Angus Grieve-Smith

This is the fifth post in a series inspired by Lake Bell’s audiobook chapter “Sexy Baby Voice.” In previous posts I’ve covered the three key features she uses to define this vocal style – bright resonance (which Bell refers to as “high pitch”), creaky voice (“vocal fry”) and legato articulation (“slurring”), and discussed the various ways that we can manipulate our vocal tracts to create or amplify bright or dark resonances.

That is not your voice

Recently I’ve written a few posts in response to the notion of “sexy baby voice” in Lake Bell’s latest audiobook.

Slurring sexy babies

In his post about Gawker’s “America’s Ugliest Accent” series, Joseph Fruehwald notes, “Predictably, the kinds of accents and languages which get dumped on the most, and get branded the ‘ugliest,’ always wind up being spoken by socially disadvantaged people.”  And that’s really the ugliest thing about this Gawker gimmick: it’s pretty much the epitome of punching down.


America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: Scranton

You may be familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, the global standard for representing speech sounds, ideally independent of the way those speech sounds may be represented in a writing system. Did you know that sign languages have similar standards for representing hand and body gestures? Unfortunately, we haven’t settled on a single notation system for sign languages the way linguists have mostly chosen the IPA for speech.

Fonts for Stokoe notation

Language change has been the focus of my research for over twenty years now, so when I taught second semester linguistics at Saint John’s University, I was very much looking forward to teaching a unit focused on change.  I had been working to replace constructed examples with real data, so I took a tip from my natural language processing colleague Dr. Wei Xu and turned to SparkNotes.

The History of English through SparkNotes

I’ve written in the past about instrumentalism, the scientific practice of treating theories as tools that can be evaluated by their usefulness, rather than as claims that can be evaluated as true or false. If you haven’t tried this way of looking at science, I highly recommend it! But if theories are tools, what are they used for? What makes a theory more or less useful?

Theories are tools for communication

There’s been some discussion of prescriptivism on various linguistics blogs lately (Kory Stamper has links).  The prescriptivism in question is definitely annoying, but I think everyone misses the mark a bit.


The humble prescriptivist

Last month I wrote about the fact that intelligibility – the ability of native speakers of one language or dialect to understand a closely related one – is not constant or automatic. A major factor in intelligibility is familiarity: when I was a kid, for example, I had a hard time understanding the Beatles until I got used to them.


Prejudice and intelligibility

There’s an idea that dialects are mutually intelligible and languages are mutually unintelligible. John McWhorter had a nice piece in the Atlantic where he summarized the evidence against this idea. There are two factors in mutual intelligibility that McWhorter does not mention: familiarity and power. Ultimately we can place any pair of language varieties on a continuum of closeness.


On mutual intelligibility and familiarity

Woman Laughing Alone with Word Salad

I’ve written about default assumptions before: how for example people in different parts of the English-speaking world have different assumptions about what they’ll get when they order “tea” or a “burger.”  In the southern United States, the subcategory of “iced tea” has become the default, while in the northern US it’s “hot tea,” and in England it’s “hot tea with milk.”  But even though iced tea is the default “tea” in the South, everyone there


Eclipsing

In a recent post, I talked about one reason that the word “cisgender” was coined. I agree that it is a good idea to have ways of talking about people who aren’t trans without evoking a context of “real” or “normal” to imply that we are not legitimate or to highlight our minority status. If this were the case, something like “non-transgender men” might be enough. But many of the arguments for “cis” go beyond this.


Trans, cis and the default

By now you’ve probably heard about Rachel Doležal, Africana Studies Professor at Eastern Washington University (despite what they say) and President of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, whose parents recently revealed to the media that their daughter has no known African ancestry (within the past few millennia, at least).  There have been a number of interesting commentaries connecting Doležal’s actions to the phenomenon of mixed-race Americans


The curious incident of Rachel Doležal&#8217;s accent

In the wake of the death of Marion Barry, the former Mayor of Washington, DC, one of the most striking revelations was how many people had believed at one time that he was actually a husband-and-wife couple named “Mary and Barry.”  Aaron Naparstek, founder of Streetsblog, tweeted about this misconception and then discovered that lots of other people had also mentioned it.  The sociolinguist David Bowie mentioned that as a child he thought


The positional neutralization of Marion Barry

One thing I have to mention at this point: It’s okay to not like an accent. This is a matter of taste. You like what you like, and you dislike what you dislike. If you think an accent is ugly, or lovely, that’s completely your prerogative. On the other hand, patterns of likes and dislikes can be telling. If all the accents you dislike are from cities, maybe you’ve got something against cities or the people who live in them.


America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: New York

There were a couple of years when I was tremendously confused about pragmatics and information structure. I learned a lot from reading Knud Lambrecht’s 1994 book

 Information Structure and Sentence Form

. And one of the most useful things I learned was that people use the word “topic” to mean several different things, some of which are mutually exclusive.

