Talkin' About Talk Date Archives

Do All Southerners Have the Same Dialect?

Download this program (Right click and Save As...)

No dialect in the U.S. is more noticed -- and commented on -- than Southern English. This is where a person totes things, but carries friends to see a show. And where else do we cut on the lights and mash the button in the elevator? To quote the title of a recent book on Southern terms, "Y'all is Spoken Here". Nothing is more Southern than its speech.

But is the South really united linguistically? Try telling people from the Carolinas that they all talk alike. Along the coast, people speak some of the most distinctive English dialects used anywhere. Someone on the Outer Banks of North Carolina may say It's hoi toid on the saned soid. That's high tide on the Sound side for those who don't recognize the distinctive vowel sounds of the coast -- or hah tahd on the sound sahd in the mainland South.

In South Carolina, traditional Charleston speech seems to have a vowel system all its own. The pronunciation of the vowel in sow and row sounds like the /o/ in Minnesoohtans, and the vowel of out and about is like the Canadian oat and aboat. Travel to the Sea Islands and you find Gullah or Geechee -- a creole language that goes back to the days of rice plantations populated largely by blacks from Africa and the West Indies. The sounds and rhythms of Gullah are popularized in the B'rer Rabbit stories and in George Gershwin's opera, Porgy and Bess. The English is closer to the creoles of the Bahamas and Jamaica than to dialects of the Southern mainland.

Travel to the western mountains and you'll find the imprint of the Scots Irish in the hollows of Southern Appalachia. In the Smoky Mountains, you might be greeted with Hit's nice to see you'uns. The plural form you'uns is, of course the equivalent of the infamous Southern y'all. And hit for it is a relic of an older English pronunciation. This is where a boomer is a red squirrel-- not a thundershower as in other parts of Carolina. In the mountains, Sai-gogglin' means something is crooked; while other Carolinians may use catawampus to talk about things that aren't quite plumb. And the term dope among older mountain people may still refer to a soft drink, thanks to some of it original ingredients.

Now add the sounds of African Americans in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain to the mix. And don't forget the unique dialect of the Lumbee Indians along the North and South Carolina border. With over 55,000 members, they're the largest group of Native Americans east of the Mississippi. Put it all together and you have dialect differences greater than those in just about any other region of the United States.

Why such diversity? First, there's the so-called "founder effect." Groups of speakers came from different parts of the world and left their imprint on the speech of the region -- the Scotch Irish influence in Appalachia, the Scottish effect on dialects in the Cape Fear valley; Southwestern England influence on the Outer Banks. And, of course, the African influence on the Sea Islands.

But there's also a cultural mix. In the antebellum South, aristocrats sent their children to England for a proper education. So the seventeenth-century British trend of dropping the r in words like fou' for four found a colonial home among the southern elite. At the same time, words like tote for carry, goober for peanut, and cooter for turtle came from African languages through the Charleston port. The result was an ironic mixture in the South of African slave language and prestigious British pronunciation.

But the most intriguing aspect of speech in the south is that much of it is homegrown. Some of the most widely-known features of Southern speech are probably the pronunciation of the vowel in tahm for time, the pronunciation of stick pin and ink pen both as "pin", and the thoroughly Southern plural, y'all. Recent research shows that these traits were barely present in the antebellum South. They're relatively new. Over the past 150 years, they germinated on their own, took root, and spread through the South like a linguistic Kudzu.

Dialects bear the impression of their history but they also have an amazing creative capacity to mark new identity. Southern English in the Carolinas is a shining example of the many paths that dialects can take.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Dr. Walt Wolfram of North Carolina State University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Richard D. Cain at March 17, 2005 12:09 PM

Is there a Language Crisis in America?

Download this program (Right click and Save As...)

Yes, there's a language crisis in the U.S. We need language qualifications for REAL jobs that have tremendous importance to the country. Because of concerns about terrorism, shortages in defense and intelligence have received the most attention. But they aren't the only needs: the globalization of business has radically increased demand for people who can move information from one language to another. Every new Windows release or American movie has to meet the language expectations of markets in other countries. And other country's products need to meet ours. You wouldn't be happy if instructions for the radio in your BMW were only in German. Or if the help wizard in your computer understood only Japanese.

