Sociolinguistics Two

1. Redundancy

“… pidgin Englishes are characterised by a limited vocabulary and the elimination of many grammatical devices such as reduction of redundant features.”

(emphasis added)

Here we go. “Redundant features” eh? I’m finally getting round to properly reading up on Information Theory and it’s interesting the way Shannon distinguishes between signal and noise, or efficiency and redundancy, and carrying capacity..

Morse’s original code had a different sequence of dots and dashes relating not to letters but to words in a dictionary. This was obviously very efficient in terms of information transmission and carrying capacity, but not particularly flexible. There was also little redundancy, which increased the room for error. If you get the sequence I-A-M-H-A-P-P-D you can be fairly sure that the D is an error and should be Y. But if you get I-AM-SAD then there’s no way of even intuiting if SAD is an error or not. In Shannon’s conception the more predicable the next step in a sequence is the less information it is said to be conveying, so the D, if intentional, has more informational value than the Y. It’s the same principal as with dropping the vowels in tlgrms or txts.

You increase efficiency by decreasing redundancy, but nothing’s truly redundant. ‘Redundancies’ act as checks, decreasing the impact of inevitable errors in transmission, which would explain why they get reintroduced as pidgins develop into full-blown languages, even at the loss of efficiency.

So how does this relate to creoles and pidgins (C+P)? It seems that here you’ve got ready made case studies regarding exactly the concepts of ‘Core Vocabulary’ we encountered earlier in the Lexis units, but also fairly concrete examples of ‘core grammar’. I don’t think it’s too much of an assumption to suggest that C+P are overwhelmingly oral modes of communication, so the relative lack of written record might make corpus analysis tricky, but if you want to get at the heart of what makes a language a language, particularly with respect to TEFL as a global lingua franca, then there’s a lot to be gained here.

* * * * *

Lingua Franca, by the way, obviously comes from Language of the Franks which stems from Mediterranean traders in 11th Century. With a pleasing disconnect Lingua Franca appears to have actually been a form of pidgin Italian, not French.

2. Relexification

How does this mesh with the concept of lexical units as examined in Lexis Five?

3. Gove

Do I have to mention him? I suppose in the interests of topicality that I must. I don’t enjoy it any more than you do.

4. Belonging

I refer you back to the comment I made about Sign Languages in Lexis Two. Interesting section in The Language Instinct (p24-25) regarding a newly established school for the deaf in Nicaragua, and how the children went about creating a fully formed language from the basic signs their parents had learned. As a declaration of interest, I used to work at a school for deaf students, and it pisses me off royally when Sign Languages are dismissed as anything other than the proper languages that they are. On which note…

              “Such a view may sometimes be… that European languages are somehow ‘better’ than others and that many people speak ‘primitive’ languages, i.e., languages that are ‘deficient’ in certain respects. Such deficiencies may then be cited that the people themselves are inferior. We must note that linguists have been unable to locate a single such ‘primitive language.’ That claims about associated intellectual deficiencies are largely ‘racist,’ and that this theory… ignores many important facts.”

(Wardhaugh, kindle location 1874)

What’s with the disassociating quote marks around ‘racist’? Let’s call it for what it is and not hide behind reported speech.

              “[M]odern linguists… have been dangerously sentimental about creole languages, which… constitute in most communities a distinct handicap to the social mobility of the individual, and may also constitute a handicap to the creole speaker’s personal intellectual development.”

              (ibid loc 1526, quoting Whinnom, 1971)

‘A handicap to the creole speaker’s personal intellectual development.” Jesus wept.

As to the first point about social advancement, a first glance it’s fair enough, but the question then remains about which society, and what exactly constitutes ‘advancement’. I’m reminded of surveys suggesting that strongly ‘ethnic’ names (i.e. names which deviate noticeably from prevailing trends in the dominant socio-economic cultural group, so Mohammed in present day England, or LaShawn in much of America) are a real hindrance towards employment prospects. If identical CVs are submitted under different names, ‘James Anderson’ will get far more positive responses than ‘Deangelo King’, say. But parents continue to give their children these names because they consider other factors, such as belonging to the community with which they most closely identify, to be more important. And more power to them.

My wife uses her maiden name at work, because it causes less hassle than her noticeably non-Japanese married name. Not coming from a historically oppressed minority I couldn’t care less about it, but I imagine things might be different if my surname was Hong or Kim and my grandfather could remember Nanjing.

As is now traditional, here are some clips to play you out with. No Stephen Fry this time though.