In yesterday’s NYT Magazine, in the “one-page magazine” feature, this story about goat accents (“What a Well-Born Goat” by Hope Reeves):
It’s not just Eton alumni who distinguish themselves with their posh accents. According to a new University of London study, English pygmy goats (those farm-bred in Nottinghamshire, anyway) also display recognizable vocalization styles that morph as their social groups change. “It is not really a measure of animal intelligence,” says Alan McElligott, a co-author. “Nevertheless, the study does show a surprising additional cognitive capacity in a domestic animal that we are all very familiar with.”
In contrast to the great “cow dialect” story of August 2006, there’s real research here — McElligott leads a research group at Queen Mary University of London, “focussed on communication and cognition research, using goats, cattle and fallow deer” — but the little piece in the Times (with its fanciful dialect map of British goat bleats) frames the story in terms of large-scale dialect differences (by geographical region and social class) that will be familiar to its readers, though that’s not what McElligott’s research was about.
