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"How British Sign Language developed its own dialects" - Adam Schembri + Kearsy Cormier 

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"How British Sign Language developed its own dialects" - Adam Schembri + Kearsy Cormier 

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• What is perhaps much less well known is that the majority sign language of the UK’s deaf community, British Sign Language (BSL), also varies from one part of the country to another – it is clear that BSL has dialects. We do not know if BSL has regional accents  but research has found that deaf people from different parts of the UK use distinct regional signs for the same meanings.

• BSL began to emerge centuries ago when deaf people gathered together to form communities across the country. As it developed separately from English, BSL has vocabulary and grammar that is different. For example, a single sign can be used to mean “I haven’t seen you in ages”. The order of signs in a question such as “what’s your name?” may be unlike typical English order too, with the question sign meaning “what” coming at the end of the sentence.

• When modern BSL was used in the first schools for deaf children in the late 18th century, there was limited contact between the communities in various parts of the country. As a result, different signs for the same meaning emerged independently of each other - particularly in residential schools for deaf children in the 19th century, where deaf children in the playgrounds and dormitories created some of their own signs.

• Signs then became part of each local regional variety of BSL. For example, the sign meaning “green” in Glasgow is different from the sign used in Cardiff. Despite the variation, however, research indicates that fluent deaf signers from different parts of the country have little trouble understanding each other.

• All of the regional variations we found are documented in BSL Sign Bank, an online BSL dictionary based on signs from the corpus. There is still so much to explore in the corpus data, so we may yet find evidence of BSL “accent” variation. If there were systematic differences in the shape of the hands, or where the hands are located or how they move, for example, then this could constitute “accent”. No such differences have yet been identified – although there might be evidence for a “late learner” accent, categorised by larger, more erratic movements, this is related to fluency and not to region.

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Alexa and Google Home are no threat to regional accents

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Alexa and Google Home are no threat to regional accents

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Erin Carrie
Our human-to-robot chat was triggered by recent news reports claiming that voice assistants are likely to “stamp out”, “kill off” and make us “lose” our regional accents, described by some as “under threat”.
exhibition reported altering the way they speak in order to be understood by voice assistants, such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Microsoft). Crucially, these visitors also reported having regional British accents, and their perceived need to accent-shift highlights two issues.
People with non-standard accents are more likely to encounter difficulties communicating when interacting with their smart speakers. The other issue is social. Speech technology appears to privilege standard accents, such as southern standard British English
Language-based discrimination is all around us and, when we ask our devices to play our favourite song and end up with something different or with a “Sorry, I don’t understand”, it can leave us wondering why our voices aren’t being heard and why these machines seem to be working against those of us with regional accents.
Scottish accents are particularly tricky for voice recognition technology, as shown by research and popularised by the comedy sketch show, Burnistoun.
Research suggests that we humans are generally good at recognising where people are from based on their accents but can sometimes struggle, usually owing to a lack of previous exposure. So it makes sense that our virtual assistants also need to gain familiarity with regional accents through linguistic input in order to recognise – or even use – accents when interacting with us.

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British people still think some accents are smarter than others – what that means in the workplace

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British people still think some accents are smarter than others – what that means in the workplace

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Author - Devyani Sharma
Opinions found 50 years ago in a survey by Howard Giles remain today. In a recent survey of attitudes to 38 different British accents, we found that exactly the same accents continue to attract high prestige - received pronunciation, the Queen’s English, French-accented English, Edinburgh English, one’s own accent - and the same accents continue to receive low ratings, particularly ethnic minority accents (Indian) and historically industrial urban accents (Cockney, Liverpool, Essex, Birmingham).

All humans have biases – simplified ways of thinking when we need to process our thoughts quickly. Accent is no exception: we all have automatic associations with accents based on people we’ve met during our lives. It’s only when we rely on these simple stereotypes to judge unrelated traits, like intelligence or competence, that our cultural baggage becomes discrimination.

Younger people didn’t judge accents differently at all. By contrast, those above the age of 40 judged speakers of the two working class London accents to be less competent and less hire able, even though all candidates gave exactly the same responses. (It’s tempting to interpret this age pattern as a decline in bias over time, but the same age pattern was found 15 years ago. This suggests that our attitudes become more conventional as we age.) Bias was also greater among people who grew up in southern England and were from a higher social class.

