Showing posts with label AVIC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AVIC. Show all posts

accent attitudes

A while ago, I coined the term AVIC ('American Verbal Inferiority Complex'), to refer to an American tendency to find British English (or at least standard English English) superior to their own way of speaking.  Having done a bit of reading about accent attitudes this week, I'm wondering whether AVIC is on its way out, perhaps mostly found in older generations.  Here's what I found:

In 1985 (see references below), Stewart et al. published a study for which American subjects had been asked to rate the social status of people with standard American or standard British accents. They found that:

speakers of British English were assigned higher social status than speakers of the respondents’ own (American) accent, even though British speech was considered less intelligible and aroused more discomfort. For American listeners, this finding contrasts with their reactions to other ethnic accents (p. 103)
But that was more than 25 years ago. And just 10 years ago, Bayard et al. (2001) found that American accents were more positively evaluated in New Zealand and Australia, and America. Here's their graph showing the reactions to accents in their sample of Cleveland University students:



You might not be able to read the graph, but that dotted line at the top represents the North American accent, as spoken by a woman. Below that is North American male. Leaving third place to....Australian men! Yes, the English accent (as spoken by a man) is way down in 4th place now.

But my favo(u)rite graph of the ones I've come across is this one, from the undergraduate research journal at Brigham Young University. It shows the results of asking Brigham Young students to rate the intelligence of people with different accents.




The main significant effect found in this study was that people who'd lived at least three months outside the US rated the English accent significantly lower than people who'd only lived in the US. In fact, Americans who had not lived abroad considered the English-accented person to be much more intelligent than themselves, but the people who had lived abroad rated the standard American accent more intelligent than the standard English one.  My preferred way of interpreting this (a bit tongue-in-cheek) is that Americans are happy to rate the English as more intelligent than themselves up until they actually start meeting and talking to the English.

Better Half often complains that while he was treated like a god (the god of what, I don't know) when he first went to live and work in the US in the early 1990s, nowadays he's "nothing special" when we go to the States. He attributed this to New York City being overrun by the British, particularly when the pound was much, much stronger than the dollar. But I think he also finds it to be true when we're away from the big city where British people tend to travel. So, perhaps this is a symptom of a general trend for (standard-AmE-speaking) Americans to have more dialectal self-esteem than they used to.  You're welcome to speculate on the reasons for this in the comments--provided that you aren't too rude.


Any other business
  1. Thanks and more thanks to all of you who voted for SbaCL and my @lynneguist Twitter feed in the Lexiophiles/bab.la Top Language Lovers for 2011.  I'm grateful/flabbergasted/proud to see Separated by a Common Language ranked 5th among Language Professional Blogs (and 37th overall) and @lynneguist ranked 2nd in the Twitter category and 4th overall. Big, big thank-yous to all who had a hand in that!
  2. Thanks again for your help in locating instances of Dialect Fail and Dialect Success in transatlantic novel-writing. The Brighton Book Festival talk ('Whose Language is it Anyway?') was a success, in no small part because of your helpful suggestions.
  3. Before you ask, that talk is not available on video--but I'm very happy to give it in other venues. Please email me if you're interested! Talks (with audio publisher/video producer Better Half) are underway to recreate parts of my Lynneguist talks in snazzy podcast form. No release dates have been imagined yet, but you know I'll tell you when they're available.
  4. I had some interesting comments from English teachers (both school teachers and language-school ESL teachers) after the talk--they'd learn{ed/t} that some of their closely held beliefs about English were fictions, and thought that their colleagues would have benefited from the talk as well.  So, that got me thinking that it might be good to do some workshops with teachers on American/British differences, standards and prejudices. (It might also be useful to do them with publishers/editors, perhaps.) If there are any schools out there who might like to be guinea pigs for such a thing, please get in touch!



References:


Anderson, S. et al. (2007) How accents affect perception of intelligence. Intuition 3:5–11.

Bayard, D., A. Weatherall, C. Gallois, and J. Pittam (2001) Pax Americana? Accent attitudinal evaluations in New Zealand, Australia, and America. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5:22–49.

