The IPA

Have you ever looked up a word in the dictionary, and next to the word itself there was a bunch of regular letters mixed with weird ones (such as an upside down e or a lambda)? That system of graphemes is what linguists call the IPA, or the International Phonetic Alphabet. The IPA contains hundreds of symbols, thousands if you count possible diacritic modifications.

Why do we use a system with so many symbols if we can express all the sounds in English with the letters we already use? There are several reasons:

• Our alphabet does not have a 1:1 sound to symbol ratio
• Our alphabet cannot not adequately represent all possible human sounds (like clicks in Xhosa etc)
• Using the Latin script puts users of other writing systems at a steep disadvantage
• When we use IPA, we have an easier time transcribing previously unwritten languages
• When investigating a language using the IPA, we aren't required to learn the language's writing system

Those are just a few perks the IPA affords us. In any linguistics textbook you browse through, you are bound to see the IPA scattered throughout; it is an integral means for us to express our findings effectively. 

Here, you can find a basic chart of the IPA: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/IPA_chart_2005_png.svg

Additionally, here is the website of the organization that standardizes the IPA:

http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/

What's a dialect and what's an accent?

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there about what a dialect is and what an accent is, so I'll spend a little time clearing that up as best I can.


Dialect - a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers.


(a la wikipedia)

Everyone speaks in one dialect or another (actually, people make use of several dialects depending on company). Dialects include accents and local usages (think y'all or chav or hizzle); they are more general ways of speaking that a speech community shares.


Accent -  is a manner of pronunciation of a language


(also from wikipedia)

Just as everyone speaks in one or more dialects, everyone has an accent. There isn't an English speaker that is 'accentless'. The people on the news are either speaking in a west coast accent, or are using something called received pronunciation (or Broadcast English). They usually have been trained to speak this way because it is thought those dialects are the ones most easily understood by the public at large.

Here's a map of America from a phonological perspective: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html

Individually, we all have an idiolect. An idiolect is a specific person's own unique way of speaking (their word choice, preferred grammar patterns etc). In linguistics, we tend to avoid studying the idiolect because the data is only useful for that one person and it's also very difficult to determine the specifics of an idiolect.

So, hopefully you can see a tiered system of the Dialect, Accent, and Idiolect. This is one of the ways human language is so layered, that variation occurs in association with huge social groups right down to the individual.

Rosetta Stone: right method, wrong time

By now everyone has seen an advertisement or two for Rosetta Stone, the leading language software out there today. I've gotten the chance to play with three or four of the languages at varying levels of difficulty, enough to form an educated opinion. As a user, I found it intuitive, fun, and visually appealing. The speech recognition software is pretty awesome (although you could basically watermelon your way through the Russian stuff), and most of Rosetta's competitors can't hold a candle to that. But as a linguist, I have a few negative comments.

The operating philosophy of Rosetta Stone is that the best way to learn a language is the way children learn them; immersion using basic sentences and sparse grammar instructions. It seems miraculous, doesn't it, how children learn to speak fluently by the age of six or so without any real help from their environment other than exposure time. Children are the best language learners out there, so they should be our models, right?

Dead wrong. Children learn languages so easily because of the primary language acquisition process, and there is a time limit to it; adults will not soak in complex grammar (grammar is your biggest hurdle) patterns in the same way children do and while learning as an academic subject is boring, awkward, and difficult for many, it's ultimately our best option. We have to tailor our programs not just to what works best theoretically, but what works best practically and for the targeted demographic.

And the idea of teaching examples without grammar works well for some languages. Swahili, for example, isn't grammatically complicated. Someone could learn Swahili as an adult without too many grammar woes. Highly inflected languages, however, are not so easily learned (or acquired) by native speakers of analytic languages like English; we need that grammar background to understand the underlying mechanisms that make sentences work. We have more language 'settings' to change in our minds when languages are more different, and that requires more intensive study (and dedication).

So, as an end result of Rosetta Stone, you will be able to parrot very basic sentences that express minimal abstract thought. A middle-aged language learner wanting to pick up Chinese before they set sail for Hong Kong so they can order in a restaurant or ask for directions may think that's all he needs: basic sentences to say basic things. But unfortunately, languages don't keep simple topics simple grammatically. In fact, since we use them everyday, verbs like "to be", "to know", "to eat", or "to have" are very often the most difficult and irregular.

Verdict: Rosetta Stone is a very cool, very expensive toy. Whether or not NASA uses it is of no interest to me; that doesn't speak to it's effectiveness, only to how much money NASA is willing to spend on bullshit.

Descriptive v. Prescriptive

There are two sorts of language nerd in the world; those that would like to tell everyone else in the world how to use language, and those who would seek to describe the way language is used. For the most part, linguists are the latter. We think that native speakers of a language should be free to speak in whatever way that makes sense. This freedom is what keeps a language useful and fluid, it's what gives speakers ownership over their language, and it's what, quite frankly, is easiest to do.

