English 12 - Origins of English Literature Test

Linguistic nationalism

• desire to adopt national accents or phrases or pronunciations to project a national identity

  • zee or zed?

  • pop or soda?

  • biscuits!

youth lang dev

• happens as a teen due to peers & internet

• figuring out identity

• desire to align with certain peer groups/power and against certain peer groups/power

weak ties

new introductions to community (via travel, technology, resource trade, marriage, etc.)

strong ties

regular community strongly linked via language & culture

women as linguistic disruptors

• perceived lack of economic / political power; innovating language disrupts power

• socialized to be more social and communicative; more social connections = more linguistic exposure

• socialized to be primary caregivers, so language is passed on from women

black folks as lang innovators

• language disruption as response to oppressive systems / policing of language and expression

• language adopted by white kids who use it without context, community, understanding of BVE grammar, no experience of discrimination or marginalization

• once white kids popularize it, corporations poach it to make money

• Black innovators aren't given credit or recompense

Geoffrey Chaucer writing “The Canterbury Tales”

Late 1300s CE

Great Vowel Shift

1400 - 1700 CE

Elizabethan Era

1558 - 1603 CE

King James publishes the first authoritative English bible

1611 CE

Shakespeare’s First Folio

1623 CE

Printing press was invented

1476 CE

Late Modern Eng

1800 - 2000 CE

Shakespeare creating public theatre

1590s - 1610s CE

“Dialect maps are just the beginning of our linguistic differences: every time we talk with some people more than others, we have the chance to develop a shared vocabulary, whether that's families, friends, schools…” (27).

1. Linguistic nationalism (elaborate further)

2. Familect: Set of invented words/phrases used between family members or an intimate group of friends (i.e., misheard song lyrics, children’s coinages, etc)

3. Cliques at highschools; power structure of schools, the jock/burnout rivalry, different vowel sounds between cliques, the group of girls that didn’t care about high school popularity and instead adopting linguistic habits linked to intellectualism

4. Dialect maps refer to geographical location, but McColloch asserts that families and groups of friends tend to develop their own linguistic features as well → relates to strong ties

5. Regional dialects still exist even after standardized language, and we retain our local ways of speaking when using social media

“Dialect maps are just the beginning of our linguistic differences: every time we talk with some people more than others, we have the chance to develop a shared vocabulary, whether that's families, friends, schools…” (27). (horror)

• Jutes, Anxons and Saxons merging into Old Eng

• Celts language and culture flourishing before the Romans

• Germanic invasions push Celts into three places, places now known as Wales, Ireland Scotland

• The langs above are proto-Germanic langs that have all developed differently in Britain Germany, Scandinavian countries

“We’re especially likely to pick up new words when we’re first entering a community” (32).

1. Studies showing that new accounts on internet forums adopt newer iterations of words than older accounts (beer jargon → “aroma” vs. “S” for smell)

2. Suggests that people are more open to adopting new words when they are younger

3. Suggests that the uniqueness of adolescence is that it is the last time a whole population enters a social group at the exact same time (adults don’t all change jobs or move cities or make new friends at varying ages, unlike teens) → easier to track and explains why adolescents are more easily influenced by new linguistic trends

And you were probably in early adolescence: the stage when linguistic influences tend to shift from caregivers to peers” (28-29)

1. Rephrase → Early adolescence is characterized as [quote]

   1. Teenagers using social media at the same age they start abiding by their peers’ linguistic habits; however, language evolution is natural for every generation and we shouldn’t attribute every teen slang to social media

   2. Picking up words from online friends → communities intermingling and exchanging linguistic features

   3. Teenagers trying to find identity/community

   4. Rejecting certain norms/peer groups/power and adopting certain norms/peer groups/power → highschool cliques

1. [T]hey keep imitating and building on the linguistic habits of their slightly older, cooler peers as they go through their teens, and then plateau in their twenties” (29).

3. \

   1. Determined by linguist Henrietta Cedergren → conducted a study in Panama City tracking linguistic innovations and fluctuations in pronoun

   2. People generally pick up the most new linguistic habits as pre-teens/teens and retain those habits as they enter adulthood, which is why there’s a disconnect between how newer teens communicate vs. young adults + the generations before

   3. Expletives are an exception as they are socially taboo, whereas other words are subtle social differences, making them last in adulthood

1. “Research in other centuries, languages, and regions continues to find that women lead linguistic change, in dozens of specific changes in specific cities and regions” (34).