Stewart, MA, EB Ryan, and H Giles (1985) Accent and social class effects on status and solidarity evaluations. Personality and  Social Psychology Bulletin 11:98–105.
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Not One-Off Britishisms

I don't usually review other websites here, and I don't really want to start now. But I'd be interested to read what you think of Ben Yagoda's site Not One-Off Britishisms.

Yagoda is a journalism professor at the University of Delaware and author of many things. I first became aware of his worries about BrEisms in AmE in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education called "The Elements of Clunk." There he bemoaned "a whole new strain of bad student writing."* To quote from that:
Another manifestation [of clunky student writing] is a boom in Britishisms: not only the weirdly popular "amongst," but also "amidst," "whilst"—I actually have gotten that more than once in assignments—and "oftentimes." (In a parallel move, the stretched-out and unpleasant "off-ten" has become a vogue pronunciation among youth, as has "eye-ther.") In spelling, "grey" has taken over from the previously standard "gray." I haven't seen "labour" yet, but the day is young.
Not One-Off Britishisms is kind of a blog, but what it is really...well, I'll let Yagoda explain. From the sidebar at the site:
Over the last decade or so, an alarming number of traditionally British expressions have found their way into the American vocabulary. This page offers a growing list of Britishisms that have been widely adopted in the U.S.–that is, they are not “one-offs.”  Each entry offers a definition/American equivalent, followed by quotes representing the first and most recent American usages I’ve found.
Some entries include a link to a Google Ngram. This is a nifty tool that allows you to search for the frequency with which a word or phrase was used year to year. The link provided here compares the use of the Britishism and the traditional U.S. equivalent in the “American English” corpus between 1990 and 2008, with a “smoothing” level of 0. (Don’t ask.) In some cases–e.g., advert, bits–Ngram data is not applicable because the word or phrase can be used in two or more different ways.
For each entry, readers are ask to vote on their opinion of the Britishism in an American context. By “over the top,” I mean that the word or phrase (still) comes off as mannered or affected. In my humble opinion, the key factor in this is whether there’s an equally good American equivalent. [...]

Yagoda's project is a perfect (although not as loud) counterpoint to the oft-heard British complaint that Americanisms "permeate, pervade and pollute British English" (Hardeep Singh Kohli, Sunday Times, 7 Nov 08--and if you like that one, I can give you plenty more), and it gives me some comfort to know that not every American is a victim of American Verbal Inferiority Complex.


Now, the longer I live in the UK (it's been more than 11 years now), the more out-of-touch I am with what Americans (other than my nearest and dearest) are saying--but some of the BrEisms that Yagoda picks out as "widely adopted" strike me as not so. For one thing, some of them are things that Americans have sent me puzzled emails about. For another, the sources Yagoda cites are very often New Yorkers, if not The New Yorker, and most come from the NY-DC corridor. The Google Ngrams show general trends in publishing, but I would be willing to bet that a fair number of US-published books are written by New Yorkers, if not British expats. I'm having a hard time finding out how many of the 685,000 British expats in the US are in New York, but many commentators seem to agree with  A.A. Gill that "The British have colonized Manhattan". And an awful lot of them seem to be in publishing. So, it could be a trend in a certain milieu. But if you're watching FOX** instead of reading Vanity Fair, it might not affect you too much. I'm not saying that all the BrEisms are coming from UK expats; I have no trouble believing that Americans in their milieu are easily influenced by chic-sounding British words. And if that continues, those words may make their way into general American English. But my impression from non-NYCers is that these words are far from "widely adopted."

There's also much reason to be suspicious of the Ngram data. Looking at the first ten 2007-08 sources for chat show in the Ngram that Yagoda presents, one finds that four are about British television (I haven't bothered to look into their authors' backgrounds), two are from Cambridge University Press dictionaries (offering it as a synonym for AmE talk show), one is by an Oxford-educated professor in the US (possibly UK-born) , and two are by (orig. AmE in this sense) faculty at UK universities whose university webpages show no educational experience outside the UK. So that's 90% that seem to be appropriately British in the American English "corpus". The remaining one is by a Brooklyn-born journalist who lives in Washington, DC.

