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8754 results in Sociolinguistics

Page 387 of 438

  • 13 - English Quebec

  • Edited by John Edwards, St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia
  • Book:
    Language in Canada
    Published online:
    18 February 2010
    Print publication:
    09 July 1998, pp 273-292

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    English Quebec is the product of very particular historical circumstances and, as we must begin somewhere, let us start with the British conquest of 1759, itself a sequel of the geopolitics of Europe of the time. To make a long story short, we now know, thanks to Philip Lawson's recent work (1989) – although Gustave Lanctôt and A. L. Burt maintained as much over a century ago – that the British military and civil administrators, most of whom were Anglo-Irish or Scottish, became of the mind that French Quebec society was worth saving, and that the error of Ireland (the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’) was to be avoided. The concretization of this consensus was the Quebec Act of 1774, the motivations behind which have been, until the work of Lawson, attributed almost wholly to short-term strategic considerations – of buying ‘Canadian’ resistance to the rebelling ‘Americans’.

    As the Parliament of Great Britain had contributed to saving Quebec from ‘Anglicization’, so French Quebecers helped to save Canada from Americanization. From their efforts, infused with the determination to save their society of the 60,000 ‘new subjects’ of 1774, and the determination of the 60,000 Loyalists who came north shortly afterwards (in 1783) to remain under British institutions, was born the Canadian political project: a conspiracy to conserve societies distinct from America.

  • 9 - French in Quebec

  • Edited by John Edwards, St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia
  • Book:
    Language in Canada
    Published online:
    18 February 2010
    Print publication:
    09 July 1998, pp 177-201

  • Summary

    HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

    In 1774, fifteen years after the surrender of Quebec to the troops of General Wolfe, King George III signed the Quebec Act to restore the coutume de Paris (the ancestor of the present civil code) in the new province. He implicitly recognized, at the same time, the legality of the French language in this part of North America. It was a decision fraught with consequences, as we know, but was done to avoid a possible uprising among the French Canadians and their Amerindian allies. In fact, the French Canadians were living with the obsessive fear of being deported (as were their French fellows in Acadia between 1755 and 1763, an ‘ethnic purification’ that affected more than 90 per cent of the 12,000 Acadians settled in this other colony of France). The threat of an uprising was combined, too, with that of an invasion of the former French possessions by the rebel troops of the United States, whose independence would be unilaterally proclaimed in 1776. These concerns also pushed George III to sign the Constitutional Act in 1791, granting a parliament to Lower Canada. This was another decision fraught with consequences because, to ensure the allegiance of his French subjects – needed to maintain his commercial hold north of the 45th parallel – the king provided them with a form of statehood.

  • 7 - Substrates and superstrates

  • Tom McArthur
  • Book:
    The English Languages
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998, pp 160-179

  • Summary

    pid.gin … n [C;U] a language which is a mixture of two or more other languages, esp. as used between people who do not speak each other's language: pidgin English - compare CREOLE, LINGUA FRANCA

    cre.ole … n (often cap) 1 [C;U] an American or West Indian language which has grown through a combination of a European language with one or more other languages - compare PIDGIN

    (definitions, Della Summers (ed.), Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture, 1992)

    Pidgins and creoles: A contentious topic

    Although the above definitions are well formed and indicate clearly the links between the two words, present-day pidginists and creolists are unlikely to consider them sufficient. This is not, however, necessarily an adverse judgement on Longman's lexicographers; rather, scholars investigating the pidgin/creole phenomenon tend to have reservations about any definitions of pidgin and creole - including their own - and there are at least four reasons for this:

  • o The etymology of the terms is problematic, and their current uses among both specialists and the general public are far from uniform, not always precise, and where precise are generally contentious.

  • o The phenomena which the terms help identify are hundreds - probably thousands - of years old, and may indeed be basic to language itself.

  • o Although progress has been made in understanding the pidgin/ creole phenomenon, there is as yet no unified theory of the subject and its boundaries are far from clear.

  • o The varieties of language which the terms cover traditionally have low prestige, and many people (including Speakers of pidgins and creoles) cannot understand why university people should bother with them. The American linguist John A. Holm has made the foUowing comment on this point:

    • What earlier generations thought of pidgin and creole languages is all too clear from their very names: broken English, bastard Portuguese, nigger French, kombuistaaltje ('cookhouse lingo’), isikula ('coolie language’). This contempt often stemmed in part from the feeling that pidgins and creoles were corruptions of ‘higher’, usually European languages, and in part from attitudes toward the Speakers of such languages, who were often perceived as semi-savages whose partial acquisition of civilized habits was somehow an affront.

