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Daniel Lavelle writes for the Guardian about the “accent softening taster session” he’s attending with Jamie Chapman (“the Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle”) at the London Speech Workshop:

I visit Chapman because, since I moved from Manchester to London two years ago, I have been mocked about my accent, which made me think about softening some of my rougher edges. Regional accents not only indicate where we are from, but can reveal our social class, while a recent study found that broad regional accents can be a barrier to social mobility.

The idea of erasing part of my identity makes me profoundly uneasy, nevertheless, it is something that many people are trying. […] Today, businesses – possibly aware of the class connotations – promote their services with more euphemistic words; it’s now about “softening” your accent not changing it and speaking “clearly”, not correctly.

Yet underpinning this are the same old assumptions, says Dr Sol Gamsu, an assistant professor of sociology at Durham University. “Accents are tied into uneven regional geographies of economic and cultural power,” he says. “The associations between intelligence and forms of middle-class and elite speech and accent are deeply woven into British class structures.” […]

“Accents tell you as much about what we project on to people as anything to do with the actual people,” says Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. How you perceive accents can be dependent on your proximity to the location of the accent, she says. She grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire, where the Liverpudlian accent was considered “metropolitan”. This contrasts with the animus that some Mancunians have towards a scouse accent, and the romanticism some Americans hear in its cadences.

Since I have been in London, I have become conscious of what my accent signals – northerners are often depicted as being louts or simpletons in the southern-centric media. During the first few ice-breakers at university, I was told by a well-spoken southerner that I sounded like Karl Pilkington, of An Idiot Abroad fame. […]

Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, however, considers her Brummie accent one of her “greatest assets”, but has experienced some of what worried Griffiths. “Outside of parliament, people definitely will use it as a tool to have a go at you,” she says. “They’ll say you sound thick and you’re common and you don’t speak properly.” The way Phillips writes has also been ridiculed. “Every single time I write anything down about being a mom, or about my mom or other moms – I write it: ‘Mom,’ because that’s how we say it in Birmingham. And every single time someone will be like: ‘Oh, that’s not how you spell it. It’s mum. You’re thick.’ I’m like: ‘Not where I live it isn’t’,” Phillips adds.

I’m fascinated by this stuff, because it’s so different from the attitude to regional speech in the US (though of course we have stigmas too), and I’ll be curious to see what my readers have to say. Thanks, Kobi!

Joss Fong, who describes herself as a “tragically monolingual producer,” presents a splendid video which she describes as follows:

A foreign accent is when someone speaks a second language with the rules of their first language, and one of the most persistent and well-studied foreign-accent features is a lack of L/R contrast among native Japanese speakers learning English. It’s so well-known that American soldiers in World War II reportedly used codewords like “lallapalooza” to distinguish Japanese spies from Chinese allies. But American movies and TV shows have applied this linguistic stereotype to Korean and Chinese characters too, like Kim Jong Il in Team America: World Police, or Chinese restaurant employees singing “fa ra ra ra ra” in A Christmas Story. However, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are completely different languages that each handle L-sound and R-sounds differently. In this episode of Vox Observatory, we take a look at each language and how it affects pronunciation for English-language learners.

But it doesn’t start out with L/R, it starts out with Cantonese tones: if you don’t say wai faai bat po ‘only speed is unbreakable’ right, it sounds like you’re talking about wi-fi (thus giving birth to a Cantonese meme). This is brilliant, because it immediately puts English-speakers on the wrong foot and makes them see how hard it is to recognize and reproduce distinctions that your native language doesn’t make. The video has linguists and vocal tracts and everything; I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I got it from MetaFilter, where user os tuberoes (Alex Chabot) links to his Glossa paper What’s wrong with being a rhotic?, which is also well worth your while; here’s his MeFi summary:

The objects we hear when someone speaks (or see when someone signs) are not what we actually have in our heads. As you don’t have any blue wave-lengths of light in your head, but can still conjure up an idea of what blue is and means to you, so we don’t actually have the physical objects of sound in our heads. They must be represented somehow. One question some linguists like to ask is, what is the relationship between those mental objects and the physical ones that vibrate through the air? The paper is an investigation of that question via r sounds across different languages.

Tl;dr: There is a kind of psychological unity across languages concerning so-called rhotics, or ‘r-sounds.’ As touched on in the video, there is enormous variation between various members of that class, so while everyone agrees there is a psychological reality, there, no one really knows if it is articulatory or acoustic or what. The paper argues that it is in fact, all in our head, and then it goes into some fairly arcane arguments for why the computational system of linguistic sound is arbitrary and not really related to actual pronunciation, and that R sounds are an especially good example of this arbitrariness since they are especially prone to variation.

