Within a move

100 word vocabulary

Fabio Capello's claim that he only needs 100 words of English to communicate with his England footballers has sparked lots of silly (but fun) discussions about what those words might be. The BBC covered it here, The Guardian reckoned that beaten excuse quarter final, Germany, jagerbomb, lager and WAGs might be in there, while today's G2 extends the 100 words to other occupations including taxi drivers (Where left right lights immigration stop roadworks traffic not being funny but come over here free council houses bloody liberty politicians all same)  and teachers (You sit quiet please everyone now enough gum tie shirt homework yes today excuses no book open page talking stop discipline noise courtesy while others trying learn). But why stop there? George Osborne would only need 3 words (cut, gloat and slime) so that would be easy, but what about other jobs and professions?

Thinking of those 100 words that are used most frequently, is there a way in which patterns in their grammar could be discerned? Katherine Nelson's study of children's first words back in 1973 showed that one year-olds tended to favour nouns heavily among their first 50 words, but what would the pattern be for you?

Wikipedia uses data from Oxford Dictionaries to assemble the 100 most frequently used words in English, but this data is drawn from written texts primarily, making it very different from what a person would say in a normal day of speaking.

Perhaps an interesting language investigation at A2 would be to record a few minutes of conversation every hour and log the words used, their frequency and word class, to establish the patterns in your own speech and that of others.

My Little Pony must die

The language used to target young consumers (or children as we used to call them) is often designed to appeal to their developing sense of gender identity, and some would argue that many ads manipulate that identity to encourage boys and girls into thinking that certain toys and games are only for the other gender. I've seen it happen with my own kids who've left the protective cocoon of CBeebies and CBBC and entered the commercial wasteland that is ITV2 and the Cartoon Network.

This brilliantly simple piece of corpus analysis using Wordle (and flagged up by an anonymous person on the English Language list today) takes the language of TV ads and represents them in word clouds. The results based on gender are really striking:

boys' toys

girls' toys

The effects of this kind of polarised language are harder to gauge perhaps, but it's pretty stunning that in the 21st Century kids are still being sold a line that fighting is what boys do and love is what girls do. This pressure group - Pink Stinks - has done some good work in challenging gender stereotypes around children's toys and clothes, and is well worth a look.

For A level Language Investigations (AS ENGA2 projects into representation for the AQA A spec or ENGB4 for the A2 investigation in AQA B) this sort of work is ideal.

Processor dari Plastik

Chip berukuran dua sentimeter dan dibangun di atas foil plastik fleksibel dan sedang, yang disebut-sebut sebagai alternatif untuk silikon. Menurut Jan Genoe di pusat nanoteknologi IMEC di Leuven, Belgia ini bisa menjadi chip murah, ramah lingkungan dan fleksibel.

Dari hasil uji coba menunjukkan bahwa chip baru ini belum mempunyai kekuatan seperti superkompeter dan prosesor pada umumnya. Chip hanya dapat menjalankan satu program sederhana dari 16 instruksi. Ini harus hardcoded menjadi foil kedua terukir dengan sirkuit plastik yang dapat dihubungkan ke prosesor.

Prosesor Ini berjalan di kekuataan 6Hz dan hanya dapat memproses informasi dalam potongan delapan-bit paling banyak. Hal ini sedikit lebih lambat dibandingkan dengan PC pada era 1980-an, atau memang tidak terlalu cukup cepat.

Namun, chip sangat tipis sehingga komponen dapat dicetak ke atasnya seperti tinta. Bekerja lebih banyak dibutuhkan untuk membuat transistor organik untuk ukuran kecil juga. Tetapi jika tim mengelolanya, akan mungkin untuk memiliki sensor gas organik membungkus pipa gas untuk melaporkan setiap kebocoran dengan mikroprosesor yang fleksibel untuk membersihkan sinyal bising.

Bukan tidak mungkin di masa depan, prosesor berbahan dasar plastik akan dapat menjadi pilihan pengganti silikon. Ini tentu saja akan ramah lingkungan dan murah, tentu saja. (Okezone/TechEye/ketok.com)

Google Uji Mobile Payment Lewat Android

Secara diam-diam perusahaan raksasa internet itu tengah menguji sistem pembayaran online dengan berpartner bersama MasterCard dan Citigroup.