Know your topics

I’ve told you about one kind of category fight, accusing someone of a bait-and-switch and this week I came across an excellent example of another one. A blogger who goes by the alias of Doctor Nerdlove wants to protect the category of Socially Awkward Men from incursions by people who are just assholes. In this case, the Socially Awkward Men have established themselves as a disabled class and asked for accommodation.


Gatekeeping the creepers

Charles Fillmore died in February. I only met the man once, briefly, but his work has been a great inspiration to me over the years, particularly frame semantics. Last week I came across this sign above, advertising a bar. The word “screwdriver” is ambiguous, because it can mean a hand tool to turn screws, or a drink made with vodka and orange juice. Fillmore’s frames help us to explore and understand that ambiguity.


Not a real screwdriver?  Frames and ambiguity

Slides from my contribution to the roundtable “Culture, Identity, Diversity: The Challenge of Multicultural Classes” at the Northeast Modern Languages Association, April 5, 2014.


Teaching Multicultural Americans about Multicultural France

The American linguist Lauren Hall-Lew, currently living in Edinburgh, was musing on Twitter recently about how both

 Scotch

and

 Oriental

are considered offensive when categorizing people, but not offensive when describing alcohol or rugs. Her main point is valid and very important: as I’ve discussed before, emotions can run very high when discussing how to categorize people, this is because so much more is at stake.

The Scotch Referendum

Recently I’ve talked about the different standards for existential and universal claims, how we can use representative samples to estimate universal claims, and how we know if our representative sample is big enough to be “statistically significant.”  But I want to add a word of caution to these tests: you can’t get statistical significance without a representative sample.


You can&#8217;t get significance without a representative sample

John Murphy of Georgia State published an article about using non-native speakers, and specifically the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, as models for teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) or as a foreign language (EFL).  Mura Nava tweeted a blog post from Robin Walker connecting Murphy’s work to similar work by Kenworthy and Jenkins, Peter Roach and others.


Speech role models

In my previous post, I discussed the differences between existential and universal statements. In particular, the standard of evidence is different: to be sure that an existential statement is correct we only need to see one example, but to be sure a universal is correct we have to have examined everything. But what if we don’t have the time to examine everything, and we don’t have to be absolutely sure?


Estimating universals, averages and percentages

Over the past few years I’ve realized that there are a lot of scientists who have a different view of science than I do, and most of them don’t even know about my way of thinking. But my way of thinking about science – Instrumentalism – is cool! I’m writing this post to explain what Instrumentalism is, and why I prefer it to other ways of thinking about science.


I&#8217;m an instrumentalist. Are you one too?

Last week I talked about how high-frequency words and phrases resist analogical change. This entrenchment happens because analogical change is driven by forgetting, and it’s harder to forget something that you’ve said a lot. In this post I want to talk about a different effect of frequency, the reduction effect, where high-frequency words and phrases get shortened and simplified.


The Reduction Effect

Some nice people retweeted my post about being a humble prescriptivist, and I had some interesting reactions in the comments and on Twitter, but Peter Sokolowski had one that I wasn’t prepared for. @ArrantPedantry @grvsmth Those are the descriptivist straw men that everybody's been looking for.


On advising descriptively

Soft or hard “g”? It’s been in the news lately in relation to the file format “gif,” which is currently enjoying a renaissance as a new generation discovers its usefulness in creating annoying animations. This week the “creator” of the Graphical Interchange Format weighed in that he’s always pronounced it with a soft “g.”  Arika Okrent gives some historical context on the sources of “g” words in English.


The politics of soft &#8220;g&#8221;

I was browsing through the Wikipedia page on relative pronouns and I found this table: Position With explicit relative pronoun With omitted relative pronoun In formal English Subject That’s the man [who ran away]. — That’s the man [who ran away]. Direct object That’s the man [who I saw yesterday]. That’s the man [I saw yesterday]. That’s the man [whom I saw yesterday]. Indirect object That’s the man [who I gave the letter to]. That’s the man [I


Nonstandard relative clauses

It’s well known that some languages have multiple national standards, to the point where you can take courses in either Brazilian or European Portuguese, for example. Most language instruction services seem to choose one variety per language: when I studied Portuguese at the University of Paris X-Nanterre it was the European variety, but the online service Duolingo only offers the Brazilian one.

Imagining an alternate language service

I think it was an important move for linguists to divorce our field from aesthetics. There can be a science of taste, but science itself is not the arbiter of taste. It is not the place of linguists to judge accents or languages. Just as biologists study animals and plants that many people consider repugnant, linguists may study words and phrases that alarm or disgust people. That said, objectivity doesn’t mean you have to like everything.


