The Indicative Accent – The Epicurean Cure

Catherine Sangster, On Dictionaries, Pronunciation, and Geekery (Part 1)

2017-08-11T20:40:42Z

Catherine Sangster is Head of Pronunciation for Oxford Dictionaries. Before moving into lexicography, she spent nine years in the BBC Pronunciation Unit, and completed a DPhil in sociolinguistics. Catherine's research interests include language and gender/sexuality, feminism, accents and dialects, Latin, Germanic languages, and the phonology of conlangs. In part 1 (of 3), we discuss how how words from geekdom find their way into dictionaries, pronunciation, and the significance of accents. You can find out more at Oxford Words, or keep up with Oxford Dictionaries on twitter @OxfordWords and @OED.

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.

“A ferlie he spied wi’ his e’e”: Examining the Apologetic Apostrophe

2017-08-11T21:05:23Z

In this article, we’ll explore the historical-linguistic phenomenon, the apologetic apostrophe, first developed in Scotland during the 18^thCentury in response to an ever-growing English-speaking readership’s demand for Scots literature. There’ll be a spot of Scottish history (shut up, it’s good for you), followed by analysis of how this feature of opportunistic punctuation became a pervasive, genre-intrinsic trope, and concluded with the merest dash of politics. I won’t lie: a number of passages have been directly copied and pasted from my masters dissertation due to time/willpower constraints but, if your life is feeling particularly empty one day – e.g. you’ve realised life as a waifish orphan isn’t all it’s cracked up to be/ you hate your family and wish you were a waifish orphan – it might be a fun game to guess which passages. Answers on a postcard.

The Modern Scots era was a period of enterprise and radical tumult, both for Scotland and her languages, encompassing the Treaty of Union, the Jacobite Rebellion, and the advent and diffusion of Scottish Standard English (the not-at-all embarrassing Scottish equivalent of RP). Whilst the Union of Parliaments in 1707 is often regarded as hastening the demise of the Scots language, the ensuing protests (read: shit-storm) produced a resurgence in Scots literature: ballads and oral tales and songs were revisited, revitalised and committed to paper, many for the first time. Despite this literary response, though, the political and social centre of gravity had inveterately shifted south and the century would confirm the Scots leid’s demotion to a non-standard language, a shift attended by the issues of stigmatism, stagnation and obsolescence anticipated by such reordering. The so-called Scots continuum – polarised by Broad Scots and Scottish Standard English – emerged to become the defining apparatus for approaching the language, linguistically and aesthetically; a framework that would increasingly force most readers to discriminate Scots texts via dimensions of class and education.

The influence of an English-speaking readership would be critical in the development of the Scots language’s fortunes in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries: the advent of literacy^[1], wherein Scots would be taught English linguistics norms, would result in the use of Anglicised spelling to represent /u/ in words such as hoose, moose and aboot, and the exponential erosion of Scots lexis: the departure south of Scotland’s premier political institutions limited the capacity of Scots to innovate lexically, particularly for scientific or specialist terms – there being, for instance, no specifically Scots term for evolution. Or felching. (Editor's note for the unwary: please don't google 'felching'.)

Most iconic, perhaps, of the official downfall of Scots was the introduction of the apologetic apostrophe: the item of punctuation signifying ‘missing’ letters in Scots words such as no’ (not) and fu’ (full). First used by the notable antiquarian, Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), the apologetic apostrophe was a marketing strategy by the Scottish literati, designed to make the language accessible to a swelling, middle-class English-speaking readership whilst retaining, ostensibly, the perception of authenticity. For example, observe below the opening lines of two versions of the story of Thomas the Rhymer, the first by Anna Gordon (1747-1810) and the second by Walter Scott (1771-1832):

True Thomas lay oer yon’d grassy bank

And he beheld a Ladie gay

A Ladie that was brisk and bold

Come riding o’er the fernie brae

Her skirt was of the grass green silk

Her mantle of the velvet fine

At ilka tett of her horses mane

Hung fifty silver bells and nine

Gordon, 2011: lines 1-8

True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank;

A ferlie he spied wi’ his e’e:

And there he saw a ladye bright,

Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.