The English Languages
  • Tom McArthur
  • Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998
  • Hundreds of millions of people use English every day everywhere in the world, but may or may not succeed in understanding each other. Despite the success of its standard form (or forms) in many countries, the complex called 'English' is immensely diverse - probably more diverse than any single language has ever been - and is likely to become even more so in the next century. This book is a compelling and broad-ranging invitation to consider the variety, the options and the implications of this vast system. The English Languages looks at the 'pluralism' of English, the 'Englishes', that have arisen in the last twenty years or so, and addresses the question of whether or not English can be considered a family of languages in its own right, like the Romance languages.

  • 6 - Scots and Southron

  • Tom McArthur
  • Book:
    The English Languages
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998, pp 138-159

  • Summary

    Scots… n 1 the Scots language, the speech of Lowland Scotland … [as] treated in this dictionary…

    (definition, from Mairi Robinson (editor-in-chief), The Concise Scots Dictionary: a new comprehensive one-volume dictionary of the Scots language, Aberdeen University Press, 1985)

    The Status of Scots: Dialect, language, or semi-language?

    The people of Scotland occupy a unique historical and cultural position in the English-speaking world. They use the Standard language (with distinctive phonological, grammatical, lexical, and idiomatic features) in administration, law, education, the media, all national institutions, and by and large in their dealings with Anglophones elsewhere, but in their everyday lives a majority of them mix ‘the King's English’ with what in an earlier age was called ‘the King's Scots'.

    Gaelic, the Celtic language shared with Ireland and once used throughout the Highlands and the Western Isles (the Hebrides), is now largely limited to those islands. At one time, most Speakers of Gaelic learned their mother tongue at home and Standard English at school, and in later life mixed it with the vernacular of the Lowlands. During much of the twentieth Century, Speakers of Gaelic have generally been bilingual from childhood; they now number some 80,000 in a population of about five million who in the main have little acquaintance with the language and its traditions, although everybody knows about it, and many have a feeling of loss because no one in their families speaks it any more. On the other hand, although the population at large also knows little about the traditions of Scots (the Germanic vernacular of the Lowlands), they use it widely as a matter of course and those who do not use it much or at all usually understand it well enough.

    On the languagehood of Gaelic there can be no argument. On its Status, however, there is much discussion but little action, official or otherwise, and it continues the decline shared with the Celtic languages of Wales, Ireland, France, Man, and Cornwall. On the Status of Scots there is also much discussion, almost all of it ineffectual in official terms, and within that debate three broad points of view can be distinguished:

  • o A dialect of English

  • For many, in Scotland and elsewhere, Scots is obviously an English dialect.

  • 9 - The shapes of English

  • Tom McArthur
  • Book:
    The English Languages
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998, pp 197-234

  • Summary

    International English [Late 20c: with or without a capital/]. The English language, usually in its Standard form, either when used, taught, and studied as a lingua franca throughout the world, or when taken as a whole and used in contrast with American English, British English, South African English, etc.

    (Tom McArthur (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1992)

    Black English 1. Also called Afro- American English. a dialect of American English characterized by pronunciations, syntactic structures, and vocabulary associated with and used by some North American blacks and exhibiting a wide variety and ränge of forms varying in the extent to which they differ from Standard English. 2. any of a variety of dialects of English or English-based pidgins and creoles associated with and used by black people. Also, black English.

    (Sol Steinmetz (ed.), Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary, 1996)

    English or not English? — The Ebonics outbreak

    On the 18th December 1996, as business was winding down for Christmas in the city of Oakland in California, the local school board unanimously passed a resolution. Although hardly routine, it was in tune with other decisions made in US educational circles in recent times regarding educational achievement, classroom language, and Standard English, so the board members apparently did not expect it to raise much interest beyond the immediately affected schools - and maybe not even there. Oakland has a large black population, and its teachers and educational administrators have long been concerned with the low level of achievement among African-American children. The board, therefore, decided to change its existing policy regarding children's everyday language and competence in the Standard language. However, the decision was swiftly reported in the local media and public reaction was instant and widespread, despite Christmas and the New Year. As two Californian journalists put it shortly afterwards:

    Saying it has failed to adequately educate black youngsters, the Oakland Unified School District has declared black English a second language, making it the first district in the nation to give the dialect offirial Status in programs targeting bilingual students. The move to recognise the black vernacular - called ‘Ebonics’ by some educators who consider it a distinct language spoken by the descendants of slaves - was approved unanimously by the Oakland school board.