Ever wondered why your English teacher told you that you couldn't split an infinitive (to go, to run, to kill etc)? It's because Latin (which English did not come from, more on that later) does not have split infinitives. Why? Because Latin infinitives are only one word!

She wants to quickly run to the store.

She wants to run to the store quickly.

Both of the above sentences make sense. They are equally 'correct'.

Your teacher probably also told you to never start a sentence with a conjunction. And I just did, and you knew exactly what I meant. My proverbial tongue is sticking out.

What about that pesky contraction "ain't"? You might have been raised hearing the expression, "Ain't ain't a word!" but it totally is. In fact, 'ain't' is old as dirt and twice as common. If native speakers use it and understand it, it's a word folks.

We as linguists want to make sense of the way people actually use language, not attempt to warp people's usage to suit our fancy. We do fieldwork, we withhold judgement on 'slang' and 'colloquialisms', and we have confidence that languages work without our help. Instead of controlling them, we want to know what makes seemingly unregulated chaos serve us so efficiently as speakers.

There are some uses to the perspective approach but, more often than not, the prescriptive approach to language (think grammar nazis) is complete CRAP.

So in summary, linguists describe how language is used. We do not prescribe how it should be used.

Is linguistics a science?

Science is a very muddy word in the English language. When the layperson talks about science in everyday conversation, they are most often referencing the collected products of scientific inquiry (knowing what animal cells look like, the periodic table, the germ theory etc). People who consider themselves scientists, however, are more interested in determining whether or not an area of study makes use of the scientific method when arriving at conclusions.


Any linguist who has been around for the past sixty years or so will profess to you that linguistics is, indeed, a science. But not so fast.


That isn't exactly true. Yes, there are areas in linguistics that use the scientific method, but not all data we've collected is scientific and some sub-disciplines in linguistics use the scientific method less exclusively than others. The reality is that linguistics is better described as a social, or soft, science. Some parts are rather methodically proven and stringent in terms of what sort of data they accept, while others are, well, are more like mushy sciences. Historical linguistics is such a sub-discipline (it uses the comparative method); unsurprisingly, historical linguistics is falling more and more out of favor in American universities. Phonetics, on the other hand, is a good example of a sub-discipline that is rooted in science. 


Is this a fault of linguistics, that it is not perfectly scientific? I'd argue that it isn't. Rather, linguistics is a soft science because its subject of study is highly variable and layered; while linguistics may study something more directly observable than what psychology is interested in, they share a similar problem. People just don't lend themselves to absolutes, and neither does their method of communication. Despite all this, we should be keenly aware of what is and isn't scientific when looking at linguistics.

What the hell is linguistics, anyway?

Hello, my name's Tyler and I've been looking for a hobby lately so, instead of crocheting or smoking crack, I figured I'd give some interested people out there short introductions to all sorts of different language-related topics in a writing style that's easy to understand. If you have a question you've wanted answered about languages or linguistics but don't want bullshit academic language, leave a comment and I'll use it as the basis for a future post.

First off, let's look at the wiki definition of linguistics:

"Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language."

For our purposes right now, that's a pretty damn good definition. Unlike some fields, linguistics is an overarching area of study that encompasses a vast array of topics but, in many cases, linguistics serves as an aide to a separate, more specified field; because of the versatility,  linguistics can be a tricky thing to pin down. There is an old commercial by 3M that says, "We don't make the products you buy, we make the products you buy better." I think that's a nifty way of describing what linguistics can do, as well. Linguists can do anything from help develop good translation machines to get someone out of jail to make a killer ad campaign.

At it's very core, linguistics studies Language. We as linguists don't study language like schoolchildren do; we don't give a shit about spelling rules, the 'right' or 'wrong' way to say any given thing, or all of those seemingly random rules English class bequeathed you. Instead, we are interested in how people really use Language (the human capacity to speak any given language), look for its source, study the differences between and underlying unity of the world languages et cetera. Our study is a thorough one, tackling the subject in all its aspects. We study things like:

• Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech production and perception
• Phonology, the study of sounds as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning
• Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
• Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
• Semantics, the study of the meaning of words and fixed word combinations, and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
• Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts, and the role played by context and non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
• Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts

PS: Those definitions above from Wikipedia are terrifyingly academic and vague, but no worries;  I'll explain each of them in a clearer manner in the coming weeks.

There are tons of other areas of linguistics that supplement other non-linguistics fields (like criminal justice or history), and I'll get to them in later posts. Right now, though, it is important to distinguish linguistics as a discipline from other studies such as language learning (second language acquisition) or the non-empirical study of a specific language (literature or English programs in college and high school). When someone is studying another language like French, Spanish, Russian, or Xhosa that doesn't mean they are a linguist, and the same goes for someone who studies literature as an art form. Many linguists do these sorts of things on their own, but that isn't what makes them linguists.

In the next post, I'll address the issue of whether or not linguistics is a science and talk a little bit about the approach we take when looking at language use.