A Scot in Scottsdale

On BBC Radio Scotland’s “Sport Nation” programme today there was an interview with Martin Laird, the “Scot in Scottsdale,” a Glasweigan golfer who lives in Arizona. He was being interviewed because of his recent success at the World Golf Championships in Scottsdale. Immediately following the radio interview the hosts were making fun of his accent, one saying, “You know when I met Martin when he was a wee boy he didn’t have that accent! <laughs>”

I should say up front that I know absolutely nothing about golf and only just heard about his guy today. Laird is 29 years old and moved to the U.S. when he was 17. According to Wikipedia he went to university in Colorado, so his ambient variety for the past 12 years has been all Western U.S. English. Colorado and Arizona are relatively understudied with respect to English variation, though at one point in my life I cobbled this page together, and I hope to collect more data in Arizona later this year. But the one thing we do know for sure is that Colorado and Arizona are part of the wider geographical region that features the Low Back Vowel Merger, i.e., we say the vowels in cot and caught identically (for more on that, check out the the Atlas of North American English). In any case, that particular feature isn’t going to help much in this instance because those vowels are also merged in Scottish English (though the position of the merged vowel is different, so I suppose you could look at that).

Anyway, as an Arizonan in Scotland, I was clearly intrigued by Martin Laird’s accent. At least some of his vowels were noticeably Scottish to my ears, and the intonation patterns I’ve come to associate with Glasgow were also there. But the commentators were also right in that his accent wasn’t nearly as strong as that of, say, Rob Lawson, the Glasweigan sociolinguist who spent a good portion of his PhD studies in Tucson (and who has a good blog you should check out, too). Okay, maybe we don’t need a linguist to tell us that the longer a person stays in a place the more likely it is to affect them. But the extent to which an person can and will change their accent as an adult is an intriguing and active area of current research, and there are still a number of open research questions. (If you’re interested in the details, the go-to research on these issues is undoubtably Gillian Sankoff)

So, being who I am and listening to Laird on the radio made me think of running a fun little study comparing expats. Would a Glasweigan who spends 12 years in Colorado/Arizona sound like an Arizona who spends 12 years in Glasgow? (Obviously we’re need to find our Arizonan, since I’m not a viable candidate, not only because I’m not in Glasgow but because what you’d want would be someone who spends as much of their time around Scots as Laird spends around Arizonans, and as a university lecturer I spend more time talking to students from England and colleagues from the U.S. than I do talking to Scots. Not to mention that I just got here.) But say you could control for things like nativeness of network and level of network interaction, it would be cool to see what features change more than others, and specifically how the features of the two expats’ resultant varieties compare with one another. I think Jennifer Nycz, who studied Canadians in New York, likely has some smart thoughts about New Yorkers in Canada. The comment section is yours, Jen!

That radio interview with Laird was quite brief. I wish it’d gone on longer, because it would’ve been interesting to see if he might have gradually shifted back to sounding more Glasweigan the longer he talked to the BBC Radio Scotland interviewers. Near the end of the interview, for example, they asked him a question and he responded with “Aye” and it made me immediately wonder how often he says “Aye” in his daily life. Maybe a lot, for all I know; he’s in a particularly interesting position as a golfer, where Scottishness surely has high social capital. Of course, now I’m wondering about getting ahold of BBC archival recordings to track down earlier interviews with him… which of course I don’t have time for right now! This is why I blog, people. Someone should steal this idea and let me know how the research goes.

for size

(In the 2012 spirit of posting shorter posts, more often…)

—–

Last weekend I went shopping in Edinburgh’s New Town for a new pair of boots. Usually shoe shopping is fun, but this time I was getting frustrated. It was my third attempt to find something decent, and I’d already bought and returned a pair. The trouble is that I’m a UK size 5.5 and boot sizes seem to not be available in half-sizes, so everything I’d tried on was either too big (6) or too small (5). Anyway, when I finally found a pair that did fit (European size 38, fwiw), I was happy to reply in the affirmative when the salesperson asked me:

“How do those fit for size?”

Which was a perfectly intelligible question, and to which I answered:

“Great, I’ll take them.”