Berdasarkan bocoran informasi, demo tersebut dilakukan dengan salah satu model ponsel Android yang menggunakan chip NFC.

Dengan demikian, hal ini sesuai perkataan Eric Schmidt dalam konferensi Web 2.0 beberapa waktu lalu. Saat itu Bos Google tersebut mengatakan bahwa ponsel Android nantinya akan memiliki chip yang akan memberi kemampuan transaksi elektronik via ponsel.

Chip akan terhubung dengan receiver terdekat, misalnya di kasir, setelah melalui konfirmasi pengguna. "Pada dasarnya, Anda cukup menempelkan ponsel ini pada semua hal untuk menggantikan kartu kredit. Di industri, kami menyebutnya 'tap and pay'," ujar Schmidt, kala itu. (Detik/WallStreetJournal/ketok.com)

Dictionary Flow

This is a neat little flowchart to explain how words enter dictionaries. Have a look here.

Anarchy in the UK

The 500,000-strong protests against the government's crippling cuts programme went ahead peacefully on Saturday, but to read the mainstream media you would have thought that the day was marked by an orgy of violence and destruction. Approximately 0.04% of those on the march were engaged in some sort of trouble, and even then 140 of the arrests have been for the outrageous crime of aggravated trespass, for sitting in a shop peacefully.

Chief among the media's targets are protesters whom they term "anarchists". In today's Evening Standard, the columnist Sam Leith takes issue with the label "anarchist" as a catch-all term of abuse for any violent protester. Radio 4's Today programme discussed the philosophy and political strands of anarchism earlier in the day too, from class war anarchism through to pacifist, pastoral anarchism.

One of Leith's more serious points is that the word "anarchist"  has become "an all-purpose boo-word for those who protest in ways we don't consider acceptable; and, cripplingly, a way of muddying and ignoring the actual political positions of the quarter of a million people who marched peacefully on Saturday" and it's a good one to make.

The word is being chucked around with little thought for what it really means and that's not very helpful. It seems to be an example of semantic broadening, where the label itself has expanded to cover an increasing range of connotations - thuggish behaviour, disorder, chaos - when the word's original denotation means none of those things.

Even more bizarre is the increasing obsession with what these "anarchists" will do when the royal wedding is on. Will they turn up and kick over old ladies' tables and upset tea urns at the street parties that literally...err... tens of people will be holding? Will they sip from tins of Special Brew and sneer as the happy couple tie the knot? What sick filth will these anarchists come up with next?

Whatever your views on violent protest and the need to oppose government cuts  - and personally I don't think smashing up shop windows and fighting with the police down side streets is a particularly clever or successful way of gaining support for the cause - the whole way in which language is used to represent protests and all those involved has got to be worthy of a bit of extra scrutiny, particularly when the media coverage of half a million marchers gets relegated to the inside pages while the actions of (at most) a couple of hundred people make the front page and set the news agenda.

Ketahuilah Tentang Tattoo Sebelum Anda Membuatnya

Tattoo tubuh sepertinya sudah menjadi hal yang umum saat ini. Bila dahulu tato identik dengan dunia kejahatan, para pelaut & geng motor, maka saat ini tato sudah menjadi hiasan tubuh yang populer & digunakan oleh orang banyak.

Gambar yang digunakan bukan lagi hanya tengkorak, jangkar ataupun kapal perang, tetapi beragam mulai dari lambang tradisonal, design tumbuhan/hewan ataupun simbol pribadi untuk mengekspresikan diri.

Bila termasuk salah seorang yang berniat untuk membuat tattoo tubuh, maka sebelum pergi ke studio tattoo & membuat tattoo, sebaiknya perhatikan dulu beberapa hal berikut ini.

Tattoo sendiri adalah luka dari tusukan, yang dibuat didalam kulit & kemudian diberi tinta. Tattoo dibuat dengan cara menusukkan jarum ke kulit & kemudian dimasukkan tinta ke wilayah tersebut.

