English with an Accent

I fully intend to start post­ing here on a reg­u­lar basis; it is just tak­ing me longer than I hoped. If you wan­der by and are curi­ous or have ques­tions, please be sure to leave a com­ment. That will help me speed up the process.

Arnold Zwicky has a recent post at Language Log on periphrastic ver­sus inflec­tional com­par­a­tives and superla­tives (com­moner vs most com­mon is the exam­ple that inspired the post to start with). For me the most inter­est­ing bit comes toward the end, with a good exam­ple of how the media claims author­ity in mat­ters of language:

Back in August 2005, Jon Lighter reported on ADS-L about Fox News anchor E. D. Hill, who main­tained vehe­mently, on cam­era, that clev­erer was not a word. Later she stated on air that a col­league had found it in a dic­tio­nary, so it was after all a word. But then (as Lighter wrote),

… in a sur­pris­ing twist that left lin­guists in the view­ing audi­ence reel­ing, min­utes before the show ended, Hill laughed as she said, "We've received an email from a viewer [name unin­tel­li­gi­ble] who has a doc­tor­ate, and she writes as fol­lows : " 'Cleverer' is not a word. It is not a verb and can­not be declined or inflected.' " Hill con­cluded, "So I was right all along ! It's not a word ! "

It is to weep.

I have many more cases in my files.

I'm not deny­ing that there are peo­ple who dis­like, some­times strongly, cer­tain inflec­tional vari­ants. They're wel­come not to use them. But they shouldn't be insist­ing that other peo­ple have to do as they do.

This is the kind of thing I'm always inter­ested in. That is, not so much the dis­cus­sion of periphrastic v inflec­tional but exam­ples of the media wax­ing author­i­ta­tive on lan­guage. I'm hop­ing that peo­ple might start post­ing such bits and pieces here in the com­ments, or email them to me. It is to weep, cer­tainly, but it also is good to have exam­ples of such silliness.

One of the things that will be new about the sec­ond revised edi­tion of EWA is that there will be a web­site of addi­tional mate­ri­als. Supplemental mate­ri­als to the text. Such a thing was not even imag­ined (at least by me) when the first edi­tion came out, but now things are such that I can embed video clips of such things as they hap­pen. If I know about them, that is.

One new sec­tion of EWA will be a com­par­i­son on how the news media han­dled two very dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal events. The first is the speech the Howard Dean gave after his first pri­mary (often referred to as 'the Dean Scream'), and the sec­ond is Sarah Palin's vari­ety of American English.

In the course of this com­par­i­son both con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­eral news­re­porters indulged in far less than pro­fes­sional behav­ior, in case you're wor­ried about my pri­or­i­ties. I call 'em like I see 'em. And there's some inter­est­ing aspects to both these events that need to be explored and compared.

I have a lot of info about Palin (but could also use more, includ­ing video links); more dif­fi­cult is doc­u­ment­ing the con­flict between the press corp, the news media, and Howard Dean, which was far more sub­tle than what went on with Palin. If you have thoughts or want to point me to infor­ma­tion, please don't be shy.

There are some vari­eties of American English that show supra-regional mark­ers. For exam­ple: African-American English has some fea­tures that show up in Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Biloxi, Seattle, and every other part of the U.S. However, there are also mark­ers that dis­tin­guish (for exam­ple) East and West Coast (or LA ver­sus NY) AAVE.

There are other vari­eties like this. I have some­times heard talk of Rez English, or U.S. English with vari­ants that sig­nal the speaker iden­ti­fies as Native American, again, with suprare­gional features.

Exactly what those suprare­gional fea­tures are is a big­ger ques­tion. I also am not sure if Rez English is spo­ken by Native Americans (of any tribe) who have never lived on a reser­va­tion. That is, there might be an eco­nomic ele­ment to the vari­a­tion as well.

My own famil­iar­ity with Rez English comes from attend­ing Powwows, so it is very limited.

Anybody out there know more about Rez English and will­ing to jump in here?