On the other hand, if you look at the relationship between chat show and talk show in British English using an Ngram, you'll see that AmE talk show has overtaken chat show in the UK (supposedly) in the same period. And looking at the data comparatively in the allegedly AmE books, chat show barely figures in comparison to talk show.

I also note that some of the things that Yagoda mentions in the Chronicle article have been in variation in AmE for a long time--for example, the pronunciation of either. And his description of often sounds like how I started pronouncing it as a child. Can we conclude that recent fashions from them are due to British influence? Are Americans even aware of these as being "more British"? (He goes in that article to try to tar the spelling advisor with the British brush--until he discovers that it's regarded as an AmEism. Click on the link for my discussion of it.)

So, in the end, I think it's the kind of site that would interest readers of this blog and so I point it out and hope you'll visit it (particularly if you're American). But I'd also like your feedback on whether you think that the "Britishisms" that Yagoda notices are indeed widespread in AmE.

As a final note--why Britishisms?  What's wrong with the good old word Briticism? I give you the Ngram for American English:



Britishism (red) has outnumbered Briticism (blue) only since 1990.  As long as we have a good old standard word for it, why use a new one?  (And no, it doesn't seem to be because of the British people in NY.)



* In hono(u)r of Yagoda, I'm using American punctuation, rather than my usual indecisive mishmash.
** Please, stop.
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Words of the Year 2009: staycation and go missing

My thanks to everyone who has engaged in the nominations and debate on Words of the Year for 2009. Here's a reminder of the rules (I'm a Libran with Virgo rising/ascendant, I've gotta have rules):
We have (at least) two Words of the Year here at SbaCL, and nominations are open for both categories as of now:
1. Best AmE to BrE import
2. Best BrE to AmE import
The word doesn’t have to have been imported into the other dialect in 2009, but it should have come into its own in some way in the (popular culture of the) other dialect this year. I retain the editor's privilege of giving other random awards on a whim.
And now, without further ado...

The 2009 SbaCL Best American English to British Import is...

staycation

Yes, the recession has hit the UK and it's become both stylish and necessary to forgo a (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation in Thailand or Morocco and instead brave the British weather in a seaside town or scenic valley. But wait...what's that you say? That's not what it originally meant in American English? All the better for proclaiming it the best AmE to BrE import of the year!

The word is eminently American--the British do not use vacation to refer to something that one can 'go on'. (They do use it to refer to the time in which, say, university is out of session--but not for the non-work activities that one does while free from one's term-time duties. That's your holiday.) And while more British alternatives, like home-iday and holistay have been proposed, they have not caught on:

CoinageGoogle hits
on .uk sites
Broliday1
homeliday73
holistay445
home-iday613
staycation16,000

Word Spy's early AmE citations have it squarely as staying in your own home during one's time off--making a vacation/holiday of being at home (which may include doing the local touristy things or indulging oneself in other ways). WordNik's more current quotations show its use as being more 'vacationing/holidaying close to home'. In BrE it generally has the latter sense, and one's staycation might not be all that close to home, as long as it's in the UK. (Then again, many US states take longer to cross than the longest journeys in the UK, so 'close' is always relative...)

Why did it catch on? First, there was definitely a need for it. The British discuss holidays/vacations a lot more than Americans do, since they generally get a longer vacation/holiday period from their employment. And many of them use that time to go abroad. Abroad is pretty close, for one thing, and many people are keen to get some sun. (They ought to be. Did you know that "in the UK, the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in all adults is around 14.5%, and may be more than 30% in those over 65 years old, and as high as 94% in otherwise healthy south Asian adults"?) Second, the euro strengthened while the pound weakened and other financial calamities. Third, the papers still had their travel sections and supplements to fill and, boy, do they like portmanteau words (or blends, as we linguists tend to call them).

But all of this doesn't tell us why the AmE one was preferred over the BrE equivalents. This may be a matter of taste, but I would say that it's just because staycation sounds better. Unlike home(l)iday, there's no unclarity about how to spell or pronounce it. Unlike holistay it doesn't sound like it should have TM after it. And unlike Broliday, you can immediately recogni{s/z}e the ingredients in the blend.

Thanks to Emmet for nominating this, and to the commentators on the nomination, who helped to seal its fate as AmE-to-BrE Word of the Year.