Then a split second later, I thought, “Hey, that’s question’s not actually grammatical to me!” And then in the next second I thought, “But the sentence ‘Try this on for size’ is grammatical to me…” And then, following that, I thought “but that sentence actually has no literal meaning to me.”

The point being that, until that moment, it had never occurred to me that the original meaning of ‘Try this one for size’ would ever actually involve someone trying on something for, well, size! I assume other Americans have this intuition as well?

 

2011 Retrospective

I’m inspired by Rachel Cotterill’s recent post to take this moment to reflect on the past twelve months. I told Jefferson that I’d try to balance this post between work-related events and personal ones, and he suggested I just do both. So if this post gets too long for your tastes, blame him.

In January I started teaching classes at my (now not-so) new job (because the department had graciously given me the Sept-Dec semester to settle in with only advising duties and reading groups to worry about). My first class at the University of Edinburgh was an MSc seminar introducing the topic of linguistic variation and indexical meaning. January was also the month when Jefferson and I started looking for a flat to buy in Edinburgh (something that still hasn’t happened, because it turns out that it’s not easy for recently-arrived Americans to get a mortgage in Britain).

In February, teaching got more intense, with the addition of lectures in 1st-year undergraduate Linguistics, 1st year undergraduate English Language (which were two separate courses that are now combined into one), and the beginning of an intense 6-week course in 2nd-year Linguistics (“Empirical Methods”). February 3 was the Asian Lunar New Year, which was a week or so after Burns’ Night, and I celebrated both with my first attempt at the blended event “Gung Haggis Fat Choy” by making homemade jiaozi stuffed with haggis. My plan in 2012 is to do it again but to make it a party!

Handmade haggis-filled jiaozi for Gung Haggis Fat Choy (January 2011)

In March I got a chance to return to Oxford for a weekend to present at and help run the “Sound Day” workshop, an interdisciplinary event that I co-organized with two other Oxford post-docs. I also had a rather high number of excellent meals with friends and colleagues that month!

In April I got the closest I’ve been so far to Wales — Chester, England — without actually going into Wales. I didn’t cross the border because I was too busy the whole time attending the fabulous VaLP conference that Phil Tipton organized and hosted at Chester. I then spent the rest of April recovering from the busy semester, especially by rediscovering the joy of reading novels (by starting with the Edinburgh-based 44 Scotland Street series).

In May I visited the University of Essex for the first time and then hosted a number of linguist-friends who were visiting Edinburgh. I also joined the Edinburgh Orchestral Ensemble, although, due to the very small number of participants (e.g., one week the conductor had to stop conducting and play the violin because there were no violins!), I dropped out that same month.

In June I examined a PhD viva for the first time (as the internal examiner), which was hard work but a great experience (congratulations, Dr. Corinne Maxwell-Reid!). I then flew to Boston for the ISLE conference; it was an excellent conference and I got to catch up with several old friends from UofA and Stanford who now live in Boston.

Participants in the ISLE 2011 conference workshop, "Mergers in English: Perspectives from phonology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics" (http://www.bu.edu/isle/isle-2011-conference-program/)

In July I had the fantastic experience of teaching at the Summer School of Sociolinguistics in Glasgow. And then, after years of waiting, I finally got to see my friends Sonny Singh and John Altieri perform live with their band, Red Baraat. They performed four times in one weekend in London and I saw three of the shows.

Red Baraat at the Barbican in London (July, 2011)

In August I attended my first ICPhS conference, which was in Hong Kong. (My slides are posted here.) It’d been 10 years since I’d been to Asia and I particularly love Hong Kong so it was another big 2011 highlight. Then Scotland won the bid for the next ICPhS meeting (in 2015), which was very exciting (and a bit nerve-wracking as well)! August was an intensely busy month personally as well, in part because we moved to a new flat (by bus, which Jefferson is very proud of), but mostly because of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Jefferson and I saw maybe two dozen shows or so, most of them not too awful (and some of them rather good!). Seeing Kristen Schaal perform, and both seeing and meeting Hari Kondabolu, were particularly cool moments (although I’m still jealous of Jefferson, who got to see and meet David Sedaris while I was away in Hong Kong).