Via bulbul’s Facebook feed, Romano-Arabica XIX (2019): Curses and Profanity in the Languages and Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa (editors in charge of this issue: George Grigore & Gabriel Bițună). It’s 259 pages long, with articles ranging from Lucia Avallone, “Literary Creativity and Curses. A Study Case: ’an takūn ‘Abbās al-‘Abd, by ’Aḥmad al-‘Āydī” to Jonas Sibony, “Curses and Profanity in Moroccan Judeo-Arabic and What’s Left of it in the Hebrew Sociolect of Israelis from Moroccan Origins,” plus Miscellanea and book reviews. The whole thing is online at the link, and you can download it freely. I’m immediately interested in Gabriel M. Rosenbaum, “Curses, Insults and Taboo Words in Egyptian Arabic: in Daily Speech and in Written Literature,” so I’m off to take a look at it. My deep appreciation to bulbul for continuing to post good stuff to FB!

Jonathan Morse writes about “decisions in front of an emptying bookshelf and a filling wastebasket”; the first entry:

A photoreduced edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, acquired as a premium for joining a now dead twentieth-century institution, the Book-of-the-Month Club. I’ll keep the nice big magnifying glass that came with it, and at my age I still very much use my multi-volume full-size edition of the original, picked up from the express agency on the same day (April 9, 1968) that I took delivery of my late beloved 1968 Mustang. A book still makes for the best browsing experience, reading in the rising smell of mildew. Obviously, though, the new database OED can do things that are all but impossible with ink on paper. So goodbye, intermediate technology reducing every four pages of the word-hoard to one page to make room on the shelf for one more book a month. The old printed books that remain and the new printed books that will arrive are equally antique now. My wife the librarian says not even the Friends of the Library would want you.

I understand the reasoning, but I will never get rid of my own Compact Edition (I never had the magnifying glass, since I bought it off a guy who presumably had been a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club and had either lost the accessory or was keeping it for other purposes, but I’m nearsighted and so don’t need it — I can even read the reduced fine print without problem). Sure, the online version is convenient and more up-to-date (upper-to-date?), but sometimes you want to look up a word without firing up a computer, and what if the power goes out? I would not, however, want the full-size edition even if it were offered gratis: too many books already, too little shelf space.

My wife and I enjoy the occasional “200 Years Ago” feature in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and the other day they had one about a reward being offered for the return of a lost indispensable. She read it to me and asked what an “indispensable” might be, so I turned to my trusty OED, where I found this sense (the entry, still unrevised, is from 1900):

A kind of small satchel or bag worn by women instead of a pocket. (French indispensable, Littré.) See Notes & Queries 9th Ser. IV. 310. Obsolete.
1800 Gillray Print 12 Feb. (repr. scene French Milliner’s) A number of disputes having arisen in the Beau Monde, respecting the exact situation of ladies Indispensibles (or New Invented Pockets).
1806 C. K. Sharpe Corr. (1888) I. 265 Rows of pretty peeresses, who sat eating sandwiches from silk indispensables [at Lord Melville’s trial].

That Sharpe citation is from a very lively description of the 1806 trial of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, for misappropriation of public money:

You would have laughed, had you seen the ridiculous care with which his (Whitbread’s) friends gave him sips of wine and water to wet his whistle, and clouts for his mouth and nose. I thought his speech very clever but in a miserable bad taste, and so abusive that Lord Melville smiled very frequently. That monster Fox was there, his sallow cheeks hanging down to his paunch, and his scowling eyes turned sometimes upon Mr Whitbread, sometimes on the rows of pretty peeresses who sat eating sandwiches from silk indispensables, and putting themselves into proper attitudes to astonish the representatives of the Commons of England, occupying the opposite benches.

I was a bit surprised by “wet his whistle,” but I soon discovered it goes back way beyond 1806, indeed back to Chaucer’s day: “So was hir ioly whistle wel ywet” (Reeve’s Tale, l. 235).

Anatoly Vorobei has an amusing post:

Великий и могучий английский язык [The great and mighty English language]:

“You are shit” – оскорбление [an insult]
“You ain’t shit” – тоже оскорбление [also an insult]
но [BUT] “You are not shit” – подбадривание [reassurance/encouragement]
“You are not the shit” – опять оскорбление [an insult again]
“You are the shit” – похвала [praise]
“You don’t know shit” и “You know shit” означают одно и то же, и это оскорбление
но [BUT] “You KNOW shit” с акцентом на втором слове – опять похвала [“You don’t know shit” and “You know shit” mean the same thing, and it’s an insult… BUT “You KNOW shit” with stress on the second syllable is praise again]

As commenters there point out, a couple of these are not as commonly used, but “You are shit” is perfectly well formed and unquestionably an insult, and I can certainly imagine it being said.

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani writes affectingly about growing up in Nigeria speaking English:

None of us children spoke Igbo, our local language. Unlike the majority of their contemporaries in our hometown, my parents had chosen to speak only English to their children. Guests in our home adjusted to the fact that we were an English-speaking household, with varying degrees of success. Our helps were also encouraged to speak English. Many arrived from their remote villages unable to utter a single word of the foreign tongue, but as the weeks rolled by, they soon began to string complete sentences together with less contortion of their faces. My parents also spoke to each other in English – never mind that they had grown up speaking Igbo with their families. On the rare occasion my father and mother spoke Igbo to each other, it was a clear sign that they were conducting a conversation in which the children were not supposed to participate. […]

[Read more…]

Michael Hendry wrote me as follows:

‘Stephanus Coombs’ (@stephanuscoombs), whom I know from Twitter, posted this question in two tweets. It seems like the kind of thing Languagehat readers (“language freaks” all) could probably answer – I know nothing about British regional and class accents. Here are his tweets:

“Where can I learn more about the prissy posh-Yorkshire accent of
people like Alan Bennett, Alan Titchmarsh and the TV cook Brian
Turner? How did it develop? Has it got a handy label like
“Morningside” for posh-Edinburgh?

