#camlangsci

Since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and subsequent election catapulted him to even greater levels of attention than he had previously enjoyed, many many people have come to notice something distinctive about his speaking style – and, as you might expect, linguists have not been exempt from this in the slightest.

A Google search for trump linguistics gives articles with comments on the President’s language style from half a dozen different linguists on the first page alone. The contributors to linguistics blog Language Log can’t get enough of Trump, as a search of the site reveals (not all of those posts are about Trump’s own language use, but many of them are). There’s even a book about how Trump talks –Talking Donald Trump: A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity  by Dr. Jennifer Sclafani, published in August 2017.

So, what’s so remarkable about the way Trump speaks? Well, you can go away and read about it yourself from the links above, but here are a few of the more interesting things. Sclafani notes how Trump tends to make use of a casual tone, with “simple vocabulary and grammar”. His speech is typified by asides and unexpected switches of topic: who knows what’s going on with the following non sequitur?

They’ve won five wars where the armies that went against them froze to death. It’s pretty amazing. So, we’re having a good time. The economy is doing great.

Trump likes repetition and hyperbolic vocabulary, as shown in one interview where he mentions in quick succession “great chemistry with all of the leaders”, “amazing relationships”, “great relationships”, “great chemistry”.  On a similar note, Kristen Kobes Du Mez notes Trump’s liking of “verbal intensifiers” like “very very”,  “many many” and “super-duper”; Eric Acton points to his use of superlative adjectives: “biggest”, “strongest”, “toughest”.

He sometimes addresses himself (“Thanks Donald!”). He says things like “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job” when talking about somebody who’s dead – you’d usually expect to hear ”somebody who did an amazing job”.  Compared to previous US Presidents, he talks much more about “America” but much less about “freedom”. And who could fail to notice his frequent catch phrases, like “fake news”, “crooked Hillary” and “Sad!”?

I could go on. It’s fascinating that there’s so much to say about the language of just one individual. It just goes to show how rich and abundant the data that linguistics is based on is – that even one person can spark whole books’ worth of research and more.

But of course it’s not only Trump who has a unique speaking style. In fact, the way everybody speaks is a little (or a lot) different from everybody else. That’s why you can identify a friend speaking down the telephone, or with your back turned to them, or why certain actors and other public figures are so associated with their voices (James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, the Queen, David Attenborough). It’s why the science of forensic linguistics is able to use linguistic clues to solve crimes – though it can’t (yet) boast of 100% accuracy. Linguists call the idiosyncratic way of speaking that each of us has our “idiolect”. In a way, everybody speaks a different language – differing in the words we know and use, the styles of speaking we prefer, the exact grammatical rules we employ, or the way our speech sounds due to subtle differences in the shape of our mouths.

All this goes to show just how wonderful and diverse language is. All of us have our own unique way of speaking, and so much can be said about the speech even of just one person. There is just so much to investigate for linguists, and for anybody interested in language.

If you have listened to Korean and thought there’s something odd about the pronunciation of the word-initial nasals /n m/, you’re not alone. In fact, you probably know more than the average native speaker about the peculiarity of Korean nasals! I bet that an absolute majority of Koreans are totally unaware of it, something which is so striking to many Korean learners.

So, yes, you were spot on when you thought you heard something like [dugu] or even [t(h)ugu] instead of /nugu/[1] ‘who’ (누구), and [bwʌrago], [p(h)wʌrago] instead of /mwʌrago/ ‘what?’ (뭐라고), while watching your favourite K-drama. In other words, nasals in Koreans lose nasality and sometimes even voicing in word-initial position. It’s only very recently that word-initial denasalisation became recognised by Korean phoneticians as a regular feature of spoken Korean and became a topic of systematic investigation (Yoshida 2008; Y-S Kim 2011).

Korean Denasalisation shows patterns associated with so-called domain-initial strengthening (Cho & Keating 2001). Domain-initial strengthening refers to the phenomenon in which domain-initial consonants are pronounced with longer, greater articulatory gestures. The domain here refers to any prosodic domain, which can be defined as the unit of speech larger than segments (vowels and consonants) such as syllable, phonological word (PW), accentual phrase (AP), intonational phrase (IP), and utterance. Domain-initial strengthening is found with different types of sounds in different languages including French, English, Estonian, Tamil, Taiwanese, Dutch, and Korean. For example, English /t/ and /h/ show a longer aspiration (the ‘h’ sound in e.g. ‘thick’, which creates a puff of air; this isn’t found in e.g. ‘stick’) and a larger glottal gesture in phrase-initial position than in phrase-medial position (Pierrehumbert & Talkin 1992).