Hong Kong at sunset, view from the convention centre (August 2011)

In September the semester started up again, with my first stab at the Honours Sociolinguistics research seminar and the (logistically complicated and, at first, very stressful) MSc Introduction to Sociolinguistics lecture. I also tried to join a Zumba class, which didn’t last more than two weeks…

Then after having taken two years away from my favorite conference (missing 2009 and 2010), in October I attended NWAV’s 40th anniversary and had a splendid time! Jefferson and I also started attending Salsa dance classes in October, which (unlike Zumba) we hope to get back to in 2012.

The NWAV40 "All-Star Panel" at Georgetown University (October 2011)

November was a big blur of teaching, advising, and giving talks (first in York and then in Freiburg at the “Indexing Authenticity” workshop). There’s not much personal to recount from November; my only day off was the day we went on strike, which I spent picketing and marching, so which didn’t really feel like a day off.

The UCU participating in the national strike for pensions on 30 November 2011 (in Edinburgh)

And finally we come to December, when classes quietly wound down and marking quickly stacked up. Jefferson and I stayed here in Scotland for the holidays instead of flying back to the States, and we celebrated our 5-year wedding anniversary by taking the “best rail journey in the world.” It was indeed beautiful, but it rained the whole time and our B&B in Mallaig lost electricity due to 90mph winds. I suppose that’s what happens when you plan a winter vacation in Scotland!

The Glenfinnan viaduct, famous for its use in the Harry Potter movies (December 2011)

2011 was a fantastic year but rather exhausting, in moments! My hope is that 2012 will be a little more laid back. And that I’ll get back to blogging more, too.

naming a corpus

I’m creating a corpus for public distribution, but I’m stuck on a highly crucial point in the project: the corpus needs a name!

Fog hanging over Golden Gate Park in western San Francisco

Some corpora have better names than others. There are corpora where the name is simply the initials: the British National Corpus is just the BNC, pronounced (thankfully!) just as “bee en see.” But some corpora have really nice names, like COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), ICE (International Corpus of English), VOICE (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English), and COLT (the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language… which you might think would be BCLT, but COLT is sooo much better). The most clever corpus names, I think, are CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System; actually much more than a single corpus, but close enough) and SCOTS (Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech), which both describe the thing they stand for (there must be a term for that kind of acronym…). There are also corpus names that are not acronyms, and which only describe what they are: Switchboard is a corpus of collected telephone calls, CallFriend is a corpus of calls specifically between friends, and the Buckeye Corpus is the speech of Buckeyes (speakers in Columbus, Ohio)!

The Sunset District, San Francisco, California

My corpus, based on my PhD research, consists of sociolinguistic interviews (in the form of anonymized sound files, transcripts, and phonetic alignments) among San Franciscans who grew up in the western neighborhood known as the Sunset District. The interviews (and reading passages and wordlists) are all in English, which thus gives me the following letters to play with for an acronym for my corpus: S(an), F(rancisco), S(unset), D(istrict), E(nglish), I(nterviews), and C(orpus). But coming up with a cute acronym has proven difficult. The most obvious one is the Corpus of San Francisco English: COSFE. But “COSFE” sounds horrible! What does that last vowel even sound like, exactly? Adding “Interviews” to the end makes it “COSFEI,” which disambiguates the vowel sound, but it still doesn’t sound very nice at all. I tried playing around “SD,” for Sunset Distict, rather than “SF,” but that didn’t get me any further. So, should I just continue to call it the boring thing I’ve affectionately been calling it from the beginning: the SanFran Corpus? Or how about the Sunset Corpus (which unfortunately makes it seem like it’s the corpus to end all corpora)?

I’ve already given this waaay too much thought, so I leave it to you….