So, on to the BrE-to-AmE WotY. It's not a particularly new borrowing, but it generated a fair amount of discussion this year. Ladies and germs, I give you:

go missing

And now I brace myself for the complaints that "It's not a word!" Well, that depends on how you define word, and "Lexical Item of the Year" just doesn't have the same ring to it. And I make up the rules, so why am I having to answer to you, Little Commenter Voice in My Head?

At the Dictionary Society of North America conference this year, Garrison Bickerstaff of the University of Georgia gave a paper on the rise of go missing and its various forms (went, gone, going, etc.). His research, based on newpaper data from the past 10 years, shows that the form has steadily gained momentum in US newspapers. Meanwhile, it's also increased in frequency in UK newspapers--indicating that it is less and less seen as 'too informal' for the news. Here are some numbers from the first and last year in Bickerstaff's study. Each represents the number of forms of went missing (the most common form) per ten million words of his corpus:


19982007
AmE0.77014.675
BrE53.25398.400

So, while it is still not used in AmE at anything like the rate at which it's used in BrE, we can see that it has made definite inroads.

Bickerstaff was not the only academic type to ruminate on go missing this year--it was the subject of quite a bit of discussion on the American Dialect Society e-mail list. Another academic discussion was by Anya Luscombe of the Netherlands, who gave a paper on BBC Style at the Poetics and Linguistics Association conference [warning: link is a pdf file]. Luscombe discusses four 'pet hates' of BBC writers, one of which is 'Americanisms' and another is go missing. While her work clearly isn't about the phrase in AmE, it's interesting to see how attitudes to it have changed in the BBC style guides. Luscombe quotes these editions:
Prior to 1992: no mention
1992: ‘“Gone missing” was originally Army slang. It now has wider use, and has become journalese.’
2000: ‘People do not “go missing”. They are missing or have been missing since.’
2003: ‘Go missing is inelegant and unpopular with many people, but its use is widespread. There are no easy synonyms. Disappear and vanish do not convince and they suggest dematerialisation, which is rare.’
And going further, a current BBC webpage says:
Missing
Perhaps it's to time to admit that further resistance against "go missing" is in vain. The problem comes when you are writing about the event in the past. " Mr Childers disappeared last Tuesday" is as improbable as "Mr Childers went missing" is ugly. ".....was last seen" is an acceptable alternative.
What I love about the importing of go missing into AmE is that American peevologists don't like it in spite of the fact that it is British! While Americans often suffer a verbal inferiority complex when they encounter a British English (standard or not), grumpy Americans are standing their ground on this one. Perhaps they don't realize that this phrase comes from the Mother Country?

Went missing was Grammar Girl's pet peeve of the year 2008. Another example comes from Peevologist-at-Large Robert Hartwell Fiske's Silence, language and society (reproduced by the eminently reasonable Mr Verb on his blog in June):
"Gone" or "went" missing is dreadfully popular today. Everyone from reporters on "CNN" to detectives (or their writers) on "Without a Trace" now prefer it.

People are so dull-witted and impressionable that, today, in this country, the popularity of "gone" or "went missing" has soared. Words like "disappeared," "vanished," "misplaced," "stolen," "lost," "deserted," "absconded" are seldom heard today because "went missing" has less meaning, or less exact meaning, than any of them, and people, especially the media, perhaps, are afraid of expressing meaning. What's more, "went missing" sounds willful or deliberate, and, indeed, sometimes that connotation is accurate, but the child who has been kidnapped is hardly agreeable to having been so.

Now, that kind of language grumpiness is just precious (and published regularly in Mr Fiske's publication, the Vocabula Review)--language is changing because people are afraid of meaning anything. My goodness, I do hope Mr Fiske is wearing his tin foil hat because the media are probably right now trying to suck meaning directly from his brain so that they can club baby seals with it.

Go missing
is beautifully meaningful--giving us some nuances not available in other words. It's not the same as vanish or disappear--and that's what makes it so useful. When something is said to go missing, it makes it seem like a less mysterious event than 'disappearing' or 'vanishing' which have a whiff of the supernatural about them. One can use it as a way to avoid blame--including self-blame: My phone went missing rather than I lost my phone. If a person 'goes missing', then there's a sense that although we don't know where they are, they do.

