This is Part 3. If you missed them, here is Part 1 and here is Part 2.

TD: So, given that you can have multiple pronunciations of a word, and presumably multiple meanings of a word, is the continued existence of dictionaries – whether paper or digital – threatened by internet enterprises like Wiktionary or even the Urban Dictionary?

CS: Dictionaries basically are becoming an online thing. The Oxford English Dictionary is an online entity; it does of course also exist in physical form, but in terms of the updates that happen to it, and the way that most people work with it and use it, it’s an online thing. Now the ones you mentioned are crowd-sourced. If they’re not the sort of sites that scrape dictionary content and then present it, a lot of them are crowd sourced. I think that contemporary dictionary producers are interested in crowd sourcing, but that there’s a value to expert editorial input to weigh things and to make sure that there’s a balance, and people aren’t creating things the way they wish they were, rather than the way things actually are.

TD: That makes sense. Again, this is from the linguist, so do forgive me. Can dictionaries ever be subversive?

CS: I’d say lexicographers can certainly be subversive, yeah! There’s not a lot of scope for subversion in the pronunciation part of a dictionary entry, although probably not none; the decision for instance to include the northern ‘A’ (bath, glass) [rhyming with ass, not arse] forms subverted the norm of giving only the close RP versions.

In parts of the dictionary that aren’t my specialism I’m wary of speaking for my colleagues too much, but say you have a dictionary entry. As well as the pronunciation, part of speech, definition, and the etymology, you’d have some quotations or example sentences.

CS: Those are drawn from massive corpora of real data –we don’t make them up, they just exist in the world and an editor picks a few to illustrate exactly how the word might be used. Now if you’re picking three from a hundred, in exercising that choice you might subvert people’s expectations. For instance if it were a word that was particularly associated with one sort of thing you might – and you’d do it partly for lexicographical reasons because you want to demonstrate the range – pick one that would surprise or upset expectations.
I invited my colleague Fiona McPherson to weigh in on this, she says:

The main purpose in selecting the quotation evidence is, course, to reflect the way the term you are defining is used. I’m looking for apt, clear examples which help the reader to understand, rather than baffle them – otherwise I’m not doing my job. In saying that, it is the one area where we can get a little creative. All other things being equal, I do get a kick out of choosing an example from one of my favourite books, or perhaps one that shows my football team in a good light. I do also enjoy choosing a publication that is more unusual – maybe something that is less canonical than those which spring to mind when you think of the OED. Working as I do with new words, you often get that opportunity as those publications tend to be where that type of vocabulary is found. But that is only possible if the quotation is one which aids understanding. That always has to be the main objective.

TD: How would you explain the concept of a dictionary to an alien?

CS: Well, what’s the alien’s language? Does the alien have language in the way we understand it?

TD: Yes, let’s assume that there is some way to actually communicate with the alien.

CS: Okay. I’m going to restrict myself to talking about the pronunciation bits of the dictionary.

TD: Fair enough.

CS: Assuming the alien had some language, and that their language was produced physiologically by some part of their alien anatomy, I would say: these symbols here, the transcription symbols, are just a sequential indication of which bit of your anatomy – which bit of alien anatomy – interacts with which other bit of alien anatomy, to produce the sound which combines to make the language.

TD: That’s an excellent description!

[CS laughs]

TD: And probably helpful to non-aliens as well to be honest [laughs]. If you could bring any obsolete item of lexis back into popular use, what would it be?

CS: Oooh. One of the nice things about OED is that nothing gets removed. There are a lot of entries in OED which are obsolete, but they won’t be expunged or deleted. I come across words a lot, actually, as I’m working through, and I think ‘oh that’s ripe for coming back’.

TD: Linguistics questions aside, a couple of quick ones to end with. You mentioned you have a doctorate in sociophonetics, and obviously you have various academic interests. What role do you think academics can or should play in the production or consumption of geek culture?

