Sound and vision blog

This week I’ve been listening to a group of naturists who live in Dorset and enjoy getting an all-over tan (weather permitting) on the nudist beaches at Studland. They all strongly identify as naturists, considering themselves to be part of a minority group that sometimes finds itself threatened by those who do not understand or approve of their way of life. For example they describe being called ‘perverts’ by a group of youths who, ironically, were watching the sunbathing nudists through binoculars from a cliff-top. One way that they express this aspect of their identity is through their speech. In one part of the interview they mention words that they use which are likely to be known by other naturists but not necessarily by people from outside of that group. You can listen to the audio clip here>.

The word ‘textile’ is used to refer to a person who wears clothes on the beach as opposed to a ‘nuddy’ who goes without. One speaker mentions the different connotations of ‘textile’, describing how it can be used either as an insult or to be purely descriptive depending on the context of the conversation and the company they are in. To a person not involved in the naturist scene the meaning of these words might be guessed but they would not necessarily feel comfortable actually using them themselves. Using language in this way enables the naturists to subtly exclude those who are not part of their group by making them feel like linguistic outsiders. At the same time, when they use these terms the naturists communicate to each other that they are insiders and belong to the group. Words are used to display to others their involvement in naturism, much like the brown bum which they describe as a ‘badge of honour’ for committed nudists.

For each recording in the BBC Voices collection, we’re writing a linguistic commentary that summarises the main features of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. To describe the pronunciation of vowels, we are using a system of “lexical sets” developed by John Wells at University College London.

Wells’ system provides a neat shorthand for grouping together words that contain the same vowel sound (irrespective of their written form) and each lexical set has a keyword that can be used to refer to the group of words. So for example soap, joke, host, toe, mauve all belong to one set, which is indexed by the keyword GOAT. Sociolinguists then talk about ‘the GOAT vowel’ and can compare its different pronunciations in regional varieties of English. The list of 27 sets Wells proposes for English is on his website here.

This week I’ve been listening to a recording of a group of young dance students from Hull. The GOAT vowel has a quite distinctive realisation in the speech of the female speakers here, and in the sound clip on the Voices website you can hear the sound itself (in the words go and coke) as well as a Londoner’s reaction to it (click here to listen):

I find it a lot when you go on holiday and you meet different people from different places. It’s the Londoners really... like we’d go to the bar and say, “got half a coke?” And they just rag you all the time and, “it’s ‘coke’,” ’cause that’s how they would say it.

If you listened to the clip, does anything also strike you about her pronunciation of the word time?

In Received Pronunciation (RP) and many other accent varieties of British English, the words ripe, tight and bike have the same vowel sound as bribe, side and time. They all belong to the PRICE lexical set. But occasionally the sets need to be re-divided to reflect regional variations in the way that vowel pronunciations pattern together.

For this speaker (who is representative of working class females in Hull) ripe, tight and bike would have a pronunciation similar to RP, but bribe, side and time would be pronounced much more like the way she pronounces bar in “...we’d go to the bar…”. This phenomenon was described by the English Dialect Society way back in 1877, and there is a nice overview of it (with some modern updates) in a study by Ann Williams and Paul Kerswill that you can access here. The PRICE vowels are discussed from the bottom of page 16 onwards.

As we listen through the recordings, we have a list of linguistic features that we index when we hear them used by one of the speakers in a particular interview. With pronunciation, we listen out for things such as: do the speakers use glottal stops (marked by the phonetic symbol [ʔ]) for /t/ ? And if so, is it only at the end of words (I like it [ɪʔ]) or is it also in the middle as well (I'm better [bɛʔə]) ? We have about 330 of these pronunciation related features, some very common like the T-glottaling just mentioned, others much rarer.

The features we listen out for under ‘grammar’ include things like how singular and plural are marked on nouns and verbs, and whether they appear to match. For example, in all parts of the UK (and other English-speaking countries) it’s common to hear that cost six pound_ or I drove six mile_ last night. In Standard English, it’s expected that because six is more than one, this is a plural construction and you would say six pounds or six miles.

Note that we’re not saying which is “correct”. If native speakers of a language use such constructions then that is valid data for us. What we’re interested in is how this usage varies, be it geographically, socially or by gender, and whether the variation is also leading to change in English.

