Englishes around the World - Language variation

hey there and welcome back to this video series on English's around the world today I want to talk about my favorite topic of all time namely linguistic variation variation and language is perhaps the subject where the views of ordinary people differ the most from what linguists think what's so different well the main difference I would say is the belief or the ideology that in language there is right and wrong there's a correct way of using words and grammar and then there are many ways of getting it wrong the key words here of course are prescriptivism

and descriptivism a prescriptivists believes that there's a correct way of using language a descriptivists acknowledges that speakers use language in different ways and that all of these differences are actually worthy of serious scientific study as linguists we want to understand variation because it's deeply connected with interesting social cultural and cognitive issues we'll get to all of that later in the series but in this video I want to focus on the topic of variation itself the ideas that I'll talk about relate to chapter two in at gosh Snyder's book English around the world before we start

however I would like you to pause this video and reflect on the topic of variation for yourself I'm sure you've experienced different varieties of English in some way so perhaps you've been taught English at school or at University and you've had teachers who were speaking English in a certain way now I can tell you a little story about myself I remember that as a student I was watching the movie se7en with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt and I remember thinking what the hell are they saying I can't understand a word yeah they sounded nothing like

my school teachers and so I had a pretty difficult time anyway I would like you to pause this video take a piece of paper and think about how varieties of English can differ from one another make a list of points and illustrate your points with concrete examples yeah that can be words it can be pronunciations it can be constructions pretty much anything that you can come up with once you feel that you have a good list continue with a video and you'll find out how your ideas relate to what others think about variation okay so

let's go and I'll continue in three two one here we go so to frame the discussion I'd like to talk about different levels of variation language is organized in two different layers and here I'm talking about structural layers so the sounds of language the words of language and the ways in which words are put together you probably know the technical terms for these layers so let's take a look at them first of all of course there's variation that's related to sound and this can be captured under the heading of phonological variation phonology is the study

of sound systems in language and varieties of English of course differ in the way their sound systems are organized then there's lexical variation lexical variation concerns differences in the words that speakers use I'm pretty sure this one is on your list yet different words that occur only in certain dialects then there's morphological variation and morphological variation has to do with differences in word internal structures one type of morphological variation that we're going to see a lot in this course is variation in the way grammatical a fixes are used so the little bits and pieces that

you find at the end of a word or at the beginning of a word um that's an area that second language learners of English have a lot of trouble with so I'm talking about the past tense edie ending or the plural s or the progressive ing and so on and so forth you know what I'm talking about as you can imagine different varieties of English make use of these suffixes in different ways and we'll see some examples of that we'll also see a lot of syntactic variation now those of you who remember drawing syntactic trees

for it sentences like Susan read the Blue Book on the couch don't look so sad you know we won't be drawing syntactic trees in this course and syntax can actually be fun yeah you don't believe me now but you will believe me eventually I promise or I hope finally there's also pragmatic variation what is pragmatic variation what pragmatics is the study of linguistic meaning in context and so this concerns processes of understanding how what is said differs from what is meant we can think of irony making jokes avoiding sensitive topics getting someone to like you

or maybe even like like you so this is touchy stuff and it differs across communities and of course across different varieties of English right so in the rest of this video what I'll do is I'll go over each of these five levels and I'll give you concrete examples for how varieties of English may differ with regard to them right so to get us started we will listen one more time to a recording of Malaysian English that you already know if you've watched the last video the introduction to this course let's listen to it once more

and this time I would like you to keep your pen and piece of paper and see if you can identify examples of variation at the different levels that I've mentioned so listen out for phonological variation look out for lexical variation morphological variation syntactic variation and who knows perhaps even pragmatic variation if you're ready here we go no knowledge is not come from thank you you have to read you have to make these people you have to have discussion and in fact you have to appreciate the differences between your opinion and other opinion then it stopped

it cleared thinking it created thinking skill it could encrypt something that will generate the the new things some people may be looking at how coconut falls from the tree and when we ask them why coconut fall from a tree may be said because it is all enough and right enough and its fall but if you ask a physicist why Falls why coconut fallen tree he will say it is because due to gravity so different person have different perception of falling object therefore having a knowledge about falling object will create you some ideas how we can

change we can transform energy from one form to another form basically knowledge is generator so if you want to build our nation if you want to do ourself if you want to improve ourself there is no other thing other than knowledge we have to because we have to be very very concerned about development the knowledge let's talk about phonological variation first just to start out with some well known examples of pronunciation variation between British and American English the word for a muscular old dude in oversized shirt is sometimes pronounced as God sometimes as God and

