Welcome to What Happens Next.
My name is Larry Bernstein.
What happens next is a podcast which covers economics,
finance, and culture.
Today's topic is, dude, WTF.
How bad English improves the language.
Our guest this week is Valerie Friedland,
who is a professor of linguistics
at the University of Nevada at Reno.
And she's the author of the book, like literally dude.
I'm annoyed when others abuse the English language,
but I recognize that language is evolved.
Some good and some bad.
I want to hear from Valerie about how that process works
and who is leading that evolution.
Valerie, can you please begin your six minute opening remarks?
I'm Valerie Friedland and I'm the author of the new book,
like literally dude, arguing for the good and bad English.
I wrote this book because I think all of us
have had that moment where we have thought,
I hate it when people say literally, non-literally,
or I hate it how often I say like these days in my speech
or what's up with that weird, crackly vocal fry
that I'm hearing all the time now.
And we don't tend to love these new features
that we hear in our speech.
And we also don't tend to stop and think about
why people are using them, why have they become so popular,
particularly in American English.
As a socio-linguist, some of the huge studies,
language and society, I'm in a unique position
to answer those questions.
We have a lot of social triggers operating in our world today
in the form of migration, settlement, economic ecologies,
social change, and even the social soup
that is middle and high school.
One of the things that we're really tied to as speakers
that we have a really hard time getting over
is prescriptivism, this one view we've learned
since the time we're very, very little
about what language is and what it should be.
And we don't realize that the concept
of prescription ofism itself is quite young
and quite recent.
It's only in the 18th century with the rise of the middle
in the merchant class and the breakdown
of rigid class barriers that we see these ideas
about what speech should be, start to emerge.
Grammar books and dictionary start to come out
and they typically were based on the norms
of the upper class because language was one
of the last remaining markers of aristocracy.
And this is what today we consider good English.
It was simply the norms and the beliefs
of a certain higher socioeconomic strata
from a certain period of time.
And we don't realize that much of these things
that we think we know about language are actually wrong.
And a great example of that is if I asked you
what are the vowels of English?
You would no doubt tell me A-E-I-O-U
and perhaps throw in that sometimes why.
But the reality is English has many more vowels than this.
In fact, we have 13 or 14 vowels in English,
not these five, just depending on your dialect.
If you say words like beat, bit, bait, bet, bat,
bot, boat, butt, boot, you see that all of those
only differ on the vowels.
And so there must be many more vowels
than simply five in English.
But because of how we've been taught in English class
since the time we were preschoolers,
we have such firm beliefs about what art language is.
And we really feel strongly about those being
the only right vowels, just like we feel very strongly
about what the right verbs are,
what the right subjects can be.
And so my goal in writing this book was really to first
unpack where the features that we notice come from.
So where does light come from?
What is it used for?
What's its purpose?
What happened to literally along the way?
Things like that.
My goal here is that people will start to understand
why language has to change and who has driven it forward
and what types of directions it tends to travel in.
And with that, I hope a little more compassion will emerge
when we look at those speakers that say the things
we love to hate.
Years ago, I read Mark Twain's novel, A Connecticut Yankee
and King Arthur's Court.
And I was thinking about how time dependency works
in linguistics.
If I engaged in time travel, could I communicate
with Thomas Jefferson?
Yes, at that point we could.
If you go back much further than that, it's a little harder.
So by the time we'd reach the 15th century or so,
we could communicate.
It wouldn't be easy and we'd have to take some time
to get used to it.
Mainly because words were quite different.
I mean, our vocabulary has changed vastly
over the last few hundred years
because English started to emerge
as an institutional language around the 15th, 16th, 17th century
and we started borrowing huge amounts of words.
However, if you go back to a thousand
when William the Conqueror was around,
we would not be able to understand ourselves
if we were talking to an earlier version
because that version of English was so drastically different
than the English we speak today.
And I think what people don't realize
if you look at the last 500 years of English,
the rate of change has slowed down considerably
compared to the previous 800 years.
And why is that?
Well, a lot of it is literacy
and codification and standardization.
Whenever you have a pressure on language to keep it one way,
then we tend to find change moves more slowly
because fewer speakers accept it.