CS: I was thinking about this recently, because I was looking at the term aca-fan. Often people are very keen to draw distinctions, you know, ‘it’s not the same as being someone who is simultaneously a fan of something and an academic’. I don’t think there should be an artificial distinction; I don’t think that academics fundamentally think about things in a different way. We might give ourselves more space to pick things apart, or we might bring particular frameworks of thinking about something to bear on whatever our particular fandom might be, but I see it as organically belonging together. And I think really anybody can analyse, if you listen to people geeking out – so, I enjoy tabletop games, I enjoy comics books, I enjoy Buffy and various…

TD: Anyone who doesn’t enjoy Buffy I don’t trust [she says, tongue in cheek].

CS: Well thinking about Buffy as an example, I’ve watched Buffy for many years and talked about Buffy with many people, friends who are academics and not, including people who were academically working on Buffy and not, and I don’t see a fundamental difference. You can pull it apart on gender lines, you can see things on a subsequent watching you hadn’t seen before, and that might be informed by your academic work or your readings or but those aren’t things that are locked up in the ivory tower especially, or they shouldn’t be.

TD: That’s a great answer. One of the things we do on the site quite a lot is talk about tropes. Do you have a favourite trope?

CS: Tropes are one of the things that feed a lot of the potential new additions to the dictionary in the areas I look at. Often they’re fairly niche and specific, and so they might not make it over the hurdle to get included. Something like 'Mary Sue' for instance as a trope, or 'Sexy Lamp Test' is certainly something that we’re looking at. I was trying to pin down a definition of Strong Female Character recently – the thing with tropes is that they’re really slippery. You know exactly what you mean by them, but they can be hard to nail down. I don’t think I have a favourite one; I’m very interested in them, and it’s fun to spot them, but I don’t think there’s a particular one that’s my favourite one of all.

TD: Are there any that you would like to stop seeing?

CS: Oh plenty! I’m trying to think of things I’ve watched recently.

TD: I know as soon as one puts that hat on then it’s just easy to get ragey about all the many things that they should really stop doing…

CS: When I think about tropes that really annoy me, it often boils down to limitations placed on female characters, of one sort of another.

TD: Agreed. Finally, do you have any recommendations for our readers: films to watch, TV series you’ve loved, books to read, or other recommendations?

CS: Oooh. I’ll pick ones that do interesting things with language…

TD: That would be great.

CS: Ok, a comic book – I’m sure many of your readers will already be familiar with it, but Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga series does really interesting things with language. It uses an existing invented language for one of its languages – Esperanto – and I’m very interested how languages get used in graphic novels in different ways. So yeah, Saga would be one.

I wouldn’t say I’d wholeheartedly recommend it for various reasons, but there’s lot of interesting language stuff in Game of Thrones, and I do enjoy watching it, and problematising it as we academics love to.

I enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general, and there are some cool language things that go on for instance in Captain America: Civil War. I mentioned Scarlet Witch already, but also Zemo, Bucky and of course Black Panther with the Xhosa. I spoke about some of that at Nine Worlds this year. Agents of SHIELD has some nice language and translation bits too.

I’m trying to think if there are any board games with really good pronunciation dimensions to them but not among the ones I love, really. Although the word ‘meeple’ – which is a little character figure from a board game – is finding its way into the dictionary.

TD: Oh that’s cool.

CS: Well we’re seeing what we can do.

TD: Thank you very much for a really interesting chat!

CS: Thank you!

NB. This interview has been edited for clarity.

This is the third in a series of interviews with authors, developers, critics, journalists, and academics. If you'd like to make a suggestion, or be interviewed, do get in touch.

TD: Hi Catherine! Firstly, tell me in a couple of sentences what your job involves as Head of Pronunciation.

