it’s all about the subtleties

You know when you’re staring off into space, your eyes looking at (but not really reading) some mundane writing in front of you, like the nutritional content of your cereal box, or the safety notice in the bus?  That’s what it was like this evening, as I stood at the kitchen sink, washing dishes, my eyes looking toward-but-not-really-at the bottle of hand soap on the sink’s edge.  And then I noticed what the label said:

http://www.carex.co.uk/products/protecting-antibacterial-handwash.htm

If you’re American, does anything strike you as odd about this slogan?  I mean, I’ve had this soap for a couple weeks, and never thought anything of it, either.  But tonight it occurred to me that I don’t/can’t use protecting in this way (as a present participle, I guess?).  I would rather expect to see the slogan “Protective Antibacterial Handwash.”  I think the only reason I noticed was that, as my eyes focused on the words, I realized I was expecting more of them.  In fact, my mind completed the superhero-esque slogan that wasn’t there: “Protecting Antibacterial Handwash From The Evils Of …” (oh, I dunno, what evils attack handwash?)  “… Dirty Water, Everywhere!” But this then leads to the bizarre reading of the label on the bottle as indicating that the bottle contains something which protects handwash, rather than being handwash that protects hands.

I’ve been living in the UK for seven weeks now, and as I suggested in my last post, the differences between US and UK English strike me as either big-n-obvious or small-n-subtle.  Much of the time they feel particularly subtle because I can’t even tell if they’re features of the majority of UK varieties in the area or if they’re specific, jargony aspects of Oxford (as Stan Carey’s comment on my last post suggests).  In this case, I don’t know, offhand, if this soap slogan has anything do with UK Englishes or with the Carex soap brand, specifically.  Perhaps one of you will tell me.  Yet if even if you do, I wonder if I’ll ever get to the point where Americanisms and Britishisms are clearly, distinctly categorized in my mind, or if I’ll just continue to blend the two, so that my range of what feels grammatical simply expands increasingly?  Someone should ask me in a few months or a year if I find anything wrong with Protecting Handwash…

(Note-to-self to speak with my friend, Jennifer Nycz, about second dialect acquisition!)

acclimating before you get there

I’d been waiting for inspiration. I’ve been putting off posting here, in hopes that I’d soon stumble upon that perfect British English oddity that would strike my American ears and send me straight to the WordPress dashboard. But it hasn’t happened, and so this post is about why that might be.

I’ve never lived in Britain before, but I have been here a few times before, as a tourist. What’s more, I’m not a stranger to the historical reaches of the British Empire: Singapore, Hong Kong, Ghana, South Africa… Canada, even (parts of British Columbia, at least, do try their hardest to live up to the title). Early and periodic exposure — I was 3 years old when we lived in Singapore — to spellings like colour and words like boot and lorry certainly makes those things seem less strange to me as an adult, especially when I know where I can expect to find them. So in a way, learning to order bangers and mash, here, is basically like learning to order Bratwurst mit Kartoffelpuree, in Germany. (Except the food you here get isn’t nearly as good!)

Sure, English English is a bit different than American English, but it’s different in ways that are mostly expected, right? (Like I said last time, heaps of folks have written about the topic.) So then this makes me wonder about the paths that lead to our forming expectations. How does acclimation happen before arrival? To what extent can exposure to place B, which was colonized by place A, acclimate you to place A? To what extent can having one good friend from either A or B accomplish the same thing? What about reading a lot of A’s novels, or just a bunch of academic articles about A’s language? For the godawful umpteenth time, what about the mass media?

It’ll be interesting to see what my husband thinks about this when he moves here in January. As someone who lived up until age 12 in Nigeria, and with a travel record comparable to mine, he’ll be a great test case!

And this isn’t to say that I don’t still find people in Oxford unintelligible (and that I’m still misunderstood more often than I even know). But that’s different: a matter of expanding my perceptual space, of gradually mapping their vowels onto my mental vowel inventory, and then learning a few colloquialisms to glue it all together. But that process strikes me as so expected, there’s not much more to say about it… At least, not this week!

To be fair, one could argue about the extent to which I can call being in Oxford being “in Britain.” Every day when I’m in town I hear loads of different languages and accents, American English varieties among them. Surely, I just need to get out a little more. When I do, I suspect I’ll have more to say.