Typical Sunset District homes, in the style of Henry Doelger

Sexy Leprechaun Accents

I’ve been watching more TV than usual. We recently moved and it’s taking forever for internet access to get set up in our new place, so, in the meantime, we watch TV. (Books, schmooks.) I completely justify doing this, academically, because watching TV is a great way to learn about the ambient culture. I’ll never forget the first day of John Rickford’s field methods course when he asked us all who the local sports teams were and none of us had any idea (and thus we were not at all ready for fieldwork). Anyway, while I do still watch a fair number of American shows, I’ve become a fan of several of the British ones as well. Particularly the game shows. Most game shows, I’d wager (pun intended), tell you a ton about a culture. At a macro level (which is true for any show), you can first see what people find entertaining and valuable. For example, there are far more trivia-based game shows in the UK than in the US. But it’s the micro level of game shows that I love, when you see contestants talking off the cuff. Of course this is also true for reality shows, but with game shows, particularly the trivia-based ones, you also get immediate evidence for what kind of knowledge people value and cultivate. And even more interesting is the immediate data you get about what attitudinal and ideological associations are most salient.

My favo(u)rite example of this was one of the first times I watched All Star Family Fortunes, which, for you Americans, is a show that’s exactly like Family Feud except that each family is the family of a British celebrity (and all the winnings go to charity, which rocks). The concept of the show is pretty simple: they “surveyed 100 people” on a particular question and then the contestants must guess the top few answers given by those 100 people. One time I was watching a round where the question was “What do you associate with builders?” First off, builders are what Americans call construction workers. If it’d been me, I would’ve said that I associate them with, oh I dunno, building materials. If I had to be specific, I’d say cement, or wood, or some other material or tool. What do they say in Britain? Well one of the top answers on that particular round was: “tea.” As in builder’s tea (or even the brand, Builders Tea). Because, you know, builders take a lot of tea breaks, and they drink strong, cheap tea. Duh.

Now that I’ve totally confirmed every British stereotype held by every American reading this, let me get to my point.

Last night I was watching a particularly trashy game show. It’s not even worthy of being called a “game show” — it’s just a dating show with many contestants and flashing lights and an obnoxious host and a live audience. The show is called “Take Me Out” and it’s filmed in Manchester, in Northern England. The premise is that single bachelors are strutted out onto the stage one at a time and a panel of a couple dozen single women decide whether or not they’d date him, and then he chooses from among the remaining subset of women who would, and then they go on a date. As I say, it’s trashy. Anyway, something interesting happened last night, related to language attitudes in Britain. It left me mystified, and so now I turn to you.

There were two bachelors in the second half of the show. The first one was a guy from Edinburgh, the second a guy from Dublin. The first guy had no one interested in him at all and left without a date. The second guy garnered tons of interest and had his pick of women. Here’s what gets me: both men gave an introduction when they came out onto the stage, something short along the lines of “I’m John, and I’m from X.” After the Edinburgh guy spoke, several of the women backed out. The host asked one of them why, and she said to the contestant “I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re nice and all, but I just can’t understand what you’re saying.” However, after the Dublin guy spoke, most of the women did not back out, and two of the women specifically swooned over his accent. One woman remarked that she’d gone to Ireland in hopes of finding herself a leprechaun, and was glad for the second chance (“leprechaun” was said very nudge nudge, wink wink). The woman who actually got the date with the Dubliner stated that her “biggest turn-on is a man with a strong accent.”

But not an Edinburgh one, apparently.

Let’s clarify a few things: as far as Scottish accents are concerned, the Edinburgh accent is not considered particularly strong. What’s more, most of the women on this show seem to be from Northern England, where accents are generally more marked than Southern England (where ‘near-RP’ and such things reside). In fact, the woman who said she “couldn’t understand” the Edinburgh man was (if I remember correctly) from Newcastle upon Tyne, which is relatively close to the Scottish border (and famous for its own very marked accent, Geordie). Even though sociolinguistic research has explored the ways in which the Scottish-English border is indeed an important psychological and ideological divide, Ireland is across a body of water and is not even part of the UK! So the idea that it would have any more comprehensible or intelligible of an accent seems like a real stretch.