1. Men tend to follow a generation later

2. Potential reasons why women tend to be language disruptors: Women being primary caregivers of children, more linguistically innovative to compensate for lack of economic/social leverage, and how women generally have more social ties

3. Modern examples: “Like” to introduce a quotation or various media trends.

4. With more social ties, women are more exposed to weak/strong ties resulting in collective linguistic change

2. “People followed the norms of their cluster rather than their gender” (36).

1. Differentiate between gender and social context

2. “Cluster” meaning online clusters based on interests; men tend to write topic-based blogs while women tend to write diary-style blogs, people on social media would form natural clusters based on their interests and none of them attracted purely female users or purely male users

3. Gender skews still exists but are never absolute

4. Examples of interest groups: Sports, fans, politics, etc

5. A woman in the sports cluster would tweet like their fellow sports fans instead of like a typical woman

6. These types of studies excludes gender non-conforming people

7. Online networks influencing language more than gender → relate to quotes abt networks/communities/societies

1. “[B]oth strong and weak ties have an important role to play in linguistic change: the weak ties introduce the new forms in the first place, while strong ties spread them once they’re introduced” (40).

1. Strong ties: People you feel close with

2. Weak ties: Acqaintances, people you have mutual ties with, people you have regular interactions with (may not always be positive interactions)

3. Weak ties are the greater source of new information (new gossip + opportunities), thus, weak ties lead to more linguistic change

4. Random variations of lang are the source of linguistic change in strong ties → if you have a friend who uses “water fountain” and you use “drinking fountain” you may start using their iteration or they start using yours

5. In close-knit communities (strong ties), one linguistic option caught on quickly and became the dom term

6. In loose-knit communities (weak ties), all options remained and none became dom

7. Mixed networks behaved like Eng → one option is dom but the others never completely disappear and eventually one of them overtakes the dom options

1. “[B]oth strong and weak ties have an important role to play in linguistic change: the weak ties introduce the new forms in the first place, while strong ties spread them once they’re introduced” (40). (historical)

8. History of English and Icelandic: They have a common Germanic ancestor → Old English and Old Norse used to be mostly interchangeable until their histories started to diverge → Icelandic has experienced little change while English has experienced a lot of lingustic evolution→ So despite Beowulf being written in Old Eng rather than Old Icelandic, Icelanders would have an easier time understanding the poem

   1. Reason being that Iceland has close-knit communities while English has had numerous sources of weak ties over its history → invasions, imperial expansion, looser-knit cities

   2. Military superiority/invasions leading to more weak ties (ex. Vikings conquering Britain and introducing Old Norse words)

   3. Colonization → new world trade/exploration, words borrowed from other cultures to describe things that didn’t exist in England

   4. Religious turmoil speeding up the mass production of books and more lang spread

Tech advancements → lang evolution

• Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” being published just as paper production shifts from being animal-based to plant-based → more affordable paper, more people buy books and his poem decentralizes French and puts pride in Eng again + his characters are differentiated by how they each speak which indicates their social class → introduced words we still use today like fart

• Invention of printing press → people can buy Shakespeare’s plays → bunch of weak ties from people using the phrases/words he invented when they build their own empires

• Industrial/scientific evolution means you need new terms for new inventions → reach back to Latin/Greek + THE INITERNET :)

Military advancements → strong ties + eng spread

• Battle of Hastings → French becomes higher class and French words enter eng

• Hundred Years War → Plague kills people educated in Latin/French and English speakers take their positions of power

• Vikings conquering Britain and Norse words entering English (Thor’s day, berserk, gun, ransack, hundreds more words)

• Swedish, Danish, Anglo-Saxon ruling classes intermarrying and fighting, forming more strong/weak ties

• Colonization

Quarto vs Folio

• Paper folded into four

• Paper folded into two

Tech → lang elitism

• Most printing presses were in London so that dialect dominated

• Standardization of eng rules (1604 → first eng dictionary)

• English trying to claim legitimacy by reaching back to Roman and Greek history

• Digital authoritative tools dictating what is and isnt proper eng

Shakespeare’s contributions to English

• Iambic pantemeter forced him to come up w new creative words and phrases

• Phrases become weak ties far from England

• First Skpr movie in Hindi

• People using Skpr’s impact as evidence of English’s superiority

Religious turmoil → lang dev/re

• Tension between Anglicanism and Catholicism

• Rush to print bibles and spread to the masses

Beowulf

Epic poem, blend of Christianity, Pagan, Anglo-Saxon story elements

• Monks in monasteries had scribes who recorded oral storytelling and would infuse w Catholic elements

• Comes after Catholism from the Holy Roman Empire reaches Britain

1. “Still, it’s tempting to mislabel the many words currently being appropriated into general American pop culture from African American English as ‘social media words’ simply because they’re used by young people, and young people are on social media, without giving due credit to the words’ true origins” (53).

1. Shorten quote when writing test

2. AAVE: African American Vernacular English

3. Elements of AAVE are picked up by white middle-class youth and the slang gets associated with mainstream culture and gets picked up by brands capitalizing on trends → Appropriation of AAVE by corporations to garner attention and profit

4. Such patterns have existed long before the internet (see next quote)

5. Effects of columbusing (white people appropriating non-white culture without recognizing its true origins)

6. Nowadays, the original speakers are more visible due to the internet as everyone can have a platform and digital footprints are apparent, while people in the sixties listening to Elvis are probably not aware that his music is heavily inspired by Black performers (see next quote)

2. “Terms associated with African American music, including blues, jazz, rock and roll, have all made their way into broader Western culture, while the speakers who originated them continue to be stigmatized for the way they talk” (53).

1. African Americans code-switch for safety reasons and to avoid ostracization/judgement

2. Oppressed groups of people contributing to Western culture but not getting credit and getting stigmatized for their linguistic habits

1. “But we don’t generally wake up and decide to change our minds about R. Instead, we get our social linguistic cues from people and power dynamics around us. … In the story of language, just like everywhere else, history is written by the winners” (45).

1. Linguistic elitists asserting that only one version of English should be accepted in academia

   1. Canon → Who had the privilege to produce and publish pieces of writing? who has the power to decide on which writing pieces are suitable for academic analysis? → Results in narrow Western perspectives in academics and media

   2. Putting Latin and Greek on a pedestal instead of allowing for natural linguistic change (THE RENAISSANCE) → Grammariwans being desperate to replace their own language forms w another → Many langs can’t have spelling bees because, unlike Eng, their spellings are highly logical

   3. Standardization of language conventions

   4. Language puts you in a category of class

      1. French in the Battle of Hastings (william the conquerer)

   5. R signals different social classes, like how blue can signal a sports team

   6. Linguistic elitism is a social constuct that can determine whether you can garner respect based on your linguistic habits → the amount of opportunities you are given is linked to your ability to abide by rules of linguistic elitism

2. "At a societal level, it’s a case of bias-laundering through technology that serves to reinforce people and names that are already powerful" (48).

1. In today's digital age, technology has the power to amplify and perpetuate existing biases and power dynamics. The algorithms and systems behind digital platforms can inadvertently reinforce the dominance of certain individuals or groups in terms of language and representation.

2. Tech speeds up lang evolution via social networks and decentralizes lang as unedited/informal registers are being published and recorded, but hinders lang evolution via standardizing tooks

3. This bias-laundering phenomenon can further entrench linguistic elitism and hinder the recognition and appreciation of diverse voices and linguistic expressions.

4. Tools like spellcheck, autocomplete reinforce one idea of the rules of Eng (invisible authorities that are impossible to escape)

5. Language features are not objective like how calculators are objective; standard lang are collective agreements and not universal truths, and collective agreements can change

6. Eng names are well-represented by standardizing tools while ethnic names are rejected by the machine, reinforcing which groups of people hold the most power and which groups have less power

1. As [Smirnov] put it: ‘15-year-old users in 2016 wrote more complex posts than users of any age in 2008’” (60).

1. Lang is becoming more and more complex due to the internet over time

2. Slangs and abbreviations make communication faster and more efficient, and are better at conveying emotion

   1. Shortcuts are for words people have overlearned like “u” instead of “you” and no one who uses “u” is unaware that “you” exists

1. “Internet writing is a distinct genre with its own goals, and to accomplish those goals successfully requires subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language” (62).

1. Informal writing shares space with formal styles

2. not an imperfect transcript of casual lang or a failed attempt at formal lang

3. People who use a lot of informal lang on the internet perform just as well or even better than people who never use informal lang

4. Teens aren’t using informal lang as much as the media portrays

5. Internet lang is its own genre with its own goals and is not inferior to formal lang → to succesfully accomplish those goals means to be aware of the full spectrum of lang and communication

why do you talkl the way yu do?

Human experience lol

Linguists are more interested in letters and social media posts/forums because they don’t go through ___________________________

editorial standardization that forces linguistic homogeneity and imposes linguistic elitism