Yang membuat tattoo menjadi tahan lama, adalah karena tinta tersebut dimasukkan bukan kedalam epidermis (lapisan teratas kulit yang, sering mengelupas & diproduksi lagi seumur hidup). Melainkan, tattoo dibuat dengan tinta yang dimasukkan kedalam lapisan dermis (lapisan kedua kulit), sel pada dermis cenderung lebih tetap, sehingga membuat tattoo menjadi permanen.

Menurut AAD (The American Academy of Dermatology) terdapat 5 jenis tato menurut fungsi & proses terjadinya, yaitu sebagai berikut :

Tattoo akibat bekas luka
Biasanya disebabkan karena adanya debu atau serpihan didalam kulit, sehingga akan timbul pigmentasi setelah lukanya sembuh. Tattoo ini biasanya terjadi karena luka akibat kecelakaan di jalan raya.

Tattoo amatir
Biasanya dibuat sendiri atau oleh teman & tidak terlalu mengedepankan fungsi artistiknya. Cara yang biasa dipakai adalah dengan menggoreskan jarum/peniti yang sudah diberi tinta kedalam kulit. Untuk pewarna yang bisa digunakan, dapat berupa tinta india, tinta pulpen, arang atau abu.

Tattoo profesional
Tattoo profesional dapat dibagi menjadi 2 bagian, tato modern & tato etnik. Tattoo etnik biasanya dibuat dengan metode etnik tertentu yang diwariskan secara turun temurun, seperti misalnya pada masyarakat dayak atau di pulau pasifik. Sedangkan tato modern, dibuat dengan menggunakan alat khusus pembuat tattoo, di studio tattoo oleh seniman tattoo. Pigmentasi yang terjadi dapat bervariasi melalui penggunaan beragam warna pada tattoo yang dibuat.

Tattoo medis
Biasanya digunakan untuk menggambar area tubuh yang akan diradiasi. Tattoo medis biasanya dilakukan oleh dokter.

Tattoo kecantikan
Digunakan untuk membuat make-up permanen, seperti eye liner, lip liner, lipstick, alis mata & rambut. Tattoo kosmetik juga dapat digunakan untuk menggambar puting payudara setelah melakukan operasi payudara, menyamarkan vitiligo (kelainan pigmen warna pada kulit) atau menutupi tato yang tidak diinginkan.

TMI? New initialisms make it into dictionary

Can a dictionary ever have Too Much Information? Has the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gone too far in adding initialisms like LOL, OMG and FYI to its latest update?

Probably not, because even though these initialisms (initial letters sounded out as their letter names) and acronyms (initial letters sounded out as a complete word) aren't really words as such, they're increasingly frequent in their use and functionally very handy.

What's also interesting about them is that they often have a longer history than we might realise:

As is often the case, OED’s research has revealed some unexpected historical  perspectives: our first quotation for OMG is from a personal letter from 1917; the letters LOL had a previous life, starting in 1960, denoting an elderly woman (or ‘little old lady’; see LOL n./1); and the entry for FYI  [FYI phr., adj., and n.], for example, shows it originated in the language of memoranda in 1941.

Elsewhere in the same OED update, the use of the verb "to heart" is commented upon. We're no doubt all familiar with T-shirts bearing the I ♥ NY/LDN/your mum logo or something similar, but the expression "to heart" is now registering as a bona fide version of "to love":

From these beginnings, heart v. has gone on to live an existence in more traditional genres of literature as a colloquial synonym for ‘to love’

Homing in

The number you are calling has been disconnected...

Mother? Can you hear me, mother?

This article in today's G2 by Jess Cartner-Morley looks at the way in which the landline phone is dying a death. It's more a piece of cultural commentary than a linguistic discussion, but raises some quite intriguing ideas about the ways in which we communicate these days.