If British employers use accent to guess at a person’s abilities, this will limit the chances of candidates who are already socioeconomically marginalised. It also prevents that accent from becoming better represented in professional sectors, perpetuating bias. Economists have long observed that if employers don’t hire people because that group isn’t well represented in their sector, this can lead to a vicious circle of continued exclusion of atypical candidates.

The reduction in bias that we found earlier was even clearer here: lawyers didn’t let accents interfere with how they evaluated candidates. Their assessment of how good an answer was corresponded to what the person said, not how they said it.

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Could you identify a criminal by their voice? It’s far harder than it sounds

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Could you identify a criminal by their voice? It’s far harder than it sounds

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Authors: Natalie Braber
Harriet Smith

He used particular distinctive features to determine that the accent was from the Sunderland area and also spent much time in the area recording local speakers and asking them to listen to the voice on the tape to decide which village it might come from.

Over the past century, a large body of research has focused on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. The outcome of this research has filtered into the legal process, resulting in the Turnbull guidelines, and influencing codes of practice. In comparison, earwitness testimony has been largely neglected, and there remain many gaps in our knowledge.

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"The Bard didn’t use Warwickshire dialect – so was he really Shakespeare?" - Ros Barber 

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"The Bard didn’t use Warwickshire dialect – so was he really Shakespeare?" - Ros Barber 

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• There is an argument that William Shakespeare may not have in fact been the Bard - or that he isn't from Stratford, so Shakespeare’s use of dialect scores a goal for those who doubt the authorship of the canon.

• Shakespeare’s use of Warwickshire, Cotswold and Midlands dialect is a key argument used by those who stand by the traditional author. Dialect words from the area around Stratford-upon-Avon are present throughout the plays,

• The 2011 Royal Shakespeare Company edition of Cymbeline tells us that “golden lads” and “chimney-sweepers” are Warwickshire dialect for the dandelion flower in its two stages, and their becoming “dust” is a reference to what happens when the seed-head is blown. But a recent paper revealed that this was a “20th-century myth, perhaps even a hoax”. Shakespeare was being literal, not poetic. He was referring to the high-born and the low-born meeting the same end: death.

• The English Dialect Dictionary, compiled 300 years after Shakespeare’s time, is one of several sources scholars have used to support their arguments. But the earliest dialect glossary was not published until 1790, and most were in the second half of the 19th century, when Bardolatry was in full-swing. As a result, Shakespeare words that seemed unusual or unique were sometimes listed as Warwickshire or Cotswold dialect, often with a quote from an appropriate play as evidence. We cannot therefore rely on these secondary sources as evidence that a word was Midlands dialect. With the resources of our digital age, it is easy to prove that these early compilers were mistaken.

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Hugh Muir

Do accents still matter? Last week Dr Alexander Baratta from the University of Manchester spoke of "accentism", where people are discriminated against because of how they speak, and likened it to racism.

Accents should not matter. No one should feel compelled to change the way they interact.

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"Northern dialects can be closer to original English – despite what southerners might say" - Rob Penhallurick 

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"Northern dialects can be closer to original English – despite what southerners might say" - Rob Penhallurick 

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• English from its origins is a language of regional dialects with Angles (settled North) and Saxons (settled South), creating the initial North/South divide.

• As Standard English norms were gradually imposed on writing and speech within the 15th century, class-based judgements were added to the regional rivalry, and the distinctive features of all dialects of British English came to be viewed as deviations from these norms, and even more funny as a consequence.

• Standard English reached the height of its use in the mid-20th century. Then in the 1960s things started to shift, as The Beatles’ John Lennon explained in 1975: “We were the first working class singers that stayed working class and pronounced it. We didn’t try to change our accents which in England are … were looked down upon … probably still are.”

• In Received Pronunciation and in the south of England most speakers use a long “ahh” vowel in such “class” words. Interestingly, the southern form is actually strictly deviant. Linguists have traced the origin of this “ahh” pronunciation in words like “class” to 17th-century London, possibly emanating from a lengthened form in Cockney speech. The short “a” pronunciation is the more historical form.

• The short-long distinction in “class” words and the “foot-strut” issue are two of the best known differences between northern and southern English accents. While McIntyre and other contemporary comedians joke about allegedly incomprehensible regional dialects, the real funny thing is that although southern forms are seen as socially superior, northern habits are sometimes more traditional.