America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: Pittsburgh

I was pleased to have the opportunity to announce some progress on my Digital Parisian Stage project in a lightning talk at the kickoff event for New York City Digital Humanities Week on Tuesday. One theme that was expressed by several other digital humanists that day was the sheer volume of interesting stuff being produced daily, and collected in our archives.


Sampling and the digital humanities

Some people have come up with the word “cisgender” to refer to people who aren’t transgender, as an alternative to problematic terms like “normal,” “regular” and “real.”  Some have gone beyond this and asked their allies to “identify as cis,” and even treat trans people as the default realization of their genders. As a trans person and a linguist, I disagree with these last two for a number of reasons.


Will &#8220;cisgender&#8221; work?

I enjoyed Miriam Posner’s keynote address at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference. It was far from the only talk last week that was animated by a desire for justice and compassion, and it was good to see that desire given such prominence by the organizers and applauded by the attendees. As a linguist I also welcomed Posner’s focus on categorization and language diversity.


Challenges for radical categorization

I’ve talked in the past about two kinds of category fights, one involving accusations of bait-and-switch tactics, another where the accusation is free riding. Often these aspects of the fight are obscured or denied, and the conflict is instead presented as between a right way and a wrong way to think about the categories.


Sometimes bugs are not insects

There’s a stereotypical “Southern” accent you’ll hear in mid-twentieth century movies and television, that owes more to Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh’s artificial accents than to anything that ever came out of the mouth of any real-life Southerner. It may bear a passing resemblance to the accents of real Coastal Southern gentry like Fritz Hollings, but it’s been used to portray people from all regions and social classes of the South.


America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: New Orleans

Shortly after I posted the first of America’s Loveliest Accents, Matthew Harrison tweeted, “This really is lovely. I hope you do some Southern accents!”  As I told him at the time, the last seven of these sixteen cities are in the South, if you define the South broadly enough to include Baltimore (#16).  It’s hard to tell whether New York accents get more hate than Southern ones, but it’s close.


America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: Tallahassee

When I think of Los Angeles accents, I think of three things: Chicanos, surfers and Valley Girls. I’ve only been to Southern California once, so these have all come to me filtered through caricatures in movies, television and music. The exaggerated Chicano accent performed by Cheech Marin.


America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: Los Angeles

One concept that I’ve found extremely valuable in recent years is the notion of “punching up.” I first encountered it in the context of rape jokes, but it applies to jokes about race and ethnicity, and really any joke that affects different groups of people disproportionately.


America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: Minneapolis

I wrote recently that if you want to be confident in generalizing observations from a sample to the entire population, your sample needs to be representative. But maybe you’re skeptical. You might have noticed that a lot of people don’t pay much attention to representativeness, and somehow there are hardly any consequences for them. But that doesn’t mean that there are

 never

consequences, for them or other people.

Why I probably won&#8217;t take your survey

Earlier this year I talked about Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, which Rosch interpreted as radial categories. I’ve also talked about how categorization is used in arguments, with a layer of “category fight” superimposed on an underlying conflict, and often obscuring that underlying conflict. I’ve used this in class with my students when we’re studying semantics.


Categorizing people

Recently I’ve written two posts about bright resonance in response to Lake Bell’s audiobook chapter, “Sexy Baby Voice.” Bell describes “sexy baby voice” as having three characteristic features: “high pitch”, “vocal fry” and “slurring.” My first post supported Byron Ahn’s analysis that found that Bell’s “sexy baby voice” samples didn’t have reliably higher pitch than the non-“sexy baby voice” samples, and suggested that she’s probably talking

Youth, authority, gender and creaky voice

My friend Josh was puzzled to see that the City of New York offers videos of some of its documents, translated from the original English into American Sign Language, on YouTube. I didn’t know of a good, short explainer online, and nobody responded when I asked for one on Twitter, so I figured I’d write one up.  The short answer is that ASL and English are completely different language, and knowing one is not that much help learning the other.

Why do people make ASL translations of written documents?

Since I first encountered

 The Parisian Stage

, I’ve been impressed by the completeness of Beaumont Wicks’s life’s work: from 1950 through 1979 he compiled a list of every play performed in the theaters of Paris between 1800 and 1899. I’ve used it as the basis for my Digital Parisian Stage corpus, currently a one percent sample of the first volume (Wicks 1950), available in full text on GitHub.

On this day in Parisian theater

When Timm, Laura, Elber and I first ran the @everytreenyc Twitter bot almost a year ago, we knew that it wasn’t actually sampling from a list that included every street tree in New York City. The Parks Department’s 2015 Tree Census was a huge undertaking, and was not complete by the time they organized the Trees Count! Data Jam last June. There were large chunks of the city missing, particularly in Southern and Eastern Queens.

And we mean really every tree!