Her shirt was o’ the grass-green silk,

Her mantle o’ the velvet fine;

At ilka tett of her horse’s mane,

Hang fifty siller bells and nine.

Scott, 1812: lines 1-8

Aside from obvious differences in orthography, structure and punctuation (to be revisited in a later article), note the absence of apologetic apostrophes in Gordon’s version and their introduction in Scott’s in line 2 (the latter’s version being inspired by the former’s). Unlike Scott, Gordon wrote down her version of the ballad purely for the benefit of various antiquarian scholars and writers. Scott, however, produced his version in his ballad collection, The Minstrelsy, whose ensuing popularity with English-speaking audiences would make him very rich indeed. This strategy to improve the marketability of Scottish prose and poetry would, according to Corbett, Mclure et al, have “the unfortunate effect of suggesting that Broad Scots was not a separate language system, but rather a divergent and inferior form of English” (2003: 13). Of course, as the Mongongo nut is salvaged from even the most impenetrable pile of steaming elephant shit, so too was there a redeeming factor to this affair. As a result of the uptake of textual transmissions of Scots works by the antiquarians and other interested parties, “from the eighteenth century onwards there is an exponential growth in the variety of literary forms in which Scots is used” (Bann & Corbett, 2015: 67). So that’s nice.

It’s important to differentiate between an apologetic apostrophe and a simple contraction – something this linguistics podcast fails to do. They argue that contracting over to o’er is an apologetic apostrophe – which is incorrect. Crack out the pitchforks and dismiss their lies! Possibly burn their holdings. Leer at their cat and thus make him uncomfortable… Contracting over to o’er is a common method, evident throughout the history of English, for shoehorning bi- (and sometimes tri-) syllabic words into monosyllabic varieties for the purposes of metrical rhythm e.g. if you’re writing to a meter of iambic tetrameter (four feet of dee-dum) but have nine syllables, that just won’t do. What they’re referencing is an eliding apostrophe – NOT an apologetic one. Be vigilant and stay safe, kids.

Someone really ought to write a history of the apologetic apostrophe – indeed, a detailed history of the apostrophe itself would be fascinating (fuck you, it would be). I say this only because, in the course of the last three hundred years, the apologetic apostrophe went through a period of radical evolution, transforming from a linguistic unit of accessibility and into a literary device, and the details of this mutation are unclear. By what manner (and media) did the apologetic apostrophe diffuse? At what pace? Was there more than a single country of diffusive origin, or is this a singular Scottish innovation? Or, one wonders aghast, is the literary device an independent invention, originating independently from its linguistic cousin? If you don’t find out, I’ll have to do the donkey work and I tire so very easily.

The influence of an English-speaking readership would be critical in the development of the Scots language’s fortunes in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Despite the fug of terra incognita, the apologetic apostrophe made the transition from linguistic feature to literary device and, as with all things literary, the function of the apologetic apostrophe in fiction seems less concerned with accessibility than it is expressing a characteristic of its respective speaker. Question: recall, if you can, instances of the apologetic apostrophe in novels, poems, video games etc. What was the nature of the speaker? An august elf? A sagacious wizard? A young hero, emerging into adulthood and struggling to not masturbate for 500 pages? You’re fuckin’ right it wisnae. The apologetic apostrophe in literature has (almost) become universally applied as part of a wider characterising apparatus wherein supporting characters of certain personalities, such as the brutish minion, the sweet-but-simple friend, are given non-standard dialects – indicated by apologetic apostrophes – to indicate their natures. Observe the two following examples:

“An’ here’s Harry!” exclaims Hagrid, when he meets the novel’s protagonist in chapter four, continuing, “Las’ time I saw you, you was only a baby” (Rowling, 1997: 39). Note the apologetic apostrophes in the opening words of each sentence and then consider Hagrid’s nature: a good-natured groundskeeper, loyal but naïve, rustic, comedic (crucially unintentionally), and magically-impotent. This echoes historical examples – for instance in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the character of John Barnet is a reverend’s manservant: perceptive but disposable. Hinting at his suspicions of the protagonist’s dark heart, he says: “They find ma bits o’ gibes come hame to their hearts wi’ a kind o’ yerk, an’ that gars them wince” (Hogg, 2010: 80). Of course, whatever perceptive abilities he possesses are rendered ineffectual by his non-standard dialect – his efforts to thwart evil are ignored.

