Archive for the ‘Sociolinguistics’ Category
September 10, 2017
Passed on by Norma Mendoza-Denton, this beautiful map of the regional languages of France, with a tool for playing sound files for each of them:
On the Positivr site, “La France a enfin son atlas sonore des langues régionales: En un seul clic, cette carte interactive permet de faire le tour de France des langues régionales. Du bonheur pour les oreilles.” by Axel Leclercq on 7/21/17.
The posting ends with a paean to the value of regional languages in France — with a treatment of (for example) Picard and Norman in the north and Gascon and Provençal in the south as languages in their own right and not merely local deviations from correct French; and also the recognition of the Germanic languages Flemish, Alsatian, and Franconian as regional languages on a par with, say, Breton and Basque:
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Posted in Language and geography, Languages, Sociolinguistics | 1 Comment »
July 25, 2017
Yesterday’s morning name was the Mexican Spanish nickname Chuy (for Jesus). I’m pretty sure it got into my head from a friend who recently ate at a Chuy’s restaurant in Texas, so I’ll start with that.
But the real topic is Mexican Spanish nicknames: Chuy or Chucho for Jesus, Pepe for José, Che for Ernesto, and Pancho or Paco for Francisco, in particular (with a note on the linguist Viola Waterhouse, who was a student of such things). That will take me to Pepe Romero, Che Guevara, Pancho Villa, the linguist Paco Ordóñez, Paco Rabanne (the man and the fragrances), and from there to Nick Youngquest in the buff, which will supply a moment of gay interest.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Etymythology, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Linguists, Names, Nicknames, Shirtlessness, Sociolinguistics, Spanish | 5 Comments »
June 12, 2017
Linguistics news from Stanford: the public portion of a PhD oral exam, next Monday, 6/19/17, 3-4:15: Jeremy Calder, Handsome Women: A semiotics of non-normative gender in SoMa, San Francisco.
Drag queens in the 2015 SoMa “Oasis Follies” drag night
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Posted in Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Sociolinguistics, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
May 26, 2017
I’ll start with the steamy gay sex talk from an on-line messaging site — sensitive readers are hereby warned about this content — and then go on to focus on a non-standard syntactic construction in this exchange, what the YGDP (the Yale University Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America) calls the Needs Washed construction (using as a label an instance of the instruction), involving a PSP complement of a head V.
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Posted in Complementation, Dialects, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Names, Naming, Passive, Sociolinguistics | Leave a Comment »
February 13, 2017
Recent books from Stanford-connected authors, some my colleagues, some my former students (so I have warm feelings). Two in sociolinguistics / educational linguistics, one on the (gasp) morphosyntax-phonology interface.
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Posted in Books, Language in education, Linguists, Morphology, Morphology and syntax, My life, Phonology, Phonology and Syntax, Sociolinguistics, Stanford, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
July 10, 2015
Back on June 11th, I posted about the documentary “Do I Sound Gay?”, as I was about to be interviewed by a journalist about it. I had a number of critical things to say about parts of the film, though I didn’t post them here. Now NPR’s Terry Gross has interviewed two of the principals in it, the filmmaker David Thorpe and a speech pathologist, Susan Sankin, with whom Thorpe worked in an attempt to sound “less gay”.
Enraged by this interview, Sameer ud Dowla Khan (a phonetician at Reed College) wrote an open letter to Gross, which Mark Liberman has now posted on Language Log (with a link to Fresh Air and one to a transcript of the interview). Khan has many of the same criticisms of the interview that I had of the trailer for the film (I haven’t been able to view the whole film), both of which exhibit deep ignorance about simple (and well-known) facts about language in social life. Some excerpts from Khan’s letter follow.
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Posted in Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Language in social life, Language in the media, Sociolinguistics | 1 Comment »
April 16, 2013
Yesterday on NPR’s Morning Edition, a piece announcing a new NPR feature:
NPR Team Covers Race, Ethnicity And Culture (by David Greene and Gene Demby)
NPR this week is introducing a new team that will cover race, ethnicity and culture. Code Switch is the name of the new blog. Code-switching is the practice of shifting between different languages or different ways of expressing yourself in conversations.
Greene and Demby chat for a while about code-switching, with examples, bringing in linguist Tyler Schnoebelen as a consultant at one point. But if you read the transcript rather than listening to the segment, you might be puzzled.
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Posted in Dialects, Language and culture, Language in the media, Sociolinguistics, Style and register, Variation | Leave a Comment »
October 15, 2012
In the NYT on Saturday, a front-page piece (“Missouree? Missouruh? To Be Politic, Say Both”, by Sarah Wheaton) about the pronunciation of names, with a political connection.
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Posted in Language and politics, Language in the news, Phonology, Sociolinguistics, Usage attitudes, Variation | 2 Comments »
January 25, 2012
Arne Adolfsen recently reported on Facebook that he’d been hearing the hit television show The Big Bang Theory. (Yes, hearing, not listening to, and certainly not watching. The show goes on in a room next to the one he’s in. He avoids it, because he hates the very obtrusive laugh track, an antipathy I sympathize with.) He’s formed the opinion that all of the male characters are gay, because of the way they talk [because of the phonetics of their talk. which is all he has to go on — see comments]. (Possibly relevant fact: Arne is gay.) Yet they’re all presented as straight — and awkwardly pursuing women — and the actors playing them all seem to be straight in real life [which is to say: there’s an apparent disjunction between orientation as perceived from phonetics and orientation as presented in the story — again, see comments]. Where does Arne’s impression come from?
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Pronunciation, Sociolinguistics | 18 Comments »