I was feeling very nervous, sitting there in Professor Bigshot’s office. I had just been accepted into the PhD program, and was visiting the department to get to know everyone and see if it was the right fit. I hadn’t applied to any other PhD program. If I didn’t go here, I probably wouldn’t get a PhD. You can figure out pretty easily who Professor Bigshot is, if you care. I guess you could say I’m giving her a pseudonym for SEO reasons.

What Professor Bigshot said

Last January I wrote that the purpose of phonetic transcription is to talk about differences in pronunciation. Last December I introduced accent tags, a fascinating genre of self-produced YouTube videos of crowdsourced dialectology and a great source of data about language variation. I put these together when I was teaching a unit on language variation for the second-semester Survey of Linguistics course at Saint John’s University.

Teaching language variation with accent tag videos

I got a paper rejected from a generativist conference a few years ago. A generativist friend of mine said, “Why did you bother submitting your paper to that conference? You knew they were going to reject it.” I said, “Well, the conference was in town, so I figured I’d send something in anyway.”  My friend proceeded to tell me a story from her early grad school days about reviewing papers for her school’s signature conference.

Nobody’s Boy

I’m very excited about a new face mask I designed.  You can order it online! I was inspired by two tweets I saw within minutes of each other on July Fourth.  First, Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, a professor at Aix-Marseille, posted a picture of  his colleague Pascal Roméas wearing a “triangle vocalique” T-shirt designed by the linguistics YouTuber Romain Filstroff, known as Linguisticae.

Show your vowels and support Doctors Without Borders!

Imagine that you belong to a category, like “tourist.” You fit all the necessary conditions for membership in that category: you are traveling to another part of the world for recreation. But that category has a bad reputation – literally a bad name. What do you do? You split the category.

Category fights: Splitting

In my post about the Memphis accent, I discussed how the Mountain and Coastal (white) Southern dialects have very distinct origins. So why do they sound “the same” to many people? In part it’s because they’ve become more similar over the years. At first it was the Mountain South imitating the Coast.


America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: Charleston

When I first studied phonetic transcription I learned about broad and narrow transcription, where narrow transcription contains much more detail, like the presence of aspiration on consonants and fine distinctions of tongue height. Of course it makes sense that you wouldn’t always want to go into such detail, but at the time I didn’t think about what detail was excluded from broad transcription and why.


Levels of phonetic description

At the beginning of June I participated in the Trees Count Data Jam, experimenting with the results of the census of New York City street trees begun by the Parks Department in 2015. I had seen a beta version of the map tool created by the Parks Department’s data team that included images of the trees pulled from the Google Street View database. Those images reminded me of others I had seen in the @everylotnyc twitter feed.

@everytreenyc

I’m pleased that so many people found my last post on forgetting and language change interesting. Ariel Cohen-Goldberg in particular noted this about forgetting:  @grvsmth Nice post! This correlates with the fact that many irregulars are high freq (went, have). Have to be HF not to get regularized! — Ariel Cohen-Goldberg (@arielmc_g) September 24, 2013   Cohen-Goldberg is absolutely right, and this stems from forgetting.


Forgetting the infrequent things

In my post last week I talked about the importance of representative samples for making universal statements, including averages and percentages. But how big should your sample be?  You don’t need to look at everything, but you probably need to look at more than one thing. How big a sample do you need in order to be reasonably sure of your estimates?


How big a sample do you need?

This is the sixth post in a series inspired by Lake Bell’s audiobook chapter “Sexy Baby Voice.” In previous posts last year, I’ve covered the three key features she uses to define this vocal style – bright resonance (which Bell refers to as “high pitch”), creaky voice (“vocal fry”) and legato articulation (“slurring”), and discussed the various ways that we can manipulate our vocal tracts to create or amplify bright or dark resonances.

Your athletic voice

A few years ago I wrote about incorporating sign linguistics when I taught Introduction to Linguistics at Saint John’s University. The other course I taught most often was Introduction to Phonology. This course was required for our majors in Speech Pathology and Audiology, and they often filled up the class.

Teaching intro sign phonetics

I’m a regular watcher of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, so in February I was looking forward to his take on “AI“ and the large language models and image generators that many people have been getting excited about lately. I was not disappointed: Oliver heaped a lot of much-deserved criticism on these technologies, particularly for the ways they replicate prejudice and are overhyped by their developers.

The supposed successes of AI

A few weeks ago I posted about “Sexy baby voice,” the topic of a chapter in Lake Bell’s audiobook about the culture and politics of voices.

Controlling the brightness of the voice

A few days ago, Byron Ahn drew our attention to an excerpt from a new, six-hour audiobook, Inside Voice by Lake Bell, credited as an “actress/writer/director/producer.” Bell is a friend of author and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell, and Gladwell agreed to serve as a kind of sounding board for Bell’s ideas about something she calls “sexy baby voice,” pointing to the voices of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian as paradigm examples of it. Gladwell, whose

Listen to the voices of the sexy babies

I’ve got great news! I have now released LanguageLab, my free, open-source software for learning languages and music, to the public on GitHub. I wish I could tell you I’ve got a public site up that you can all use for free. Unfortunately, the features that would make LanguageLab easy for multiple users to share one server are later in the roadmap. There are a few other issues that also stand in the way of a massive public service.