sometimes if you've been affected by the northern cities shift god oh my god now the world's tastiest substitute for olive oil can be pronounced as butter now I would say like that but or ba now depending on where you tasted this first coming back to our speaker of Malaysian English there are some examples that I highlighted already in the last video namely that the speaker sometimes produces monophthongs where speakers of British or American English would use diphthongs let me play this to you from a three maybe C from a three maybe C okay so say

instead of say here's the other one which renders basically as basically let's listen to this basically knowledge is generator so our speaker also shows dental stopping let me play this to you in clip thinking it's skilled ok dental stopping is the realization of an inter dental fricative type sound as an alveolar sound - mmhmm right so I think when you listen to the recording the differences in sound were actually those that stood out the most yeah there are the easiest to perceive but let's move on to lexical variation lexical variation is most visible when speakers

of different varieties have different names for very common objects or concepts the example that is here on this slide is the great pop versus soda controversy in American English that many of you will know yeah how do you call a sugary carbonated drink for some speakers of American English it's pop for others it's soda and for still others it's called coke if you've had English at school there's a good chance that your teacher talked about lexical variation between British English and American English so they would have mentioned things like lift versus elevator or of course

the classic chips versus crisps yeah but what about our Malaysian speaker oh did you catch anything so to be honest the words this example actually don't reveal much about the variety of the speaker all the words that this speaker uses I have in my usage as well even though I speak a very different variety so also that is an observation lexical words are perhaps the first thing that comes to our mind when we think about language variation here all those funny words that we know from different dialects but actually they are far from being the

most important or the most significant aspect of linguistic variation now let's move on to morphological variation and here I'm sure that you noticed quite a few differences let me pick out just one ya namely the absence of third-person singular s let's listen to the example here include thinking skill okay so the first instance is in its start instead of it starts now the third person singular s is missing it's not there from the perspective of let's say standard British English and it's the same thing in the two instances of create here it creates a thinking

it creates a thinking skill both times without the present tense singular s so the absence is systemic it's a feature of Malaysian English and it's actually a feature of many different varieties of English Creoles pigeons high contact l1 varieties and l2 learn a variety of which Malaysian English is one so what you see here is a map from the Yi wave the electronic world atlas of varieties of English and in the next video I'll show you how to work with that interesting resource for now let's check out syntactic variation did you find anything in the

recording well there is one example in the very first line that I'd like to talk about namely knowledge is not come from vacuum let's listen to this no knowledge it's not come from thank you okay um think about it for a minute instead of what the speaker says what would you say you probably say that knowledge does not come from a vacuum yeah so with negated sentences chances are that the variety of English that you have learned has what we call do support so you use the verb do before the negative marker not again this

is something that is realized differently in Malaysian English I'm coming to pragmatics variation and here I would actually like to ask you to reflect on your own experience and your own intuitions let's take as an example the way you address a teacher or a professor what do you say when you talk to them do you use their first name I tell my students to do that yeah so but then again many of my colleagues don't so this creates some confusion and some of my students actually find it embarrassing to call me Martin yeah so instead

they say something like dear professor or dear teacher and that always makes me smile a bit yeah another example of pragmatic variation would be the use of humor across different situations in what situations is it okay to say something that is funny or ironical again I have some colleagues that are super serious and they have never made a joke in their entire life yeah but then again there are some cultures where humor is valued much more yeah so humor is actually taken as a sign that you're connecting and that you're human and so it's very

important how this plays out across different cultures across different communities is a topic of interest that relates to pragmatics variation right so this brings me back to the five levels of variation in language phonological variation which concerns how speakers pronounce their words lexical variation which concerns the words that speakers use and the specificity of these words to certain varieties morphological variation I've presented as variation in how speakers use word endings I've talked about grammatical word endings but we can also consider derivational morphology here fourth is syntactic variation the fact that speakers across different varieties use

different syntactic constructions and pragmatics variation concerns the fact that speakers across different communities behave differently in conversation right so in the last part of this video I want to talk a little bit about variation across speakers and variation within speakers up to this point I've essentially been discussing variation across speakers speakers of American English to this speakers of British English to that our speaker of Malaysian English does this yeah it's true of course that there are differences across these varieties and that each variety can be characterized in terms of features that make it more or