Now, here’s why domain-initial strengthening is so cool. The effects of domain-initial strengthening are cumulative, so that the larger the prosodic domain of the initial segment, the greater the effects. Using domain-initial denasalisation as an example, IP (or large phrase, in plain English) -initial nasals are more denasalised than AP (a unit made up of one or two phonological words in Korean) –initial nasals, and AP-initial nasals are in turn more denasalised than PW-initial nasals, and so on. Let’s look at some examples:

1(a) /ob*a IP[mandu mʌgɯrʌga]/

‘Obba (what you call an older brother), are you going to eat dumplings?’

오빠, 만두 먹으러 가?

1(b) /ʌmma ob*a AP[mandu mʌgɯrʌga]/

‘Mom, is Obba going to eat dumplings?

엄마, 오빠 만두 먹으러 가?

1(c) /ʌmma ab*aga AP[ob*a pw[mandu]] mʌgɯrʌga]/

‘Mom, is Dad going to eat “Obba Dumpling” (product name)?

엄마, 아빠가 오빠 만두 먹으러 가?

All these sentences contain the word /mandu/ ‘dumpling’, with the word-initial /m/. The key difference is that the highest possible position of /m/ is the IP-initial position (though, of course, it is also syllable-initial, word-initial, and so on) in (a), AP-initial position in (b), and PW-initial position in (c). Because the effect of Korean denasalisation is cumulative, the extent of denasalisation is (a)>(b)>(c). I would be surprised if an English listener heard the /m/ in (c) as anything other than [m]. But the /m/ in (a) is likely to be completely denasalised and devoiced as [p], and may even be slightly aspirated [ph]!

As what’s described so far is a relatively new discovery, there is a lot to be known about domain-initial denasalisation in Korean and domain-initial strengthening in general. One of the most exciting questions to ask next is what role domain-initial strengthening plays in perception. Because we now know that the pronunciation of consonants is not invariant but shows fine-grained variation as a function of prosodic position, we can hypothesise that this information can be used by listeners as a cue to a prosodic boundary. Consider the following examples:

2(a) IP[While eating], IP[my dog, my cat and I watched the TV].

2(b) IP[While eating my dog], IP[my cat and I watched the TV].

I’m using English examples for a quick illustration, but similar examples can be found easily in Korean. For now, let’s assume that English has domain-initial denasalisation. We would then expect the /m/ in (a) to be denasalised to a greater extent than in (b), because it is in IP-initial position. Given the pattern, are listeners able to use denasalisation as a cue in speech perception to disambiguate these sentences, in addition to pitch and duration cues? This is exactly what I’m trying to find out during my fieldwork in Korea in the next two months, so we’ll see!

  [1] Slant brackets are for phonemes, the abstract mental representation of a segment in the speaker’s mind. If you like, this is what the speaker thinks they are saying. On the other hand, square brackets are for (allo)phones, the actual realisation of phonemes, which may be slightly different every time they are uttered and from what the speaker thinks they are pronouncing.

  References

Cho, T., & Keating, P. A. (2001). Articulatory and acoustic studies on domain-initial strengthening in Korean. Journal of Phonetics, 29(2), 155–190.

Kim, Y. S. (2011). An acoustic, aerodynamic and perceptual investigation of word-initial denasalization in Korean. University College London.

Pierrehumbert, J., & Talkin, D. (1992). Lenition of /h/ and glottal stop. Papers in Laboratory Phonology II: Gesture, Segment, Prosody, 90–117.

Yoshida, K. (2008). Phonetic implementation of Korean denasalization and its variation related to prosody. IULC Working Papers, 8(1).

I love emojis. Who doesn’t? The LOL face [😂] (official name: “Face with Tears of Joy”) was chosen by Oxford Dictionaries as Word of the Year in 2015, and the recent popular SHRUGGING emoji [🤷] (according to Emojipedia) is just as expressive. Being called ‘word’ seems to suggest that emojis are part of a verbal language (and indeed there have been linguistic studies of them), though one can’t really tell which language they belong to. English? Japanese? Or some ‘universal language’?

Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2015: the LOL emoji [1]

Well, it may be too early to grant ‘language’ status to emojis, because, on the one hand, they can never be used as a first language (even if they had sounds), nor can human communication solely rely on emojis (this should be obvious, I’d hope). On the other hand, these cute little ideograms can fit into any language, as you can see below.

(1) a. [😋] Get list of all emojis to [✂️] and [📋]. (English) b. Les emojis de Samsung sont [🤢]. “The emojis of Samsung are ugly.” (French) c. Muchos éxitos chicas [👏][🎉]! “Many successes (i.e. good luck) girls!” (Spanish) d. Guten [🌇]! Montag ist doch ein schöner Tag [😴][😷]. “Good morning! Monday is a good day.” (German)

Such ubiquity implies that if an emoji can play a role in one language, it would have a role to play in every language. In other words, emojis probably are universal, but they do not form a complete language; what they realize are probably some universally available linguistic concepts or categories. Some of these categories are easier to translate back into verbal language, such as ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ in (1a) (Verb), ‘ugly’ (French moches) in (1b) (Adjective), and ‘morning’ (German Morgen) in (1d) (Noun). Others are less easy to translate. For example, the Clapping Hands plus Party Popper in (1c) intensify the preceding proposition (a wish), and the Sleeping Face plus Face with Medical Mask in (1d) depict the mood of the speaker (presumably ‘sleepy and sick’). But these meanings are ineffable in the corresponding verbal languages Spanish and German – at least not with equal-sized elements (e.g. 1 emoji = 1 word). The Face Savouring Delicious Food in (1a) is even more difficult to translate, for it is not even clear what its relationship with the English sentence is (perhaps it functions as a discourse marker like well).

If we want to incorporate these emojis into sentence structure, the translatable ones realize V, A, and N not so differently from their verbal counterparts. The ‘untranslatable’ ones, on the other hand, probably realize some functional constituent adding discourse meanings to propositions. Following the tradition of syntax, let’s call this unknown constituent EmojiP (=Emoji Phrase).

A syntactic tree for EmojiP

Now, there are two interesting observations. First, this EmojiP may be sentence-initial (1a) or sentence-final (1c,d), but it seldom shows up in the middle of a sentence. Since the quasi-well in (1a) is not necessarily part of the following sentence, we can boldly assume for now that EmojiP is always sentence-final, regardless of the general head direction of the language – both French and German actually have head-initial CP, as is shown in the emoji-free sentences below.

(2) a. J’ai dit [CP [C que] [TP j’aime les pommes]].  “I said that I like apples.” (French) b. Ich bin sicher, [CP [C dass] [TP ich meinen Reisepaß habe]]. “I’m sure that I have my passport.” (German)

Second, the EmojiP elements, namely the emojis (LOL), do not necessarily depend on verbal sentences; they may well appear as standalone utterances and be assigned whatever interpretation our imagination renders. For example, someone texted their mom the emoji string in (3), which got two different interpretations.

(3) 🍴🌙🍝 Intended version: I had spaghetti for dinner last night. Mom’s version: I had noodles and a croissant.

Such ambiguity is unlikely to arise in English (or any natural language), which can well distinguish last night (/læst naɪt/, Adverbial) and croissant (/krwɑːsɒŋ/, Noun) phonologically and categorially. Importantly, in English the time adverbial doesn’t come between the verb and its object, as in (4).

(4) *I had last night spaghetti.

In this sense, the mom’s understanding is more natural – she simply followed the VO word order of English. This said, the child’s choice of word order perhaps isn’t random either, because in the world of emojis the ‘preverbal’ constituent is by default interpreted as the agent subject. So, without additional disambiguating mechanisms, neither (5a) nor (5b) could easily result in the intended interpretation.

(5) a. 🍴🍝🌙 (same problem as (3)) b. 🌙🍴🍝 (by default “some moon-shaped agent ate noodles”)

The above two observations have two implications for the syntax of emojis. First, EmojiP is an exceptional constituent which needn’t obey the head-initial phrase-structure parameter. In other words, it’s probably neither a head nor a specifier. Second, the emoji ideograms are only associated with minimal (and maybe unfixed) meanings but not syntactic categories. Therefore, their interpretation may change flexibly depending on where they are and what category the language user assigns to them.

Another interesting observation is that in languages with sentence-final particles, the function of such particles is quite similar to that of emojis, as in Mandarin Chinese.

(6) a. Zhù nǐ chénggōng o! “Wish you success [😊]” b. Zhōuyī búcuò en… “Monday is not bad [😔]…”

Similar things seem to be happening in other languages, too. In my own case, for example, I am often tempted to add either “LOL” [😂] or “XD” [😝] at the end of English sentences, as in (7).

(7) a. That’s cool [😂].              b. I dunno [😝]…

So, in languages without ‘official’ sentence-final particles, emojis are potential candidates for the role, as least in the written informal register. And they are even more powerful than the real sentence-final particles, thanks to their rich visual effects and easily enlargeable inventory.

Picture source: [1] http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/11/word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/

A few years ago, I attended a friend’s party, during which she introduced me to her other friends: “Have you met my friend Li? She’s from Vietnam, and she talks about future things in the present.” This line stayed with me for a very long time, as up till then, it never occurred to me that the way I spoke English constituted a salient part of my identity, and that there was possibly a link between “from Vietnam” and the “use of present tense” for future events. This incident sparked my interest in how Vietnamese learners use English, and in particular, how this variety of English treats tense and aspect in everyday discourse. I then decided to pursue this enquiry further by gathering data from recorded natural conversations and Facebook posts[1]. Results suggest two conspicuous variants in Vietnamese learners’ treatment of tense and aspect: (1) the use of non-conjugated verbs and/or misuse of conjugated verbs, and (2) preference for simple present tense when referring to future events.