But also if you look at the history of the last 1500 years
in Britain, you'll see that we had migration,
we had wars, we had invasion,
and we had English as only a colloquial language.
It was a vulgar language.
English wasn't spoken by anybody in the elite
for a thousand years, basically.
It was Latin.
It was French classical languages were used
as the language of religion,
the language of medicine, the language of institutions,
the language of law.
And so English was just spoken by the common people
and when you don't have a purpose for it
that tries to hold it still, like education,
like institutional use,
it changes because natural and inherent pressures emerge
to make language more efficient over time.
When you have an overlay of a different language,
you also force change much faster.
And during the Middle English period,
we got a huge amount of our words from French,
the 15th century, English rose to become the language
of government and institution, literacy rose,
the printing press started,
and all of that solidified the dominance of English
and with dominance with literacy
comes codification standardization
and all of those things hold language still.
How much are we adding to the English language today?
We're constantly inviting new words.
So obviously our initial word stock
was pretty much 100% Germanic.
By the time the French were around,
we had taken a lot of words in from Old Norse,
which was also a Germanic language,
so it wasn't all that different.
And then in the 15, 16, 1700s,
we wanted to enrich the vocabulary of English
and we turned to classical languages like Latin and Greek.
So we got a huge inflow at that time in medicine
and law particularly.
So a lot of those words are of Greek or Latin origin
because that was where we borrowed them from in that period
when we needed more words to talk about those things.
And then recently, of course,
we have a lot of Japanese influence,
a huge amount of Spanish influence,
even things like Hebrew influences on English
when we colonized the Americas,
we took in a lot of indigenous words
and Native American languages from contact
with those languages.
We got words like lobster, a lot of place names,
a lot of food names, corn, for example.
I don't think we've ever stopped bringing in those influences.
The rate probably has slowed
because we have a lot of words in English.
We don't need that many more.
So we had to get a lot of words
when we started to use English in medicine and in law.
But these days, we don't really have that.
I grew up in Chicago.
And when I was a kid,
there was a very small Hispanic population.
But by 2050, Chicago is expected to be majority Hispanic.
And many of them are Native Spanish speakers.
How will the interaction of so many Spanish speakers
change the nature of English spoken in places like Chicago?
A lot depends on how that language is coming in.
And I think with Spanish,
like other immigrant languages that have come in,
it tends to be assimilated into English.
So we get new words and new dialects often arise.
But the standard language model
typically doesn't change to accommodate it.
The influence of large numbers of Spanish speakers
coming in on standard English norms
is probably quite slow and fairly small.
Just like we would see when we had a big Irish influx
into the United States.
In Chicago, there certainly are vowel changes
that are going on that might have some
substrate influence from Spanish.
You mentioned that pre-1500,
English is a backwater language
and then it quickly becomes the dominant language
in the world.
Some believe that is because of the global nature
of the British Empire
and then the economic success of the United States.
Is there anything special about English
that makes it easy to speak and understand?
Well, it's not a very morphosyntactically complex language.
And by that, I mean it had a lot of endings.
So in Old English, we had case marking.
You had grammatical gender marking.
Every word had some ending that told you where it went,
what it did and why it was there.
We don't have any of that anymore.
And a lot of that's been contact with other languages
that has atrophied those endings,
which is why it's funny when people get so upset
if someone deletes a plural ending today.
So if someone says $3 because of an influence
of their background language instead of $3
when English used to have not just plural S,
which they used to have like three different ways
to mark plurals in Old English
that we don't use at all anymore.
So it's just being nitpicky to get upset about it today.
So it is true that it's a less morphosynthetic complex.
We don't have to remember all those endings.
We do things instead with word order.
Also with things like adverbs and prepositions
and helping words.
That's potentially psychologically easier to acquire
than a language that has more morphosynthetically
complex grammar.
What we see is when you get two languages that are learned
by large numbers of non-native speakers,
they tend to transmit that language
with less morphosynthetic complexity,
which suggests that that's somehow easier to grasp
than the really intimate relationship
between parent and child that's required
for very complex languages with lots of endings.
And it's called isolating languages,
which have very few endings versus a gluten of languages
that have a ton of them.