This week I’ve been writing the linguistic commentary for an interview with three teenage males in Sheffield. One of the constructions they use very frequently is the tag innit. In the clip that’s available on the BBC Voices site (you can listen here) there are three instances (the time stamp in minutes and seconds is included):

I just get that from my friends, innit (0:23)
we always looked out for everybody on... you know soldiers, warriors, innit (0:42)
say that about each other, innit (0:48)

The first interesting thing about the way they use this tag is that it doesn’t correspond to Standard English, given that these end-of-sentence tags usually echo or agree with the form of the verb that’s gone before. So Standard English would have:

I just get that from my friends, don't I
you know soldiers, warriors, aren't they
say that about each other, don't we

The second interesting thing is that this construction (its spelling innit and the way it is currently used invariantly by young speakers) is now included in the September 2009 online update of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The lexicographers note that it is a particular feature of Anglo-Welsh dialects and include this quotation from a journal article by J. G. Wolff: “Many Welsh people … say and accept as correct, such expressions as …‘Shall we go out, is it?’, or even: ‘Like you know innit see, me mother, see, do always like tell me to do the washing up, innit see?’.” On the British Library Sounds Familiar? website (here) there is a five minute audio clip with lots of examples of this kind of i(s)n('t) it from an older speaker in Aberhosan in Powys.

The OED also notes that this modern use of innit is associated with the speech of young British Asians. This comedy sketch from the BBC series “Goodness Gracious Me” below includes some nice examples (even though they are exaggerated for effect!).

One of the recordings we’ve been working on this month is of a group from the British Caribbean community in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Of the four speakers, the two younger ones were in their late thirties at the time of the recording and were born and bred in Huddersfield, while the two older ones were in their mid fifties and had been born in Jamaica but moved to Yorkshire in the 1960s. They speak quite a bit about patwa (Jamaican Creole) and how many of the younger generation they know don’t really use it any more, even though it’s heard a lot in lyrics to songs, and so on.

As part of the interview, the group are asked if they have any particular word that is shorthand for ‘a young person in cheap trendy clothes and jewellery’ – this is an item that is known to vary a lot across the UK. One of the men, Keith, says that he’d use ‘poppy-show’ which combines elements of foolishness or ridicule but also ostentation and a kind of vanity. ‘Poppy-show’ is in the Oxford English Dictionary and is believed to have originated in Scots English, but shown to be widely used in the way Keith suggests in Caribbean varieties of English.

However, in explaining to the BBC reporter how it’s used, Keith reveals that it would often be accompanied by ‘kissing your teeth’, which we abbreviate to (KST) in the extract below:

first you kiss your teeth you go, “(kst) look like poppy-show” you have to kiss your teeth first though “(kst)”

This sound is made by placing the front ‘blade’ of your tongue against the hard palate behind your top teeth, and drawing air inwards from the back of your mouth (more from the mouth than actually the lungs). It’s a little bit like one of the clicks found in the south African language Xhosa (video example here), but kiss-teeth is more drawn out. It’s also like the marker of disapproval or disappointment in English that is often represented as ‘tsk’ or ‘tut tut’ in the written language.

(KST) is actually a much more complex phenomenon than a mere ‘marker of disapproval’ for speakers of patwa, though. Peter Patrick and Esther Figueroa have written a serious linguistic appraisal of kiss-teeth exploring how it serves to “negotiate and enact moral standing” and express a wide variety of physical and emotional feeling. You can access their article on Peter Patrick’s webpage here.

Do you call “the long soft seat in the main room of your house” the sofa, the settee, the couch or something else? And what is your word for “a thing whose name you’ve forgotten”?

In 2005, as part of the BBC Voices project, over 1,300 people participated in a large-scale survey about the words they use, and their views and attitudes to language, accents and dialects. Journalists from every BBC Local Radio station in England, plus BBC Wales, BBC Scotland and BBC Ulster, recorded hour-long interviews with different groups of speakers in their region.

These recordings have now been deposited with the British Library so that they can be accessed and used by linguists, oral historians and the general public. Voices of the UK is a three year project at the British Library, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to exploit and enhance the collection.

The main outcomes of this project will be: