Oh Hey There

The Department of Justice is seeking to hire linguists fluent in Ebonics to help monitor, translate, and transcribe the secretly recorded conversations of subjects of narcotics investigations, according to federal records. A maximum of nine Ebonics experts will work with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta field division, where the linguists, after obtaining a “DEA Sensitive” security clearance, will help investigators decipher the results of “telephonic monitoring of court ordered nonconsensual intercepts, consensual listening devices, and other media

— Justice Department Seeks Ebonics Experts | The Smoking Gun (via sexartandpolitics)

fuck yeah eye dialect (which i used to not tolerate but now don’t hate so much because sarah palin exists, and because even though politics is not a vocabulary contest, etc., it totally is a vocabulary contest when you’re crafting super-coded, signifier-rich political messages. verbing weirds language, etc. and my country wears its weirdedness on its sleeve.)

edit: jonathanbogart says:

Fuckno to eye dialect, and fuckfuckno to furriners attempting to do eye dialects on American English. There are plenty of sticks to beat Sarah Palin with without hauling out class-based rhetoric.

This is true. I should clarify that eye dialect is not a Good Thing because it renders another’s voice unintelligible in a really underhanded way: “tru” becomes “true” for no principled reason other than to shit-talk and misrepresent. But that’s how politics is!! I merely appreciate it as a piece of politico-linguistic toolbox that uses our language biases to encode lots of certain associations and feelings.

Record your own accent! →

loscheiner:

Parallelbotany (my neighbor from back in northern Manhattan) wanted to know how to make voice recordings so that she could share her Oregonian with the tumblrverse.  

I’m sure there are tons of voice recording softwares available.  I always use PRAAT because you can record and edit sound files easily.  Also, it’s free, so click through to download it (for either pc or mac).

To record a file you click “new” and start talking. To save click “write” and save the file as .wav.  Open the file in iTunes and under “Advanced” you can convert it to .mp3. Then, it’s tumblr-ready.  Easy peasy.

Funny I was using Praat today to record and analyze myself saying sentences with ”our” and “are”.

Someone replied to lolo’s post asking if there are any standardized texts to determine accent. Yes, please call Stella. Not that recording this passage will tell you anything in particular.

The best way I know to pin down your dialect is to go through Wikipedia and look at the features listed on each dialect page. Which sucks, because the features can be weird unsourced and obviously anecdotal things and because you probably need a linguist to explain some of the features in plain English. (Which I can do btw.)

What I Did When I Couldn't Find a Job →

via azspot:

It was a bit of a shock, losing all expectations. For years—all my life, really—parents, teachers, and guidance counselors had told me that if I went to a good college and did well, I would be able to find a job after graduation that would, with a little ladder-climbing, keep me comfortable and financially secure. After I graduated in May 2009, in political science, I moved back home to St. Louis to start my career, but there simply were no jobs to be found.

Over several months, I sent out more than 500 résumés for all sorts of jobs all over the country, but I got only two interviews and no offers.

I couldn’t find a job, but neither could anyone I knew. Now, more than a year after graduation, most of my college friends still live at home, and many of those who have moved out are borrowing money from their parents to eat and pay rent. A few have internships, but most of those are unpaid, and few are likely to lead to jobs. Two friends who studied psychology for four years now work off the books at a sandwich shop. Another, who got her master’s in development studies from Cambridge, became a barista at Starbucks.

Some are applying to grad school just to have something to do, but the prospect of racking up thousands more dollars in student debt is crushing. The rest are still looking, sending out résumés, going to career fairs, volunteering for experience, and networking. Some have given up. We are a whole generation graduating into a job market that has no room for us.

So I moved to India.

i was too busy commiserating with the piece to see that “punchline” coming, and when i did, i panted OH MY GAWD out loud. ugh. i guess i should start looking into communicative disorders programs if i want some secure and meaningful work with linguistics.

Thought without symbols — life without language — it’s a cognitive reality that is virtually impossible for most modern humans to fathom. For the vast majority of us, our thought processes have been profoundly shaped by the introjection of language into our cognitive worlds, the taking on board of a massive intellectual prosthesis, the collective product of countless generations. Human thought, for the majority, is not simply the individual outcome of our evolved neural architecture, but also the result of our borrowing of the immense symbolic and intellectual resources available in language. What would human thought be like without language?

— 

Life without language (via azspot)

Reblogged for Simen and for later reading.

You know how there people who are really really into shitty industrial/noise music and you don’t know why/how they get pleasure from something so intolerable and painful? Simen’s kinda like that but for linguistic determinism. No, really.

Actually, I don’t know what this analogy means. I think he’s a genius on a pretty perverse and (IMHO) unappealing topic.

yoshang:

Computational Linguistics book from the 1960s, you’re so hip. But where be my lambdas?

heh*

University of Arizona Linguistics Department on the "Teachers’ English Fluency Initiative" (pdf) →

They are of course against the horrible initiative that says that teachers with “heavily accented” English are to be removed. These are their main facts; (7) and (8) are my favorite points:

1. ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech.
2. Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
3. Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don’t speak Spanish.
4. Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
5. It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign‐accented speech as a part of their education.
6. There are many different ‘accents’ within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English.
7. Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre‐existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
8. There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical.

They later elaborate on (7), and it’s pretty interesting:

Evidence exists that listeners’ perceptions of ‘foreign accented speech’ are often inaccurate – listeners’ predisposed to view a speaker has having a ‘foreign’ identity are likely to perceive that person’s speech as accented, even when it is not (Rubin, 1992; Derwing and Monroe 2009). Nancy Niedzielski’s (1996, 1999) work shows that people think the same sounds are [more ‘standard’ or less ‘standard’] depending on whether they are told the speaker is from Canada vs. right over the border in Detroit (participants, of course, viewed their own dialect as ‘standard’). In Rubin’s work, these beliefs lead to lower comprehension scores for listeners who think that they are listening to ‘foreign accented speech’ (even when they are not). To the extent that policies like this further stigmatize foreign accented speech, therefore, they are counterproductive to learning.

As an enthusiastic student of the Irish language, I know that minority languages risk being consigned to the periphery of history unless young people take up the torch. I fear that our youth may abandon a language that has no accomodation for lolcats. We cannot afford to be complacent.

— Language Log: Linguist macros?

Since you asked

monkeytypist:

My favourite phoneme is the alveolar lateral affricate.  It’s so much fun.  I could say it all day.

tɬ tɬ tɬ tɬ tɬ tɬ tɬ tɬ tɬ!