Time, Tense and Aspect

In linguistics, tense is a deictic category that functions to situate an event in a chronological order in relation to other events, and aspect deals with speakers’ subjective perception of the situation: as complete, in progress, having duration, beginning, ending, or being repeated. Tense and aspect are universal grammatical categories that are present in most languages, although the coding systems of these categories vary from language to language.

As an oversimplified contrastive description, tense and aspect are encoded in finite verbs in English while they are not overtly marked in Vietnamese, but rather understood from the context. English makes a three-way distinction between present, past, and future tense, with only present and past tense triggering verbal inflection. Present tense is unmarked (Ø) by default, and marked with the -(e)s morpheme when the subject is 3SG. Past tense is realised with the suffix –ed for regular verbs. Futurity is usually realised with the modal ‘will’ followed by a bare infinitive, but it can also be realised through other means such as phrasal modals, or the present progressive simple present tense with time adverbials.

Unfortunately, it’s not that obvious in Vietnamese. Consider the following Vietnamese sentence:

(*) Chị ấy         khóc

3SG.F                cry

This can be translated as ‘she cries’, ‘she cried’, she was crying’, or ‘she has been crying’ depending on the context. Vietnamese does not rely on verbal inflection to indicate tense or aspect, but rather on other designated lexical or pragmatic devices. Although Vietnamese has particles such as rồi [completed], đã [past], đang [progressive], and sẽ [future] to mark time/state when required (Dam 2001), those particles are often dropped when time adverbials such as hôm qua (yesterday), ngày mai (tomorrow), bây giờ (now), trước đây (before) are present.

Data

To investigate Vietnamese learners’ variety of English when it comes to treatment of tense and aspect, three natural conversations of 3 – 5 minutes each between a Vietnamese parent learning English and an Australian-born child were recorded, with the parents’ and children’s oral consent. Additionally, I also gained access to 50 Facebook posts by Vietnamese learners. Half of this dataset were from a private Facebook group consisting of Vietnamese learners who have been in Australia for more than 10 years, and the other half were from Vietnamese learners living in Vietnam. This mixed selection was solely for the purpose of getting a good overview of the variety used by a random population of Vietnamese learners, rather than to find out whether there is a difference between two groups. In order to ensure that the features identified are indeed part of the Vietnamese learners’ variety rather than a result of an individual error, I work on the principle that a feature only counts as significant if it occurs for at least three times across the dataset, and in case of the Facebook posts, by at least three different speakers.

Result

The use of non-conjugated verbs and/or misuse of conjugated verbs

Due to Vietnamese famously lacking inflectional morphology, it is predictable that the codification of English conjugated verbs is problematic for many Vietnamese learners. Data gathered show strong evidence that Vietnamese learners tend to omit the inflectional morpheme of the verb when progressive or perfect aspect is in use. Consider the following data:

(1) P: TJ have you write your homework?

C: Not yet.

P: Why don’t you do it while I am cook dinner

(2) “Dad is happy and comfortable and has enjoy all the visits of family.”

(3) “hello Ireland. itz turn cool here in DN but no sunshine…envy you!”

As the examples show, speakers tend to use bare infinitives following the auxiliary ‘have’ in the perfective construction (1 & 2), and bare infinitive following the auxiliary ‘be’ in the progressive construction (1 & 3). Given that Vietnamese has no morphology on the verb, this tendency towards bare infinitives is likely to be a result of Vietnamese learners’ language transfer. Speakers naturally transfer the skills and patterns they acquired in their first language into their second language. It is also worth considering that, as inflectional morphemes (particularly the word-final /s/) are small, redundant and not permissible in Vietnamese phonotactics, they are less likely to be perceived by Vietnamese learners.

Preference for simple present tense when referring to future events

Another salient feature, which also served as an impetus for this study, is Vietnamese learners’ tendency to use the simple present tense to refer to future events. Consider the following sentences:

(4) “Sunday family picnic at Floriade.

I am suggesting a family day out at Floriade. We buy food at Floriade, nice photos are taken and there is a lot to see and do there. So we come to Thao Thi for breakfast and then go to Floriade for a picnic lunch. It is a rare opportunity for all of us to get together outdoor, with Trang/Nghia family here too.”

(5) C: Dad have you called iinet?

P: I do it

C: Have you already done it? Or are you going to?