How to set up your own LanguageLab

C’est l’année 1810, et vous vous promenez sur les Grands Boulevards de Paris. Vous avez l’impression que toute la ville, voir même toute la France, a eu la même idée, et est venue pour se promener, pour voir les gens et se faire voir. Qu’est-ce que vous entendez? Vous arrivez à un théâtre, vous montrez un billet pour une nouvelle pièce, et vous entrez. La pièce commence. Qu’est-ce que vous entendez de la scène? Quels voix, quel langage?

Le Corpus de la scène parisienne

Language is not just spoken and written, and even though I’ve been working mostly on spoken languages for the past fifteen years, my understanding of language has been tremendously deepened by my study of sign languages. At the beginning of the semester I always asked my students what languages they had studied and what aspects of language they wanted to know more about, and they were always very interested in sign language.

Teaching sign linguistics in introductory classes

You might be familiar with Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke tucked this away in a footnote without explanation, but it fits in with the discussion of magic in Chapter III of James Frazer’s magnum opus

 The Golden Bough

. These two works have shaped a lot of my thoughts about science, technology and the way we interact with our world.

Indistinguishable from magic

The big buzz over the past few years has been Data Science. Corporations are opening Data Science departments and staffing them with PhDs, and universities have started Data Science programs to sell credentials for these jobs. As a linguist I’m particularly interested in this new field, because it includes research practices that I’ve been using for years, like corpus linguistics and natural language processing.

Data science and data technology

On Saturday I found out that Alan Hudson died. Alan was my doctoral advisor at the University of New Mexico until his retirement in 2005, and a source of support after that. I first met Alan when I visited the UNM Linguistics Department in 1997. Alan welcomed me into his office with a broad smile, and asked, “So Angus, have you made up your mind about whether you want to come here?”  “Well…” I said.

Remembering Alan Hudson

In September I wrote about how I used accent tag videos to teach phonetic transcription in my online linguistics classes. Since I could not be there in person, the videos provided a stable reference that we could all refer to from our computers around the country.

Teaching with accent tags in the face-to-face classroom

Scene: a quietly bustling bistro in Paris’s 14th Arrondissement.

SERVER: Oui, vous désirez? PIXELBUDS: Yes, you desire? TOURIST: Um, yeah, I’ll have the steak frites. PIXELBUDS: UM, OUAIS, JE VAIS AVOIR LES FRITES DE STEAK SERVER: Que les frites? PIXELBUDS: Than fries? TOURIST: No, at the same time. PIXELBUDS: NON, EN MEME TEMPS SERVER: Alors, vous voulez le steak aussi? PIXELBUDS: DESOLE, JE N’AI PAS COMPRIS.

How Google’s Pixel Buds will change the world!

In January I wrote that I believe online learning is possible, but I have doubts about whether online courses are an adequate substitute for in-person college classes, let alone an improvement. One of those doubts concerns trust and intellectual honesty. Any course is an exchange. The students pay money to the college, the instructor gets a cut, and the students get something of value in return. What that something is can be disputed.

Online learning and intellectual honesty

In a comment, Candy asked: The use of “shut up” and “bitches” in Candy’s (unattested) example is definitely abuse, but in this dismissive context, “cis” is not functioning as abuse but

 othering

. It positions the referent as an outsider who has no standing in the group, and possibly a threat.

Othering, dehumanization and abuse

Testing usage-based theories with a representative corpus of nineteenth-century French

The Problem   You’ve probably heard the joke about the two people camping in the woods who encounter a hungry predator. One person stops to put on running shoes. The other says, “Why are you wasting time? Even with running shoes you’re not going to outrun that animal!” The other replies, “I don’t have to outrun the animal, I just have to outrun you.”  For me this joke highlights a problem with the way some people argue about climate change.

I just have to outrun your theory

Last month I wrote those words on a slide I was preparing to show to the American Association for Corpus Linguistics, as a part of a presentation of my Digital Parisian Stage Corpus. I was proud of having a truly representative sample of theatrical texts performed in Paris between 1800 and 1815, and thus finding a difference in the use of negation constructions that was not just large but statistically significant.

Sampling is a labor-saving device

Data Science is all the rage these days. But this current craze focuses on a particular kind of data analysis. I conducted an informal poll as an icebreaker at a recent data science party, and most of the people I talked to said that it wasn’t data science if it didn’t include machine learning. Companies in all industries have been hiring “quants” to do statistical modeling. Even in the humanities, “distant reading” is a growing trend.