“I REALLY WANT TO KNOW! Surely there’s some language freak out there
who knows more than I do about POSH-YORKSHIRE? (Google is for once no
help at all.)”

Seems like an interesting question; anybody know?

Sameh Hanna writes for Biblia Arabica about a man with the right idea about translating into Arabic:

In an interview published in 1927 in the Cairo-based monthly al-Hilāl, Egyptian intellectual and reformist Salama Musa (1887-1958) asked a retired British civil engineer, among other things, about what made him happy at the end of his career. The then 74-year old Sir William Willcocks (1852-1932) replied: “obeying God and fulfilling Christ’s purpose by serving people… and by printing the gospel in the colloquial so that the common people would have access to Christ’s words and sermons. In this I find more happiness than I used to find in engineering” (Musa 1927:1165). […]

The first edition of Willcocks’ translation of the New Testament (entitled in Arabic Al-Khabar al-Ṭayyib bitāʿ Yasūʿ al-Masīḥ) was published in five serialised volumes that started with Matthew and Mark’s Gospels, published in one volume in 1921, followed by Luke and John’s Gospels (volume 2) and Book of Acts (volume 3) in 1926. The first edition of the translation was completed in 1927 with two more volumes, Selections from Early Epistles (volume 4) and Selections from the Later Epistles (volume 5). The translation went into a second edition in 1928 and Saʿīd (1964/1980, 61) indicates that she had access to a 1949 edition of it, after which time the translation seems to have gone out of print. In addition to his translation of the New Testament, it is claimed that Willcocks also translated the books of Genesis and Psalms into the Egyptian vernacular (ibid), but there is no evidence to support this claim.

This translation project was motivated by Willcocks’ firm belief in the expressive potential of Egyptian colloquial Arabic and its ability to communicate the loftiest ideas in literary as well as sacred texts. He took this belief to the public domain much earlier, when in 1893 he gave a public lecture entitled ‘Why does not the power of invention exist among Egyptians now?’ In answering the question, he mainly argued that thinking and writing in fuṣḥa (a language register that Egyptians learn at school) is the main reason why Egyptians lack in creativity and inventiveness. He emphasised the potentials for using ʿāmmiyya in literature, giving the example of the British people who rejected Latin and adopted English as their language of literary expression and hence achieved progress (al-Dusuqi, 1948/2000, 44-5). To make his point, he published extracts from Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Hamlet translated in the Egyptian colloquial. More than two decades later, he published his translation of the New Testament, co-authored by an Egyptian Christian by the name of Manṣūr Effendi Bakhīt. The translation was published with the Nile Mission Press, a Cairo-based publishing mission that was so active in publishing Christian literature in Arabic vernaculars, not only in Egypt but in other Arab countries. Founded by two British missionaries, Annie Van Sommer and Arthur T. Upson in 1905, Nile Mission Press (NMP) was operated from Tunbridge Wells, England, though based in Cairo. NMP was known for publishing translations in the colloquial and Menzie (1936: 169) reports that the “late Sir William Willcocks said that the Nile Mission Press was the only Press that he knew which took pains to print colloquial accurately.”

There’s more discussion of the translation, as well as images, at the link.

I’ve just finished Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions: A Continental History (highly recommended), and I decided to take a look at the Acknowledgments section following the text; I’m glad I did, or I would have missed this delightful passage, which I hereby share with you all:

I have primarily dedicated the book to Wyatt, who is the very best of dogs although woefully underappreciated by his masters, the Kelmans, who considered roasting him when snowed in and unable to get to a supermarket during the infamous winter of 2014–2015. But it would not look good to exclude them from the dedication after they have been the very best and most generous of friends to me. Despite Ari Kelman’s phobias against adverbs and the word “the,” he greatly improved this book by his close and careful reading of every chapter. Unfortunately, very few of his keen and funny comments can be repeated in public. Any persisting flaws in the book must therefore be his fault, so please send all complaints and corrections to him.

In the book’s introduction, I wanted to invoke a clever observation by the historian Sarah M. S. Pearsall. When apprised of this sequel to American Colonies, she suggested that the title should pay homage to Bruce Willis’s Die Hard and Die Harder films to become American Revolutions: Colonize Harder. Pearsall’s wit is fitting, for American Revolutions interprets the revolutionary era as accelerating colonial processes of change. But Ari made me take that out, for as everyone knows, he has no sense of humor.

I should add that my wife and I have more than once threatened to turn our cat Pushkin into slippers, so I have no standing to criticize the Kelmans on those grounds.