For more on this, I point you to another language commentator who picked up on this phrase this year, Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe (and not just because she quotes me!). It was her research on the phrase earlier in the year that put it in my mind as the frontrunner for the WotY crown, and it wears it well, I think.

Happy New Words!
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"I love this guy!"

Better Half got back (on) Tuesday after eight days in New York. He had a great time promoting his work at an English teachers' conference and enjoyed working with his US distributors, except for one thing that niggled. He'd be chatting with the American folk, cracking jokes as he is apt to do, and someone would exclaim (no doubt indicating him with a nod or a pointing gesture) to the others in the group, "I love this guy!" or "Don't you just love this guy?" or some variation on this. (He should be used to this by now—some of my family members are guilty of the same behavio(u)r.)

Now, BH, it must be said, usually enjoys the attention that he gets for being English when in America. In fact, his main complaint about the country on one of our visits last year was that due to the favo(u)rable exchange rate, New York was crawling with Brits, and he was no longer special. So, one might think that he'd love people exclaiming their love for him, but he found it rather off-putting—and so would I. No doubt, the people who say it would think that they're being complimentary. So, what's behind this phrase/behavio(u)r (which I can't say I've ever experienced in the UK)?

Why some people would find it off-putting, or even rude, to be the topic of such an exclamation is easily explained. There you are, getting along with people, feeling like you're making headway in being accepted as part of the gang. Then you say something funny, and instead of laughter, compliments, or inclusive back-slapping, someone starts talking about you in the third person. You stop being you or Lester (or whatever your name is) and start being this guy. It's distancing. It makes you feel like a performing seal and not a person taking part in the conversation. And what do you say after someone says I love this guy? You haven't been addressed, so it has essentially ended your turn at talking. You're put in an awkward position.

So, why it makes people uncomfortable—easily explained. Why do people say it? It seems to say "Look at me! I'm sophisticated and/or clever enough to appreciate this person's humo(u)r!" In other words, it seems a rather self-cent(e)red thing to say. So, part of me is tempted to say that one hears expressions like this more in the US than the UK because the US is a more individualistic society, with more emphasis on the 'me' in conversation. And I'm sure that's part of it. Another part, I think, is the relative insularity of mainstream American life—if you don't interact with a lot of people from other cultures (as equals) on a regular basis, perhaps you don't know what to do when they make a slightly off-colo(u)r comment. (BH does have a tendency to like to shock middle Americans with his Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.) Folded into this is some Americans' insecurity around British folk, whom they consider particularly funny, well-spoken (recall AVIC) and therefore possibly more intelligent than themselves. So, perhaps in such a situation, it's more natural for people to express their appreciation in a distanced way (this guy!) rather than a personal way (you're hilarious!) or a joining-in way (carrying on the joke).

Those are my working hypotheses, at least. (Or since it's a bit of this, a bit of that, maybe it's only one complicated hypothesis.) I'm not sure how much they're worth (it's been a long and tiring week—not a good time for self-critique!), but at least I can offer the public service of pointing out to I-love-this-guy-sayers that there are more effective ways of making people feel loved.

BTW, one more notch in the Canadian count bedpost this weekend—courtesy of a very nice (well, not nice enough to let me beat him) Scrabble player from the Wirral. The Canadian count has slowed down of late (we're just up to 11 now)—maybe I'm not meeting enough new people, or maybe I'm volunteering information about my childhood home too early in conversations, or maybe I'm being accepted as British now that I'm a citizen (HA HA HA—tell us another one, Lynne!).
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diapers, nappies and verbal inferiority complexes

I was tracking back to sites where visitors to this site have come from (as you do, if you're a nosy procrastinator like me), and was taken to the blog of an American surgeon, Orac, and his[?] post on linguistics differences, particularly in signs that he noticed on a recent trip to London. Those of you (particularly the American yous) who like signage discussions will probably enjoy it.

But there was a comment in the post that got me a bit down. Orac shows a photo of a sign for a "Baby Nappy Changer Unit" in a public toilet/restroom (which funnily uses the more Canadian washroom in the sign--it's at the Tower of London, so perhaps they're going for the most transparent term, given the tourists). About this sign, Orac says:
It sounds so much more civilized that [sic] "diaper."
And my question is why? Nappy, the modern BrE equivalent to (AmE) diaper, is a baby-talk version of napkin--though no one these days calls the things that you put on babies napkins.* So, nappy, etymologically speaking, is on a par with other baby-talk words like doggy, horsie, and choo-choo. The OED's (draft 2003 definition) first citation for it in print comes from 1927, and it's hardly complimentary of the word:
1927 W. E. COLLINSON Contemp. Eng. 7 Mothers and nurses use pseudo-infantile forms like pinny (pinafore), nappy (napkin).
Diaper, on the other hand comes from a Latin, later French, with a root meaning 'white'. The first citation for it is from the 14th century, where it refers to a type of cloth, and it has its place in Shakespeare (probably not referring to a baby's napkin in that case, but to a napkin or towel). So, why does a babyfied word sound more 'civilized' to an educated AmE speaker than a good, old latinate word? Methinks that this is a symptom of American Verbal Inferiority Complex.

AVIC strikes Americans from all walks of life. It's why my mother thinks that it's "pretty" when an Englishperson rhymes garage with carriage. It's why Americans think people with English accents are more intelligent than they are. It's why I get e-mails from Americans who despair of their fellow citizens' diction and thank me for championing the 'correct ways'. (I e-mail back and explain that I'm doing no such thing and that their reasoning on the matter is flawed. I wonder why they never send a reply...) Of course, there's a similar syndrome affecting some BrE speakers: British Verbal Superiority Complex; however, I've not found this to be quite as evenly distributed through the population as AVIC is in the US.

Now, there are times to think that some (uses of) language is(/are) better than others. One thing that Orac and commentators on his blog praise is the directness and honesty of certain signs. I don't always agree with their examples, but directness and honesty are admirable qualities in signs. (One that is pictured on the blog, but that I've never understood, is the BrE convention of putting polite notice at the top of a sign that orders people around. What's wrong with please?) Other things that make some (uses of) language arguably better than others are consistency within the system (e.g. in spelling) and avoidance of ambiguity. But these are issues about the use of the language, and both BrE and AmE can be (and often are) used in clear, consistent, direct, honest ways.

So, back to my old mantras:
  • 'Different' doesn't mean 'better' or 'worse'.
  • 'British' doesn't necessarily mean 'older' or 'original'.
  • 'Older' doesn't mean 'better' either!
  • Let's enjoy each other's dialects AND our own!

(One can be obnoxiously preachy in either dialect too.)

Happy Labor Day to the Americans out there. (I won't re-spell it Labour, since it's a name.) And I will admit my prejudice that American Monday-holidays generally have better names!


* I can't resist a few side-notes on nappy and napkin.
  • AmE uses sanitary napkin for a feminine hygiene product, while BrE uses sanitary towel.
  • Then there's the AmE meaning of nappy, which derives from the more general sense of 'having a nap'--as fabric can (BrE: can have). In AmE this also refers to the type of tightly curled hair that is (pheno)typical of people of sub-Saharan African ancestry--particularly when said hair is not very well cared for. This was the meaning in play when (orig. AmE) shock-jock Don Imus called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos". When the news story was reported in the UK, there was some confusion (see, for example the comments here), with some people thinking that Imus was claiming that the women wore diapers or napkins on their heads (à la Aunt Jemima).
  • Then there's the old napkin versus serviette drama in BrE and related Es. In some (e.g. South African and some BrE speakers), the former is reserved for cloth table napkins, and the latter for paper. Elsewhere, serviette just marks you out as being 'non-U'--i.e. not upper class. Serviette is virtually unknown in AmE.
Postscript (8th September): Found a lovely example of AVIC (and its cure, in this case) in last week's Saturday Guardian Review section, in an article by AM Homes about American writer Grace Paley:
Grace often retold the story of how, at 19, desperate to be a poet, she took a course taught by WH Auden. When she used the word "trousers" in a poem, Auden asked why she was writing in British English - why didn't she just say "pants"? Paley explained that she thought that was just what writers did, and then never did it again.
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)