  • 8 - The Latin analogy

  • Tom McArthur
  • Book:
    The English Languages
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998, pp 180-196

  • Summary

    o As for the antiquitie of our speche, whether it be measured by the ancient Almane, whence it cummeth originallie, or euen but by the latest terms which it boroweth daielie from foren tungs…, it cannot be young. Onelesse the Germane himself be young, which claimeth a prerogatiue for the age of his speche, of an infinit prescription: Onelesse the Latin and Greke be young, whose words we enfranchise to our own vse.

    (Richard Mulcaster, in chapter XIII of The First Part of the Elementarie, 1582)

    o The two languages from which our primitives have been derived are the Roman and the Teutonick: under the Roman I comprehend the French and provincial tongues; and under the Teutonick ränge the Saxon, German, and all their kindred dialects. Most of our polysyllables are Roman, and our words of one syllable are very often Teutonick.

    (Samuel Johnson, in the preface to A Dictionary ofthe English Language, London: 1755)

    The future of English: Another Latin?

    In the first iss English Today, the British EFL textbook-writer and teachertrainer Alan Maley observed with regard to the future of the language:

    One possible scenario for English as an international language is that it will succumb to the same fate as Latin did in the Middle Ages. That is, that the regional varieties will develop independently to the point where they become different languages rather than varieties of the same language.

    (The most chameleon of languages: Perceptions of English Abroad', English Today 1, January 1985, p. 31)

    The same year saw the publication of the paper which Randolph Quirk presented at the British Council Conference in London in 1984 (as discussed in chapter 3). In it, Quirk considers the same possibility:

    Few today would suggest that there was a Single Standard of English in the world. There are few enough (not least among Professional linguists) that would claim the existence of a Single Standard within any one of the ENL countries: plenty that would even deny both the possibility and the desirability of such a thing. Recent emphasis has been on multiple and variable Standards (insofar as the use of the word ‘Standard’ is ventured): different Standards for different occasions for different people - and each as ‘correct’ as any other.

  • 5 - Standardness

  • Tom McArthur
  • Book:
    The English Languages
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998, pp 102-137

  • Summary

    stand.ard (stan'dard), n. 1. something considered by an authority or by general consent as a basis of comparison. 2. an object regarded as the most common size or form of its kind. 3. a rule or principle that is used as a basis for judgment. 4. an average or normal quality, quantity, or level: The work isn't up to his usual Standard. 5. Standards, the morals, ethics, customs, etc., regarded generally or by an individual as acceptable. 6. the authorized exemplar of a unit of weight or measure. 7. a certain commodity in or by which a basic monetary unit is stated: gold Standard…. 12. a flag indicating the presence of a sovereign or public official. 13. a flag or emblematic figure used as a rallying point for anarmy, fleet, etc….

    (defmition, Random House Webster's College Dictionary, New York: 1991)

    Flags and measures: The king's Standard

    In the year 1138, the English and the Scots met in battle at Cowton Moor in Yorkshire. In the normal course of events, language had little impact on war between these ancient enemies and war had little impact on language, but the victory of the English at Cowton was an exception. Their rallying point was unusual: a cluster of flags on a ship's mast mounted on a carriage. When the contemporary observer Richard of Hexham later wrote about this stränge device, he quoted a couplet which called it a 'Standard', because ‘it was there that valour took its stand’. Both the device and the name were so novel - and proved so effective - that the encounter came to be called, not the Battle of Cowton, in the usual way of things, but the Battle of the Standard.

    Richard of Hexham has provided The Oxford English Dictionary with its earliest citation of Standard, in the process letting us know that in the twelfth Century the word was associated with Germanic stand ('be upright in one place’) and not Latin extendere ('to Stretch out’), which the OED gives as its proper source. But associating a battle flag with a place where soldiers ‘stand hard’ in the face of their enemies made eminent sense in the twelfth Century.

  • 4 - Models of English

  • Tom McArthur
  • Book:
    The English Languages
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998, pp 78-101

  • Summary

    model… 14 a : a description, a collection of statistical data, or an analogy used to help visualize often in a simplified way something that cannot be directly observed (as an atom) b : a theoretical projection in detail of a possible System of human relationships (as in economics, politics, or psychology)…

    (definition, Philip Babcock Gove (ed.), Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Springfield, Mass., 1966)

    Describing a ‘language’: Two truisms and three modeis

    The first truism is that the day-to-day language acts of users of English worldwide - thought, spoken, written, typed, printed, broadcast, taped, telephoned, faxed, and emailed - are so vast and varied that no person, group, or System could ever catch and catalogue them all. Even the most extensive, subtle, and flexible Computer corpus currently imaginable could not encompass all the registers and usages of Standard English, leave alone the rest. No language has ever been easy to describe and catalogue, but the relatively modest scale of most of the world's languages has allowed - and still allows in many cases - a sense of comprehensiveness in relation to any grammars, dictionaries, and other works associated with them. But the scale of present-day English does not permit any such comfortable illusion.