P: I do it tomorrow

Although futurity in Vietnamese can be marked by the particle sẽ [future] (equivalent of ‘will’ in English), this particle is often dropped when a time abverbial is present, or when the time of the event could be inferred from the context. Language transfer is apparent in example 5 – when the father responds to the child “I do it” with an implication that ‘I have not done it, but I will do it.’ However, the child – an English speaker – is confused by the answer and has to seek clarification as to whether this action has already been done, or will be done later. Even in response to the child’s follow-up question, the father still does not adopt the modal ‘will,’ but makes his intended meaning clearer by inserting the time adverbial ‘tomorrow.’

On a similar yet rather different note, example 4 presents an interesting case when the Vietnamese learners’ preference for the present tense for future events gives the sentence a different reading in English – the habitual aspect. Without the background context, it appears as though this group frequently buys food at Floriade and takes photos. The subsequent sentence “So we come to Thao Thi for breakfast and then go to Floriade for a picnic lunch” creates a similar impression. This then makes a nice example of possible mismatches between form and meaning when two varieties of the same language come into contact, with the structurally variant feature generating derived semantic effects.

[1] This includes Facebook statuses and Facebook comments.

References:

Dam, Phap 2001, Old habits die hard: Persistent errors in English written by Vietnamese speakers. A paper presented at National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) Annual Conference, February. 20-24, 2001 in Phoenix, Arizona. Retrieved online on 15 October 2015 at http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED453672

Brunelle, Marc 2014, “Vietnamese”. In: J Mathias & P Sidwell (Eds), The handbook of Austroasiatic languages. Leiden Boston Brill, pp. 909-953.

Do the languages you speak affect your well-being? By which I don’t mean, does speaking language X make you happier, on average, than speaking language Y? Nor am I thinking of the body of evidence – somewhat controversial and definitely complex – that there is a bilingual advantage for particular cognitive functions. Rather, in a particular linguistic context, how do language choices – which languages you learn, which languages you lose – influence life satisfaction?

Take Johannes. His parents are German but he’s been in the UK since he was just a tot. He feels more British than German and doesn’t want to waste time at the weekend at the community language school, or even to talk to his parents in German. After all, they can speak English, so even when they try to talk to him in German, he answers back in English, which is the language he uses with most of his friends. It can cause quite a bit of friction at home, and it does make trips to his grandparents trickier, but that doesn’t happen so often. Or what about Amira: she’s happy speaking Turkish with family and friends, but hasn’t learnt to read or write the language. Now she’s growing up, that makes it harder to investigate her questions about identity herself. And there’s Sandra: she only learned English at home, but school Spanish, and now degree, has given her experiences and friendships across the world.

These examples are made up, but perhaps you can identify with one. The recent OECD Pisa report looked at well-being in young people across the world for the first time, and found that one of the main predictors was communication within the family: where parents spent time just talking with their child, he or she was over 60% more likely to report high levels of life satisfaction. Likewise, in UK The Good Childhood Report 2013 found that talking with parents about things that matter, as well as seeing friends and extended family, were positively associated with well-being. Good communication and the relationships that it builds, of course, involve language. What happens when members of a family – or community – can no longer talk to one another, or not fluently?

There is some evidence that maintaining a home language – like speaking German, Turkish, Arabic or any of the hundreds of languages spoken in UK – as well as learning the language of the community – in our case English – can be beneficial for well-being, precisely through this crucial link between quality of relationships and well-being.1 Annick De Houwer talks about ‘harmonious bilingualism’, where “on the whole children and their families do not experience any interpersonal problems because of the language contact situation, or have a clearly positive experience with bilingualism” (2013:170).2 Of course, the picture is going to be a complex one, with the social characteristics of the community, prestige of the languages, and many other factors playing a role. However, these are fascinating and necessary questions to ask, in our increasingly multilingual society – and ones which are only just beginning to see research to answer them. Members of the Cambridge Bilingualism Network are hoping to lift the lid on some of the issues, so watch this space for more thoughts on multilingualism and well-being in the coming months!

1. E.g,. Tannenbaum, M., & Berkovich, M. (2005). Family relations and language maintenance: Implications for language educational policies. Language Policy, 4(3), 287–309.

2. De Houwer, A. (2015). Harmonious bilingual development: Young families’ well-being in language contact situations. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(2), 169–184.

I’ve got a confession to make. I love pop science books. Sometimes, as an academicky type, I wonder whether I should, as there are so many interesting hard-core research articles and weighty tomes to read, and so little time. But actually, there are some good reasons to read pop linguistics books, even if you are a linguist. I’m talking here mostly about books written by academics for a general audience, rather than those sometimes poorly researched compendiums that adorn bookshop tables in the run-up to Christmas. Here are my top 3 reasons to read linguistics books aimed at a general audience, and top book recommendations for this week.