CS: My job involves researching and advising on the way words ought to be pronounced. When one of our dictionaries is going to have pronunciations – either in the transcription form or audio – I would be the person who would ultimately show editors how to do that, teach editors how to do the transcription, and check them before they get published. And when it comes to audio (which is a relatively new thing for the Oxford English Dictionary) I also oversee the procedure of getting all the recordings made and put online. I can come on to it later, but something we’ve done quite recently in Oxford English Dictionary is, as well as British and American English, we’ve made recordings for other varieties of English, so that’s been a recent focus for me.

TD: Very cool. Yes, I definitely have some questions about the types of English and the types of accents that get used, which we will get to shortly (Editor's note: in part 2!). But first, what is your favourite recent addition to Oxford Dictionaries?

CS: Oxford English Dictionary is the big dictionary – the most dominant large dictionary that I work on – but the other dictionary that I do a lot of work on is the one that gets presented when you look at OxfordDictionaries.com, the free online one. It is an amalgam of two print dictionaries: the Oxford Dictionary of English and the New Oxford American Dictionary. That gets regular updates in a certain way, and the OED has quarterly updates – new stuff gets added every quarter – and my work often focuses on the quarterly updates for OED. I think in the public mind, OED and Oxford Dictionaries are…

TD: Synonymous.

CS: Hopefully they don’t actually contradict each other too much! [TD laughs] But they’re two different beasts.

TD: I see! Well, you should feel free to answer any of my questions then in relation to either, or to both.

CS: Okay. I’m thinking favourite recent addition still. There were some nice ones on the shortlist for word of the year – woke, and hygge, and Latinx, for instance. When I come to Nine Worlds I’m collecting examples of usage and it gets fed in, and there have been a few that are some way through the pipeline. One of the ones I collected back in 2014 is actually just about to be published in OED, which is extra exciting for me – it’s “Mary Sue” – I’m so happy that she’s going in to our dictionary at last.

TD: You’ve given talks at Nine Worlds for the last couple of years. What motivates you to get involved in something like that?

CS: Well, although the focus of my work is on how words are pronounced, everybody at the dictionary is encouraged to think about the entire process. I have colleagues who specialise in new words – in drafting new words, and researching what words we ought to add – but they’re always interested in input from different people, and that aligns with people’s different interests and specialisms. And so it happens in different ways. One of my colleagues in New Words recently was putting together a lot of words around parenting; there’s a lot of new vocabulary around things like cloth nappies, baby-led weaning, baby-wearing with slings, and so forth. It’s quite a generative area for vocabulary. And so she would look at that area, and I had some thoughts of my own there, and similarly just with Nine Worlds: the area of things like gaming and the political side of what goes on at Nine Worlds in terms of gender politics, sexual identity and gender identity – that’s another fertile area for new words, and new usages for old words as well. Because that’s something I’m into anyway – popular culture and geekery – it seemed like a good place to say ‘Come and tell me about what words you use all the time but you don’t see in dictionaries; let us catch up!’.

TD: Before you were at Oxford Dictionaries – and I will come back to that, because I’ve got quite a lot of questions about dictionaries – you were part of the BBC Pronunciation Unit.

CS: That’s right. My chequered past involved doing a doctorate in sociophonetics (a branch of linguistics). I specialised in accents and dialects, and looked particularly at accommodation, which is how, when you speak to someone with a different accent, your own accent changes. Or somebody’s regional accent changes over their life with moving around, with contact, or with wanting to present a different persona. So my research was sociolinguistics with a particular focus on pronunciation. And then after I finished that I went to work in the Pronunciation Unit, which is where I was for several years, then had a little baby-having interlude, and now I’m at Oxford Dictionaries.

The Pronunciation Unit’s job is to help broadcasters pronounce anything they need to know how to pronounce. They might be people’s names, place names, phrases – all kinds of things really. Unlike my current work which focuses on English, that was any language that they needed.

TD: Cool.

CS: Not all of the BBC is in English, of course – there’s the World Service and so forth – but even if they were broadcasting in English the words and phrases often weren’t. Radio 3 might say ‘We need this Old Church Slavonic for the mass that we’re playing’, or maybe a Polish football team, or Icelandic volcano; all kinds of things! There was a very small team of linguists – phoneticians – and we used published sources (reference books etc.) but you’d also do interviews.

I’m still in touch with them, it’s quite useful for us to check in with each other sometimes. Most recently I had a call about the news story about the woman who was head of UKIP for about a week…

TD: Ah yes, for a sneeze.

CS: The story was that when she signed up to be the leader she’d written vi coactus, the Latin tag, indicating that the signature was given under duress. And I was the Latinist, they don’t have a Latinist at the moment, so I had a phone call at about half past five saying ‘We need this for the six o’clock news! Help!’. That doesn’t happen very often anymore. One of the big differences between the Pronunciation Unit and dictionaries is the different time pressures, different time scales.

TD: I suppose so! You’ve just mentioned there that people’s regional accents change: people change their accents depending on who they’re with, or what kind of characteristics they’re wanting to portray. We see that quite a lot in fiction, and I wonder if you have any thoughts on what accents can be used to denote in fiction. It seems that sometimes its class, sometimes its personality. Are the kinds of patterns that you see like the kinds of patterns you see in the real world?

CS: Thinking back to my research – which is obviously several years ago now – I would imagine that in fiction, as in the real world, people will tap into certain associations. Let’s restrict ourselves to talking about urban regional accents of the British Isles. My own work was about Liverpool English, and I’ve got family background in Liverpool, and all of my subjects were Liverpudlians: all young people either living in Liverpool or recently moved from Liverpool. I wanted to track how they did or didn’t lose their accent. Now Liverpool is a city that people have a lot of opinions about, lots of stereotypes cluster around it, and the same is true of Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham, and indeed, London. And however much you might want to challenge or problematize the reality of the stereotypes that cluster around those cities, you can still see people using a character who speaks with a Scouse accent as a shorthand for somebody who matches those stereotypical values.

CS: I remember reading an accent study once that looked at different scores for levels of likability: do you trust this person, would you lend this person money, you know. And another about midwives, and people’s favourite accent for their midwife to have. It wasn’t a very rigorous quantitative study but it was, you know, ‘Ah yes, the lovely Welsh midwife is what you want’.

Similarly, I’ve done some talks and research on invented languages in speculative fiction and in sci-fi, and while it’s obviously more difficult – because they’re in a newly created world, and you don’t have those pre-existing stereotypes to draw meaning from – I think there are still ways to create that even with constructed languages.

TD: Thank you – that’s genuinely really interesting.

CS: One of the most fully elaborated sets is in Tolkien, you definitely see there’s a diglossia situation with Elvish languages, with Quenya. I’m on thin ice with Tolkien, but there are different registers, used for different situations, and that’s a classic illustration of diglossia.

TD: It’s interesting that you mention Tolkien, and how accents can be shorthand for things. Sometimes they can be shorthand for positive things, but with High Fantasy, often it’s negative. You’ll see the elves speaking with RP accents, and you’ll see the orcs speaking with Cockney accents,

CS: Or something rustic, some kind of West Country (for the hobbits).

TD: Exactly, and when you decide that one accent is associated with the definitely evil lot then we might have some problems.

CS: You get that with foreign accented English as well.

TD: Yes.

CS: I did a panel at Nine Worlds this year called The use and function of ‘foreign’ languages in genre fiction, where we were looking at the use of language in different ways, including how characters are othered, how well or not they can communicate and so on. Take the trajectory of someone like Scarlet Witch in Age of Ultron: she’s initially an enemy character, and she and her brother have quite thick impenetrable accents. Then in Civil War, she’s much more Americanised. Of course, time has passed, she’s part of the Avengers team; there are lots of in-story reasons for her speech changing, her accent becoming softer and more Americanised. But it also operates thematically to position her character differently.

And so ends Part 1. Our discussion continues in Part 2.

This is the third in a series of interviews with authors, developers, critics, journalists, and academics. If you'd like to make a suggestion, or be interviewed, do get in touch.