“Is email a variety of speech (as many people are claiming)? What important new properties does it share with writing? Does it have emergent qualities that are unlike those typifying speech or writing?”

What is are some differences in the properties in email “language” as opposed to texting? Is there language ideology at play in texting? How does the Romanization of the keyboard affect how language is written? By that I mean, is this an effect of an Eurocentric world?

How does translanguaging in verbal speech differ from code-meshing in written text, is it the same concept as translanguaging ? How does the absence of social cues or body language in written text have an effect in written text? How do emojis or the interpretation of emojis become ‘obvious’ or are they dependent on the context?

“In the interviews during which she was asked to reflect on the interactions, Dream commented that because Tee is older than her, she felt it more appropriate to write in Thai rather than English”

What are some constraints on translanguaging based on your audience or with whom you are conversing? Can entrainment be an influence on translanguaging? If someone translanguages, will you translanguage as well or vice-versa (if you normally translanguage, will you cease to translanguage if the person you are talking to does not)?

#1

IM example:

Joan: to be in love

Joan: that must be nice

Joan: in the spring

Baron states that these breaks could reflect intonation in speech. Or to produce quick “speech-like” pace / to “hold the floor by not leaving time for another participant’s message to intervene”. 

What are other reasons why someone might send an IM with these breaks? 

#2

A lot of examples are given from the 90s, and most recent around the early 2000s. What are some issues with A, using examples that are this dated? And B, authors being from an older generation analyzing a sub-culture (group chat, social media, text messaging) that they are not a part of?

#3

A study on female Thai speakers found that on Facebook group online talk, participants had “A great complexity of code-switching into English”. But, it was noted that “Although, no English would be expected in their face-to-face conversational exchanges”.

This was stated in the code-switching and multilingual section, but not discussed. I found this very interesting, thoughts on this?

1. One of the main features distinguishing written texts from spoken language is their permanence, more specifically their ability to have a potentially very large number of readers across a number of cultural and historical contexts, or at least a wider audience than the author originally imagined. Does Sebba’s insistence on the importance of historical context confine the interpretation of these texts to single-purpose linguistic interactions between an author and a fixed number of interlocutors at a fixed point in time?
2. Should linguists only concern themselves with a historically specific analysis of multilingual written texts, just as we do with spoken language? If so, does this reflect the tendency to study writing as a derivation of spoken language rather than a separate variation of language in its own right?
3. Certain memes (“you’ll read this first”) have developed a sort of metadiscourse around language-spatial relationships that plays on the idea that there is a very fixed and predictable language-spatial hierarchy. Do you agree with Scollon & Scollon’s claim that certain locations in/on a text are necessarily privileged (top/center/etc.)? Does this vary too much according to other variables (font size, etc.) to be predicted? How culturally specific is this hierarchy?

Questions for Lillis & McKinney (2013)
1. Lillis & McKinney critiques the speech/writing binary, among other binaries such as formal/informal, official/unofficial, etc. In what contexts do we see a gray area between speech and writing, and what impact does this have on how we study it?
2. How does conceptualizing writing as a finished product limit the ways in which we study it and “skew conceptualisations of the nature of what the object is–as something rigid rather than dynamic”?

Thanks,
Meredith Hilliard
youwillreadthisfirst.jpgthenyoullreadthis.jpg

Good day to everyone! I hope everyone has had a lovely week. My name is Alina Fernanda Picayo and I will be writing some of my reflections and thoughts on Jannis Androutsopoulos’ Non-standard spellings in media texts: The case of German fanzines, Lillis and McKinney’s The sociolinguistics of writing in a global context: Objects, lenses, consequences and Mark Sebba’s Multilingualism in written discourse: An approach to the analysis of multilingual texts.

I want to briefly mention that I write a lot of things the way that I talk in real life so if anything I’ve said is confusing or unclear or anything at all, please feel free to mention it to me or comment on it in class. Really, all I’ve done here is give my thoughts on what I read and reflect back with things that have been a part of my life experiences. Here it is.

The main theme I see in the three articles is one of people trying to find meaning in written discourse. There’s a lot of conflict inside of people and how to make meaning or interpret meaning. Sociolinguists have not focused enough on written discourse and have treated it as if it is a thing apart from how we speak to each other. If you want to read and make meaning take a literature class or go into education, find yourself in psychology studies or something else. Everyone is just very confused. Do we take power away from what people are saying by giving importance to what they’re writing? Are we missing out on entire universes of knowledge inside of people by taking them at their word and discarding what it is that they’ve put down on paper (an act which is deliberate as it is a deliberated one). We don’t need to choose which form of communication is more valid but I understand why people are wary of written discourse. Writing has a dirty and oppressive history. It also has been a liberator and an instrument towards great freedoms. To know how to read and write marks those who are best positioned in all societies in all senses. Those who know how to write are even better positioned in society because these are the people who will get degrees in school, these are the people who have been shown how to write to get somewhere in this life, in some overall acceptable way. I know it’s an ugly thing but being able to communicate your writing in some standardized way has value. It might not be how you would like to express your thoughts but if it gets you somewhere in life, somewhere that you want to be, does it not have value? Writing is perilous territory.

I understand the need for standardization of written discourse and I understand the need to step away from the norms. I think of the Franco dictatorship in Spain and of the long history Spain has of trying to replace cultures with Castilian language, religion, customs and thoughts. Spain has more than a dozen languages and standardization of writing has allowed these languages to not be erased during times like this last century’s dictatorship. Asturian has its own academy, great literature and editorials. It is a culture and world that could not be erased even when some tried to do just that, now preserved and alive and well in the world. The graffiti I saw in the streets on the walls in the city of Oviedo was almost all in Asturian, the names of the fishermen’s boats at the wharves in Llanes or other coastal cities always in Asturian (the names usually carefully picked out to honor something or someone to protect you on your voyages). The menu in restaurants in Asturias are written in both Asturian and Castilian, just like the signs signaling how to get to Oviedo/Uviéu or wherever else from Galicia on the west to Cantabria on the East. Standardizing this language has helped to preserve these people and they continue to have a very real voice and existence, a true identity. In the very same country you will find a prominent example of people who whole heartedly believe that they are preserving their culture, honoring it, and that their identity is being suppressed on a world level and that they therefore are fighting to be represented in the world. Welcome to Cataluña. If you can’t speak Catalan or read it you have no place there and that’s how they like it. School is taught in Catalan. All street signs and airport signs are in Catalan. They might speak Castilian but that does not mean that they will. If you go there you have to speak and read and live on their terms. This would be admirable if it weren’t a language and cultural movement to promote the bourgeoisie of Spain. This has been a movement to mark an economic and social elite in a region of Spain and they want to be as separate from the rest of us as possible. It is important to mention that although I hold the current Cataluña politics regarding identity, language and culture in contempt, that their language was also oppressed and tried to be erased. They currently have their own official academy which standardizes and preserves Catalan so that it can continue to be a part of the world. The problem is what the people do with it.

So yes, sometimes standardizing orthography and what qualifies as acceptable writing can preserve and conserve a whole culture of people. Sometimes standardized means of communication attempt to unify too broad of a geography and ideals and it doesn’t work so people deviate from these norms to represent how they identify more accurately. I don’t want to talk too much about Germany because I am not German, I have not been to Germany and I do not know enough about Germany to tell you what the purpose of pushing away traditional methods of writing have been as is the case with the ‘zines. I have read Mein Kampf, and I know of some history of Germany including the changes in educational pedagogy which was implemented and that this included unifying the German languages and orthographic systems. I don’t know how much of this standardized method of writing continues to exist in schools today from those times in the 1930s and 40s. There are just some places where unifying writing just does not work or that it once worked and meant something but that the future requires different considerations than those methods which had once made sense in the past. We change with what society demands of us. I can’t really tell you why so many subcultures in Germany exist with regard to writing. My guess is that simply that where there is not sufficient representation of populaces, the people will make sure that you see them in a way that does represent them. Spanish speaking cultures, as rigid as they can be with regard to written language are still also very accepting of change. Real Academia Española reviews every single two years orthography and they publish all changes to our language. Things should be reviewed and should be changed if it is what people want. What came to mind is that people can write “ellxs” or “amigxs” using the letter x to signal referring to both females and males (instead of ‘o’ or ‘a’) in an essay and a lot of people in universities will accept it as correct (when it is used to include both genders in the content, not as a method of omitting gender in general).