So Chinese, for example, is very isolating.
In 1998, I moved to Tokyo to run
Psalms proprietary trading department.
I had no chance of learning enough Japanese
to speak effectively in business.
Yet we had a team of Japanese professionals
who could speak English competently.
Why is that?
Well, that had less to do with the complexity of the language
and more to do with the power of the language.
The fundamental point is that the benefit accrues
to those that can use language in a way
that helps them with their economy
and helps them with their institutional practices.
And it is more beneficial for the Japanese
to learn English in the world economy
that it is for you to learn Japanese.
It has a personal decision if you look
at how it's classified.
English is at the very top of the pyramid
of languages in which scientific endeavors are done,
legal endeavors are done,
government institutional endeavors are done,
and trade is done.
And therefore, it makes sense that people
would flock to a language that has that kind of utility.
Why do some people find the word like annoying?
I don't find like problematic,
but it is definitely, I think,
the number one feature I would hear about
when people would complain to me about the decay of language
like always came up.
And my students certainly use it
and feel self-conscious about using it.
The interesting thing about like used as a discourse marker,
which is where it's not strictly tied
to the semantic meaning of the sentence.
It's meaning is more pragmatic or conversational.
We don't think of it as being an old feature,
but when we look at criminal proceedings
from the old Bailey transcripts from the 1700s,
we find like appears there as a discourse marker,
just like we use it today.
Also, when you look at recordings from the 1950s
in New Zealand of octogenarians of older speakers
that had emigrated to New Zealand from Britain,
in the late 1800s, they use like excessively
at the beginning of their sentences
as a discourse particle elsewhere.
So it's not a new feature.
And in those varieties,
it's pretty similar to how it's used
in American English today.
But it is a new feature relatively to American English.
And I think that's the key.
People didn't notice because it wasn't used that often.
And then in the late 80s, it seemed to have taken off.
A lot of this was driven by this iconic image
of the valley girl.
I think Moon unit and Frank Zappa had a lot to do with that
where they popularized a feature
that was becoming more popular in Southern California.
And since California has been featured
as part of this view of what America is
and what America should be, especially with young people,
its influence has been unusually great.
For someone that uses it naturally,
it has three main functions in addition
to its grammatical functions.
So if someone uses about,
would you say they're saying something meaningless?
Probably not.
But if they use like in that exact same context,
somehow it becomes meaningless.
Again, just a matter of perspective.
It's also used as a discourse marker.
That's where we put it at the beginning of the sentence
to highlight that what you're about to say
is your own stance or your own evaluation
of what was just said, either by you or another speaker.
We also use it as a discourse particle
where it's used in the middle of a sentence
to highlight or emphasize something.
So that would be an example, such as,
I waited for like 10 hours for you,
where maybe I didn't wait 10 hours,
but what I'm saying is look dude,
you wait, maybe wait a long time and I'm pissed.
But you can see we have a bunch of different likes.
So you have likes, they're used as verbs.
Likes, they're used as nouns.
Likes, they're used as prepositions.
Likes, they're used as conjunction.
And now you also have likes that are used
as approximators, discourse particles,
discourse markers and quoted to verbs.
So it doesn't come across like there's a lot of likes,
absolutely.
Does that make them meaningless?
Not if you understand all those different purposes,
but if I don't understand it if it's not native to me,
I will hear them as useless and pointless.
Penny Eckert wrote a book, Jocks and Burnouts,
suggesting that individuals in high school
of a particular social class have much more influence.
One of the important players in our society
that influenced the use of language
and introduce new words and expressions.
Penny is an amazing linguist
and has been very influential on my career.
But if we look at the history of language change,
not just in English, but globally in all languages,
we find the same recurrent players
as the leaders of linguistic change,
both in modern times and in past times.
And that is the young, the female and the lower classes.
And while we often ascribe good language
and standard norms to upper middle class speakers
and often men, the reality is those are not changes.
Those are just adoptions of language forms
that were already in play.
When we look at who introduced most of those standard forms
that we take as good English today,
and we go back in the historical records
to try to find evidence of when they started to emerge,
what we find is it's usually lower class innovations
that have spread up through the social hierarchy,
often through the mouths of women,
and become the norms by which we applaud our speech today.