Coming from the generation in which we did actually dial a number by putting our pinkies in the dial and turning it round, then telling the person at the other end who we were, I can just about cope with caller display and mobile phones which use different ringtones for different callers. I can even cope with texting, even though I was taught to text by my Colchester students back in 1998 and then taught how to use predictive text by the boyfriend of one of my ex-students, embarrassingly for me quite recently... down the pub in 2008. But to me a landline was always a given, especially for having a chat to parents or siblings.

As Cartner-Morley tells us, it's all different now, even for people in their 30s and 40s:

My landline rarely rings these days. And even when it does, I usually don't answer it. It seems like an increasingly alien concept, picking up a phone without knowing who is on the other end, so as often as not I let the answerphone pick up. Oh, and I never, ever listen to landline answerphone messages. My reasoning is that a message left at a house when someone's not even there must by definition be so non-urgent that it doesn't need listening to. I assume that if anyone actually needs me, they will reach me on my mobile, or by text or email. And this, at the grand old age of 37. For millions of today's twentysomethings, who have had a mobile number since their teens and for whom a landline makes no practical sense during the transient years before they settle down, the moment of opting into landline-owning may never come if it becomes an expensive extra. My sister and my closest colleague, for instance, both have grown-up jobs and mortgages, but no landlines.

 She finishes the article by suggesting that it's probably not healthy or helpful to rely on texts, tweets and emails to conduct our lives:

It would be sad if, having crammed our lives full of texting, tweeting and status updates, we no longer have the energy to speak to people who want to talk to us. There are repercussions of cutting ourselves in or out of the loop as we please, because real community doesn't work like that. Interestingly, relatively new forms of online interaction, such as Twitter and BBM instant-messaging, have returned to a more conversational, back-and-forth style, rather than the hit-and-run approach of sending an email. Horror films have moved on from the snipped landline to the dreaded out-of-battery/low-signal plot device. But in real life, we're all running scared from a ringing phone.

 This article from the NY Times offers a similar take on the same subject, but contains the great summary "You pretty much call people on the phone when you don’t understand their e-mail".

To verb like no one has verbed before

The English language is always adding new words to its lexicon and it's also quite partial to using existing words in new ways: we're all aware of lexical and semantic changes and can probably point to several new words or new meanings that we've spotted every month, whether it's a charming new (?) word for stabbing someone or a knife used to do it (nank), a word to describe an attractive member of the opposite sex (reem, choong or boom) or an old word like optics used in a strange new context (to describe public perception of a war event) .

But English is also pretty flexible in its adaptation of a word from one class to another, something that's generally called conversion or functional shift, but which has often been called verbing too. It's probably worth being clear here that we're not talking about derivational morphology where a word is altered so it functions in a new word class (like walk - walker, run - runner, smile - smiler) but a straightforward shift from (usually) a noun to a verb without any extra bits (morphemes) being added.

On Radio 4's Today Programme this morning, a housing expert talked about the process of staircasing and referred to shared ownership buyers who staircase their share of a property. The process is probably familiar to lots of public sector workers (including me) who have found that shared ownership is about the only way they could afford to buy a house of their own, but clearly sounded a bit odd to the presenter, John Humphrys, who needed an explanation of this term.

Jonathan Marks on the MacMillan Dictionary blog has looked at other examples of this process in a number of posts about the subject and he provides lots of good illustrations. Have a look here, here and here to see what kinds of examples he cites.

It's also interesting to look up some examples in the OED and see if you can see which usage came first. I was under the impression that to ramp was a fairly recent verb ("to ramp up prices") and it may be fairly recent in its use as a phrasal verb (with the up particle) but its use as a verb predates its appearance as a noun by about 300 years, although the various different meanings of the word may slightly complicate that.

Afternoon on Stob Ban

Mei, Google Akan Luncurkan Situs Saingan Facebook?

Informasi terbaru itu dihembuskan oleh blog teknologi The Next Web. Google diramalkan akan memamerkan Google Circle di Austin, Texas.

Media sosial memang menjadi perhatian pihak Google. Wakil Presiden layanan lokasi Google, Marissa Mayer pernah menyebutkan Google sedang bekerja menciptakan sistem rekomendasi sosial berbasis lokasi.

