to Dutch-medium schools teaching English as a foreign language (or vice-versa). Objections to the DEA hiring “Ebonics translators” or to the use of Black English or other non-standard varieties in classes designed to teach Standard English are thus primarily social and political objections, not linguistic ones.

*See, for example, the Linguistic Society of America’s resolution on the use of “Ebonics.”

**See, for example, Fordham’s (1999) “Dissin’ the Standard.”
Fordham, Signithia. (1999). Dissin’ “the Standard”: Ebonics as guerrilla warfare at capital high. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 30: 272–293. doi: 10.1525/aeq.1999.30.3.272

See also Samy Alim and Imani Perry’s DEA and Ebonics, below.

This being the thirteenth roundup, I thought I would provide a few links to talk about triskaidekaphobia. It turns out, though, that “triskaidekaphobia” is, to paraphrase Gene Weingarten, an Anthrosource Nope. So are “fear of thirteen” and “thirteen phobia.”

Click to see full size.

In lieu of linguistic anthropology treatments of the fear of thirteen, I will link to “Triskaidekaphobia or Fear of the Number 13″ at About.com and Ben Zimmer’s 2007 post on the etymology of paraskevidekatriaphobia, a modern coinage for “fear of Friday the 13th.” Be warned that this is in the archives of Language Log Classic; some people around this landscape may have a fear of Language Log.

WEIRD and MYOPIC psychology subjects

Speaking of topics long since covered elsewhere, in June Brain and Behavioral Sciences published “The weirdest people in the world,” a review article by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. (PDF courtesy of Dr. Henrich) The authors survey work in behavioral sciences on visual perception, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization, moral reasoning, and other aspects of human psychology. The vast majority of subjects observed are undergraduates in US universities, but research conclusions are often assumed to be generalizable to human being as such. Contrary to this assumption, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan find that undergraduate subjects are actually outliers in most of the dimensions studied. They call such subjects WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic).

[M]embers of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.

I learned of this study in July when Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology posted an excellent summary and critique of the paper and the numerous responses published along side it in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Downey wholeheartedly agrees with the paper’s conclusions, but points out in addition that the dimensions Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan highlight through the acronym WEIRD are dimensions salient to WEIRD cultures. Downey suggests that US undergraduates could also be seen as MYOPICS, “Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary.” Nor are these necessarily the dimensions on which such subjects should be judged; the point, instead, is that a critique of Western subjects from a Western point of view inevitably features ideological blind spots.

Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan suggest changes in psychological research funding and publishing that may help address this issue. Downey’s comments suggest that research from outside psychology, including ethnographic research, is also necessary to point out the limits of our own ideological blinders.

I am reminded of areas where linguistic anthropology has had a similarly broadening affect on theory in related fields.

For example, “The things we do with words,” Michelle Rosaldo’s study of Ilongot speech acts, offered a corrective to philosopher John Searle’s version of speech act theory. Searle set as his subject “all linguistic communication” (Searle 1997, 16) and argued that the production of speech acts is the basic unit of human communication. In addition to the simple production of utterances, Searle argued that the intention of the speaker is an important element of the speech act. Rosaldo studied communication in Ilongot society in the Philippines. The Ilongot do not have folk theories of speaker intent or sincerity, so that speaker intent is not an important element of communication.

Reflections on Ilongot notions concerning acts of speech should serve, then as a reminder that the understanding of linguistic action always, and necessarily, demands more than an account of what it is that individuals intend to say: because, as Ilongots themselves are well aware, the ‘force’ of acts of speech depends on things participants expect; and then again, because, as our comparison makes clear, such expectations are themselves products of particular forms of sociocultural being. (Rosaldo 1982, 228-29)

LINK ROUNDUP:

• Triskaidekaphobia or Fear of the Number 13
• Fear of Friday the 13th
• The weirdest people in the world?
• We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?
• The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy

I feel that the notion of strategic essentialism (Spivak 1988; Bucholtz 2003) may be relevant here, by an analysis through the lens of imposed adequation (Hodges 2008).

Spivak described strategic essentialism as the assumption of an identity position as a means for subalterns to organize political response while still recognizing and critiquing the problems of essentialist discourses. Hodges analyzed narratives through which American authorities equated secular Ba’athist Iraq with Qutbist Islamist al-Qaeda, imposing a politically useful identity between the two groups.

In the case Fish critiques, critics identify the builders of Park51 with the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks while denying that suspicion or antipathy toward Islam is a basis for identification.

As I say, I feel like there is an analysis there, but at this point I’ll look forward to someone else making it.

Bucholtz, Mary. 2003. Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3), 398-416.

Hodges, Adam. 2008. The ‘war on terror’ narrative: The (inter)textual construction and contestation of sociopolitical reality. PhD thesis. Boulder: University of Colorado.

Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Subaltern studies: Deconstructing historiography. In R. Guha and G. Spivak (eds.) Selected Subaltern Studies. London: Oxford University Press. 3-32.

Caster Semenya, gender tests, and bodies out of place

On Tuesday of this week the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) announced that 19-year-old middle distance runner Caster Semenya will be allowed to return to international competition. After Semenya won the 800 meter race at the World Championships in Berlin last August, various critics charged that she may not be a woman and therefore should be disqualified.

The IAAF ordered gender testing to determine whether Semnya was eligible to compete as a woman. In November of 2009 the federation announced that Semenya would be allowed to keep the gold medal she earned, but did not say whether she would be allowed to compete in future events, and refused to discuss gender testing.

This week the IAAF cleared Semenya to return to competition immediately, but again avoided details of the agreement or the gender verification procedure.
The New York Times described the November announcement here.
ESPN covered of the reinstatement announcement (per Associated Press).

In the weeks after the 2009 championships, Semnya’s gender and her sexual identity were a topic of discussion on the web and in the tabloid press. On September 11, 2009, the Sydney Daily Telegraph reported, “the South African world champion has no womb or ovaries,” and recommended “immediate surgery.”

The South African magazine You responded with a photo layout featuring Semenya with relaxed hair in fashionable clothes and make-up. (You magazine’s web page appears to be down. See the cover photo on the blog B4tea.)

Britain’s Daily Mail digested the back and forth between Australian and South African media.

Since that time the New York Times has featured a number of pieces on Semenya and gender in sports.

In her 12 September New York Times essay, Northwestern University bioethics professor Alice Dreger noted that “the science of sport has outpaced the philosophy of sport.” Sports officials are now able to examine athlete’s chromosomes, hormones, androgen receptors and the like, but they have not decided what any of that information means in a realm where athletes are classified as men or women.

In January of this year, a panel convened by the International Olympics Committee recommended that gender ambiguity be treated as a medical issue, and that athletes with “sexual disorder,” presumably including any body that cannot be easily classified, receive treatment. (Coverage in the New York Times)

All this talk of disorder puts me in mind of Judith Butler as well as Mary Douglas, who wrote in her 1966 volume Purity and Danger:

It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created.

It seems that sports officials, like many people in the world, are unprepared to deal with the problematic nature of normative gender binaries. Bodies that cannot be easily classified result in crisis.

Tavia Nyong’o examines various issues of gender normativity, colonial histories, and competing paternalisms raised in this case. Please do read the article, “The unforgivable transgression of being Caster Semenya.”

Sumo scandal

Japanese public television broadcaster NHK has announced that it will not air live coverage of the Grand Sumo tournament beginning in Nagoya this Sunday.
Coverage in the Japan Times

The Japan Sumo Association (日本相撲協会) has been beset by two recent scandals over ties to organized crime. Dozens of yakuza gangsters were given valuable ring-side seats at the May tournament in Tokyo. Following the tournament a stable master and a coach were reprimanded by the Sumo Association for providing tickets to the gangsters.
Coverage on Asahi Shinbun’s English-language web site

More recently, Kotomitsuki, an ozeki, or athlete of the second-highest rank, was suspended after several tabloids reported that he has gambled on professional baseball. Since then, several other athletes have also been suspended for ties to gambling and organized crime.
Coverage in Mainichi Daily News
[UPDATE - Contacts in Japan inform me that Kotomitsuki has been dismissed from sumo. Since athlete's names are the property of the sumo association, he is now referred to as "the former Kotomitsuki" (元琴光喜).]

There was talk of canceling the Nagoya tournament in the wake of these scandals. When the Sumo Association decided to go ahead with the event, NHK, the only broadcaster that features live coverage of Japan’s six annual sumo tournaments, decided not to cover the event. This is the first time since 1953 that the national broadcaster will not cover what is sometimes called the national sport (国技).

The New York Times provides an overview of these scandals and other problems in the sumo world.

(Those wishing for more linguistic content may want to check out Tessa Carroll’s analysis of NHK’s influence on defining and disseminating Standard Japanese in her book Language Planning and Language Change in Japan. Personally, I’ m going to check out Marvin Opler’s 1945 “A ‘Sumo’ Tournament at Tule Lake Center” in American Anthropologist.)

World Cup woo woo

Finally, what would a sports wrap up be without talk about the World Cup? The vuvuzela, the plastic trumpets beloved by South African soccer fans and despised by some broadcasters and others outside South Africa, provides a linguistic hook.

The etymology of the word vuvuzela appears to be a mystery. Wikipedia asserts, boldly but vaguely, that the word “was first used in South Africa from the Zulu language or Nguni dialect meaning to make a vuvu sound.”[1] BBC News also suggests Zulu onomatopoeia as a possible source, but notes that no one is certain of the word’s origin. They suggest two possible “township slang” sources: words for shower or for pump it up. SouthAfrica.info largely agrees with (or may be a source for) BBC News, adding that the word may come from a Zulu word meaning make noise.