I have a son and a daughter,
and it appears to me that the discussions
between young girls are much more varied
in their vocabulary.
Is that true?
I don't know of many studies
that have actually compared word count
among teenage boys to teenage girls,
but I guarantee if you go in a room full
of a bunch of teenage boys that are talking to each other,
there is a lot of conversation going on.
Whether my son talks to me is a different question,
whereas my daughter spends more time
both talking to me and her friends,
and so maybe it's partly that their speech
is more visible to us rather than more frequent.
But when we study the word count of women
in professional arenas,
what we find is typically women talk less than men,
but the social pressures on men and women,
especially as adolescents, are vastly different,
and those different social pressures
are immensely important
on the direction of language change over time.
When we look at the changes that are innovated by young women,
most of them are ones that come up
from under the level of consciousness.
We call them changes from below in linguistics,
which means that people aren't aware of doing them.
They're these very low level variations in speech.
So for example, whether you say you're a vowel as a,
or a, so if I'm a New Yorker, I might say that.
If I'm a California, I'll say that.
Those are actually really subtle changes in the vowels
that have happened over time, led by young women.
Young men are attracted to a lot of hip hop language,
a lot of ethnic subculture language,
because those come with the ideologies of masculinity
that are culture values in young men,
which is toughness, physicality, strength, roughness.
Those are really stereotypes about the speakers
that use those features.
So unlike women who are drawing from these sensitive,
low level changes that don't have meaning attached yet,
at an overt level, young men tend to bring in features
to their speech like dude, like bra, like ain't,
that are strongly marked with a stigma, but a stigma of cool.
If a woman starts to do that, she doesn't get treated
very well because of it.
So when young women go home and they're using hip hop language,
it doesn't go over so well with mom and dad,
but when young men come home with it,
they are awarded some covert prestige for using them
and it's valued by those types of speakers.
I was born and raised in Chicago,
and I always thought that Chicago had no accent
as compared to Boston or the Deep South.
But Bill Abov, who was a famous linguist
who taught at the University of Pennsylvania,
did experiments where he showed that other Americans
had trouble understanding Chicago speakers
because of their use of vowels.
That's a very famous study by Bill and some of his students
that looked at different versions of words
and played them in different places
to see how well they are understood.
He did it in Chicago and then he also compared it
with speech from Birmingham, Alabama.
But the reality is we all talk weird.
Everybody has an accent.
We just don't hear it because those people we talk to
the most sound just like we do.
We only hear it when we go somewhere else
and we realize that it's hard to understand us
or we can't understand someone else.
And we're pretty good at learning different dialects.
So we do something called vowel normalization
as listeners and over a few days, you get better at it,
which is why, for example, if you go to Scotland,
you cannot understand them for the first day,
but after two or three days,
you can kind of get along pretty well, at least at the bar.
But LaBoe's work was critical because he both
was the first to really make many people from the Midwest
and from the North who thought their language was superior,
understand that they had a version of language
just like everybody else,
but he also was the first to really trace
these major regional vowel shifts
that were happening in American English
that have drastically changed the way
that English speakers in America say words
over the last 50 or 60 years.
Vowels don't just move in random ways,
they move in ways predictable by our brains and our mouths.
And the same kinds of changes have happened
throughout history in many, many languages.
And he was one of the first to look at the changes
in American English and be able to relate it to changes
that have happened in the historical record
and in other languages to try to trace
these universal principles.
He's done a great job of publicizing the facts
that dialects are something that are deeply tied
to our social identities, where we're from, who we are.
He was one of the first to trace the pattern of women
in leading those changes, not just in Chicago's speech,
but in Southern speech, in California's speech,
in Canadian speech, and also of tracing the ethnic segregation,
what he found is he looked at comparisons
between white speakers and non-white speakers
and found that most of these vowel changes
that are happening are Anglo-vallow changes.
And most of the ethnic varieties spoken
have either their own vowel shifts happening
or are moving away from white speech.
Some of it's white flight from the vowels
of African American speech, and some of it's just simply
a marker of the fact that we are not integrated
as a society, and it's a very good way to look
at people's integration levels in different cities
and compare them.
So we find that African American Southerners
and white Southerners actually have
a much more similar vowel system
than Northern white speakers and Northern black speakers.
It doesn't mean that people are integrated
in terms of their social networks,
but in terms of vast numbers of African Americans
that live in Southern cities,
and their involvement in those cities compared
to Northern cities where they tend to be much more ghettoized
and segregated.
My son listens to rap music,
and has a much greater exposure to African American language
than I did.
Do you think that will affect his use of that dialect
in the future, or is listening to music
different from conversation?
I don't think the long term effects are going to last
because they use those in some ways to be
non-conformist and rebellious, but as they age,
we find something called age grading,
which is where certain speech features
that get picked up for social purpose in adolescence
start to fade off.
Urban speech is very much tied to African American English,
and that doesn't matter whether you're black or white,
but still the language of success
is based on white male middle class norms,
and for boys like your son, chances are,
they won't bring much of their African American English
variety into the professional world with them.
Those will be sort of short-lived.
I've been doing this podcast for over three years,
and I make transcripts,
and I noticed that the academic speakers
opened many of their sentences with the word, so.
They also use the words, actually, and really.
What do you find?
You know, I am guilty of all of those.
I know that from listening to myself in podcasts,
and they're the conversational glue.
We can't have conversations without signposting for people
where we're going and without connecting where we've been.
And particularly as a professor, when we teach,
we have a lot of signposting going on in our speech.
We've learned to do it because we have to make sure
everybody keeps up with us.
I think we use actually a lot to signal
that what we're going to say is slightly different
than the idea that you had when you asked me that question
or what I had just said.
It signals this contrastive state.
So a lot of these features,
these discourse markers that you're talking about,
signal something called change of state
when we study them.
And that means that we're going from one type of conversation,
one kind of topic, one kind of direction.
And they signal that the person who's about to speak
is going to take it in a different direction.
And they provide orientation to the listener
of what direction that is.
The other thing that I think is very common
among professors is to use things like write
at the end of our statements.
I know I do this a lot with my students
because I'm reminding them that we just did this
or I want to make sure we're all on the same page.
We are constantly checking for listenership
and we're inviting inferences.
All of these features are very helpful
as conversational cohesion markers
and as ways for me to tell you the stance
I'm going to take and what I'm about to say
and how it connects to what we were just talking about.
We use audio editing in this podcast
and we eliminate the us from the podcast.
Does the a serve a purpose?
And is it a mistake to remove them?
Alamna or what Ling was referred to as Phil deposits
and there have been a number of really fascinating studies
on their purpose.
Does it enhance the listener's experience?
Yes and no.
Unconsciously it enhances that listener's experience
because we find that Alamna do some really important
signaling work that help them understand what a speaker's
saying.
Consciously people don't like them.
They tend to be disfavored because again
we're really tied to only things
that contribute semantic information.
Especially if they're not very interesting speakers.
The less interesting the speaker
the more we notice that they am an a
and in fact it can be distracting.
So does it enhance the listening experience?
Not from that perspective.
Does it enhance the listener's cognitive reception
of the material?
There's also evidence that suggests yes it does
that when a speaker uses um or uh
it usually signals either new information
more abstract information,
less familiar information or more syntactically complex
information which means first of all
I'm not done with my turn as a speaker
and I'm going to continue so don't jump in.
But we also find really interesting studies
that suggest because we understand as a listener
that um and us signals something harder is about to come.
That we devote more cognitive resources
to unpacking what they're about to say
and so the benefit is it actually helps us
integrate that new information more quickly
and remember it better later.
So from a cognitive perspective yes it does do
some beneficial work.
From a perceptual perspective no we don't like it
and we consider it distracting.
So it's hard to integrate those two different viewpoints
because it's an perfect example of something
that has cognitive benefits but not social benefits.
This is a podcast and it differs from an article
or a presentation because it is a conversation.
Why do people prefer listening to conversations?
Well I think part of the reasons podcasts
have become very popular is because people
anticipate they're conversational
and that's one of the reasons people like them
rather than a formal interview that is more stiff.