Meskipun begitu, juru bicara Google, seperti dikutip Telegraph membantah dan menolak memberikan keterangan lebih lanjut.

“Google tidak meluncurkan produk di acara apapun. Kami tidak ingin memberikan komentar atas rumor dan spekulasi,” katanya.

Kabar burung itu terus berhembus mengingat Google biasanya memamerkan produk baru di acara bergengsi ini. Pada konferensi Google I/O tahun lalu, perusahaan meluncurkan Google TV.

Selain itu, Google I/0 di 2009, Google meluncurkan Google Wave, layanan kolaborasi yang saat ini sudah tidak dimanfaatkan lagi. (inilah/ketok.com)

RIP Smiley Culture

It was really sad to hear of the death of Smiley Culture, the genius behind Cockney Translation and Police Officer, in really strange and disturbing circumstances this week.


The lyrics of Cockney Translation were some of the first to really address the ways in which Caribbean slang and dialect and home-grown varieties like Cockney were starting to come together to create what most of would recognise as Multicultural London English/ Multi-ethnic youth dialect  these days. While the song is all about differences in slang, it's the shared subject matter and the celebration of different words that make this such a great song, especially considering the time when it first came out and the social unrest and race riots that had been part of the landscape around the early 1980s.

Musically and lyrically Smiley Culture led the way for people like The Streets, Lethal Bizzle, Dizzee Rascal and many other performers who've been happy to mix and match words from different strands of their ethnic and cultural backgrounds to create a new form of speech.

RIP David Emmanuel AKA Smiley Culture

Tweeting and blogging and everything in between

I've just been to a lecture on Twitter and digital identity, delivered by Dr Claire Warwick of the Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL and it was interesting to hear different angles on how we create identities online and through microblogging resources like Twitter. Some of it is clearly linguistic - the words we choose to use that reveal something about who we are or the identity we wish to present to others - but other parts of the talk touched on areas that were a bit more sociological: who uses these new media forms, differences between digital natives and newcomers, gender and identity performance.

Claire Warwick mentioned that gender and language was an area they were keen to explore, but it was perhaps a bit disappointing that having been enlightened by Deborah Cameron's brilliant lecture on the Myth of Mars and Venus at the emagazine conference yesterday, I heard the old stereotypes about men doing x and women doing y - even if it is updated for a new medium like Twitter - being repeated.

There may well be some significant gender differences in whether we use @replies, or if we "chat" and/or "tell", but it's probably not helpful to reduce it all to broad generalisations in this way, and maybe more revealing to look at language and identity within genders too.

Anyway, this is only a minor gripe and one I'm sure they'll address when they start their research into the whole area. The lecture was really interesting, particularly for a relatively new tweep (tweeting person? Twitter person?) like me. The lecture is (or soon will be) available from here.

Eleshere, this blog post about the word blog is a good read. We all know about the noun blog being a blend of web + log, but did you know it's being used as an intransitive verb to blog and as a transitive verb to blog something? Here, you can find out more.

Tattoo Ikan Dolphin

Emagazine Language conference is tomorrow!

Just a reminder that the conference I've been working on with Barbara Bleiman and the English and Media Centre is happening tomorrow at the Institute of Education, London. You can see the details here and the full programme of speakers is here.

If you're coming along, please say hi. If you mention Haribo and perform a secret handshake you'll get mentioned on the blog next week.

Tattoo Lebah untuk Cewek

Ada kebiasaan cewek meletakkan tattoo lebah di belakang daun kuping

Ilmuwan Temukan Cara Tingkatkan Daya Tahan Baterai 100 x Lipat

 

Caranya adalah dengan mengubah cara kerja memory digital perangkat tersebut, karena ini mengkonsumsi sebagian besar daya baterai.

 

Diketahui, memory ponsel saat ini memiliki kawat logam tipis, yang akan dilewati aliran listrik untuk menerima data. Tim insinyur ini berpendapat, jika ukuran komponen yang digunakan untuk menyimpan dan menerima data bisa diperkecil, maka arus listrik yang mengalir juga akan berkurang.

