Sociolinguistics Ten

Phillipson’s got a bee in his bonnet, hasn’t he? Can’t say I disagree. I read From the Ruins of Empire not so long ago, and it makes for an interesting companion piece here.

Despite it rather being a case of biting the hand that feeds me, I remain hugely skeptical of ‘The Native Premium.’ The analogy I like is that the best football players (Bobby Moore, Maradona) generally don’t make great coaches because the game has always come so naturally to them. They’ve never had to think about why it works or how to play it, so they have real difficulty in communicating that to lesser players. It’s a problem level lower down the scale, as this interview with Tony Adams demonstrates.

The same is true with language teachers. The best ones are probably going to be those who’ve been there and done that. They won’t be the best speakers, probably, but the will be the best at explaining it to others. Yet, fortunately for my wallet, ol’ blue eyes here can rock up and command a fat paycheck merely on the strength of his passport. I can completely understand people being pissed off about that.

Sociolinguistics Nine

“By looking at language policy from a historical-structural viewpoint we can see why teachers are placed in a situation where embarrassment occurs and why they have to resort to using hygiene resources.”

When I was seven, I think, Barry Connors pissed himself during assembly. Mrs Wright stopped talking about Jesus and we all had to go back to our classrooms. She would have been comforted, I feel, to have known about the historical-structural context for Baz’s incontinence.

Sociolinguistics Eight

“[T]eachers and students adopt their own overt policies for coming to terms with an official policy which is in fact impossible to implement as intended.”

Ho ho, yes.

Sociolinguistics Seven

My notes here, again, seem to mainly consist of the words “who?” and “whose?” over and over. We’re well into power politics here once more, and I’m surprised the Law of Unintended Consequences hasn’t had a bit more of a run out.

Also interesting to note that, pace the claim that, “if one group benefits from a particular language policy it is likely that another group will be disadvantaged,” LPP appears to be a zero-sum game. Or at least it is conceptualized as such, and so we’re back to power politics again. Particularly notable in the Gill reading which characterizes the bartering of Malayan citizenship for Chinese residents as a “language battle” (p247) when to all intents and purposes it appears to be nothing short of a massacre. 

Sociolingustics Six

This module had a fair amount of associated reading, which got interspersed with that for the essay (as did units 5 and 7). My notes are even more slipshod than normal then, so this’ll be short.

Basically this is about power politics and the projection of ‘soft power’ through linguistics, isn’t it?

My notes contain the word ‘prestige’ numerous times, and ‘WHO?’ quite a lot. Sometimes ‘WHOSE?’ as well, often quite close to ‘prestige’. Also power. So those are clearly the main themes. You didn’t want details, did you?

Sociolinguistics Five

Cross-Cultural Communication

After four years of marriage, I have still yet to find a mode of address for my (older) Japanese brother-in-law with which we’re both comfortable.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Sociolinguistics Four

Here we go, boys and girls: Language and Gender. This is the big one.

Sociolinguistics Three

1.    Cut to the chase

I’m going to skip over most of this, merely pausing to provide a link to the Wikipedia article on keigo, before getting into the real business of the final discussion task. I might also include a brief diversion here to note that I recognize the slight clash of mode and field I’ve got going on here, where I’m quite deliberately discussing academic matters in a style and medium more usually associated with more casual discourse. Whether you consider that to be successful or not is largely up to you.

Evolution of a Language

I gave that academic a conceptual diagram. Academics love conceptual diagrams.

  

Clear as mud

  

‘Evolution’ is a tricky metaphor for language development. I’m still trying to work out if it’s suitable or not, though I suspect it’ll be superficially attractive but ultimately not really workable. Comparing methods of evolutionary speciation to language development might be pretty instructive, but one of the main underpinnings of biological taxonomy is that cross-breeding between species is impossible; that’s a pretty good description of what a species is. That obviously doesn’t hold true for languages (and it’s worth noting there are dissenting voices on the biological front as well).

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.

Sociolinguistics One

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

An old saw, but a pleasingly robust one. The requirement for a navy, for example, helps explain why Switzerland has no single language of its own and has to make do with borrowings from more seafaring nations.