Quantitative needs qualitative, and vice versa

It’s happened to me too: I’m angry, or upset, or excited about something. I go on Twitter. I’ve got stuff to say. It’s more than will fit in the 140-character limit, but I don’t have the time or energy to write a blog post. So I just write a tweet. And then another, and another. I’ve seen other people doing this, and I’m fine with it. But for a while now I’ve seen people doing something more planned, numbering their tweets.

Shelter from the tweetstorm

If you have an Android phone like me, you probably use Google Calendar. I like the way it integrates with my contacts so that I can schedule events with people. I like the idea of it integrating with my Google+ contacts to automatically create a calendar of birthdays that I don’t want to miss. There’s a glitch in that, but I’ve created a new app to get around it, called Selected Birthdays.


Introducing Selected Birthdays

In my last post, I gave Prince as an example of a Minneapolis native with a lovely accent. Prince is black, and you can hear it in his voice because there are at least two different kinds of Minneapolis accent, due in part to segregation. But he doesn’t just have a black accent, he has a Minneapolis black accent. There’s also a Minneapolis white accent, and maybe a Minneapolis Hmong accent too.


America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: Chicago

The news these days is that “cisgender” has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is a descriptive tool, so if people are using the word, the editors should put it in.  But as a transgender person, I don’t like the word and I’m not happy people are using it.  Ben Zimmer had a nice writeup about the word in March.


Why some people like &#8220;cisgender&#8221;

This showed up today in the comments that Akismet flagged for spam:  {Photo|Picture|Photograph|Image|Photography|Snapshot|Shot|Pic|Photographic|Graphic|Pics} {credit|credit score|credit rating|credit history|credit ratings|consumer credit|credit ranking|credit standing|consumer credit rating|credit scores|credit worthiness}: {AP|Elp} | {FILE|Document|Record|Report|Data file|Submit|Computer file|Data|Register|Archive|Database}


One way of generating spam

Last month I guessed that when Ari Wallach said that Hastings-on-Hudson is a village “in a Wittgensteinian sense,” he meant that it was part of a family of things that are called “villages,” but don’t all share the same set of criteria. Wallach confirmed on Twitter that this was what he meant.


Wittgensteinian villages

I realized today that I hadn’t yet blogged about my dissertation,

 the Spread of Change in French Negation

. That’s too bad, because I like my dissertation topic. It’s fun, and it’s interesting. You may see here, from time to time, posts about my dissertation research. I’ll try to make them accessible to anyone, not just the specialized audience that I wrote the dissertation for.

Two changes in French negation

I just got back from the American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference in Ames, Iowa, and I’m calling the Word of the Year: for 2016 it will be

 said

. You may think you know

 said

. It’s the past participle of

 say

. You’ve said it yourself many times.

“Said” for 2016 Word of the Year

Last month I wrote that instead of only two levels of phonetic transcription, “broad” and “narrow,” what people do in practice is to adjust their level of detail according to the point they want to make. In this it is like any other form of communication: too much detail can be a distraction. But how do we decide how much detail to put in a given transcription, and how can we teach this to our students?


Describing differences in pronunciation

When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe “the pronunciation” of individual words – implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription.

Teaching phonetic transcription online

The spectacle of two bilingual Presidential candidates arguing in Spanish last week reminded me of the Twitter feed, “Miguel Bloombito,” created by Rachel Figueroa-Levin to mock our former Mayor’s Spanish for the amusement of her friends. I may be coming late to the party here, but Bloombito is still tweeting, and was recently mentioned by one of my fellow linguists.


The Mayor&#8217;s speech

This weekend the New York

 Times

Styles section ran one of their periodic stories about kids growing up and moving to the suburbs, and changing both themselves and the suburbs in the process. A while back the suburb in question (more of an exurb) was Rosendale, and this time it was Hastings-on-Hudson.

In a Wittgensteinian sort of way

People say you should stand up for what you believe in. They say you should look out for those less fortunate, and speak up for those who don’t get heard. They say that those of us who come from marginalized backgrounds, like TBLG backgrounds for example, but have enough privilege to be out in relative safety should speak up for those who don’t have that privilege.

On being a public linguist

In a recent post I talked about how the same category (“tea,” for example) can have different default assumptions for different people. This is actually a very big deal, one that people have lost their lives over. For such a heated topic it receives relatively little attention in semantics. These default assumptions matter because they’re an important part of the way we use categories.


Default assumptions about sesame seeds

I’ve never been to Baltimore, but I would like to visit one day. I’ve never watched “The Wire,” but I’ve seen a couple of John Waters movies. I also went on a date once with a woman from Baltimore.


America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: Baltimore

In a couple of recent posts I talked about the idea of speech role models for language learning, specifically on fluent, clear non-native speakers providing more accessible models for students learning after the teenage years. I ended with a caution against “cloning” a single non-native speaker, raising the specter of a class of students who all come out speaking English like Javier Bardem.


Choose your Own Speech Role Model

In my last post I mentioned three caveats that I wanted to add to Miriam Posner’s keynote address to the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference, and I discussed the fact that the categories we use to organize our lived experience are slippery and problematic and just as reified as the ideological categories employed by researchers.


Radical categorization and the difficulty of doing justice

Even if you didn’t grow up in a hippie town like I did, you may very well like to eat natural foods. If I weren’t allergic I would eat natural chicken; everyone says it’s healthy, right? Not so fast!


How to get to the bottom of category fights

Slides from my talk today at the Georgetown University Roundtable on Linguistics.


How type frequency gives us S-curves

When I wrote about my son’s use of “they” pronouns to refer to a single, specific person, I mentioned how there are people who want to be referred to with “they” or another set of gender-neutral pronouns because they don’t want to be identified by a gender. This change is also happening, but it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. A few months ago I got into a small argument on Facebook.


Both of them?

Today I was walking with my son, and we passed two men going the other way. I said to him, “Did you see how one of those guys was really red in the face?”  “No, what’s so special about them being red in the face?”  “I think he was drunk. Sometimes when people get really drunk, their faces get red that way. Not every red face means the person is drunk;


That guy and their red face

We talk about “Southern” accents, but dialectologists distinguish at least two major dialect groups: South and South Midland, sometimes known as “Upper South” and “Lower South.” The different histories of the Coastal and Mountain South are presented in

 Albion’s Seed

, David Hackett Fischer’s accessible history of early British migration to North America.

America&#8217;s Loveliest Accents: Louisville

I just got back from attending my second meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association. My experience at both conferences has been very positive: friendly people, interesting talks, good connections. But I would like to see a little more linguistics at NeMLA, and better opportunities for linguists to attend.


Including linguistics at literary conferences

Just So stories were named by Rudyard Kipling in his book of the same name, which contained stories like “How the Rhinoceros Got his Skin.”  In that one, the rhino’s skin starts out tight, but after he takes it off to swim, a man put crumbs in it to take revenge for the rhino eating his cake. When the rhino put his skin back on, it itched so much he loosened it up with all his scratching.


Just so stories in French negation

I wrote most of this post in June 2022, before a lot of us decided to try out Mastodon. I didn’t publish it because I despaired of it making a difference. It felt like so many people were set in particular practices, including not reading blog posts! My experience on Mastodon has been so much better than the past several years on Twitter. I think this is connected with how Twitter and Mastodon handle threads.

Dialogue and monologue in social media

Viewers of

 the Crown

may have noticed a brief scene where Prince Charles practices Welsh by sitting in a glass cubicle wearing a headset.  Some viewers may recognize that as a language lab. Some may have even used language labs themselves. The core of the language lab technique is language drills, which are based on the bedrock of all skills training: mimicry, feedback and repetition.

A free, open source language lab app

Since July 2016 I have been working as Associate Application Systems in the Teaching and Learning Applications group at Columbia University. I have developed several apps, including this Photo Roster, an LTI plugin to the Canvas Learning Management System. The back end of the Photo Roster is written in Python and Flask.

The Photo Roster, a web app for Columbia University faculty

Technology and language

I wrote most of this post in June 2022, before a lot of us decided to
try out Mastodon. I didn't publish it because I despaired of it making a
difference. It felt like so many people were set in particular
practices, including not reading blog posts! My experience on Mastodon
has been so much better than the past several years on Twitter. I think
this is connected with how Twitter and Mastodon handle threads.

A few years ago I wrote [a critique of Twitter
threads](https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2016/10/shelter-from-the-tweetstorm/),
tweetstorms, essays, and similar forms. I realize now that I didn't
actually talk much about what's wrong with them. I focused on how
difficult they are to read, but I didn't realize how the native Twitter
website and app actually makes them easier to read. So let me tell you
some of the deeper problems with threads.

In 2001 I visited some of the computational linguistics labs at Carnegie
Mellon University. Unfortunately I don't remember the researchers'
names, but they described a set of experiments that has informed my
thinking about language ever since. They were looking at the size of the
input box in a communication app.

These researchers did experiments where they asked people to communicate
with each other using a custom application. They presented different
users with input boxes of different sizes: some got only a single line,
others got three or four, and maybe some got six or eight lines.

What they found was that when someone was presented with a large blank
space, as in an email application or the Google Docs application I'm
writing this in, they tended to take their time and write long blocks of
text, and edit them until they were satisfied. Only then did they hit
send. Then the other user would do the same.

When the Carnegie Mellon researchers presented users with only one line,
as in a text message app, their behavior was much different. They wrote
short messages and sent them off with minimal editing. The short
turnaround time resulted in a dialogue that was much closer to the
rhythm of spoken conversation.