[1] It’s not clear what Wikipedia authors intend by Nguni dialect. Ethnologue classifies Zulu as one of four languages in the “Nguni (S.40)” group of the Narrow Bantu branch of Niger-Congo languages.
[See Steven Black's comment below for a description of Nguni languages.]

Some colleagues at the University of Auckland and I are conducting a survey on North American English and trialling the use of flash web recording for phonetic analysis. We are doing a short survey collecting examples of as many different types of American English as possible. We are aiming for a few thousand responses from all over the US and Canada. We’re also aiming to be as representative as possible for age, gender, geography, ethnicity and class (as representative as we can be given we’re using an internet-based survey system). If you would like to participate by recording a short wordlist, please visit http://pantheon.yale.edu/~clb3/NorthAmericanDialects for further information and instructions. The survey is open to anyone who grew up speaking English and will take approximately five minutes to complete. If you could help us spread the word by forwarding this to friends, family, networks, students, etc, that would be great!

For any questions regarding this project, please contact Dr. Claire Bowern, Department of Linguistics, Yale University.
E-mail: claire.bowernyale.edu.
Phone: 203-432-2045

Thanks,
Claire

Following a meeting with President Obama at the White House, Svanberg said of the president, “He’s frustrated because he cares, about the small people. And we care about the small people.”

Svanberg later apologized, saying he “spoke clumsily” when he used the phrase. Some people have suggested that he meant to refer to small business people. (I could swear that I heard Tony Hayward offer this explanation on the radio yesterday, but can’t find evidence of it in print. The link is to a blog at The Guardian where a similar explanation is offered in the comments section.) Others suggest that Svanberg, who is Swedish, produced a calque of den lilla människan “the little people”.

My first reaction when I heard Svanberg’s remarks was that he must have been aiming for “the little guy” and produced a near miss.

Where many seem to hear “the small people” as condescending and elitist, “the little guy” has always seemed to me like an attempt to appeal to democratic, even populist sentiment. Consider these examples from the Corpus of Contemporary American English:

A broad swathe of the investor world, including the little guy, is yelling at Chairman Greenspan. (PBS Newshour, 1997)

[It's] not going to be the rich who are hurt; it’s going to be the little guy that gets hurt, like my aunt and uncle out in Pittsburgh. (CNN, 1993)

Rockne saw Notre Dame as the tough little guy, the outsider, just as he himself had been while growing up. (Smithsonian magazine, 1993)

Whatever the merits of Pyle’s case against San Jose, he looks like a little guy getting stepped on by a high-profile bureaucrat. (San Francisco Chronicle, 1990)

To me, Svanberg seemed to talking about individual people, as opposed to powerful institutions such as government or corporations. Of course, my home and livelihood have not recently been threatened by the company Svanberg represents. If they had, my first reactions to whatever he said might be less generous.

In response, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona has drafted a statement summarizing research on language variation and its effects on language acquisition. The statement was sent to Governor Jan Brewer and to Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne. A PDF version of the statement is also publicly available here.

The statement points out eight facts about language and language acquisition drawn from linguistic research ranging from William Labov (1963) and Eric Lenneberg (1967) to recent (2009) publications in psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, etc.

I will  quote the statement’s eight bullet points here. Check out the PDF for the detailed descriptions.

1. ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech.
2. Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
3. Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don’t speak Spanish.
4. Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
5. It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign‐accented speech as a part of their education.
6. There are many different ‘accents’ within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English.
7. Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre‐existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
8. There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical.
   (University of Arizona Department of Linguistics, May 26 2010)

The Speculative Grammarian is a parody academic journal that describes itself as “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.”

I will admit that I seldom read SpecGram, as fans call it, since I don’t really enjoy its brand of humor, generally very dry, deadpan satire of academic writing and more specifically the discourse of descriptive and theoretical linguistics. This month, however, three different acquaintances commended the latest “Special Fieldwork Issue”.

On the principle of de gustibus non est disputandum and as your humble conduit, I present links to Speculative Grammarian’s Special Fieldwork Issue 1 (April 2010) and Special Fieldwork Issue 2 (May 2010). I did get a good chuckle from Elwin Ransom’s piece, “On the Applicability of Recent Theoretical Advances in Linguistics to the Practice of Fieldwork.” And really, what more can I demand for the price of my subscription?

The Simpsons question my life choice

Speaking of humor, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at this YouTube video: “The Simpsons – Comments about PhDs and Grad Students.”

Muscogee (Creek) Nation responds to Arizona’s immigration bill

Last month Arizona passed the “Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” a controversial but popular law involving local police in immigration law by making it a misdemeanor to be in Arizona without carrying immigration papers. Many commentators responded at that time by drawing or recalling cartoons of Native Americans viewing Europeans as illegal immigrants.

Although the law does not officially go into effect until July, some local media outlets and several blogs have suggested that Native Americans as well as US-born Latinos are already being detained or harassed in Arizona, an apparent reversal of those cartoons.

Now the Muscogee (Creek) Nation is discussing a resolution that would condemn the Arizona law. A bill being discussed by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation legislative committee would declare that the tribe “opposes laws and policies that unfairly target minorities and supports other tribal nations that challenge these bills.” It also urges the state of Oklahoma, where the Creek Nation is located, to refrain from passing similar laws. Oklahoma House Bill 1804 would empower state and local police to enforce immigration law, similar to the Arizona law. It would also deny state services to people without proper documents.

Other tribal governments oppose the Arizona law.

In a similar note, Indian Country Today reports that many Native American governments, including the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, have opposed Arizona’s immigration enforcement law. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona and representatives of various tribes urged the Arizona legislature not to pass the bill, and are now apprising federal officials of their concerns.

In contrast, and despite the breadth of coverage of protests against the law, the Pew Research Center found broad support for the Arizona law, especially among older Americans. Most respondents (59%) approve of the Arizona law; 74% of respondents over 65 years of age report approval, compared to just 45% of those under thirty.

Unilateral hearing loss hurts language development

Science Daily reports on work by Judith Lieu and colleagues on the effects of unilateral hearing loss (loss of hearing in one ear) on language development and school success. According to Lieu, “For many years, pediatricians and educators thought that as long as children have one normal hearing ear, their speech and language would develop normally.” In work to be published in Pediatrics, Lieu and her coauthors argue that children with hearing loss in one ear — a condition that effects approximately one in twenty children — show lower scores on tests of oral language ability. The study does not show whether such hearing loss is similarly correlated with overall educational achievement.

Dear Dr. Nilep,

We have learned of your published research on
energy. We would like to invite your
participation in our publishing program. In
particular, I have in mind a new research or
review article for an edited collection
(invitation only) being assembled under my direction tentatively entitled

“Advances in Energy Research”

This made me suspicious, as I have not published research under the broad heading of “energy”. In this age of FCYA it took me only a few minutes to find a post at Publishing Archaeology by Michael E. Smith suggesting that these invitations are ubiquitous, and speculating that the volumes that proceed from them are of low quality. Smith was also invited to contribute to a volume outside his area of expertise, a fact he attributed to having a common name. My own name, though, is not nearly so common. In fact, I know of no other scholar in any field named Chad Nilep, and would be curious to hear from any other Dr. Nileps reading this post.

A few more minutes of searching turned up this Wikipedia page, which suggests that Nova Publishers’ journals “cross publish” the same article in multiple imprints and re-publish older public domain work. Participants at Chronicle of Higher Education forums claim that Nova Publishers’ books are of low quality and may not be peer reviewed. Perhaps most damning, librarian David Bade’s survey of Political History and Culture of Russia and Current Politics and Economics of Russia, Eastern and Central Europe by Nova Publishers found “a pattern of entire books about Russia from the early 20th century being reprinted chapter by chapter as though they were separately titled articles.” Bade criticizes the high cost of the journals, particularly in light of the fact that portions of their content may be freely available elsewhere.

After these several minutes of reflection, I have decided not to submit my work to Nova Publishers.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find two recent blog posts pointing out how this usage differs from the traditional definition of socialism as a political position. Two bloggers with quite different political positions have each taken up discussion of the word in the past week.

James Bowman, a self-described conservative writing at Cliftonchadwick’s Blog, points out, “Socialism … has a particular historical meaning associated with state ownership of the means of production and distribution.” Mr. Bowman points out that the Obama Administration, which he criticizes, is not socialist. Bowman argues that Obama and other self-identified progressives seem hostile to the bourgeoisie in ways that are somewhat reminiscent of socialism, but that their actual proposals for governance are very different from those of traditional socialism.

Geoffrey Pullum is a regular blogger at Language Log. Along with his fellow blogger and co-author of Far from the Maddening Gerund, Mark Liberman, Pullum describes their output as inhabiting “neither the Trotskyite end of the spectrum nor the Mussolinian one.”

Pullum recalls the various factions of socialists in Britain during the 1970s who, he recalls, viewed everyone to their right as “to some extent fascist enemies of the people” rather than socialist fellow-travelers. In order to understand recent uses of the word, Pullum argues, “At the very least, we have to allow for a massive polysemy in the word socialist today” [hyperlink added].

I found it interesting – if all too rare – to find two writers from decidedly different positions each offering a parsing and definition of what is becoming a label of primary potency.