Our speech in general is less formal than it used to be
and we seem to enjoy and encourage those formats more
today than we ever did before.
And I think podcasts are a really nice hybrid
between the more formal interviews because they're long form
but in a casual style that invites people in
as if they're in the living room with you.
When I chat with my brother on the phone and I say to him
Ron you're not gonna believe what happened.
His response is usually,
what, why does he drop the T in what?
Is he being lazy with his use of language?
No it's not laziness and this number lazy
then the fact that you say walk with no L
or often with no T.
If you say night like the types with the swords
and the jousting, if you say night instead of
mixed creaks, is that lazy?
I mean are you lazy because you drop the K
and the sound and you change the vowel?
No, it's just the natural evolution of language over time
when normal processes of speech interact with social identity
and become meaningful in some ways
that speakers adopt it more wholesale.
It's not lazy at all, it's still an articulatory process.
And also if you like British English,
which a lot of people do and they love it when the king
or the queen say things like,
Pock the Ka, then you're doing the exact same thing.
Our deletion is caused through very similar reasons
that glottalization of T happens.
And that was a low class feature prior to the 19th century
that gradually crept up into upper class aristocratic speech
and became the new norm.
But if you don't see the king as lazy,
then you shouldn't see someone that says what is lazy
because it's the exact same kind of process.
In 1994, my boss assigned me to trade municipal bonds.
I was first introduced to a municipal bond broker
who called himself JB.
Then I met double G.
My Maryland salesmen introduced himself as TMB at the bull.
So when I answered the phone,
I began to refer to myself as LB.
That was my new name.
Two years later I was transferred
to our proprietary trading in emerging markets.
I went on my first overseas trip to Asia
and I attended a conference with leading Asian finance ministers,
economists and businessmen.
They would say things like,
the so-called sovereign debt credit spreads
have recently widened because of the so-called tequila crisis
which resulted in so-called losses.
And I was baffled by the use of so-called
which did not enhance the information load of a sentence
and it was a distraction.
I saw some sort of hedge.
When I returned back to the US,
I started answering the phone as so-called LB.
What do you make of that?
Well, first of all, that's a great story.
I think what you're talking about
is sort of how different communities get
these different markers that are
deeply tied to their social identities.
And particularly when we get into groups
that are formed through work or clubs or activities,
we find that they often develop something called
a language of practice or a community of practice.
Language is a beautiful way of signaling in group status
in those communities.
What are you optimistic about as it relates to language?
I'm optimistic that we are moving in the right direction
with language, even though I think people cringe
at these new forms.
And a lot of times it's because the innovations
that we hear in the language around us
start with speaker groups that tend to be disfavored,
social classes or ethnic groups.
English is a living language.
We want it to change.
If it's not changing, it's Latin.
And let's just look at where Latin ended up, right?
Inviting different influences into our language
has been what made English the vibrant language it is today.
It is the natural course of language to evolve.
And we should embrace it rather than be afraid of it.
And just remember that the things we hate language today
are born of specific cultural moments and ideas.
And in the long view of history, they do not matter.
Linguistic decay is a creation that we have
based on these norms that we've idealized in our heads
about what language should be.
But it's really not about what language is.
Just think of them as a pair of boots that hurt at first,
but one day they'll be your favorite boots to wear around.
So I think I'm optimistic about the future of our language.
Thanks to Valerie for joining us today.
If you missed last week's show, check it out.
The topic was how to make a good apology.
Our speaker was Edwin Batastella,
who is the author of the book, sorry about that,
the language of public apology.
I'm fascinated by apologies and what makes a good one
and why some fall flat.
It's more than just words as it must include true
contrition, mistakes are made.
So let's find out how to make more effective meacopas.
We also welcomed back by Buddy Darren Schwartz,
who is the what happens next movie critic.
Darren weighed in on the success and failures of apologies
and he reviewed nine time Oscar nominated movie
Banshees of Inushiren because apology and forgiveness
is at the core of that film.
I also want to make a plug for next week's program
with Jennifer Scubia and her book, Eight Billion and Counting,
as I'm very interested in demographics
and the political implications of it.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts
on our website, what happens next in six minutes.com.
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Thank you for joining me.
Goodbye.
.