With regard to the last article involving code switching and different ways that this is represented in writing…I don’t know what to say except that this is super complicated. I am a person who has been raised with three languages my entire life and who basically code switches all day long (except in English taught classes) and that is why I am saying that this is complicated business. I felt that the article was interesting and I had fun looking at the different posters but I really think that before looking at what these different multilingual posters and signs mean linguistically, that you should try seeing them culturally first. Go to different neighborhoods like El Barrio or to Chinatown and get an idea of the context of who lives there and how people live to understand the significance of these things like ads and store names. If you go into these different stores that advertise their services in different languages and if you ask people why they made certain linguistic choices, they will tell you and I think the answers are more rooted in specific cultural things than in linguistics. That’s what I think as far as the things you’ll see in the United States. I think that in different countries you will find different reasons for code switching or multilingual written representation. Like I said, it is cultural and maybe political or maybe that’s the same thing. The case with Luxembourg is a good example of how people represent several languages for political reasons. There are language laws which say what languages and at what points in education will be the formal language of instruction, the law says what is the language of administration and which one is of legislation. I think it’s great, you give everyone a place and represent them all. I found this so incredibly civilized. Maybe these types of things work well in small countries but that’s a whole different blog.

The readings this week all revolved around the primary focus of writing as a form of language and discussed the different ways to investigate writing through a sociolinguistic lens. Each article approached writing from a different perspective, Lillis and McKinney (2013) as an untapped area for sociolinguistic research and the present flaws with how writing is analyzed and regarded, Androutsopoulos (2000) as how orthographic choices can convey a sense of identity and belonging to communities of practice, and Sebba (2012) as a multimodal practice, specifically when looking at posters, advertisements, and media, and the ways in which written languages interact with each other when they share space.

Lillis and McKinney’s article introduces the history and context of writing as it has been discussed thus far in sociolinguistics. They argue that linguists have ignored writing thus far, citing various reasons for this lack of research including a lack of interest based on assumptions that written language is fixed, inauthentic (compared to spoken), and engrained in the “standard/deviant” dichotomy. While Lillis and McKinney acknowledge that these historical problems in the contextualization of writing, they also introduce the various ways in which writing is beginning to be utilized and valued as a source of research.

Writing studies are framed by one of three imperatives, according to Lillis and McKinney: ethnography, education, and digital. Lillis and McKinney argue that examining writing from any of the three imperatives is valuable as the varied perspectives emphasize the fact that writing, perhaps now more than ever, is “an ‘everyday’ activity, that is as nested in a myriad of ways in people’s lives” (p. 423) and, like spoken language, is something that is continuously read and reread and thus indexed and reindexed. While encouraging the increased examination of writing, Lillis and McKinney acknowledge that there are challenges facing this research, namely escaping the aforementioned dichotomy of standard and deviant language use, determining the best way to describe writing and written language use, and the idea that writing is fixed in singular moments and sites.

While Lillis and McKinney introduce the examination of writing, Androutsopoulos and Sebba are both excellent places to show how researchers are treating written language in their work. Androutsopoulos (2000) examines the use of orthography in German fanzines to convey social meaning and membership to communities. He explores the ways in which fanzine authors are utilizing non-standard spellings to convey an attitude of “anti-establishment” and authenticity. Androutsopoulos outlines six ways that orthography is non-standard in the fanzines: phonetic spellings, colloquial spellings, regiolectal spellings, prosodic spellings, interlingual spellings, and homophone spellings. He also notes a difference between types of fanzines, namely the A5 (smaller, more independent, less circulated, and perhaps for these reasons more authentic) and the A4 fanzines (more established, created by well-known individuals in the field, more expensive, and less non-standard in layout of content). Androutsopoulos notes that the A5 fanzines are more likely to utilize the non-standard spellings, further conveying them as more authentic.

Androutsopoulos posits that there are different goals that language users seek to achieve with their use of non-standard orthography. Specifically, non-standard spellings can be interpreted as denoting membership to a community of practice, in this case a specific music scene, and also to portray someone else as less authentic by utilizing non-standard spellings in a negative aspect to mock them as appropriating the counterculture style. Androutsopoulos notes that fanzines are an excellent place for this sort of research, as the goal of the authors is to denote a local and intimate relationship with its readers through the use of both non-standard spelling and content layout, and like spoken language, is constantly reread and reindexed.

Though Androutsopoulos briefly notes that both the design of the fanzine and the content inside is valuable for informing the research, he does not explore how to analyze content layout. This is where the work of Sebba (2012) and his theories on the multimodality of signs becomes important. Drawing on theories that fall in line with Linguistic Landscapes studies, Sebba argues that looking at what languages are used in written text is not sufficient for understanding it. Rather, he argues that we need to analyze the signs from a multimodal perspective, wherein we discuss the text not only through what languages are used but the layout in which they are displayed. This analysis can draw on theories from typography, the spatial relations between the languages, the content of the languages and the design of the overall media. Sebba also spends time analyzing how we should describe the language use on signs, whether as multilingual or monolingual, depending on what information is conveyed in each of the languages and why a specific language is chosen to convey the information that it does.

