Sociolinguistics Beep Boop Bop

Hello, I am late to the blog party. Here are some memes to hopefully express my current state of mental stability. 

   

Sociolinguistics

Language differences are sometimes easily noticeable and can be a key to understanding a person and how they live or how they were raised. I read an article called "The Need for New Approaches To Social Class Analysis In Sociolinguistics" that's about the approaches to research within sociolinguistics and thought it would help me find a new perspective on how people interact with each other and its relation to language. Basically, the article focuses on the importance of social class, ethnicity, and network. Another important factor within this article is their weight of importance on the socio side of linguistics and that made me think of a sociology project I had to complete this semester that is focused on the relationships between students and professors across the departments within Clarion University. I had used participation observation as a method of conducting my research for that project. This brought me to make a connection of networking that was one of the key factors within the article. I noticed through my observations within the classrooms that there are social structures within the students and they seem to be connected by their goals in that class. Those who seem to have a strategy of when participation would help them most sat with those who had a similar technique. I think this relates to how humans process language and learn from it, but also has shown me that within the student body there were little groupings based on how they learn. I noticed that these groups were also linked by the way they spoke based on when the professor was around or not. There were also differences in types of mannerisms or jokes being said within the classroom. I find networking to be a very important skill set and can be varied based on how a person was raised and with the inequality within America, there can be disadvantages that can lead to variations with how people speak when they are networking.   

 -Zoe Stone

http://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/Institute2015/Readings/Rickford1986.pdf   -  Article Link

Proceedings of our Last Meeting

Well, our blog has run its course—and performed its primary function, which was to keep us all engaged and talking to each other about the topics and ideas of this class in "American Voices." I am so pleased with the way all of you rose to this very unexpected occasion and together created such an interesting conversation about language and dialect in the time of quarantine.

For those of you who haven't been able to zoom in, last Wednesday we had our final "meeting"—party, really, because all we did was shoot the breeze, crack some jokes, and toast the future, whatever it may bring.

Oh, and play some music. Zoom doesn't permit overlapping audio feeds, so jamming was a complete non-starter. So we took turns. I played a couple, then Nate played one, then Eli—well, I think Eli was about to play something, but then we fell down a rabbit hole and forgot that was ever going to happen. (Sorry, Eli!)

Nate's tune was a cover of Ben King's "Stand By Me". Here's a cool version of it (although I feel I must point out that any "standing by" now needs to be at a safe distance of six feet):

These were my tunes, plus a third one that I meant to play but forgot:


https://open.spotify.com/artist/4fM1RtB7pgnhic6phSkanx

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1CPwHx5lgVxv0rfcp7UXLx

 

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0hh1N707d2q6xRvhnvraIK     

I literally have no idea what Eli was going to play, so here's my best guess as to what it might have been...

Bye folks, it's been swell. I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed our little time together. Stay well, stay home, stay sane, and we'll all meet again on the other side of Covid-19!

Marine Vocabulary Lesson

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine who is in the Marines. I was joking about how I don’t know what he’s talking about half the time when he uses their lingo/slang- and then I remembered this class and realized, hey, I can use that! So I got him to define a few terms for me, and now I will share them with you: slang apparently used by Marines, as informally defined for me by my friend Mark.

1. Grunt: “Ground Unit Not Trained,” or “musclehead” infantrymen.
2. POG: “Person Other than Grunt.” An insulting term which implies you aren’t a “real” Marine if you aren’t infantry.
3. Blue Falcon: That one guy that screws everyone else over; someone who really needs to get their act together.
4. Boot: Someone fresh out of boot camp, especially one who flaunts the fact that they’re a Marine now and gives you secondhand embarrassment.
5. Skate: A verb; to get the easiest job where you have to do minimal work.
6. Barney style: Instructions given in words even a toddler could understand.
7. Terminal lance: I quote, “the many, many lance corporals who have given up on life, and are just waiting out the rest of their enlistment in agony so they can get out.”
8. Ninja punch: NJP, Non-Judicial Punishment. Mark says this is his favorite term, and is basically criminal charges without a trial and with its own punishment system, used when someone does something stupid but not warranting an actual trial.

Anyone else never heard of most of these before? Or, alternatively, have others to share?

"He" to "he/she" to "they" to...?

One of the passages that interested me in our textbook was the section on the gradual shift away from using masculine words as generic forms. For a long time, it was commonly accepted practice to use “man” as synonymous with “humankind,” to use the pronoun “he” by default when referring to an unknown individual, and so on. This only changed around the 1970s, prompted by the second wave of feminism. Generic “he,” and considering men the default in general, started to fall out of favor. Today, the generic “he” seems old-fashioned, and it’s more common to see “he or she,” “he/she,” “(s)he” or some other variation on including both male and female pronouns. Another option, which I haven’t seen as frequently, is to alternate the pronouns used for the unknown or hypothetical person every time you start a new sentence.