1. Broaden your horizons. Poking your head out from your own research nook and finding what’s going on in other crannies is not only interesting but can spark new ideas and make you aware of connections you hadn’t previously seen. And what better way of doing that than with a book you can relax with on the beach, in the bath, or under the bedsheets. 2. Get the bigger picture. At least in my neck of the linguistic woods, developments tend to be announced in journal articles and conference papers rather than books, and therefore are often very tightly focussed. It’s so easy to get bogged down in experiment methodology, stimuli, or statistics. A book helps you to see the wood for the trees, especially one that’s written for non-specialists and so has a strong narrative thread or polemic stance. 3. Be inspired. Some academics I’ve met seem to find the idea of public engagement ridiculous or unnecessary. I wonder whether it’s because there’s an implicit threat that ‘your research isn’t worth anything, unless you package it up so it’s useful to some other community, right now!’ But reading great pop science books makes it so clear that that’s not the case at all. Of course, research work has its own value, and this goes hand-in-hand with communicating it far and wide.

On my bookshelf: 1. The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker Every linguistics undergrad comes up to university equipped with some Steven Pinker. Usually it’s The Language Instinct that transforms every young reader from an intuitive Sapir-Whorfian to a fully-formed nativist. But, being a pragmatician myself, I would commend this later work, which unpacks some key themes in semantics and pragmatics, while being full of delightful and witty examples.

2. Neurotribes, Steve Silberman This isn’t strictly about language per se, but it still makes the cut. It’s a history of thinking and research on autistic spectrum disorder – which of course can profoundly affect communication and language – and for those of a younger generation for whom the condition is now common parlance, this book is truly eye-opening. I would never have thought that a whole chapter on the development of a diagnostic tool could be a page-turner, but this book kept me up late on several occasions.

3. Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough Another not-quite-language offering: this book is about memory. And of course, without memory we have no language. Written by a psychologist-cum-author, it’s a beautiful introduction to the wonderful, mysterious world of our memory, and the tragedy of losing it. Psycholinguistics classes are often filled with mysterious initials, like ‘JBR’ and ‘MD’ – famous case studies of aphasia, where the person has lost some aspect of language (which can be as broad as productive syntax, or as narrow as words for particular categories like vegetables), often as the results of a stroke or other brain damage. But the focus on the – admittedly fascinating – insights this gives us into language itself can make us forget the tragic consequences for these people’s lives. This book is a moving reminder.

4. Speaking Our Minds, Thomas Scott-Phillips This is a beautifully – and forcefully – argued treaty on how human communication is so special. Scott-Phillips explains how when we talk with one another, we’re not just doing encoding and decoding, like a machine, but a complex process of inferencing about each other’s intentions. These kind of observations have been very influential in one of the main areas of linguistic study – pragmatics – over the last half century, and this book also adds an evolutionary perspective (though disclaimer: I haven’t read those chapters yet).

5. Wordsmiths & Warriors, David and Hilary Crystal There had to be something from our British resident celebrity linguist on the list. There are too many books to choose from here, but a fun recent(ish) addition is this linguistic guide to UK, complete with photos. The entries are varied – they could be about a place with some significant connection to the history of English, the location of an important historical linguistic source, the home of some important linguistic work – and complete with photographs.

Ask Chris: I always feel that differences between cultures and differences between languages are somehow correlated, although linguists seem not to stress that. How do you see the influence of cultural differences on the differences between languages? Do you think the influence of cultural diversity on language has been severely underestimated in linguistics?

Chris answers: To be frank, after I started answering the questions online, I found that so many people tried to bind language and culture together, which is, from the point of view of a linguist-to-be, a bit annoying. The point is not that linguists do not, cannot, or should not put language and culture together, but that we have connected them properly in terms of the scientific research of language, while people outside the field of linguistics always believe that we need to do more – when there is nothing more to be done. If you ask me to estimate the influence of cultural diversity on language, I will say that it is far from what you describe as an “underestimation.” I should admit that the current focus of linguistics is not on the correlation between cross-linguistic diversity and cultural diversity, and we do not have an adequate explanation for the reason of any such correlation. But that is not to admit that we are ‘underestimating’ such influence of cultural diversity. And I hope you will get why I say so after reading the following.

We can now say that at a particular stage in the history of linguistics (or philology) the influence of language diversity was overestimated. By saying so, I am referring to the famous book titled The heterogeneity of language and its influence on the intellectual development of mankind by Wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as the popularisation of linguistic relativity. The latter one is more frequently called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but since Sapir and Whorf never collaborated to produce such a hypothesis, it is actually inappropriate to use that name. Both pieces of work suggest, based on different evidence, that the structure of a language can influence the cognition of the speakers of that language, and also that to some extent the culture established by those speakers can influence the structure of the language. Von Humboldt’s book was first published in 1836, while Edward Sapir was active in the first decades of the 20th century; the idea of the correlation between cultural diversity and linguistic diversity was rather popular a hundred years ago.