This echoed my own findings from a few years before. I was searching for
features of French that I heard all over the streets of Paris, but had
not been taught to me in school, in particular what linguists call right
dislocation ("Ils sont fous, ces Romains") and left dislocation
("L'état, c'est moi").

In 1998 the easiest place to look was USENET newsgroups, and I found
that even casual newsgroups like fr.rec.animaux were heavy on the
formal, carefully crafted types of messages I remembered from high
school French class. I had already read some prior research on this kind
of language variation, so I decided to try something with faster
dialogue.

In Internet Relay Chat (IRC) I hit the jackpot. On the
[\#france](https://grieve-smith.com/blog/tag/france/){.hashtag .u-tag
.u-category rel="tag"} IRC channel, left and right dislocations made up
between 21% and 38% of all finite clauses. I noticed other features of
conversational French like ne-dropping were common as well. I could even
see IRC newbies adapting in real time: they would start off trying to
write formal sentences the way they were taught in lycée, and soon give
up and start writing the way they talked.

At this point I have to say: I love dialogue. Don't get me wrong: I can
get into a nice well-crafted monologue or monograph. And anyone who
knows me knows I enjoy telling a good story or tearing off on a rant
about something. But dialogue keeps me honest, and it keeps other people
honest too.

Dialogue is not inherently or automatically good. On Twitter as in many
other places, it is used to harass and intimidate. But when properly
structured and regulated it can be a democratizing force. It's important
to remember how long our media has been dominated by monologues:
newspapers, films, television. Even when these formats contain
dialogues, they are often fictional dialogues written by a single author
or team of authors to send a single message.

One of my favorite things about the internet is that it has always
favored dialogue. Before large numbers of people were on the internet
there was a large gap between privileged media sources and independent
ones. Those of us who disagreed with the monologues being thrust upon us
by television and newspapers were often reduced to impotently talking
back at those powerful media sources, in an empty room.

USENET, email newsletters, personal websites and blogs were
democratizing forces because they allowed anyone who could afford the
hosting fees (sometimes with the help of advertisers) to command these
monologic platforms. They were the equivalent of Speakers' Corner in
London. They were like pamphlets or letters to the editor or cable
access television, but they eliminated most of the barriers to entry.
But they were focused on monologues.

In the 1990s and early 2000s we had formats that encouraged dialogue,
like mailing lists and bulletin boards, but they had large input boxes.
As I saw on fr.rec.animaux in 1998, that encouraged long, edited
messages.  
We did have forums with smaller input boxes, like IRC or the group chats
on AOL Instant Messenger. As I found, those encouraged people to write
short messages in dialog with each other. When I first heard about
Twitter with its 140-character limit I immediately recognized it as a
dialogic forum.

But what sets Twitter apart from IRC or AOL Instant Messenger? Twitter
is a broadcast platform. The fact that every tweet is public by default,
searchable and assigned a unique URL, makes it a "microblog" site like
some popular sites in China.

If someone said something on IRC or AIM in 1999 it was very hard to
share it outside that channel. I was able to compile my corpus by
creating a "bot" that logged on to the
[\#france](https://grieve-smith.com/blog/tag/france/){.hashtag .u-tag
.u-category rel="tag"} channel every night and logged a copy of all the
messages. What Twitter and the sites it copied like Weibo brought was
the combination of permanent broadcast, low barrier to entry, and
dialogue.

This is why I'm bothered by Twitter threads, by screenshots of text, by
the unending demands for an edit button. These are all attempts to
overpower the dialogue on Twitter, to remove one of the key elements
that make it special.

Without the character limits, Twitter is just a blogging platform. Of
course, there's nothing wrong with blogs! I've done a lot of blogging,
I've done a lot of commenting on blogs and I've tweeted a lot of links
to blogs. But I want to choose when to follow those links and go read
those blog posts or news articles or press releases.

I want a feed full of dialogue or short statements. Threads and
screenshots interrupt the dialogue. They aggressively claim the floor,
crowding out other tweets. Screenshots interrupt the other tweets with
large blocks of text, demanding to be read in their entirety. Threads
take up even more of the timeline. The Twitter web app will show as many
as three tweets of a thread, interrupting the flow of dialogue.

The experience of threads is much worse on Twitter clients that don't
manipulate the timeline, like TweetDeck (which was bought by Twitter in
2011) and HootSuite. If it's a long thread, your timeline is screwed,
and you have to scroll endlessly to get past it.

One of the things I love the most about Mastodon is the standard
practice of making the first toot in a thread public, but publishing all
the other toots as unlisted. That broadcasts the toot announcing the
thread, and then gives readers the agency to decide whether they want to
read the follow-up toots. It's more or less the equivalent of including
a link to a web page or blog post in a toot.

There's a lot more to say about dialogue and social media, but for now
I'm hugely encouraged by the feeling of being on Mastodon, and I'm
hoping it leads us in a better direction for dialogue, away from threads
and screenshots.