So what’s going on here? Is a Dublin accent considered more sexy than an Edinburgh accent? In Coupland and Bishop’s 2007 analysis of “5010 U.K. informants’ reactions to 34 different accents of English,” Edinburgh scored an average of 4.49 (on a 5-point scale) on Social Attractiveness measures, and Southern Irish scored 4.68. These are very similar values, when compared to the other 32 accents, though with Southern Irish slightly higher than Edinburgh it is leaning in the direction expected. In terms of Prestige, Edinburgh scored 4.04, Southern Irish 3.63, which is not particularly helpful here. If we look at the results for Social Attractiveness by gender, women rate both accents higher than men do (which is true for most of the accents), but not drastically differently between the two (Edinburgh = 4.59, Southern Irish = 4.83). For Prestige, there’s no gender difference for Edinburgh, while women rate Southern Irish as slightly more prestigious than men do (3.69 vs. men’s 3.58). In short, I think there’s something interesting about the value of these accents that was reflected in last night’s “Take Me Out” but which I don’t think has been fully captured in the language attitudes literature, yet.

Granted, the Dublin contestant was more conventionally attractive than the Edinburgh lad, so maybe all that incomprehensible-accent stuff was just an way to save face.

"Take Me Out" host, Paddy McGuinness

“Let’s Speak Twi!”

An announcement

In the midst of my busiest teaching semester ever, I’m going to pause between moments of powerpoint-slide creation to advertise the final result of a project that I’m very excited about! Last month, CSLI Publications released Let’s Speak Twi: A Proficiency Course in Akan Language and Culture, co-authored by me and fellow linguists Adams Bodomo and Charles Marfo. Let me tell you a little bit about the book!

Cover for "Let's Speak Twi"

About Twi

Twi is a Ghanaian language and the most widely-spoken variety of the Akan language group. It is the politically dominant indigenous language of Ghana, particularly found in the South (although the capital, Accra, is also associated with the minority language, Ga). When Americans and Brits go to Ghana and want to learn a native language, Twi is usually the one that they study. When I talk to people who have never heard of Twi before, I often tell them that it’s the native language of Kofi Annan (remember him?).

Kofi Annan (photo from Wikipedia)

Twi Names

The name Kofi is a very common Twi day name, given to males born on Friday. My husband’s sister, who is Ghanaian, has four children, all of them who happened to be born on Friday (!), and three of them boys. So they’re all technically named Kofi, though with variations on their name that distinguish between them (one of them goes by an English nickname, for example). I personally think Twi naming practices are really interesting… Wikipedia (and our book, of course!) gives a decent overview.

Pronunciation Tip

Here’s a hint for if you ever want to actually say the word ‘Twi’ outloud: the first sound in ‘Twi’ is a rounded affricate, so it sounds to an English speaker something like ‘chwee’. This is because the digraph ‘tw’ represents a single complex sound in Twi, not two (/t/ + /w/) as it would be in English. (As a parallel, think about how wrong it would sound if someone pronounced the th in ‘think’ as ‘tuh-hink’!)

IPA for the sound indicated by "tw" in Twi

Twi has two major dialects: Asante (or Ashanti) Twi, associated with the major city of Kumasi, and Akuapem Twi, associated with the city of Koforidua (where my husband’s family calls home). Twi is often referred to as Fante-Twi or Twi-Fante, because Fante (or Fanti or Mfantse, spoken in and around Cape Coast) is very similar to Twi; both Fante and Twi are Akan languages. But they’re different enough from one another that we decided to focus specifically on (Asante) Twi, in our book, and not on Fante. For example, here’s a website showing the differences between Twi and Fante day names.

Me & Twi

I’ve been interested in linguistic aspects of Twi for awhile, ever since meeting my now-husband, who is half-Ghanaian (and who understands Twi but doesn’t speak it so much), and his mother, to whom this book is dedicated. At the time when Jefferson and I met, I already had studied a little German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese, and as someone from Flagstaff, Arizona, I had also always been personally interested in the Navajo and Hopi languages. But Twi was so different from all of these, and as I studied it (first at Stanford University, then informally in Ghana, and then at SCALI), I grew to like it more and more.

Visiting Akaa Falls in Ghanas Eastern Region (August 2010)

I wrote my second of two PhD qualifying papers on a phonological issue in Twi dialect variation (with advisors Arto Anttila & Will Leben). I had considered going back to Ghana for sociolinguistic fieldwork for my dissertation. For various reasons, that never materialized, and so I’m very proud to have this book instead.