Americans buy from, sell to, compete with, or worry about almost every other country on the globe, and our newest citizens come from many of those countries. Consider Arlington, Virginia. Responding to demand, the cable service has a South Asian TV package. Staffers in a local bank speak several languages to set up accounts. Hardware and paint stores sell to foreign-born owners of small construction firms. Businesses have found that multi-lingual service is good business, both globally and locally.

But the U.S. needs professional-level competence in over 100 different languages. We have some of it. But there are huge gaps.

You might ask: How can there be a problem when there are thousands of kids studying languages in high school and college every year? Well, first of all, our schools and colleges aren't focused on the most important tongues. How many schools do you know that teach Mandarin Chinese, the most-spoken language on the planet? And how about the languages of Afghanistan and Pakistan? To say nothing of Arabic, the federal government's highest priority.

Second, when we talk about professionally-usable skills, the output of our education system is modest at best. It's not the fault of teachers or students. It's a result of the small amount of time we spend on language learning. In many countries, children start a foreign language in fourth or fifth grade and continue it through high school, adding a second language along the way. We don't do that. Professional-level skill can come from living in a country where the language is spoken, but we send far fewer students abroad than most countries. When they do go, it's often to places like Australia. Learning to say, "G'day, Mate" doesn't count! Of course there are exceptions: people who love languages and other cultures gravitate to the Peace Corps, or a year of teaching English overseas, or the diplomatic corps. But it's a relatively small number of people.

So how about the immigrants who bring language skills to the U.S? Aren't they filling the gap? In the 2000 census, 47 million people reported speaking another language at home at least part of the time. The count includes 2 million speakers of Chinese, over 600,000 speakers each of Arabic and Korean, and 300,000 speakers of Hindi. When the FBI asked for Arabic speakers after 9/11, the flood of volunteers crashed the phone system. These folks are critical for our capability in less-taught languages. But here's the catch: most newly-arrived immigrants don't speak English well enough to fill the jobs. The children of immigrants may speak the family language at home, but once they're in school, they quickly switch to English. And by the third generation, the family language is gone. You know the story. A lot of us have grandparents who spoke another language -- Ukrainian, Italian, Spanish -- but we, their offspring, may not know more than a dozen words -- mostly about food! So despite being a nation of immigrants, we have a language problem.

If we want the next generation to fill critical roles in government, business, and community service, we need to provide wider and deeper education in far more languages -- both for new language learners and for people who speak another language at home.

In 1958, the Soviets surprised us by putting the Sputnik satellite into space. Congress responded by creating a generation of scientists, engineers, and linguists who helped win the Cold War. After September 11, 2001, we found ourselves facing another Sputnik moment. Shouldn't we have a national commitment to languages of the Middle East and Asia, as we did for Russian? Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey has proposed the National Security Language Act, which would invest in teaching languages of critical need for national security. Why not write your congressman about it? That's the National Security Language Act. We need it.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Catherine Ingold, Deputy Director of the National Foreign Language Center in Washington. If you want to read the proposed bill on languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Marci at March 17, 2005 12:11 PM

Posted by: Jackie Fan at May 20, 2005 05:19 AM

What Does it Take to Learn a Language Well?

Download this program (Right click and Save As...)

I often hear people say: "I had 4 semesters of Language X -- but I can't speak a word." That's a very common problem. In fact, it may be that most people who study a language have the same experience. So what's going on? The implication seems to be that we're not very smart, or we're bad at learning languages or we had poor teachers. But probably none of that is true.

Let's assume we're not talking here about reading or understanding a language. Both reading and understanding can be learned to an advanced level without ever meeting a native speaker. But how do you get to speak a language well enough to talk fluently with people who don't speak English?

First, let's be clear that it isn't a matter of IQ or academic smarts: there are millions of people who have no formal education at all but speak several languages fluently. And let's not be pessimistic and say that only children can learn languages. You can learn a language at any age.

But you don't want to just limp along, sounding like Inspector Clouseau of The Pink Panther films. A language is a communication system, so it's not enough to memorize a few words and phrases. And don't believe the ads in airline magazines for courses that guarantee "mastery" of a language in just a few weeks. That's really nonsense. Like learning to fly a plane, language learning takes time, and the less similar the language is to English, the more time it takes. Think about this: in a typical four-semester course in college, you'll have fewer than 200 hours of contact time with the language.