The readings from this week all discuss the various perspectives from which we can analyze written language. I thought it was most important to challenge the historical idea that written language is fixed and not re-contextualized as time goes on and that language use and ideologies change, especially with the new technology that is ever shifting the ways that we communicate with each other. While reading I had several questions that I wished the articles had addressed and that I hope future works can explore. One is I’m curious if people would still agree that, in an online discourse, standard spelling and syntax are still the norm? It seems to me that in an online community standard writing would be more marked especially as our technologies allow cross-culture, cross-linguistic exchanges and practices to occur at a much more rapid pace than in the past. I wonder, if those that engage with communication online more frequently (and so typically utilize online speech more), rather than those who do not, are those that define the “standards” for online communication.  As opposed to analyzing online discourse as a comparison to those standards that define academic or professional writing. In using non-standard language online, I’m also curious how much of it is a conscious choice to align oneself with a community of practice or to convey something about oneself as opposed to an unconscious adaptation of new online languaging norms. I also believe that these analyses of written language would benefit extensively from theories in other fields such as translation and graphic design, as these theories could help enlighten us to other ideas for the goals and success of what we are analyzing based on the inherent interdisciplinary nature of it.

In the German fanzines article, we see a German orthographic appropriation of English loan words which reflect German pronunciations such as “Blählist” (for playlist) and “Pönks” (Punks). There are countries such as Iceland, where rather than adopted any loan words, neologisms based on words that already exist are made to keep their language theirs and as unaffected by the outside world as possible. How do you feel about loan words being introduced into your own languages and/ or how do your countries deal with these types of issues?

What are some other deviations from the standardized orthography in subcultures outside of music scenes that you have seen in your own country and what can it be attributed to (socially, artistically or politically speaking?

There is a strong correlation between the non-standard spellings found in subculture literature and the phonology it aims to represent versus some standard pronunciation in some cases which connects the spoken word with the written word. What are your thoughts on why this occurs?

1. How valid/objective is our interpretation of metacommentary? Does its objectivity matter?

2. The majority of the author’s examples are based on children’s metacommentary and take place in a classroom. I wonder if this setting was chosen on purpose. Could it be that society forces adults to act in certain ways (not to say or wear certain things) that make this idea of metacommentary analysis more easily applicable to children?

3. It was interesting to see that while explicit metacommentary can have a positive connotation, the overarching message could be negative and make children stop speaking the language (e.g. Spanish). I wonder about other examples in the classroom when languages other than English were implicitly banned. Did this work and did children actually stop using their home language?

#1 “The New York Times’ circulation of the survey and its subsequent recirculation via social media illustrates that many individuals are interested in descriptions of how they speak.” What are other reasons why this was so successful (the mass recirculation of the survey)? 

#2 One of the videos with the most views (~5000) only had about 27 comments. I was not able to look at the other videos as they have been deleted since publication, but you can imagine the videos with fewer views had fewer comments. What is the appropriate number (or in this case views) a published article should represent? What do the findings tell us if the sample size is so small? 

#3 Internet, specifically Twitter and YouTube comments seem to be hot right now, what can be done to filter out “trolls” when doing qualitative research?

Received Pronunciation was integrated in schools and the teachers had “training in ethnographic methods of participant observation that allow him to hunt out the phonetic ‘defects’ peculiar to each locale and, once identified, to eliminate them within the classroom.”(pg. 263). I wonder how effective this ‘technique’ was in ‘correcting’ pronunciation in children if children usually imitate their peers’ speech and not those of authority.

On page 253, it states ‘They formulate speech and accent as ‘passports., as means of gaining access to ‘good circles”. I wonder how far can one get solely on speaking a certain way? Where does race, ethnicity or class interrupt the access this ‘passport’ provides?

Speech chains through mass media can exponentially speed up the rate of the chain, but not everything we hear is used. Do we only begin to adopt new vocabulary if we identify with the speaker or is it arbitrary? How?

Readings for this week are mostly concerned with some of the following concepts:

• Metacommentary is ‘how language comments on itself’ (Rymes) or ‘talk about talk’ (Johnstone).
• Social indexicality is ‘the relationship between sign and meaning’ (Johnstone).
• Enregisterment is ’when a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’ (Agha). There is also the concept of de-enregisterment (Rymes).
• Speech chain is ‘how discursive interaction drives language perception and is how this change is being sedimented into society’ (Agha).

The main idea of this week is that people talk about how they talk. They create meanings/social indices based on people’s speech. There is also societal and historical influence on how people talk because of different media. In the past, there were newspapers and magazines and now there are YouTube comments. Through different media and people’s perception of speech, some varieties would become enregistered over other ones (e.g. received pronunciation of British English). In both the past and present, people were and are interested in how they talk, and how other people think they talk.

Barbara Johnstone talks about the Pittsburghese dialect which is characterized by a set of phonological features (e.g /aw/ monophthongization, need+ X’ed construction (needs washed), or word (yinz)). For Johnstone, Pittsburgh is not simply a location, but a ‘social construct’ connected to what locals experience about the place. The main theme of the article is that Pittsburghers talk about Pittsburghese. But how is this way of speaking linked to peoples’ identities? To answer this Johnstone goes back to the history of the region from when Pennsylvania was Scotch-Irish and when immigrants came for employment opportunities in the steel factories. However, later when steel industry collapsed, Pittsburghers moved out of the region. This is when people themselves noticed differences in their speech. This seems interesting, but a bit odd that for such a long time people didn’t notice that they spoke differently. I guess this is Johnstone’s point as well that different Pittsburghers have different ways of noticing Pittsburgh’s speech. Some don’t notice anything different at all, some have positive feelings while others have negative opinions about the dialect because of a perceived link to working-class life. The local dialect has become a very popular topic of conversation among Pittsburghers whenever they discuss their city. So, there is a link between dialect and place. ‘Talk about talk’ is a locally meaningful social practice as Johnstone illustrated through Pittsburghese. Johnstone also argues that there are ‘material constraints’ on the process of enregisterment of Pittsburghese based on available technology (newspapers and dictionaries). Commodification (t-shirts that have lists of Pittsburghese words and even toy dolls that speak Pittsburghese) is another way in which Pittsburghesebecomes enregistered.

Asif Agha talks about the Received Pronunciation (RP) of British English, how it was spread, and how it developed the cultural connotation it has today. He refers to it as the process of enregisterment as well. Interestingly, RP is spoken by a very small population, however, people have the competence to recognize it (but not to speak it). Agha first describes the phonetic distinctions and how these distinctions translate into social metadiscourses and metapragmatic judgments. For example, in British cartoons, there are two characters, one depicting social failure and the other an aristocratic gentleman. The author says that any British reader knows which accent is aligned with which character. The aristocrat speaks RP and the social failure do not. Here, interestingly, even without those characters speaking, people already attributed certain meaning to their speech. Agha also comes up with the rank for accents’ speech levels in Britain where the highest one is “unmarked RP” and the lowest one is urban accents. Then he talks about speech chains, which probably gave rise to this RP register. The way people talk about language changes its language perception and how they themselves are being sedimented into society. There are multiple ways in which this is achieved, such as through literature, news, or face-to-face conversations. 

Betsy Rymes talks more about everyday interaction, how people talk and make sense of each other. Her focus is metacommentary or ‘how language comments on itself’ (Rymes). She highlights five different types of metacommentaries: marking code, the sounds of language, address terms, and comments on clothing/appearance. In a way, those codes can be deceiving. While the explicit metapragmatic discourse could suggest desire to speak (such as in ‘I wanna speak Spanish’), the overarching idea can actually be to stop usage of Spanish in a classroom. Rymes says that these metacommentaries can be a useful analytical tool because they show what is socially salient to people. About this article, I wonder how valid are the comments on other people’s speech because they seem pretty subjective.

Andrea R Leone-Pizzighella and Betsy Rymes talk about Web.2 environment, a new methodological way of describing sociolinguistic research on interactive platforms like YouTube. They tried to analyzed stories about accents that emerge from human interaction. They chose two Philadelphia accent narrators (male and female) and observed how their narrative was noted/perceived in the comment section on YouTube. They observe that YouTubers themselves provide detailed biographical comments on their speech (again, talking about how they talk), while youtube viewers provide commentary about their performance and claims if it sounds authentic or not. This article also compares two different narrative models, an older “logico-scientific” model that uses scientific proofs, statistical regularities and a new “narrative” model that is more interested in gripping drama and audience involvement. I do think that in the 21^st century, we need to use more actual methodological models. This one seems particularly interesting because it provides ‘self-conscious portraits’ created by language users themselves and assesses the validity of those portraits by examining the commentary on them posted by Internet peers, which is unique to our time.