As with Hogg’s prose in the early 19^th Century, Rowling’s use of the apologetic apostrophe is part of a wider nexus of sociolinguistic and phonaesthetic tropes: pioneered in Scots literature (for the same reasons as the apologetic apostrophe), it became, and continues to be, a popular device by authors to write narrative in standard English and contain non-standard dialectal speech within dialogue.

It’s still less common for a speaker in fiction (and particularly the fantasy genre) of a non-standard dialect to be written as the protagonist of any literary venture, but one such instance is Lyra Belacqua: the fearsome, bidialectal protagonist of Pullman’s (utterly magnificent) The Northern Lights (also known, unnecessarily, as The Golden Compass). Unlike Hagrid, then, where Rowling’s use of the apologetic apostrophe is arguably solely literary to convince us of the stereotypical qualities that attend its use (see also the driver of the Knight Bus, Stan – Choo lookin’ at? – Shunpike), Pullman deploys the apologetic apostrophe in order to reflect the communities of practice that Lyra moves in, a phenomenon explained by Milroy as “the closer an individual’s network ties are with his local community, the closer his language approximates to localised vernacular norms” (1980: 175). In essence, Lyra uses standard English variants whenever speaking to an authoritative audience, such as her father, Lord Asriel, and non-standard variants when speaking to peers.

Observe this passage from chapter 2 between Lyra and Lord Asriel:

“Did they vote to give you money?” she said, sleepily.

“Yes.”

“What’s Dust?” she said, struggling to stand up after having been cramped for so long.

“Nothing to do with you.”

“It is to do with me,” she said, “If you wanted me to be a spy in the wardrobe you ought to tell me what I’m spying about. Can I see the man’s head?”

Pullman, 1995: 28-29

Now consider this passage between Lyra and the other children of Oxford:

“The Gobblers,” she said. “En’t you heard of the Gobblers?”

…

“Gobblers,” said Lyra’s acquaintance, whose name was Dick. “It’s stupid. These stupid Gyptians, they pick up all kinds of stupid ideas.”

“They said there was Gobblers in Banbury a couple of weeks ago. They probably come to Oxford now to get kids from us. It must’ve been them what got Jessie.”

“…They en’t real, Gobblers. Just a story.”

“They are!” Lyra said, “The Gyptians seen ‘em!”

Pullman, 1995: 60

The Lyra engaging with the other children of Oxford would never use ought; likewise, the Lyra attendant to her father carefully avoids non-standard expressions requiring the authorial illumination of an apologetic apostrophe such as “en’t” or “’em.” Whilst Pullman’s use of the apologetic apostrophe is arguably somewhat more sophisticated than Rowling’s, functioning as an indicator of the complex linguistic landscapes we all navigate, and Lyra is certainly less of a caricature than Hagrid, the use of the apologetic apostrophe in both texts remains bound to its original mission: decorating non-standard speech for the benefit of standard speakers (or at least speakers with an understanding of standard English as the default). It ought to be said there’s nothing inherently wrong with this – all languages have prestige forms – but it is important we’re aware of its function and impact. For science.

There are many souls the world over for whom language is a political battleground, often attended by issues of language revival. Such a scrimmage is (and has been for some time) being waged in Scotland. Not being in the business of language revival myself, suffice to say the situation concerns attempts to rejuvenate a stagnant Scots language, presumably with ultimate goal being to establish it once again as a prestige form within Scottish society. The role of apologetic apostrophe has been integral within this movement and its exorcism from textual varieties of Scots has become a socio-political act. Minutes from the meeting of the Makar’s Club in 1947 simples reads: “Apostrophe’s to be discouraged.” The website of the British Ordnance Survey, a repository of maps and guide to outdoor Britain, writes: “In earlier writing an apostrophe will be found in such words, for example, ha’, to indicate the loss of ll, but this is no longer acceptable.” The banishment of the apologetic apostrophe was a key tenet of Lallans Scots, the synthetic variety of the language created in the early 20^th Century by poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid to supply Scotland with a unified national language. Whilst one might describe the idea of Lallans as an ongoing project, it has produced some rather beautiful lexis e.g. watergaw: “an imperfect or fragmentary rainbow” (Macleod, 1999: 59).

It’s still less common for a speaker in fiction (and particularly the fantasy genre) of a non-standard dialect to be written as the protagonist…

The elision of the apologetic apostrophe can also be interpreted as an important political statement, particular concerning notions of identity, in other varieties of English.

A notable example is in the poetry of the much-celebrated (and rightly so) writer and artist, Louise Bennett (pictured above). Her poem, Yuh Nephew Sue, is written in unfettered Jamaican English, as shown in its opening lines:

Aunt Tama, dear, me sad fi hear

How storm wreck Jackass Tung;

But wus of all, yuh one deggeh

Coaknut tree tumble dung!

Las week dem had a meetin fi all De coaknut growers what

Lose coaknut tree eena de storm, So me was eena dat.

Bennet, 2016: lines 1-6

In a world where social issues inevitably intersect with one another, reifying one’s identity through language is an understandable act, and thus the elision of the apologetic apostrophe an understandable protest – and in the 21^st Century, it can be profoundly post-colonial. Socio-politics aside, the deconstruction of the apologetic apostrophe is perhaps an inevitable outcome of language evolution: change and deviation, as it does, becoming subsumed by systemic regulation.

Given its current trajectory, it’s likely the apologetic apostrophe will vanish genre-by-genre, beginning with, one imagines, non-fiction and its dissolution eventually migrating throughout the entirety of fiction. The apologetic apostrophe, however, is a fascinating example of how a single unit of punctuation can reach across linguistics, literature, history and politics, and in that regard we ought to admire the pluck of the little fellow.

If your whistle has been moistened by this article, you might consider ‘It’s glo/t/al stop, not glo/ʔ/al stop!’ Or don’t – I’m not paid to do this so my attitude to your education is, at best, apathetic. As a parting gift, however, do enjoy this screenshot of a cockney cockatrice.

Footnotes

[1] As an interesting aside, there are parallels across the world and throughout history of oral cultures suffering their demise at the hands of literacy. A particularly rich exploration of this can be found in the novels of Chinua Achebe such as Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, both of which explore the impact of European civilisation on the Igbo culture (now part of present-day Nigeria).

References

Bennett, L. (2016), Yuh Nephew Sue, Retrieved from: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/art-leisure/20160911/poems-0
Corbett, J., McClure, J. & Stuart-Smith, J. (2003), A Brief History of Scots, The Edinburgh Companion to Scots, ed. Corbett, McClure & Stuart-Smith, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Hogg, J. (2010), The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Macleod, I. (1999), Scots Thesaurus, (Edinburgh: Polygon).
Milroy, L. (1980), Language and Social Networks, (Baltimore: University of Park Press).
Rowling, J. (1997), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, (London: Bloomsbury).
Pullman, P. (1998), The Northern Lights, (London: Scholastic).

Hermione Granger & the Glottal of Fire (Part 2)

2017-08-11T20:25:31Z

This is Part 2 of a series. You can find Part 1 here.

So you’ve clicked accidentally on Part 2, you’re showing previously latent masochistic tendencies or you excitedly, but alas mistakenly, think ‘Glottal Stop’ is something you remember from Pornhub – either or, we’re both here now so we might as well get on with it.

I recently completed a small, real-time analysis of Hermione Granger’s use of T-glottaling in the Harry Potter film franchise, as played by Emma Watson, which observed the T-glottaling variant in terms of the follow social and linguistic constraints:

Age: does Hermione’s use of T-glottaling increase, decrease or remain static between pre-adolescence (the first film) and adolescence (the penultimate)?
Audience: does Hermione T-glottal less or more depending on whether she’s talking to a peer, an adult or reading out loud?
Word position: does Hermione T-glottal more or less depending on whether [t] occurs word-finally or medially? E.g. i/t/s, be/t/er v.s. rabbi/t/, ge/t/
Phonetic environment: does Hermione T-glottal more or less depending on whether [t] occurs pre-consonantally (…tha/t/ country)…), pre-vocalically (…tha/t/ idea…), pre-pausally (…her ca/t/.) or intervocalically (…be/t/er…, …qui/t/e easy…)? It should be noted, if you weren’t already suffering from confusion-induced spasms at this stage, that when studying speech, we interpret data phonetically rather than orthographically – that is, how it is vocalised rather than how it is spelled (hence why it’s the [e] in easy that makes the [t] in quite easy intervocalic)

When one thinks of Hermione Granger, we conjure a speaker who is erudite, middle-class and, in the linguistic world that-which-should-not-be-claimed, ‘well-spoken’. Accumulating 260 tokens (instances where she could have used either [t] or [ʔ]) from the first film, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and the penultimate instalment, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part One, the intention of the micro-study was to determine the real-time development in the use of T-glottaling variable between pre-adolescent and adolescent Hermione (data was also collected and disseminated for Harry but this article is a one-woman show). Heads-up regarding the tables: the ‘N’ row represents the number of tokens that occurred in that specific constraint (such as ‘word-medial’) and the ‘%’ row represents the percentage which occurred as the corresponding variable, listed above. These were the results:

Figure 1: Overall % of /ʔ/ and /t/ used by Hermione

Overall, taking into consideration all tokens regardless of delineation, Hermione uses the standard variant (or alveolar plosive – I’ll enchant you with the IPA some other time) 63.8% of the time and T-glottals 36.2%. Unsurprisingly, a Received Pronunciation (RP) speaker like Hermione uses [t] more than [ʔ] in her speech. However, the reality, when we consider social and linguistic constraints like age and audience, word and phonetic environment, paint a rather more nuanced picture. Which means, you’ll be moistened to hear, lots more data!

Figure 2: % of T-glottaling: adolescence and pre-adolescence vs. audience

Figure 2 details the extent to which Hermione style-shifts (or switches between standard and non-standard variables in response to a social situation, rather like when you deliberately enunciate around your gran to support the illusion that you, and you alone, are worthy of her inheritance) in her use of T-glottaling dependent on audience: whether she is communicating with a peer, an adult or reading aloud. Between the stages of pre-adolescence and adolescence, Hermione actually increases her use of T-glottaling from 13% to 56% respectively, reflecting the pressure to conform to peer norms of speech.^[1] The data extracted for Hermione in the fields of adult conversation and reading aloud were unfortunately negligible but the substantial increase in her use of T-glottaling around peers (like Ron and Harry) reflects current sociolinguistic theory that non-standard variants are innovated by the young – y’ge/ʔ/ me?

Table 1: Hermione: overall distribution of variants cross-tabulated with pre-adolescence and adolescence.

The result of Hermione’s distribution of variants cross-tabulated with her age in real-time are, amazingly, even more interesting (you could support a substantial marine ecosystem in my pants right now): they not only reflect the claims made by earlier studies^[2] that young, middle-class females are the prime innovators of T-glottaling in Britain but also appear to support theories such as the Gender Paradox (explained below). Pre-adolescence, Hermione T-glottals at only 12% compared to 88% for the standard variant but by the penultimate film, Hermione fundamentally shifts in favour of T-glottaling: her use of the non-prestigious variant (outside of Cardiff, that is) soars to at 56.3% compared to 43.7% for [t]. William Labov, who essentially invented the field of sociolinguistics in his Master’s dissertation (bastard), outlined the Gender Paradox as a result of:

[S]table situations [where] women perceive and react to prestige or stigma more strongly than men do, and when change begins, women are quicker and more forceful [in] employing the new social symbolism, whatever it might be.^[3]

It’s canon in the field of linguistics that, generally-speaking, women lead language change and development. There are, however, a number of caveats that should be remembered: sociolinguistic studies tend only to record data based on a gender binary (male and female) and this is largely an issue of practicality – it’s difficult to find non-binary, genderfluid etc. people in substantial-enough numbers in a delineated geographic space. There are, it should be said, new methods of analysing sociolinguistic data emerging that take into account much more detailed information about an individual such as ‘R’ software (oh dear god, don’t make me explain it – just know it is vast and complex and you should be afraid). Watch this space for an article all about the Gender Paradox in pop culture.

…young, middle-class females are the prime innovators of T-glottaling in Britain…

Rapidity certainly characterises Hermione’s shift and it supports previous research that younger people are increasingly responding more favourably to T-glottaling as its social stigma wanes.[4]

Table 2: Hermione: Cross-tabulation of word position vs. adolescence and pre-adolescence.

With regards to the development of T-glottaling in the RP sociolect, Hermione’s accent, it has previously been recorded that T-glottaling has found purchase amongst word-final environments but is largely excluded from word-medial positions (think back also to Harry Hart from Kingsman).[5] Evidence from the above tables, however, showing a cross-tabulation between word environment and age, seems to challenge this established norm. Firstly, the decline in instances of [t] in word-final position in the transition from pre-adolescence to adolescence, 87% to 39%, is – based on previous evidence we’ve looked at – to be expected, especially since word-final position is the most fecund area for [ʔ] adoption in RP speakers (and practically everyone else). That said, Hermione’s drop is considerable, but more intriguing is her drop in usage of word-medial [t], from 95% to 60%, and complimented by a corresponding rise in word-medial T-glottaling from 5% to 40%. Whilst it should be made clear fewer tokens were available for pre-adolescent Hermione, the fact that 40% of available tokens to adolescent Hermione were registered as [ʔ] is substantial. It ought to be added as a caveat, however, that it is unlikely to be word-bounded instances of T-glottaling that are infiltrating Hermione’s RP (e.g. bu/ʔ/er) and more likely unbounded, intervocalic (recall: occurring between two vowels) incidences as shown below in Table 3 (e.g. tha/ʔ/ easy). Either way, the result is in keeping with the female talent for linguistic innovation.

Table 3: Hermione: Cross-tabulation of T-glottaling in word-final and word-medial positions vs intervocalic phonetic environment

Table 4: Hermione: Cross-tabulation of T-glottaling in phonetic environment vs. adolescence and pre-adolescence.

Previous research[6] has contended that the linguistic diffusion (or spread) of T-glottaling can generally be understood as migrating along the pattern: PreConsonantal > PrePausal > PreVocalic.[7] Table 4 shows Hermione developing from T-glottaling pre-consonantally from 71% in pre-adolescence to 91% in adolescence – an expected trajectory. Despite pre-vocalic T-glottaling having a higher percentile development, the tokens were too few for the result to be credible and thus, developing in real-time from 29% to 53% pre-pausally, Hermione’s instances of [ʔ] in following phonetic environments seem to confirm the assertions of previous research. There was, however, an increase intervocalically – 35% to 48% - which, given it is the most stigmatised phonetic environment, is fascinating. Screw you, it is.

So there you have it. Not only Britain’s premier witch, Hermione Granger is a linguistic innovator, an agent of trope subversion, and a slayer of stereotypes; a middle-class, young, female who wields her glottals like a 10 ¾” vinewood with a dragon heartstring core. If you’ve any queries, drop a comment below and I’ll get back to you. Maybe.

Finally, I really ought to apologise as, in the course of reading this article, you’ve become the unwitting victim of the Sociolinguist’s Curse (the fourth one that Rowling missed out). Where once you would have sat blissfully on your IKEA couch, munching and slurping on whatever carcinogenic delights you’ve foraged from the kitchen, and watching The Order of the Phoenix for sixth time because you’re not sure if not-having-a-nose is oddly attractive, you’ll find yourself unconsciously listening, periodically jerked out from the film: did he…did he just glottal? Rewind. I don’t care about your Carpal Tunnel syndrome, Martha, pick up the remote and rewind the goddamn film!

Enjoy.

Footnotes

[1] Marshall, 2001: 63

[2] Mees & Collins, 1999; Stuart-Smith, 1999; Docherty & Foulkes, 1999

[3] Labov, 2001: 291

[4] Smith & Holmes, 2016; Trudgill, 1988

[5] Fabricus, 2002: 115; Mees & Collins, 1999: 202

[6] Straw & Patrick, 2003

[7] Fabricus has postulated that “the pre-pausal environment will become the next widely acceptable environment for T-glottalling, perhaps within the next generation or two” (2002: 133).

References

Fabricus, Anne (2002). "Evidence for the disappearing stigma of t-glottalling: Ongoing change in modern RP", English World-Wide 23:1, 115–136.
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change, Vol. 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Marshall, J. (2001), "The Sociolinguistic status of the glottal stop in Northeast Scots" www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/cl/slals/workingpapers/marshall.pdf
Mees, I. & Collins, B. (1999). "Cardiff: a real-time study of glottalisation." In P. Foulkes & G. Docherty (eds.) Urban voices. London: Arnold. 185-2-2.
Smith, J & Holmes, S, (2016), "The unstoppable glottal: tracking rapid change in an iconic British variable", not-yet-published.
Straw, M & Patrick, P (2003) "Variation in the realisation of (t) in Ipswich" – NWAV 2003 abstract www.ling.upenn.edu/NWAVE/abs-pdf/patrick.pdf

It's glo/t/al stop, not glo/ʔ/al stop! (Part 1)

2017-08-11T20:19:54Z

This is Part 1 of a series. You can find Part 2 here.

You do it. I do it (multiple times a day). Even your gran does it, often right next to you and you don’t even notice. She likes doing it too.

We all glottal our t’s.

T-glottaling is the sound produced by obstructing the airflow in the vocal tract, resulting in what seems like an omission of the letter /t/, and represented in text by what can only be described as a grieving question mark lamenting its stolen egg e.g. Draco would say “Oi, Po/t/er”, aspirating his t’s, whereas Hagrid might delightedly boom, “Arry Po/ʔ/er!”

In fact, /ʔ/ is a consonant in its own right but, like most deviations from established convention, it’s been subject to both historical and contemporary protest – usually by the same prescriptivists who mindlessly insist splitting infinitives is ‘bad grammar’ (spoiler alert: it’s not. It was an arbitrary rule pulled out of someone’s arse in the 18^th Century when regularisation was all the craze and Latin was the guy to imitate, all the while apparently failing to realise that whilst you literally can’t split an infinitive in Latin, since they occur as a single word – e.g. amare, to love – you can in English, and with gusto and wild abandon e.g. to passionately detest prescriptivism. See? Ahem, I digress…).

/ʔ/ is a consonant in its own right but, like most deviations from established convention, it’s been subject to both historical and contemporary protest…

The earliest known meta-commentary on the emerging T-glottaling variable in Glasgow, from a letter dated to 1892, complains: “Strangers hurl at us a sort of shibboleth such sentences as ‘pass the wa’er bo”le, Mr Pa’erson”^[1] and, as recently as 2011, Ed Miliband was widely pilloried for glottaling his t’s in that interview with Russel Brand: “Go/ʔ/a deal with that…go/ʔ/a do it.”

If by this stage you’ve descended into a gibbering middle-class panic, imagine yourself in Waitrose or M&S, your basket full of ethically-sourced honey from bees fairly paid for their labour. Let that sensation of self-congratulation wash over you and casually say out loud: please sit down.

You just T-glottaled. Peasant.

Unless you’re reading aloud very slowly and very precisely, with informal speech chances are you say si/ʔ/ down – mainly because, anatomically, aspirating the /t/ in a pre-consonantal position (when it’s followed by a consonant) is quite difficult (or qui/ʔ/ difficult). So if we all do it and it’s not the 18^th Century, why the stigma? Well, the answer seems to be a mix of salience and word position.

In a society like Britain’s where class and language are intrinsically associated with one another, certain linguistic variants, like the glottal stop, are subject to widespread stereotyping and perform extralinguistic functions such as imparting information (or, crucially, perceived information) about our background, particularly our level of privilege growing up. It’s one of the reasons why Received Pronunciation (more commonly known as Queen’s English) exists and is referred to as a sociolect – it reflects the linguistic norms of a social class as opposed to a dialect, which reflects those of a particular region e.g. Glaswegian, Mancunian, Cardiff Welsh. Historically, RP has emerged in Britain as the standard variety (as opposed to non-standard regional varieties) of English and it’s in this taxonomy that the stigmatisation of T-glottaling can be traced: not only as a non-standard variant but one that emerged from the working-class dialects of Glasgow and London, T-glottaling was always doomed to be a habitual bridesmaid. You’ve seen above that T-glottaling is pounced upon by purists – it’s a _salient_ variant. It’s well-known, subject to wide meta-linguistic commentary and is heavily stereotyped, its users often represented in media as urban-dwelling, working-class and, alas, gobby and unburdened by intellect (think the quintessential American effort at the Cockney accent – looking at you Dick Van Dyke).

The perfect example of this is the class binary we see in the film Kingsman: The Secret Service between Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin, our cockney-speaking (mostly), working-class protagonist, and upper-class, RP-drawling Harry Hart. Both characters use the glottal stop but the crucial disparity is that Eggsy regularly T-glottals in both word final and word medial position e.g. “tha/ʔ/s be/ʔ/er.” Think back to our T-glottaling exercise: in word final position, you don’t really notice that you’re replacing your [t] with a glottal stop and so we don’t really pick up on it when Harry, about to separate some local thugs from consciousness, says: “Manners maketh man. Do you know wha/ʔ/ tha/ʔ/ means?” We don’t hear it because we aren’t looking for it and, in word final position, it isn’t especially audible. Word medial T-glottaling, however, is highly salient – it’s very obvious to us, and thus easy to condemn its speakers for their lack of breeding over a slice of Battenberg with Humphrey at the Rotary Club.

Change, however, is afoo/ʔ/. Of late, T-glottaling has been described by sociolinguists as “one of the most dramatic, widespread and rapid changes to have occurred in British English in recent times” and been found to be migrating both “socially” and from “informal to formal speech.”^[2] Amongst the research into the T-glottaling phenomenon, perhaps the most surprising and interesting conclusions are: it is rapidly progressing throughout Britain; its associated stigma is disappearing; and the developmental process is primarily being innovated by young, working and middle-class females.^[3]

Who better, then, to be exemplary agent of subversion than Hermione Granger? In Part 2, we look at a small sociolinguistic study I completed assessing her development of T-glottaling between the first Harry Potter film, The Philosopher’s Stone, and the penultimate instalment, The Deathly Hallows Part One. Heads up: it’s fairly numbers heavy so if that isn’t your cup of tea or, like me, you have panic attacks at the thought of counting in double figures, I won’t judge you for turning back (I mean, I will but not till you’re out of earshot). If, however, numbers, tables and graphs are a guilty pleasure of yours, shut your bedroom door, crack out the Vaseline and click on Part 2.

If you’ve any questions, by all means comment below and I’ll do my best to ~~ignore~~ respond quickly. More importantly, if you’ve any knowledge of instances where this particular linguistic trope is defied, I’d love to hear about it.

Footnotes

[1] Macafee, 1994: 27, n. 20, cited from Stuart-Smith, 1999: 183.

[2] Trudgill, 1999: 136.

[3] Recent research by Mees & Collins (1999) has shown that, in Cardiff, T-glottaling has actually replaced aspirated [t] as the prestige variant (in other words, the standard variant), an evolution that has, most significantly, been suggested to be the result of a shift in perceptions, with [ʔ] representing “a more sophisticated and fashionable speech…associated with London life, metropolitan fashions and trend-setting attitudes” (Straw & Patrick, 2003: 14).

References

Mees, I. & Collins, B. (1999). "Cardiff: a real-time study of glottalisation." In P. Foulkes & G. Docherty (eds.) Urban voices. London: Arnold. 185-2-2.
Straw, M & Patrick, P (2003) Variation in the realisation of (t) in Ipswich – NWAV 2003 abstract www.ling.upenn.edu/NWAVE/abs-pdf/patrick.pdf
Stuart-Smith, J. (1999). "Glottals past and present: a study of t- glottalling in Glaswegian." In C. Upton and K. Wales (eds.). Leeds studies in English. Leeds: University of Leeds.
Trudgill, P (1999) The Dialects of England, Oxford: Blackwell.

The Indicative Accent – The Epicurean Cure

Catherine Sangster, On Dictionaries, Pronunciation, and Geekery (Part 1)

“A ferlie he spied wi’ his e’e”: Examining the Apologetic Apostrophe

Footnotes

References

Hermione Granger & the Glottal of Fire (Part 2)

Footnotes

References

Further Reading

It's glo/t/al stop, not glo/ʔ/al stop! (Part 1)

Footnotes

References

Further Reading