Even more recently, though, singular “they” has been making a comeback- probably helped along by many people (including myself!) using it as a personal pronoun. The advantages of “they” in place of “he/she” are greater inclusivity, eliminating the need for one pronoun or the other to come first, and generally being less clunky to write, read, and say. However, it also has its disadvantages, such as the possibility of confusion if a single unknown person is referred to with “they” in the same passage where a group of people is also referred to with “they.” This can be avoided with careful enough phrasing, but having to phrase things carefully to avoid pronoun confusion can get annoying.

So, after reading about how quickly the generic “he” became “he or she,” and knowing that “he or she” now seems to be turning into singular “they,” I’ve been wondering: is there going to be another shift? If we move away from “they,” where will we go next? Or do you think we’ll be sticking with it for a while, until it’s swept away in some big social movement? I don’t know if anyone is still looking at this blog, since the semester is over, but if anyone does read this, I’d like to hear your thoughts!

Language in the Workforce Cont.

https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1827&context=ngresearchconf

I have included the link to a pdf that I found that was exactly what I seemed to be experiencing in the workforce in regard to gendered language. The article follows a woman named Hettie, listening to her speak and watching how she conducts herself within the work force.

The article talks about how Hettie "constructs herself as a competent professional, managing a difficult situation well and with dignity through a variety of strategic discursive, lexical and grammatical choices. These choices also present her as a vulnerable, warm-blooded person with strong feelings, and a story-teller who is responsive to her audience". She tries to relate to the person she is assisting and makes her work persona very personable and approachable, while at the same time alluding a ray of authority and professionalism. 

This article then went on to talk about how men and women differ in the fact that women tend to use more "rapport-talk", or rather where more personal information is used in the act of conversation, but I tend to disagree slightly. I disagree in that I do believe a lot of men participate in rapport talk as well. Within my own job the men around me are often telling stories of their past. Mostly because that past consists of serving in the United States Military, and military men are different than normal men - in my opinion, which is a whole other discussion - telling militia tales. 

Differences in Gender Language in the Workforce

For the last couple of weeks I have been working at a technology center for Northwest Savings Bank in Warren, PA. Due to the fact that technology and help support such as this are predominately male dominated, I was able to observe and record the differences in language between male and female coworkers and within different help desk calls received by the desk.

I suppose I should start by explaining what we do: I am one of four interns currently working at the Tech Support Center, with an additional employee-band of ten or less. From that work pool of people there were three girls total, myself included. To me, this was more than I thought there would be when I started working for tech support. During a normal work day we answer close to one-hundred calls each; each call with a different technological issue that needs solving. Now while that sounds impressive, it's merely unlocking user accounts and logging back in.

From performing these calls myself, and also listening into many calls made by others, I was able to observe many different styles of speaking between male and female.

Some of these observations are that, like in school, women tend to tag themselves before speaking. By this I mean, they begin asking their question(s) by saying things such as "I don't know if you'll be able to fix this..." or "hopefully his isn't too tricky...". They never want to outright ask for something to be fixed. And the same goes on my end. After I solved some issues for people I would go to email them back and find myself belittling my own accomplishment of fixing their issue by saying something along the lines of: "everything SHOULD be fixed by now" and "Hopefully it works for you".

But this fact is not the same when it comes to my male coworkers. In observation I decided men are very matter-of-fact. They state what needs to be said, and hardly elaborate more. If the account is unlocked thats all the information they give you. Whereas women tend to add more information than needed. For example I would always add in the note: "If you have any more issues please do not hesitate to call the help desk and someone will take care of it". The men at work hardly ever did a follow up on someone's account or issues that were previously recorded; while women remember the names of frequent callers and have chats about life in between fixing the problem.

There were so many different part about speech and gender in the workforce and I will continue to write and observe more.

Digging into Family Root Similarities

As my last blog post I wanted to bring attention to my family roots, the dialects of the Polish and Ukrainian language.  My father’s side is Polish and my mother’s side is Ukrainian. Both have made comments here and there, mentioning that both languages are quite similar.  But in what ways? I began to dig, asking my very Ukrainian grandmother and doing some research on my own.  This is what I found, both Polish and Ukrainian are Slavic languages from the Indo-European family.  And during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ukraine came under the domination of Poland this resulted in cultural Polonization.  Gradually, the official language of Ukrainian provinces under Poland was changed to Polish.  As a result, many Ukrainian nobles learned the Polish language.  This could explain why the west of the modern day Ukraine has much closer vocabulary and dialect use of the Polish language.  To get technical, both Ukrainian and Polish orthography is largely phonetic. There is a consistent correspondence between their spelling system of language, sounds, and letters.  As for grammar, both languages have a relatively free word order, and are considered a highly inflected language.  This meanings a language that changes the form or ending of some words due to the way they are used in a sentence.  There are no articles, and often subject pronouns are dropped.  Adding to that, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and numerals are inclined by numbers, cases, and gender. 

I watched an interesting video of a man who spoke Polish and a women who spoke Ukrainian, trying to have a simple conversation.  It was interesting the way the women picked up on a few common spoken words.  I recommend watching about 5 or so minutes since the video is so long.  Let me know what you thought and if you know any other slavic languages who are also similar.  Or feel free to express your family’s roots if they have any correspondence to one another.