So why is it no longer as popular? That boils down to the linguistic analysis of a language. The word ‘language’ I use here includes not only the systematic structure of a language (‘langue’ as per de Saussure), but also the conventions of speech shared by the speakers of that language (akin to ‘parole’ as per de Saussure). By analysing how culture can and cannot influence a language, we can establish how far the influence of cultural diversity can go. Fortunately, comparative descriptive linguistics and socio-linguistics provide a series of fruitful clues to us, and that’s why I’m rather confident when answering your question.

The systematic structure of a language includes the sound system (the choice of phonetic inventory, the structure of a syllable, the phonological rules when we put sounds or syllables together etc.), the so-called ‘grammar’ structure (the structure of a word, the structure of a sentence, etc.), and the meanings of the language. Neither the sound system nor the grammar structure is significantly influenced by culture, if we observe carefully the differences and similarities between different languages. We can find similar sounds and structures from two historically unrelated languages whose speakers are from two totally different cultures, while at the same time we can get different sounds and structures from two languages whose speakers are friendly neighbours. It would be astonishing to everyone if Germans in Europe and Kashmiris in South Asia were observed to share a similar culture, just because both of the languages need the main verb to appear in the second position of a sentence. So you see, it is not very plausible to establish reliable links between cultures and linguistic structures, at least based on what we know at this point in time; I hope you agree when I say that culture and the (sound or grammar) structure of a language are independent of each other.

That established, we can move onto the meaning system. Meaning can be divided into two parts: propositional semantics – what a sentence mean –, and lexical semantics – what a single word means. In general, propositional semantics is universal: we are able to use a sentence to express meaning, and the way we pile up words to get meaning is roughly the same across cultures. You may want to say, “wait, but in some case a sentence may have different meanings in different cultures”; I know, but please save that for later, because that is not the meaning we get by combining words together. The word meaning, especially the connection between a word and a concept, is another story. Word meaning is more susceptible to cultural diversity in two aspects. Firstly, different cultures may have different classifications of concepts and different prototypes for a concept, and that can be reflected in the matching between a word and a concept. Years ago, when I stumbled upon the question for the first time, I gave the example of sweetcorn and potatoes (see here): potatoes are classified as vegetables in Chinese, while it is a prototype of starchy foods in English; sweetcorn is the opposite. Such differences are pervasive, even in household terms: just last week I  had a discussion with my supervisor, whose native language is Dutch, on whether a glass is a cup. It is all about how concepts are categorised and represented prototypically in a culture, and factors like these can definitely influence the language in use.

Furthermore, there are some culture-based concepts that can only be described in the language associated with that culture. This includes normal words and idiomatic expressions. For example, traditional Chinese medical practitioners believe that anger comes from the heat in the liver, so many Chinese sayings connect liver and anger: for example, ‘I’m so angry that my liver hurts’, or ‘She got fire in her liver.’ Expressions like these would be far from comprehensible to my British colleagues unless they have some experience of alternative therapy. Such concepts and the corresponding verbal expressions are again culture-specific and subject to the influence of cultural diversity. Although we do not have a systematic analysis of the reasons for such differences, we can find books and journal articles on the comparison between languages spoken in two cultures.

In terms of the non-structural part of language, such as the conventions and rules of language use, we may observe more influence of cultural diversity on language. Maybe you have noticed that more linguists (perhaps many sociolinguists) are starting to talk about ‘intercultural communication.’ That is because cultural diversity may influence the manners of communication, and thus influence the language an individual uses. Sometimes we talk about how ‘people from Culture A talk directly and people from Culture B talks indirectly’; such ‘directness’ or ‘indirectness’ is not related to the structure of the language they use, but whether they use implicatures to convey their intended meaning or not. The strategies of politeness and the preferences of implicature are both related to cultures. In sociolinguistics, we investigate the act of speaking between people in different cultures, and we see that even the use of silence and the competition of turn-taking vary from group to group. When the ‘language’ we discuss is not limited to the linguistic system, and when it extends to become the medium of communication in a community, we can see that cultural diversity plays an important role to influence the language.

However, we should always make a clear cut between the structural and non-structural parts of language – they are not equal, and sometimes not even related to each other. In the real world, a language is not tied up with a culture, or vice versa. Speech activity, just like one’ preferences for eating, drinking and clothing, and also rituals and ceremonies, is a part of the customs shared by a community, but language is not. It is highly likely that we change some traditions of speech activity without influencing the structure of that language, or switch to another linguistic code without changing the speech traditions. To simplify a little bit, it is like ladies wearing trousers or skirts: no matter what you select to wear, the trousers and skirts themselves will not change at all, and the fact that we need to wear something to cover our lower part will not change either.

There may be ways in which cultural diversity influences language that we are not able to observe yet, maybe because we still do not have a good methodology to quantify cultural diversity. But that is not because we are not paying attention to such influences. Now you may understand why I have chosen ‘Give back to culture what is culture’s’ as the title for this answer: we do need a clear cut here, even for people who do not study linguistics. Give back to culture what is culture’s, and to language what is language’s.

  To have a look at how culture may influence language, you may want to read these:

Basso, Keith H. 1970. ‘“To Give up on Words”: Silence in Western Apache Culture’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 26.3: 213–30

Jarvis, Scott, and Aneta Pavlenko. 2008. Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition (Routledge)

Link, Perry. 2013. An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press)

Leaving my room in a rush one day, I walked straight into the wall opposite my door. It was a high-speed collision, the wall was a properly constructed one – not a paper thin one like the one separating me from my neighbour –, and the result could be described as full-on face-meet-wall contact. “Oh oopsy daisy!” I exclaimed, brushing off the blood gushing from my nose, patting some powder onto my increasingly blackening eye, and wondering how much reconstructive facial surgery would be necessary.

I lie. Hugh Grant may have gone for an ‘oopsy daisy’ in Notting Hill (for those who haven’t seen the British romcom classic, shame on you: he fails at his attempt to climb into a private garden over a spiked fence), but I had no Julia Roberts around to keep my language in check. Suffice to say that it was an expletive heavy incident for me, with said wall undergoing heavy verbal abuse – details of which would probably lead to this post being censored.

‘Oopsy daisy’ may be as iconic as the Travel Bookshop but not as effective as the good ol’ f-word in alleviating pain. Credit: Álvaro Millán.

But I feel justified in my expletive outburst given what swearing can tell us about language, culture, and society.

Back in 2009, scientists at Keele University discovered that swearing can in fact ease pain. They had participants (or ‘volunteers’ as they put it – I’d hope so!) submerge their hand in iced water, and repeat either swear words or words that could be used to describe a table (‘brown’ for instance). Interestingly, the participants were able to keep their hand in longer when they swore; their heart rate also accelerated, and their pain perception was reduced. I was basically just applying a verbal painkiller!

Just a few weeks ago, Keele University came back with more swearsome results: swearing also makes you stronger. This time the experiment was somewhat less painful, with volunteers hopping onto an exercise bike and performing a hand grip test. When swearing, the participants’ peak power rose by 24 watts in a 30 second cycling challenge, and there strength was boosted by the equivalent of 2.1kg in the grip test – not surprisingly, table-describing words didn’t do it for anyone.

Any guesses how much he swears? Credit: Helgi Halldórsson.

Swearing isn’t only about enhancing physical powers, though. It can also shed light on how emotionally connected we feel to a language. To throw some science at you, there is a phenomenon called reduced emotional resonance of language. It’s not uncommon for bilinguals to report that they ‘feel less’ in their second language. They may, for example, find discussing taboo or emotionally involved topics – love, sex, death, you know the drill – easier in their second language because they’re emotionally more distant from it. Swearing falls into this category, too: chances are that if a speaker is more profane in one of their languages, it won’t be their first one. Why and how exactly this works are still question to be answered – keep your eyes peeled for exciting results from Glasgow, though!

What exactly you say to swear once you’ve picked your language to do so varies from one language and culture to another. Universally speaking, though, items bad enough for swearing tend to involve forbidden desires, and have some societal power or control structure attached to them.

Genitalia, for example, is a cross-cultural favourite when comes to qualifying items for swearing vocabulary. Female anatomy often makes for more powerful swearing: some say this is because the male bits and pieces are key (no pun intended) to power in society, while female genitalia are to be reserved to a specific male, and hence more forbidden. In Rinconada Bikol in the Philippines, buray ni nanya ‘mother’s vagina’ is a common expression, while in Finnish vittu ‘vagina’ (not just your mother’s, any will do) is one of the crudest swearwords, coming in an array of noun, verb, and adjective uses. In Arabic, you can insult someone by calling them fatah ‘foreskin’. In Italian, you can always opt for che cazzo! (‘What the cock!’). You get the picture.

Eh calice! Credit: 4saintsepiscopalfoodpantry

Power structure also crops up in religious swearwords. In Quebec French, a lot of strong language favourites come from church objects rather than the classic continental merde: tabernacle (where communion wafers are stored) and calice (a chalice for wine) have taken on other uses than just the ones describing church objects, reflecting the strong prominence of the Catholic church until a few decades ago. Also in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish the likes of hell, the devil, and co. are a go-to solution when expressing negative emotion. Take Finnish perkele for example. Roll out that trilled r to release all your pent up anger, while referring to the pre-Christian thunder god.

Needless to say, the list goes on. Next time you feel like letting it all out, do it (but don’t say I told you to) and take a note of what comes out. Chances are it’ll reflect societal trends, psychological processes, and your language preferences. How f***ing awesome is that?