bert-and-ernie-are-gay:

Hate vocal fry? Bothered by the use of “like” and “just”? Think uptalk makes people sound less confident? If so, you may find yourself growing increasingly unpopular—there’s a new wave of people pointingout that criticizing young women’s speech is just old-fashioned sexism.

I agree, but I think we can go even further: young women’s speech isn’t just acceptable—it’s revolutionary. And if we value disruptors and innovation, we shouldn’t just be tolerating young women’s speech—we should be celebrating it. To use a modern metaphor, young women are the Uber of language.

What does it mean to disrupt language? Let’s start with the great English disruptor: William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is celebrated to this day not just because he wrote a mean soliloquy but because of what he added to our language—he’s said to have brought in over 1,700 words. But recent scholars have called that number of words into question. As Katherine Martin, head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, has pointed out, if Shakespeare was inventing dozens of new words per play, how would his audience have understood him? Rather, it’s likely that Shakespeare had an excellent grasp of the vernacular and was merely writing down words that his audience was already using.

So if Shakespeare wasn’t disrupting the English language, who was? And how did we get from Shakespearean English to the version we speak now? That’s right: young women.

A pair of linguists, Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg at the University of Helsinki, conducted a study that combed through 6,000 personal letters written between 1417 and 1681. The pair looked at fourteen language changes that occurred during this period, things like the eradication of ye, the switch from “mine eyes” to “my eyes,” and the change from hath, doth, maketh to has, does, makes.

In 11 out of the 14 changes, they found that female letter-writers were changing the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers. In the three exceptional cases where the men were ahead of the women, those particular changes were linked to men’s greater access to education at the time. In other words, women are reliably ahead of the game when it comes to word-of-mouth linguistic changes.

This trend hasn’t changed much. While young people have long driven innovation, it’s not just an age thing—it’s also a gender thing. During the decades that sociolinguists have been researching the question, they’ve continually found evidence that women lead linguistic change.

Young women are leading the change away from the distinctive /r/ pronunciation of New York City, they’re leading the vowel changes in US cities around the Great Lakes, the /aw/ pronunciation in Toronto and Vancouver, the “ch” pronunciation in Panama, the /r/ pronunciation in Montreal, the ne deletion in Tours, /t/ and /d/ pronunciations in Cairo Arabic, vowel pronunciation in Paris, not to mention entire language shifts, like that from Hungarian to German in Austria—and the list goes on.

Plus, young women are on the bleeding edge of those linguistic changes that periodically sweep through the media’s trend sections, from uptalk to “selfie” to the quotative like to vocal fry.

The role that young women play as language disruptors is so well-established at this point it’s practically boring to sociolinguists. The founder of modern sociolinguistics, William Labov, observed that women lead 90% of linguistic change—in a paper he wrote 25 years ago. Researchers continue to confirm his findings.

It takes about a generation for the language patterns started among young women to jump over to men. Uptalk, for example, which is associated with Valley Girls in the 1970s, is found among young men today. In other words, women learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers.

While the pattern is well-established, we still don’t know for sure yet why young women reliably lead linguistic innovation. Maybe it’s nature, maybe it’s nurture; but we do know that young women tend to be more socially aware, more empathetic, and more concerned about how their peers perceive them. This may translate into a greater facility for linguistic disruption. Women also tend to have larger social networks, which means they’re more likely to be exposed to a greater diversity of language innovations.

And of course, women are still likely to spend more time caring for children than men—even if a particular woman works outside the home, daycare workers and elementary school teachers are disproportionately female. This means that even if young men were disrupting language as much as women, they would be hard-pressed to pass it along.

All of this leads us to the biggest question: if women are such natural linguistic innovators, why do they get criticized for the same thing that we praise Shakespeare for? Plain old-fashioned sexism.

Our society takes middle-aged men more seriously than young women for a whole host of reasons, so it’s only logical that we have also been conditioned to automatically respect the tone and cadence of the typical male voice, as well as their word choices.

Sure, let’s encourage young women to speak with confidence, but not by avoiding vocal fry or “like” or whatever the next linguistic disruption is. Let’s tell them to speak with confidence because they’re participating in a millennia-old cycle of linguistic innovation—and one that generations of powerful men still haven’t figured out how to crack.

—Gretchen McCullough writing for Quartz, 7 August 2015 [x]

“The role that young women play as language disruptors is so well-established at this point it’s practically boring to sociolinguists” *weeps with joy*

the-fisher-queen:

serpentinetigerlily:

startedwellthatsentence:

tvalkyrie:

breadpocalypse:

ilovejohnmurphy:

furryputin:

ilovejohnmurphy:

corntroversy:

ilovejohnmurphy:

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

Whenever I see people bitch about language like this, it enrages me to untold levels, because they clearly don’t even get why or how it happens, so I’m thankful someone took the time to actually spell it out with so many people being huge dicks thinking they’re wicked fucking special.

You know they don’t do the research because then they’d have to do something other than laugh at so-called dumb white people.

luvtheheaven:

samanticshift:

samanticshift:

“i don’t judge people based on race, creed, color, or gender. i judge people based on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.”

i hate to burst your pretentious little bubble, but linguistic prejudice is inextricably tied to racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and ableism.