less unique however things are more complicated than that because there is not only variation across speakers there's also variation within speakers everyone who is speaking a language speaks in fact several versions of it we have different registers different ways of using our languages and this varies depending on who will with and who we're talking to an important concept that I need to mention here is the sociolinguistic variable which allows us to talk about speaker in tonal variation with a bit more precision basically a sociolinguistic variable is a linguistic category that can be realized in two

or more different ways informally speaking we have two ways of saying the same thing now what is so Co about sociolinguistic variables well typically the social context determines whether speakers choose one thing or other that means that language variation is to a large extent driven by social factors such as your age or your gender your sexual orientation or your general outlook on life social linguistic variables exist on the five different levels of variation that I've discussed earlier here on the slide I just mentioned three of them namely phonology morphology and syntax so a phonological sociolinguistic

variable would be post vocalic R which we have in car but not in car you know which one you choose which one you realize that says something about your social identity we also have variables in morphology so the example of Malaysian English that we saw earlier yeah the absence of third-person singular s the difference between it creates and it create that is another important variable in syntax we have the difference between the way you introduce quotations do you say I said okay or do you say I was like okay yeah which one of these you

choose says something about who you're hanging out with sociolinguistic variables often represent a binary choice so that speakers can do one thing or the other however it is rarely the case that a speaker goes for one variant a hundred percent of the time that is there is speaker in tonal variation speakers sometimes produce one variant and sometimes another and a lot of this variation is conditioned by social factors the social contexts in which the speaker finds themselves so speakers cannot be cleanly divided into discrete categories but rather they have to be placed somewhere along a

continuum so that they are more likely to use one level of the sociolinguistic variable rather than another right I would like to finish this video with an example of speaker in tonal variation in the domain of phonology for that let's listen to another recording that you may remember on the last video so here we go this is the transcript and you see that I highlighted three words namely easy pleased and again easy I would like to ask you to listen out carefully for those words if you have a set of good headphones now would be

the time to put them on and I'm going to press play here in the years in which I've served as Prime Minister predominantly I have faced a minority Parliament and I've also faced internal division within my political party it has not been an easy environment to work in but I am pleased that in this environment which wasn't easy I have prevailed to ensure that this country is made stronger and smarter and fairer for the future okay do you remember where the speaker is coming from Australian English will analyze this in a second but for now

we can probably agree that the speaker does something that sounds different from me when I say the words easy or pleased yeah I produce what is called a high front vowel e linguists also call this vowel the fleece vowel so what you see here is a vowel chart that shows you the names and relative positions of different English vowels you see the fleece vowel right up here it is next to the kit vowel further down we have the face vowel the dress vowel and then down below we have the trap vowel the strut vowel the

palme vowel and if we move from the top back down here on the backside of the vowel chart we start with goose then go down to foot further down to goat - lot and we're back at palm right so the way the vowels are organized we can differentiate between high vowels mid vowels and low vowels and can differentiate between front vowels and back vowels and the vowel that were particularly interested in right now is the high front vowel that is called the fleece vowel right so fleece is a high front vowel but our speaker realizes

it in such a way that the vowel starts actually as a mid front vowel let's listen to the relevant words once more here we go easy easy plays the plays easy easy okay so you can hear that the speaker doesn't just produce an E but rather it starts out with an AK type sound that then glides up to the e so what we end up having is something like a diphthong yeah however there's a complication when you listen to the three words you actually notice that they are not completely identical each of them sounds a

little different yeah and this is speaker internal variation let's turn to a professional resource namely the handbook of varieties of English I will talk about this resource in more detail in later videos in this volume we actually find a description of Australian vowels and among them a description of the Australian fleece vowel let me zoom into that so the handbook recognizes that there is variation in the fleece vowel what it says is that it's a long high front vowel with an on glide the latter two are very commonly heard in Australian English with a continuum

of realizations varying from slight on glide to full diphthong ization okay so the same speaker will realize the sound a little differently in different words that doesn't make our job as linguists any easier but it is nonetheless important to realize okay let me recap what this video was about I hope to have given you a first taste of how varieties of English can differ and I hope you agree that dividing variation up into the linguistic layers in which we can observe them makes a lot of sense yeah in the next videos we'll continue to explore

variation across phonology lexis morphology syntax and pragmatics and I hope you'll join me for the ride if you know me you know that I'm a bit of a grammar geek so we'll do a couple of deep dives into morphological and syntactic variation right the next video will in fact be on grammatical variation in variety is of English and how we can explore them through the electronic world atlas of varieties of English I hope you join me for that until then have a good time and bye-bye