In U.S. government schools, where languages are taught for real proficiency, none of the courses meets for less than 600 hours -- of full time study.

And then, beyond a realistic amount of time, you need two things for success: some prolonged exposure to people speaking the language; and someone to help you make sense of what's going on linguistically. You can do one before the other, or do them at the same time. But it's NOT enough just to hang out for a month or so in a country where the language is spoken. Imagine that you know no Spanish, and someone says "quien es esse chico?" That's four words, but can you tell where one word ends and the next begins? When you're surrounded by native speakers, the people around you are just trying to communicate. They aren't there to teach you grammar or pronunciation, and probably don't know how. Without someone explaining the system, your learning is random -- and inefficient.

After puberty most of us need classroom work to create a framework for hearing sounds, figuring out how sentences work, and understanding the cultural context. Adults who pick up a language without that framework often end up with a kind of "abominable fluency" – a lot of words, maybe even decent pronunciation, but typically mangled grammar and not much sensitivity about how the words are used... Inspector Clouseau with a bigger vocabulary.

So you need a guide. But the classroom isn't enough. If you took a language course and a few years later couldn't remember what you learned, it's probably because you left out the second step: prolonged contact with people who speak the language. You can do that in country, of course, but you can also do it by immersion in a summer language school or camp, or by dating a near-monolingual speaker of the language, or even by "talking" to native-speakers over the internet. And there are other technologies that can help. But without some in-depth experience -- without passing a threshold we can define as confidence in using the language, what you learn in class will probably fade away. Once you cross that threshold, like learning to swim, the language will be with you for a long, long time, and maybe forever.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Dr. Nina Garrett at Yale University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Melissa Drummond at April 21, 2005 01:32 PM

What's the History of Language Study in the US?

Download this program (Right click and Save As...)

Hmmm. The first language taught to anyone in America was... Algonquian. New arrivals from England learned native American languages so they could survive in a foreign land. The goal: communication. But something happened to language teaching along the way. We built schools. And when we, as good Europeans, started teaching languages in the schools, we wanted the best of European tradition. So before the 1800's, learning a language in America meant learning Ancient Greek or Latin -- and often both.

When modern languages came on the scene -- and w're talking only about French, Spanish, Italian and German -- we studied them the same way people learned Latin and Greek -- and for the same reasons. Here's what Thomas Jefferson said in 1824, a year before his new University of Virginia opened:

"The Latin and Greek languages constitute the basis of good education and are indispensable to fill up the character of a well educated man." The next year he wrote, "We generally learn languages for the benefit of reading the books written in them." So much for communication.

For the next century and more, people mostly studied languages, not to talk with native speakers but to learn to read. The language class was all about reading, translating, and analyzing grammar -- not just in Latin and Greek but modern languages, too. So if you studied a language in the first half of the 20th century, you probably didn't learn to speak it. Because no one intended that you should. Speaking wasn't the goal.

And then came World War II. Suddenly we urgently needed a way of mass-producing speakers of foreign languages -- soldiers and civilians -- who could not just conjugate French verbs or read Don Quixote but actually talk with people in all parts of the world. And we needed a dazzling variety of languages-- everything from Dutch to Burmese.

The linguistic profession was pressed into war service... and the teaching of languages dramatically changed. Teachers were to use stimulus and response to imprint language patterns in student minds. Students were to learn by memorizing dialogues and producing rapid-fire responses in all kinds of oral drills.

It worked. More people became more fluent, in more languages, faster, through these so-called audiolingual courses than they ever could through the model of grammar and translation. World War II needs carried over into the Cold War, and demand for language learning -- Russian in particular -- remained high. Ancient Greek... fell off the charts. Latin became something of a boutique language, experiencing ups and downs in popularity.

By the early 1960s, the audiolingual method was widely used across the country. But its flaws began to show up. There were limitations on stimulus-response as a model for learning something as complex as a language. Researchers looked more closely at how language is acquired, and came to see it as an evolving process rather than something to be mastered. Language teaching changed again to reflect those insights.

Teaching also changed because students are pushing the envelope. They talk across continents with instant messages. They read websites. They download news and entertainment. They want to learn more about the cultures that use the languages they study. So in classrooms today, students take on real-world tasks.

If Jefferson were brought back to see what's happened since 1824, he'd mourn the status of Greek and Latin. But he'd no doubt be fascinated by today's students, the variety of languages they study, and the ways they develop language skills. If he could visit a typical classroom he'd see them working in pairs, moving around the room, chattering in short sentences, using imperfect but understandable grammar, and filling in meanings with gestures when necessary. Above all, communicating. I suspect it looked a lot like that when we were learning Algonquian...

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. June Phillips, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at Weber State University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about language, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Should We be Learning Arabic?

Download this program (Right click and Save As...)

Arabic is all around us these days. On news broadcasts we hear words like mujahideen, intifada and Al-Qaida (or is it Al-Kayda?). Middle-Eastern foods like hummus and falafel are gourmet goodies. And, if you look closely you'll see small ads in Arabic script -- for some reason often on the sports page -- seeking people who can read and speak the language.

Here, from the beginning of the tales of 1001 Nights, is what the language sounds like:

(Audio Sample of 1001 Nights)

It's an exotic sound to western ears. But we'd better get used to it. Because it's not just for linguists and gourmets anymore. It promises to be part of our lives for a long time to come.

Arabic is spoken by more than 250 million people in an area extending from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean. It's the language of the Koran, the holy book of Islam, so more than seven hundred million people have it as a spiritual component of their daily lives. The governments of 19 countries list Arabic as their principal language. And the UN made it one of its official languages in 1974.

Yet, while Arabic is one of the most important languages in the world, it's been pretty much neglected in the U.S. And that has to change. You’ve probably heard that the FBI and other government agencies have huge needs for Americans proficient in Arabic. And that military and civilians serving in Iraq don't have the language or cultural skills to deal with the Iraqis. Arabic is now the foreign language most critical to US national security.

So there are jobs to be had. A lot of them: Translator or interpreter, business consultant, market analyst, intelligence analyst, and of course, teaching and research positions. More than 80 federal agencies want to hire people with Arabic skills.

You've probably heard it said that Arabic is hard to learn. What's the hard part? Well, the writing system takes a little getting used to, because words and sentences are written from right to left, meaning that what you might think of as the back of the book -- is the front. The alphabet has just 28 letters, with a few extra dots that float above and below them. I've heard the letters described as a collection of "worms and snails," and to the western eye they can look... vermicular. But they're really quite beautiful. And it doesn't take more than a couple of weeks to learn them.

Probably the most challenging thing about Arabic is that you have to learn two variants of the language to get along well: Modern Standard Arabic, known as MSA, is the language of literature and media throughout the Arab world. And then you need a colloquial variant of Arabic, the language used in everyday talk in a given country. Which dialect to study? Well, the dialect of the country you plan to go to. While most Arabs understand MSA because they hear it in films or TV, local speech varies from country to country -- so that even Arabs may not understand one another when they travel in the Arabic-speaking world.

If you speak only MSA, you'll be understood by most Arabs.
But you won't understand them unless you learn their dialect --- because most Arabs don't speak MSA. The pronunciation can be tricky in spots, because there are 3 or 4 sounds that we don't have in English, like some in the back of the throat that remind me a little of German. By the way, the Arabic pronunciation of the word we hear in the news is: Al Qaida.

So yes, it takes some time and dedication to learn Arabic. But, it's well worth doing. Shouldn't we be teaching it more often in our schools?

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Gerald Lampe at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you're interested in a scholarship to study Arabic, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Arabic Scholarships

Scholarships are available for Arabic language study through the National Security Education Program. See also the National Flagship Language Initiative on the websites of the National Foreign Language Center or the Center for Arabic Study Abroad at Emory University.

Comments

Posted by: Michael Bennett at July 10, 2005 04:24 PM

Posted by: Jared at November 2, 2005 04:10 PM

Posted by: Daleela at December 24, 2005 12:41 PM

Posted by: Tini at February 5, 2006 10:41 AM