Lexis lexispodcast

Here are the show notes for Episode 56, in which Raj and Dan talk to Dr Danielle Turton, Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at Lancaster University and Principal Investigator for a Leverhulme funded project on Lancashire rhoticity. We talk about:


Dialect levelling and why it’s a complicated picture


Why researching UK dialects is so interesting


What’s happening to rhoticity in the North West (and beyond)


Media discourses around dialect change



Danielle Turton’s Lancaster page: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about/people/danielle-turton 

Danielle Turton’s own pages: https://danielleturton.rbind.io/ 

The rhoticity paper can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095447023000694 

Some of the news stories that we mention: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/researchers-fear-the-spoken-r-is-ready-to-roll-away-from-the-last-bastion-of-rhoticity 

Telegraph article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/16/blackburn-bristol-traditional-english-accent/ 

Archived Telegraph link: http://archive.today/pFeod 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/lancashire-north-west-blackburn-jane-horrocks-england-b2470464.html 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/dec/28/strong-r-sound-of-some-lancashire-accents-in-danger-of-dying-out 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog)

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys 

Here are the show notes for Episode 55, in which Jacky and Dan talk to Dr Christian Ilbury, Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at The University of Edinburgh about:


Being an online linguist


Social media and language change - why it’s complicated


Why ‘slang’ is an unhelpful word and why ‘internet vernacular’ is a better term for the kind of styles he is looking at


Appropriation and diffusion


Media discourses about young people, online language and technology


His continuing work on MLE and why ‘MLE’ is still a useful term



Christian’s University of Edinburgh profile: https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/christian-ilbury

Some appearances in the media that we mention: https://theconversation.com/theyre-serving-what-how-the-c-word-went-from-camp-to-internet-mainstream-210214 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/apr/09/bait-ting-certi-how-uk-rap-changed-the-language-of-the-nation

“You have quite a long history of British vernaculars being exported through British cultural forms,” says Christian Ilbury, a lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh – from Scouse accents with the Beatles to Arctic Monkeys and the presence of industrial working-class accents in indie music. “Grime essentially became the vehicle in which we perceived MLE.” Those kids in suburban England, he says, “don’t speak this variety because of where they grew up. They’re using it to align with a cultural orientation that they appreciate.”

https://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.com/2019/10/ 

‘Slay’, ‘yaas kween’, ‘squad’ – if you’re a keen social media, you might be familiar with some of these words. Originally from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) – a variety of English spoken by some Black Americans – these terms have quickly become part of the internet grammar. But, how and why have these terms entered our lexicon and what does the use of AAVE in internet communication mean? This and other questions are examined by Christian Ilbury in his recent paper.

The episode of Lexis that we mention in which we interviewed Shivonne gates about MLE in East London:  https://open.spotify.com/episode/5leNPWkgQTMFzZ2UHRktnC 

Christian’s book recommendation can be found here: 

Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs. London: Blackwell.

“In this ground-breaking new book on the Norteña and Sureña (North/South) youth gang dynamic, cultural anthropologist and linguist Norma Mendoza-Denton looks at the daily lives of young Latinas and their innovative use of speech, bodily practices, and symbolic exchanges that signal their gang affiliations and ideologies. Her engrossing ethnographic and sociolinguistic study reveals the connection of language behavior and other symbolic practices among Latina gang girls in California,and their connections to larger social processes of nationalism,racial/ethnic consciousness, and gender identity.”

https://www.norma-mendoza-denton.com/books 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog)

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys 

Here are the show notes for Episode 54, in which Raj and Dan talk to Dr Florent Moncomble, Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at University of Artois, France about what English and French have in common and all the discourses swirling around French that are also relevant to English, including:


The role of L’Académie Française 


Prescriptivism in French and English


Complaints about decline, destruction, young people and migration and why they use the same language proxies as their English counterparts. 


What French linguists are doing to address these misunderstandings and misrepresentations. 