ETA: don’t send me angry messages about this…at all, preferably, but at least check the tag for this post before firing off an irate screed.

no one seems to be following the directive above, so here’s the version of this post i would like all you indignant folk to read.

no, i am not saying that people of color, women, poor people, disabled people, etc, “can’t learn proper english.” what i’m saying is that how we define “proper english” is itself rooted in bigotry. aave is not bad english, it’s a marginalized dialect which is just as useful, complex, and efficient as the english you’re taught in school. “like” as a filler word, valley girl speech, and uptalk don’t indicate vapidity, they’re common verbal patterns that serve a purpose. etc.

because the point of language is to communicate, and there are many ways to go about that. different communities have different needs; different people have different habits. so if you think of certain usages as fundamentally “wrong” or “bad,” if you think there’s a “pure” form of english to which everyone should aspire, then i challenge you to justify that view. i challenge you to explain why “like” makes people sound “stupid,” while “um” doesn’t raise the same alarms. explain the problem with the habitual be. don’t appeal to popular opinion, don’t insist that it just sounds wrong. give a detailed explanation.

point being that the concept of “proper english” is culturally constructed, and carries cultural biases with it. those usages you consider wrong? they aren’t. they’re just different, and common to certain marginalized groups.

not to mention that many people who speak marginalized dialects are adept at code-switching, i.e. flipping between non-standard dialects and “standard english,” which makes them more literate than most of the people complaining about this post.

not to mention that most of the people complaining about this post do not speak/write english nearly as “perfectly” as they’d like to believe and would therefore benefit by taking my side.

not to mention that the claim i’m making in the OP is flat-out not that interesting. this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook. the only reason it sounds so outlandish is that we’ve been inundated with the idea that how people speak and write is a reflection of their worth. and that’s a joyless, elitist idea you need to abandon if you care about social justice or, frankly, the beauty of language.

and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real ramifications–in employment (tossing resumes with “black-sounding names”), in the legal system (prejudice against rachel jeantel’s language in the trayvon martin trial), in education (marginalizing students due to prejudice against dialectical differences, language-related disabilities, etc), and…well, a lot.

no, this doesn’t mean that there’s never a reason to follow the conventions of “standard english.” different genres, situations, etc, have different conventions and that’s fine. what it does mean, however, is that this standard english you claim to love so much has limited usefulness, and that, while it may be better in certain situations, it is not inherently better overall. it also means that non-standard dialects can communicate complex ideas just as effectively as the english you were taught in school. and it means that, while it’s fine to have personal preferences regarding language (i have plenty myself), 1) it’s worth interrogating the source of your preferences, and 2) it’s never okay to judge people on the basis of their language use.

so spare me your self-righteous tirades, thanks.

Oh my gosh YES, this post got so much better.

this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook. 

and

and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real ramifications

allthingslinguistic:

ladydrace:

howlnatural:

britishpineapple:

bananoots:

kainoliero:

tuonenjoutsenen:

miss-cath:

animentality:

freezingdesert:

please be aware that the correct way to replace ä, ö, ü, ß is turning them into ae, oe, ue, and ss, not just taking the dots away or typing “B”.

Otherwise you can get things like,

“Das Wetter ist sehr schwül heute.”
= “The weather is very hot and humid today.”

“Das Wetter ist sehr schwul heute.”
= “The weather is very gay today.”

well I now know how to call the weather gay

So, it’s like in Polish. 

“Zrobić łaskę” means “Do mercy to someone”

but

“Zrobić laskę” means “Make a blowjob”.

I cannot think of a case where removing the dots of ä and ö in Finnish would result in something naughty (if you can, please contribute) but the same thing applies, ä and ö are completely different from a and o, and one does not simply remove the dots.

Finnish:

Näin appelsiineja = I saw oranges.

Nain appelsiineja = I fucked oranges.

its even worse in turkish doe cus like

Sık dişini?? Hang in there/Endure

Sik dişini?? Literally just fuck your tooth

that’s it

amazing

Even in Spanish:

Feliz año nuevo = happy new year

Feliz ano nuevo = happy new butthole

Irish: 

Tá mo chroí briste = My heart is broken.

Tá mo chroí bríste = My heart is trousers.

Danish:

Bølle = thug

Bolle = fucking

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language that uses diacritics must have a minimal pair with and without diacritics that means something rude. 

magiccatprincess:

aph-wyonegonic:

ladyshinga:

yourfuckingmuse:

Die Spinnen!
= The spiders!
Die spinnen!
= They are crazy!

Er hatte liebe Genossen.
= He had kind companions.
Er hatte Liebe genossen.
= He had enjoyed love.

Sich brüsten und Anderem zuwenden.
= to gloat and turn towards other things
Sich Brüsten und Anderem zuwenden.
= to turn towards breasts and other things

Sie konnte geschickt Blasen und Glieder behandeln.
= She was adept at treating blisters and limbs.
Sie konnte geschickt blasen und Glieder behandeln.
= She was adept at giving blowjobs and handling members.

Der Gefangene floh.
= The prisoner escaped.
Der gefangene Floh.
= The imprisoned flea

Helft den armen Vögeln.
= Help the poor birds.
Helft den Armen vögeln.
= Help poor people with sex.

In case anyone wanted to feel better about how confusing English can get.

Suddenly I remember why I almost failed german class back in High School

ravenstagsmooches:

Where do cats go when they die? Purrgatory.

¿De dónde van los gatos cuando mueren? Purgatorio.

actuallyclintbarton:

greaseonmymouth:

assassinationtipsforladies:

atamajakki:

I love when ghost hunting shows are in a fucking ancient ruin and ask their questions in english

“what is your name” homeboy I was a viking several hundred years ago I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying

Is anyone else imagining “J.R.R. Tolkien: Ghost Hunter”

“Alright, now I’m going to try 8th century Anglo-Norse”

love the idea, but:

there is no such thing as 8th century Anglo-Norse. The Norse language in the 8th century is the tail end of Proto-Norse/beginning of Old Norse. In Scandinavia we often call it Runic Danish because that’s the language on the rune stones found in Denmark and Southern Sweden.

calm down tolkien

dajo42:

laid is pronounced like paid but not said and said is pronounced like bread but not bead and bead is pronounced like lead but not lead