 

Para ilmuwan ini pun menawarkan solusi dengan menggunakan tube nano karbon yang berukuran 10 ribu kali lebih kecil daripada rambut manusia.

 

"Dengan menggunakan kontak berskala nano, kami bisa menggunakan listrik yang jauh lebih sedikit. Saya rasa, setiap orang yang bermasalah dengan begitu banyak charger dan men-charge perangkat mereka setiap malam akan menginginkan ponsel ataupun laptop yang memiliki daya tahan batere hingga beberapa pekan atau bulan," jelas Profesor Eric Pop yang memimpin proyek ini.

 

Prof Pop menambahkan, metode ini bisa meningkatkan efisiensi ponsel sedemikian rupa sehingga ponsel nantinya bisa beroperasi dengan memanfaatkan udara panas, energi kinetik atau energi matahari. (Okezone/Telegraph/ketok.com)

Baby Gaga

a view from one of the cameras

Deb Roy's longitudinal study of his own son's acquisition of language is the focus of this TED lecture. It's a clear explanation of how he went about gathering many hundreds of thousands of hours of data and some observations about what the data tells us about how his child's language developed over three years, particularly the social dimensions of interaction and acquisition. The idea of feedback cycles - caregiver speech and child's speech working together in an ongoing process of acquisition and influence - is a key point from the lecture.

One particular case study is his son's movement from gaga to water (from about 5 minutes in). The "wordscapes" created from the data are pretty amazing to look at and the tagging of particular words is a particularly fascinating way of mapping language to events. So, for example, Roy and his team have mapped the child's use of words to where he and other family members were in the house and who they were talking with. Here's the wordscape for water:

"water" wordscape, with peaks in the kitchen

You can also read more about the study in this pdf.

What's also interesting, as the lecture goes on, is Roy's team's application of this model to patterns of language usage beyond his own son and house and into the wider world, where mapping of language is linked very closely to national media events.

You say tomato; I say potato

The British Library's research into accents in the UK has attracted media interest, with some of the first findings being made public. This report in the Daily Mail takes a look at some of the results and offers the view that we aren't adopting American pronunciation as rapidly as some had assumed. Of course, this being the Daily Mail, they have to build in some kind of reactionary nationalism, stating that "many British English speakers are refusing to use American pronunciations" (my italics) which suggests that it's a conscious decision, when change often doesn't work like that.

Jonnie Robinson, curator of the Evolving English exhibition at the British Library (and speaker at the Emagazine Language conference this Wednesday) is quoted in the story:

British English and American English continue to be very distinct entities and the way both sets of speakers pronounce words continues to differ. But that doesn’t mean that British English speakers are sticking with traditional pronunciations while American English speakers come up with their own alternatives. In fact, in some cases it is the other way around. British English, for whatever reason, is innovating and changing while American English remains very conservative and traditional in its speech patterns.

John Wells looks at The Guardian's coverage of the study here and is a bit more sceptical about what the results tell us.

On a similar theme, but this time focusing on dialect and spelling, the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan writes in the Daily Telegraph about the influence of  the internet on spreading American English (rather than English English) around the world.

Tattoo Anjing

Gempa, Jepang Umumkan 'Darurat Nuklir'

Trojan Serang Ponsel Blackberry

“Seperti varian Zeus di desktop, program jahat ini tak mengubah tatap muka perangkat. Program jahat ini bisa menghapus dirinya sendiri dari daftar aplikasi agar tak bisa dideteksi,” kata analis Trend Micro, Patrick Estavillo.

Ketika Zeus terinstal di BlackBerry, perangkat akan mengirim pesan konfirmasi ke administrator dan akhirnya bisa dikontrol pihak lain. Zeus Trojan ini betujuan mengawasi informasi pribadi pengguna, terlebih ketika pengguna bertransaksi online banking.

Menurut Estavillo, akibatnya penyerang bisa memblokir panggilan, mengubah administrator perangkat atau mematikan ponsel. Seperti dikutip cioinsight, sistem operasi (OS) BlackBerry bukanlah satu-satunya target serangan Zeus.

Estavillo memperingatkan, varian lain berciri sama telah mencoba menyerang smartphone ber-OS Symbian dan Windows Mobile.

"Pengguna sebaiknya waspada saat menginstall aplikasi atau mengklik link yang dikirim pengguna asing,” paparnya. Pasalnya, hal tersebut bisa menjadi link ke aplikasi jahat. (inilah/ketok.com)

Video Seks Artis Jebak Pengguna Facebook

More is more

intensive reading?

There's a really good response by Melody Dye on the Scientopia blog to the Robert Lane Greene article in the NY times (which I blogged about here) this week.

Dye, who is a cognitive science researcher at Stanford University, argues that Greene's article doesn't go far enough in its attack on prescriptivist thinking and she makes several interesting points about reading as well as writing. She argues - quoting Joshua Foer - that people's reading habits have changed from "intensive" reading of a very few texts to "extensive" reading,  valuing quantity over "quality".

Dye's argument is that as we get more choice over what we read - increasingly being able to pursue our own niche interests in music, film, literature, TV - a bottom-up model of language change is exerting its power more than ever. If standardisation is all about imposing a top-down model then, she argues, what's happening now is that more "writers" (if we're calling texting, tweeting and Facebooking "writing", and I'm happy to) are writing more stuff and it's less standardised than ever before.

extensive reading?

But that does rely on the assumption that standardisation is designed to (as Dye puts it)  "conventionalize, and even ‘crystalize,’ our language according to certain norms, and to make it more uniformly patterned ". Straight after that she adds "Education is one forcible means of (attempting to) root out non-standard ‘grammars’ (such as African American Vernacular English) and of homogenizing usage"...all of which tends to sound to me like she's arguing that education can be a big bad force for social control, a viewpoint that's problematic for me as an English teacher (who wants to see everyone get a good education in a standard form of English) and as a politically left-wing person (who values non-standard forms too and sees them as part of a wider picture of language use), but for two very different reasons.

Does education really have to be like this? Does the teaching of a standard form necessarily preclude an appreciation and study of non-standard varieties? You could argue that the very existence of  Standard English means that all other varieties - and remember, Standard English was chosen very deliberately out of existing varieties of English - are treated as inferior.

You could equally argue though, that if we don't have a standard we have no shared language, no means of communicating with each other on a level playing field and that the ones who will really suffer are not those at the top of society but those at the bottom. In this case, Standard English might be seen as a democratising force, giving linguistic power to everyone in a society.

I suppose what I'd like to see* (and what I think is partly delivered in the English Language A level, if not elsewhere in the English curriculum) is a model like this that opens up the history and development of English as a language, and lets us look at how it became what it is now and where it's going. It should be a model that allows us to interrogate the idea of a standard and see how it's become important over time, while helping students develop their own grasp of that standard, and their understanding of all the non-standard forms around us - many of which like texting and tweeting are in fact changing what might be the Standard English of years to come.

Melody Dye develops her argument by looking outside the natural homes of English - the UK and the USA - too:

In broadening our picture of the forces at work in language change, we might also consider how English is being influenced from the outside.  According to one statistic, there are now something like three times as many non-native speakers of English as there are native speakers.  English is thus being reappropriated by foreign speakers, both on our shores (in the tides of immigrants that come to this country) and off it (in English creoles and pidgins, and in widespread lexical borrowing), and these reformulations are, in turn, shifting the normative space of what is acceptable.

Where this fits in to the study of Language Change and Language Discourses at A level is interesting, I think, and should allow you plenty of scope for discussion and exploration in your work. The English Language is clearly changing - it always has - but is it now changing so quickly, thanks to technology creating so many new users of English all over the world and spreading non-standard forms  - that what we know as Standard English is rapidly disappearing?  Perhaps a new standard is being formed even now, a type of English that we can all understand but which doesn't much resemble the Standard English we've seen before. And maybe that new standard is actually being created away from the places previously considered to be the home of the English language.



Edited 11.46 11/03/11
I'd also like to see world peace and international socialism. Is that not too much to ask?