In other words, my apologies (to those of you who’ve asked) for not posting until now. I guess one problem with being a linguist who studies English variation is that something that might’ve seemed like a funny British thing, before, now often just seems like another datapoint.

But, okay, okay, so there is this one thing…

I have this small obsession with variable count/mass distinctions (e.g., my elderly Chinese relative says she has “a lot of junks” in her apartment, clearly referring to things and stuff, not the ships), and the other day I was reading this official Oxford publication that was all about “researches” — you know, bits of research. I had no idea “research” could be a count noun. So that’s kind of cool, right?

on becoming intelligible

Six hours into the overnight flight from San Francisco to Heathrow, the cabin lights came on and the flight attendants began serving breakfast.  Sitting in an aisle seat, I could hear the food choices being announced ahead of time, so when the attendant got to my row, I was ready.

“Ham and cheese muffin or egg and cheese bagel?”

“The bagel, please.”

“Right, ham it is.”

Too startled to get my bearings, weary from a sleepless night (and confounded by my own overconfidence in preparing to order), I simply took and ate the ham muffin.  It was alright, but I really did want that bagel.  I was perplexed at what had just happened, and yet this was only the beginning of many reminders I was about to get that I was no longer living in the perceptual landscape of California English.

Strangely, the next reminder also came at another breakfast time.  For my first week in Oxford I stayed at a little B&B, waiting for permission to move into my college flat.  By little, I do mean little, as I was the only guest in a house with only one host.  Breakfast consisted of me dining alone at a little glass table, though the woman who ran the house would come in each morning and make sure everything was set.  On my first morning there, she asked me:

“Would you like your tea now or would you like to wait and have it later?”

“I think I’ll wait a little, thank you.”

“Now, then? Alright.”

And she promptly made the tea.  Twice in the space of 24 hours, I was being completely misunderstood, even (or only?) when being presented with a binary choice, with only two possible responses!  What was going on?  Having just got my PhD, I’d like to think that I can at least speak clearly — and not only do I study English accents for a living, but I usually end up accommodating to my interlocutor’s accent to an embarrassingly strong extent!  Of course I expected dialect differences, but I don’t think I had reason to expect so much miscommunication.  Okay, maybe the ham/bagel confusion could be understood — perhaps my first vowel in ‘bagel’ somehow sounds more like a Brit’s ‘ham’ vowel than their ‘bagel’ vowel — but the vowels in ‘wait’ and ‘now’ strike me as less confusable, especially for people with RP or Oxbridge accents.  No, it was definitely something more than vowels.  Something pragmatic?  Something prosodic?

I wish I could say I figured it out, but luckily (for life) I haven’t had any more such obvious examples of miscommunication in the 2.5 weeks since then, and so unluckily (for analysis) I haven’t gotten any more datapoints for comparison!

It’s been a busy 2.5 weeks.  I’ve never moved internationally before, and having just finished a 300-page dissertation, even the idea of starting a new blog amid all the chaos was enough to make me tired.  That said, my acclimatization to my new British home is happening almost too rapidly, and the sociolinguistic oddities that strike me from day to day are either getting lost somewhere in the Twitterverse or else simply forgotten.  And so, here I am.

Many, many people have written about the differences between British and American varieties of English.  That is not the explicit purpose of this blog, though due to my profession, who I am, and where I live, that will surely be a frequent topic of discussion.  For example, the title of this blog: the issue of spelling (American `z’ or British `s’, in this case) is one that immediately confronts an expat, and becomes an interesting site for identity construction.  Furthermore, my post-doctoral research will focus on a particular phonetic variable, known as `L-vocalization’.  This is a common feature of many British and some American varieties of English, and consists of the `vocalization’ of the /l/ sound at the ends of syllables, in other words, the pronunciation of /l/s like /w/s w-like vowels (think of sold rhyming with sewed).

[NB: As an American, I must note that I first tried for http://vocalized.wordpress.com/, but the domain was taken. *shakes fist* I therefore have to begin with a slight concession to the British spelling, though, I should say, colour be damned!!]

And the last reason for the blog’s title, not to get too obvious about it, is that a blog is just a collection of vocalizations (in the more common sense), right?  So, I hope you enjoy mine.  Welcome!  Please come back soon.