The making of “Let’s Speak Twi”

Adams Bodomo, the lead author on Let’s Speak Twi, is actually not a native speaker of Twi (he’s from Northern Ghana, and speaks a language called Dagaare). Clearly, I am not a native speaker of Twi! Our second author, Charles Marfo, is the native speaker here. The story of the book is that Adams and Charles together developed an earlier version for their students at Hong Kong University. Around the same time, I was studying Twi and was a little disappointed with the textbooks on offer. Then in 2006, Adams came to Stanford University, to collaborate with Arto Anttila. Adams showed me the earlier version and my first reaction to it was “This must get published!” So, Adams invited me to join the team and get it done.

The main challenge in getting it published was, sadly, an issue of fonts. Twi has two vowel symbols that are not part of the standard Roman script: ɛ & ɔ, which we needed in both uppercase and lowercase forms. What’s more, we wanted to represent every syllable with its own tone marking (acute or grave marking), and sometimes that symbol had to appear above the ɛ & ɔ vowels! As any linguist who’s worked with earlier versions of the SIL IPA font set will understand, these typographic features didn’t translate very well, so to speak, from Charles’ computer to my computer. After several months of hair-pulling (including the regretful purchasing of a $40 laptop that was old enough to run the right version of Microsoft Word + SIL font set, but not new to have an ethernet port or USB port to transfer the file), I decided that the only way we were going to get this text published was if I retyped the entire book. And the best thing to do was to do that in LaTeX, which I had ony just begun to learn how to use.

Most people would say that this wasn’t the smartest project to undertake in the midst of (completely unrelated) PhD dissertation fieldwork and thesis writing. It was challenging, time consuming, and a bit tedious. But in my mind, it was totally worth it! I didn’t, however, tell my advisors what I was doing (sorry John & Penny). There were months at a time when I didn’t work on the book, of course. Like most of the first half of 2009. There were many, many days when I didn’t think it would ever happen. I owe a lot of thanks to the people who helped me with LaTeX issues, namely ʻŌiwi Parker Jones and CSLI’s Emma Pease, and a huge debt of gratitude to the head of CSLI publication, Dikran Karagueuzian.

About the book

In my humble opinion, our book is really good! It covers a wide range of levels and topics, from beginners learning the basics, to the very advanced study of things like politics and law. And it has some important, unique features. Twi is a tone language, and our book is the first to include full phonological tone information for all Twi examples. Since we’re linguists, we’ve included a chapter-length Appendix dedicated to describing the standard Twi sound system and syntactic structure, along with practice exercises for students. During my time at Oxford last year I also made an effort to render all the English parts (half of the book) so that they were both linguistically and culturally understandable for speakers of both US- and UK-based Englishes. My favorite thing in the book, though, is the list of idiomatic, colloquial, and euphemistic expressions, including taboo expressions that the learner should try to avoid, and even a few common words and phrases that can easily sound like said taboo expressions, if one is not careful! (I’m proud to say that this bit was my idea, mostly due to the trauma I face every time I need to say the word ‘eight’ in Twi…)

Purchasing

I’ll end my shameless advert here. If you’re interested in ordering our book, you can get it direct from the distributor or check it out on Amazon. Nante yie! (Go well!)

View from a house in Dansoman, Western Accra, Ghana (August 2010)

All About Vocalisation

Time to put the name of this blog to use!  You may recall that one of my motivations for calling this “vocalized/vocalised” is because of my interest in L-vocalization across varieties of English.  That interest is presently taking the form of an online speech perception survey, available to anyone who considers themselves a “linguist” — anyone with any linguistic training, regardless of native language or dialect.  The survey takes roughly 20 minutes (probably less), and if you’re reading this you’re invited to participate:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/423080/Perception-of-L-Vocalization-version-B

Some linguists insist that they can’t ‘hear’ vocalization, and if that’s you, please don’t let that stop you from taking the survey!  That’s part of what we’re interested in looking at.

Thanks in advance for your time and help!  Check back here for details on the results, or come in person to see my talk (with co-author Sonya Fix) on Saturday, 8 January 2011, at the Linguistics Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh, PA.