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"The fight for education doesn’t stop when working-class boys get into university" - Michael Ward   

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"The fight for education doesn’t stop when working-class boys get into university" - Michael Ward   

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• Concern has also centred on boys’ supposed educational “underachievement” – and an idea that they suffer from what some have called a poverty of aspiration or a poverty of expectation. Yet, as I and sociologists have written before, this so-called underachievement isn’t the same for all boys – neither is it the fault of schools alone.

• Considering the arguments raging about the UK Higher Education sector at present and the ongoing tuition fees discussions, it is important now, more than ever, to acknowledge the roles universities play in this debate.

• One boy in Wales applied for Oxford and attended a preparation day event in Bristol. However, his interview at Oxford was unsuccessful and he was not offered a place; he said that his strong working-class Welsh accent was a real disadvantage.

I could hear myself, everyone was really different is the best way to put it. They spoke, you know, with that really intelligent sounding non-dialect accent. At one point they said, ‘do you want to speak in front of the group’ and I said ‘no I don’t’.

• Working-class “achieving boys” have often had to adopt a hybridised form of masculinity, forced by economic circumstance to escape their roots, but when they return to their home communities, they can feel further out of place. The implication of this on their ability to be successful is important and shows how much harder working-class boys must work than those from more privileged backgrounds to achieve in different aspects of their lives.

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Love Island: audience reaction shows deep snobbery about accents

In general, speakers with more standard southern accents are less criticised, and those with accents that we are socially conditioned to think of as funny, friendly, and socially attractive, such as Welsh, Scottish and Newcastle accents, also get off lightly.
The use of the word “like” is currently one of the most stigmatised aspects of linguistic variation. Its use is generally attributed by non-linguists to adolescents and young people – when it is often perceived as a sign of lexical indecision, perhaps through having a small vocabulary or just not knowing what you want to say. However, research shows that the use of like in utterances always performs a function. It frequently acts as a marker that may be used to sustain or repair a sentence, link information in the utterance together, or alternatively mark a boundary between the different points the speaker is making.

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Slang shouldn’t be banned … it should be celebrated, innit

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Slang shouldn’t be banned … it should be celebrated, innit

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Author: Rob Drummond

A head teacher in Essex banned the use of slang language from programmes like TOWIE in the hopes of improving their job chances in the future.

Nobody has doubted the good intentions but it is a short sighted and inefficient way of trying to produce young people who are confident and adaptable communicators.

There is no such thing as proper English there are just certain situations when you should and shouldn't use certain dialects.

A ban is so pointless. All it can possibly achieve is to make young people self-conscious about the way they speak, thus stifling creativity and expression.

In an English language class, students are taught how the ways in which we use language are part of how we construct and perform our social identities. Unfortunately, their break-times are then patrolled by some kind of language police who are tasked with ensuring those identities aren’t expressed

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Teachers with Northern accents are being told to ‘posh up’, here’s why

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Does the way we speak affect our future? 

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Does the way we speak affect our future? 

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Author: Annabelle Lukin

Dialects bring with them an ensemble of cultural associations, a rich resource for writers like Dickens, Twain and Achebe, who draw on dialectal features to create highly evocative characters. Dialects place speakers geographically and from a socioeconomic perspective.

Class was as uncomfortable a topic back then as now. Bernstein, himself the child of working-class Jewish immigrant parents from London’s East End, was condemned. His views were labelled as a “deficit” model, as if he was saying the language of working-class kids was impoverished.

Bernstein believed differences in the speech habits of kids from different class backgrounds were tied into deeper habits of socialisation. Bernstein argued that social stratification was reproduced in and through interaction – class was so profound in the organisation of life it permeated everyday interactions. Through these interactions, children were positioned to see the world, and their place in it, through the eyes and experiences of their parents.

Linguists have disagreed over the significance of class-related linguistic variation. America’s most famous sociolinguist, William Labov, in his studies of African American Vernacular English, showed the remarkable heterogeneity of natural speech. His work should have laid to rest both popular prejudices about “proper grammar”, as well as the most risible academic fiction of 20th-century linguistics: Chomsky’s “ideal speaker/hearer” living in his “homogeneous speech community”.