    The second truism is that since total knowledge of the subject is impossible, our efforts to describe, prescribe for, and teach English - however extensive, elegant, and influential they may be - are incomplete, indirect and, in the last analysis, fictive. As a consequence of insight and effort there has often been an impressive match (as far as we can teil) between scholarly modeis and the System likely to underlie the ungraspable whole, resulting in many eminently practical achievements. But all the modeis ever made are exercises of the imagination, not embodiments of God's truth.

    In addition, and paradoxically, each new descriptive and explanatory framework adds to the complexity of what there is to study, and may in due course become an object of investigation in its own right, part of received tradition. What is more, such a framework may serve to underpin and validate the methodology and content of English teaching in particular places for particular purposes at particular times.

  • 1 - Organized Babel

  • Tom McArthur
  • Book:
    The English Languages
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998, pp 1-29

  • Summary

    babel /'beib(3)l/ n. & a. Also B-. E16. [Babely the city and tower where the confusion of tongues took place (Gen. 11), = Heb. babel Babylon, f. Akkadian bab ili gate of God.] An. 1A confused medley of sounds; meaningless noise. El6. 2 A scene of confusion; a noisy assembly. El7. 3 (B-) A lofty structure; a visionary project. Ml7…

    (definition, in Leslie Brown (ed.), The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993)[E16/17 = early 16th/17th Century; M17 = mid-17th Century]

    Together yet separate: Is English we speakin'

    The Bible is not so widely read as once it was, nor are its stories, laws, admonitions, and prophecies so well known as once they were, but such phrases as Adam and Eve, the Garden ofEden, Noah'sArk, and the Tower of Babel continue to resonate in those languages which have ancient links with Christianity and Judaism. The original account of Babel, which takes up less than half of one brief chapter of the Book of Genesis, opens with the assertion that ‘the whole earth was of one language’, then reports that in the land of Shinar (Sumer, now southern Iraq) humankind undertook a project so vast and arrogant that it brought down upon them the very wrathof God:

    4 And they said; Goe to, let vs build vs a city and a tower, whose top may reach vnto heauen, and let vs make vs a name, lest we be scattered abroad vpon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the LORD came downe to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 6 And the LORD said; Behold, the people is one, and they haue all one language: and this they begin to doe: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they haue imagined to doe. 7 Goe to, let vs goe downe, and there confound their language, that they may not vnderstand one anothers speech. 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence, vpon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the Citie. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel [marginal note: ‘that is, Confusion’], because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth.

  • Introduction

  • Tom McArthur
  • Book:
    The English Languages
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998, pp xiii-xx

  • Summary

    English spoken; American understood.

    (The Daily Chronicle, London, 10 June 1908)

    English and French spoken; Australian understood.

    (a notice in Turkey, quoted in O. Hogue's Trooper Bluegum at Dardanelles, London, 1916)

    English understood?

    Although the writers of the gems quoted above were essentially amusing themselves at other people's expense, they were also pointing to something signifkant that received little official or scholarly attention at the time. The early years of the twentieth Century were marked by the worldwide spread not only of English at large but also of an increasingly prestigious Standard English. As a result, more and more people throughout both the British Empire and the United States were sensitive to any perceived failure - individual or collective - to live up to that Standard. At the same time, the many marked differences in usage around the world had been obvious for decades, as demonstrated for example by comments from two writers in the 1880s, one from each side of the Atlantic:

  • o When I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity in England, an Englishman can't understand me at all.

  • (Sam Clemens (Mark Twain), The Stolen White Elephant, 1882)

  • o The American I have heard up to the present is a tongue as distinct from English as Patagonian.

  • (Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 1889)

    • Wry hyperbole in both cases, certainly, but again, something serious behind the smile. If officialdom or the scholarly world in the late nineteenth Century commented on kinds of alienness and incomprehension inside English, it was usually to advocate more efficient schooling and a greater exposure to the language of schools and books, so that such defi ciencies might be reduced. By and large, the only English-speaking scholars of the period who took on diversity every day were the dialectologists, but they pursued their cataloguing and commentary under the vast shadow of standardization. As a result, they considered that, in the face of universal education, the dialects of the British and Irish islands and of North America were dying out, and so worked with a sense of urgency. Soon, they supposed, there would be nothing left to describe, apart from a few fossils embedded here and there in an otherwise smoothly Standard medium, a State of affairs which had been the dream of British and American opinion-formers since the eighteenth Century.

  • 2 - A universal resource

  • Tom McArthur
  • Book:
    The English Languages
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998, pp 30-55

  • Summary

    1933

    English… B. sb. 1. The English language. Also attrib., as E. scholar. OE…

    (definition, William Little et al (eds.), The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Prindples)

    1993

    English… Bn. 1 Orig., the language spoken by the Germanic invaders of Britain in the 5th cent. AD. Now, the language descended from this, used in Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the US, and many other countries. OE…

    (definition, Lesley Brown (ed.), The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary on Historical Prindples)

    Bilingual within a language? - The scale and scope of English

    For good or ill, at the end of the second millennium AD and the fifth füll millennium since recorded history began, English is unique. No language has ever before been put to so many uses so massively by so many people in so many places - on every continent and in every sea; in the air and in space; in thought, Speech, and writing; in print on paper and screen; in sound on tape and film; by radio, television, and telephone; and via electronic networks and multimedia. It is also used as mother tongue or other tongue - fluently, adequately, or haltingly; constantly, intermittently, or seldom; happily, unhappily, or ambivalently - by over a billion people. Perhaps a fifth of the human race. Frangois Chevillet, Professor of English at Universite Stendhal in Grenoble, France, has described the Situation as follows:

    Depuis le milieu du XIXe siede, le röle de Tanglais n'a fait que croitre. Le declin de l'empire britannique n'a pas entraine le recul de la langue (cf. le sort du frangais), bien au contraire. L'anglais n'est pas une langue internationale, ä l'instar de Fespagnol ou du russe, mais c'est une langue mondiale, en raison de la puissance economique et culturelle du monde anglo-saxon (Etats-Unis) et du röle croissant des medias.

    (Histoire de la langue anglaise, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994, p. 118.)

    [My translation: Since the middle of the nineteenth Century, the role of English has done nothing but grow. The decline of the British Empire has not entailed a corresponding decline in the language (compare the fate of French) - quite the contrary. English is not an international language, after the fashion of Spanish or Russian, but a world language, a consequence of the economic and cultural strength of the Anglo-Saxon world (the United States) and the increasing role of the media.]

  • 3 - Cracks in the academic monolith

  • Tom McArthur
  • Book:
    The English Languages
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    23 April 1998, pp 56-77

  • Summary

    monolith mon'o-lith, n a Single block of stone forming a pillar or column; anything resembling a monolith in uniformity, massiveness or intractability. - adj monolith'ic relating to or resembling a monolith; (of a State, an organization, etc) massive, and undifferentiated throughout; intractable for this reason…

    (definition, Catherine Schwarz (ed.) The Chambers Dictionary, Edinburgh: 1993)

    An apostolic succession? - Reviews of the language

    The study of English is an international industry. Tens of thousands of scholars engage in it throughout the world, teaching a Student population of millions and producing innumerable books, periodicals, monographs, dissertations, papers, articles, reports, Conference proceedings, class notes, course books, newsletters, and Internet contributions. Their total Output is more than any one of them can ever hope to digest, and in many cases few will see - or even be informed about - every publication or other document which touches on their areas of Special interest. By and large, however, academics and others who are engaged professionally in the study of English know - or at least know about - the pre-eminent publications in their field. Many such publications have appeared throughout this Century, at least nine of which have had the same archetypal title, The English Language. (For details, see panel 3.1.)

    Although these books differ considerably in perspective, aim, content, and style (and have no official link one with another), the deliberate manner in which their authors and publishers have used the same all-encompassing title lends them an institutional quality. The authors as it were proceed in apostolic succession, each charged with producing the latest interim report on the same vast on-going project. Although all report that the object of their study has been diverse from the beginning and has changed over the centuries, their shared title suggests - despite all such diversity and change - that the subject has nonetheless stayed the same. It was English 1,500 years ago when its disunited Speakers arrived in Britain; it was English despite the consequences of the invasions of first the Norse then the Normans; it then remained English despite centurieslong infusions of vocabulary from French, Latin, Greek, and other sources; it was still English after it had spread from the home archipelago to every continent in the world; and it remains English, as its varieties burgeon and its more-or-less Standard more-or-less internationalized form becomes the most universal linguistic entity that humankind has ever known.

Page 387 of 438