Florent’s links: https://linktr.ee/f_moncomble 


Les Linguistes Atterrées: https://www.tract-linguistes.org/ 

L'Académie Française: https://www.academie-francaise.fr/ 

and a Guardian story about it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/16/academie-francaise-denounces-rise-of-english-words-in-public-life 

Bernard Cerquiglini on why English isn’t a real language: 

https://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/actu-des-mots/la-langue-anglaise-n-existe-pas-un-linguiste-provoque-avec-humour-les-britanniques-20240311  

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/03/08/english-is-not-a-language-its-just-badly-spoken-french/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13181993/English-exist-badly-pronounced-French-linguist.html 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog)

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys 

Show notes for Episode 53

Here are the show notes for Episode 53, an episode aimed primarily at teachers, in which Jacky and Dan talk to Steve Collins (Head of English at Bishop Luffa School, Chichester) and Tim Marr (Visiting Professor at Icesi University, Cali, Colombia) about the ideas in their book, Language Awareness at School: A Practical Guide for Teachers and School Leaders, published in May 2023 by Routledge, including:


The importance of language education across the curriculum


Why language matters to each of them


Why zero tolerance approaches and deficit models help no one 


Why debates about English teaching keep appearing in cycles every few decades


What can be done to revive the prospects of English Language across the secondary and A-level stages and into university and teacher training.



The book: https://www.routledge.com/Language-Awareness-at-School-A-Practical-Guide-for-Teachers-and-School-Leaders/Marr-Collins/p/book/9781032062334 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog)

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys 

Show notes for Episode 52

Here are the show notes for Episode 52, a migration discourses bumper episode, in which we feature two interviews. First off, Dan and Raj talk to Professor Charlotte Taylor of the University of Sussex about:


Why corpus linguistics can refresh the parts other approaches cannot reach


Discourses around migration and the metaphors that are often used - water, commodity and them/us


Why discourses around migration are usually about immigration 


Why nostalgia is such a powerful theme


Whether the discourses around migration are worse now than they have been in the past


Tools for students analysing language discourses



We also talk to Ana Gavalas of the Migrants’ Rights Network about:


The work of their organisation and why it matters


The ‘Words Matter’ campaign they have been running


Why migration is linked to wider struggles


Why challenging dangerous migration myths involves critically engaging with language.



Charlotte Taylor’s University of Sussex page: https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p329327-charlotte-taylor

Open access paper: Metaphors of Migration Over Time https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0957926521992156 

Charlotte Taylor on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_ctaylor_ 

Dan’s article on the language of migration: https://bylinetimes.com/2022/12/16/swamping-cockroaches-invasion-how-language-shapes-our-view-of-migration/ 

The Migrants’ Rights Network: https://migrantsrights.org.uk 

Words Matter campaign: https://migrantsrights.org.uk/projects/wordsmatter/ 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog)

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys

Show notes for Episode 51

Here are the show notes for Episode 51, in which Dan and (new Lexis team member) Raj talk to Professor Emily M. Bender of the University of Washington about:


Why ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is not really the right term at all


How Large Language Models work and why we should be sceptical of many of the claims made for them


The biases inherent in LLMs and what to do about them


Whether ‘neural networks’ and language processing can shed any light on child language development


The discourses around ‘AI’: from booster to doomer. 



Emily M. Bender’s University of Washington page: https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/ 

A great interview from 2023: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Time Magazine on the ‘machine-learning myth buster’: https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6308275/emily-m-bender/ 

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast: https://www.dair-institute.org/maiht3k/

Emily’s book recommendations: 

‘Babel’, R.F. Kuang: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/babel-or-the-necessity-of-violence-an-arcane-history-of-the-oxford-translators-revolution-r-f-kuang/6627642?ean=9780008501853 

‘A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/a-memory-called-empire-winner-of-the-hugo-award-for-best-novel-arkady-martine/219166?ean=9781529001594 

Other links from the interview

Jess Dodge’s work: https://jessedodge.github.io/ 

Batya Friedman & Helen Nissenbaum, Bias in Computer Systems (1996): https://nyuscholars.nyu.edu/en/publications/bias-in-computer-systems 

Some further reading: 

Police worried 101 call bot would struggle with 'Brummie' accents

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68466369

BBC News - 'Journalists are feeding the AI hype machine'

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68488924 

Bias against African American English 

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00742 

Register article: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/11/ai_models_exhibit_racism_based/ 

An Al-Jazeera opinion piece about AI and borders: 

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/4/20/ban-racist-and-lethal-ai-from-europes-borders 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog)

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys