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Welcome back to the Deep Dive.
Today, we're really getting into something fundamental.
How the way you speak tells this deep story about who you are, where you're from.
We're taking into chapter five of Linguistic Anthropology, a brief introduction,
the big topic,
variation in language.
And I love this Robert Frost quote to kick us off.
You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
That quote just nails it, doesn't it?
It perfectly captures this tension we're exploring today.
Our goal here is really to look at that constant friction between language as a system solider's language, you know, the official rules.
Right, the dictionary and grammar books.
Exactly.
And then there's the reality of how we actually use language every day, the messy part.
Parole.
And the chapter makes it really clear, this variation, it's not just random changes happening.
It's tied directly to history, to economics, to social groups separating.
Absolutely.
When a group wants to set itself apart, language, well, it's often the tool they use.
Think about that classic Martha's Vineyard study.
Oh, yeah, the Islanders of Massachusetts.
Right.
Researchers found the year -round residents were actually, consciously or not, using slightly different vowel sounds.
Why?
To sound different from the summer tourists, the wealthy vacationers.
It's like building a fence with sounds, identity.
So let's get that term clear first.
Dialect.
Where does that come from?
It's from the Greek, dialectos.
And it just meant speech, basically, the common ways people actually talk, which, you know, almost always differ from some kind of official standard.
And that's where the power dynamics creep in, isn't it?
How does one way of speaking become the standard, the prestige code?
Well, here's the thing.
It's got almost nothing to do with whether that dialect is somehow better or clearer.
It's pretty much always about social history, political power, maybe literary influence.
Like Parisian French.
It's not standard because it sounds more, I don't know, cultured than dialects in the south of France.
Not at all.
It's the standard because Paris was the center of power for centuries.
Politics, education, literature, it all radiated outwards from there.
Okay.
Or the Italian example.
Standard Italian comes from Tuscan.
Right.
And why Tuscan?
Because giants of medieval literature, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, they wrote in Tuscan.
Everyone wanted to read them.
So that dialect gained huge social currency.
It became the default.
Okay.
So prestige is social, but linguists must have a more scientific way to draw the line.
How do you separate a language from a dialect?
Yeah, the classic question.
The main tool dialectologists use is mutual intelligeneity.
People like Chambers and Trugill laid this out.
Meaning?
Meaning if speakers of code A can understand speakers of code B and vice versa, even if their speech is systematically different, they're speaking dialects of the same language.
Okay.
But if they can understand each other, then they're generally considered different languages.
Boy, doesn't history kind of mess that up?
Like think about French, Spanish,
Italian.
They all came from Latin, right?
Exactly.
You could argue they started as dialects of Latin.
So they were mutually intelligible, at least for a while.
But now they're definitely separate languages.
What changed?
Politics, mostly.
When the regions where these Latin dialects were spoken became separate political entities, kingdoms,
nations, the dialects got promoted, they became national languages, the political border suddenly mattered more than strict mutual intelligibility.
So the scientific rule gets overridden by flags and borders?
Pretty much, yeah.
It shows how tangled language and politics really are.
Okay, let's stick with geography for a bit.
North American English.
The chapter points out some major regional variations in the US.
Yeah, we can roughly divide it into three big zones.
You've got the northern or eastern type, I think New York, New England.
A key feature there is being Donrotic.
Meaning they drop the sounds like car becomes car.
Exactly.
Then you go south and you often get even more ur dropping, plus different vowel sounds, like a really broad sound and a word like time.
And the third one?
Middle and western.
Right, which covers this huge area, the midwest out west.
And that's often seen as this sort of standard American English.
Why is that one considered standard?
Well, partly because it keeps the R sound in all positions, but also just geography and demographics.
It's spoken over the largest area and it's been heavily reinforced by national media, people moving around.
It just gained this kind of dominance.
And beyond pronunciation,
there are tons of word differences, right?
Even between, say, American and British English.
We say gasoline, they say petrol.
Elevator versus lift.
Color versus color, even spelling.
Yeah, these little differences add up and mapping them is the job of dialectology.
The earliest tool they used was fascinating, the word cart.
A word map.
Yeah, literally a map showing how one specific word is pronounced or what word is used for a concept across different villages or regions.
It was like a huge amount of work back then.
Oh, it was.
The pioneer was a German linguist, George Winker.
He sent out questionnaires like 40 sentences and asked people to transcribe them into their local dialect.
Imagine the data.
Wow.
And then in France.
Jules Girond took it further.
He actually hired someone, Edmond Edmond, to travel all over France, connecting 700 interviews face to face for the Atlas Linguistique de la France.
Incredible fieldwork.
Right.
So we've moved on from that now, I assume.
Computers and stuff.
For sure.
Now we use large scale phone surveys, computer analysis, like the Atlas of North American English that used massive amounts of phone data to map sound changes happening right now.
Can you give us a sense of what these maps show, like that Italian example for the word now?
Oh, it's a perfect illustration.
You see this clear three way split.
Adesso is the standard form.
You find it in the North, clusters around Rome.
Okay.
Then aura is really strong, just in Tuscany.
And then that little word is common across most of the South.
Three different words for now, drawing these invisible lines across the country.
That's amazing.
Okay.
Let's shift from geography to more socio -historical situations.
Pigeons and creoles.
Right.
This happens when people speaking totally different languages are thrown together, often in really difficult circumstances, like, say, the slave trade bringing Africans to the Americas where they encountered European languages.
You need to communicate somehow, right?
Exactly.
So a pigeon language emerges.
It's very basic, stripped down grammar, limited vocabulary,
just enough for essential communication trade, orders, basic needs.
It's not bad language.
It's efficient for its specific purpose.
But it's not anyone's native language initially.
No.
The magic happens, linguistically speaking, when that pigeon does become a native language, when children grow up speaking it as their first tongue.
That's when it becomes a creole.
Yes.
The word creole itself comes from Spanish creole, meaning native to the place.
Kids naturally expand the pigeon's grammar, its vocabulary, making it a full complex language capable of expressing anything.
Like Louisiana creole French, maybe?
And the music.
A perfect example.
Creoles become the basis for whole new cultures.
It shows how language adapts and grows.
So once you have these established ways of speaking dialects, creoles,
whatever society starts judging them, right?
Which brings us to DeGlossia.
Yeah.
Charles Ferdinand's concept from 1959.
DeGlossia is where a society basically uses two distinct varieties of the same language, but assigns them different levels of prestige, high H and low L.
And they're used in totally different situations.
Strictly separated.
The H form is for formal stuff, sermons, political speeches, serious literature, university lectures.
It's the one taught in schools, usually has a strong written tradition.
And the L form.
That's for everyday talk.
Chatting with family and friends, jokes, cartoons, folk stories.
It's the language of informal life.
You see this in places like the Arab world or Swiss German.
Those are classic examples.
Modern Greek also had it for a long time with Cathareza as the H form and Demotiki as the L form.
I remember reading about the Greek wine example.
Right.
Two words for wine.
Enos was the H word, the one you'd see printed on a fancy menu.
Very formal.
But when you actually ordered the wine from the waiter, you'd use the L word, crassi, shows the separation perfectly.
But these situations aren't set in stone, are they?
Definitely not.
They can be quite unstable.
Like in Greece, that diglossic situation officially ended in 1976.
They decided to promote Demotiki, the L form, for official and educational use.
Social change drives language change.
Okay, that H and L distinction feels really relevant when we talk about slang.
That super informal language tied to specific groups, often young people, spreading through media.
Absolutely.
Slang can be brand new words.
The text mentions glitzy or it can be taking an old word and giving it a totally new meaning.
Like cool.
Cool has been around a while in its slang sense, hasn't it?
Oh, yeah.
Since the 30s or 40s jazz scene, apparently.
Slang has history.
And adolescent slang, the chapter says, is really packed with emotion, emotivity.
How does that work?
It uses a few key tricks.
One is tagging, adding little questions like right or yeah, no.
To kind of pull the listener in, check for agreement.
It also...
Vocalism, things like drawing out sounds or using intensifiers like so, that's so last year.
Right, and hesitancy.
Yeah, using fillers like or like.
Not just because you're unsure, but sometimes to hold your turn in a conversation to manage the flow.
And the fourth one, well, it's profanity, used for emphasis or group bonding.
The word like gets a whole section to itself, practically.
Its evolution is fascinating.
It really is.
It pops up in the 80s, maybe earlier, initially just as a hesitation marker.
I kind of like want to go.
Then it took on all these other jobs.
Softening statements.
The movie was like, okay, approximating, it costs like 20 bucks.
And the big one, the quoted of like...
And she was like, no way.
Exactly.
Using like to introduce reported speech or thought, it's become incredibly common.
And people have been complaining about like forever, apparently.
Yeah, the book mentions a Time Magazine article from 1954 worrying about teenagers using it.
And believe it or not, the Oxford English Dictionary traces one use of like sort of meaning, so to speak, back to 1778.
Wow.
So our linguistic pet peeves often aren't that new.
Rarely are.
But slang isn't just about being informal, it's deeply tied to identity.
Think about hip -hop slang.
Yeah, the book talks about it as resistance,
using non -standard English deliberately.
It's often positioned as an anti -hegemonic stance, yeah.
A rejection of the mainstream, often associated with whiteness.
Chuck D's quote is powerful.
This is our voice.
We're not going to take the cookie cutter they give us.
Even spelling choices, like was for was.
It's a conscious marker of identity and difference.
And slang often works through these incredibly dense metaphors or ironic sketches.
Like the definition of dork.
A greasy male teen who studies chemistry all night.
Exactly, it paints a whole picture in one word.
Or using sperm donor for an absent father that's sharp, ironic social commentary.
So if slang is the informal, often rebellious code,
what about jargon?
Jargon is different.
It's the specialized vocabulary of a particular profession or a skill, or even a hobby group.
Think medical terminology.
Like doctors saying rectum instead of a more common term.
Precisely.
Or musicians using terms like coda or largo.
Jargon serves two main purposes.
First, it allows for really precise, unambiguous communication within the group.
Makes sense.
And the second.
It signals identity.
Knowing the jargon proves you're an insider, you belong to that group.
But that line between jargon and everyday language seems pretty blurry now.
It really is.
Thanks to education, the internet, technology.
Lots of terms that started as specialist jargon are now completely mainstream.
Think arthritis, eczema, even basic math terms like equation.
Jargon constantly feeds into the general language.
Okay, so the last big way variation happens is through borrowing.
Taking words from other languages.
Right, loan words.
The most basic reason is just needing a word for something new, a necessary loan.
Your language doesn't have a word for computer initially, so you borrow it or you borrow the concept.
Like memorandum from Latin or naive from French.
Perfect examples.
And English.
Well, English is a massive borrower.
The Norman conquest in 1066 was huge.
Because the ruling class spoke French.
Exactly.
Norman French, which was Latin based.
So for centuries, English got absolutely flooded with French and Latin vocabulary.
Especially for things related to government, law, food, fashion.
We barely notice them as foreign now.
But sometimes we borrow words not because we need them, but why?
For prestige.
Yeah, what the book calls luxury loans.
Borrowing for social cachet or maybe just because a foreign word sounds sophisticated.
This often gives us pairs of words with similar meanings.
Like native Germanic home versus the Latin derived residence.
Or clap versus applaud.
One sounds more formal, maybe more prestigious, because of its Latin roots.
The history hidden in some borrowed words is amazing.
Like rivals.
Yeah, from Latin rivus, meaning a stream or brook.
Rivals were originally people who shared the same water source and, well, probably argued over it.
And salary.
From salarium, which was the Roman soldier's allowance for buying salt.
Salt was incredibly valuable.
Language holds so much history.
So when we borrow these necessary words, they tend to change, right?
To fit into English.
Yes, that's nativization.
The borrowed word adapts to the sounds, the spelling patterns, the grammar of the borrowing language.
The Italian word sonnetto became the English sonnet, losing that final vowel sound.
The sheer scale of borrowing in English is kind of mind blowing.
That statistic from the OED.
It's incredible.
The 1973 survey found French words made up over 28 percent.
Latin words, another 28 percent.
That's over half the vocabulary.
Our original Germanic roots, only about 25 percent.
We're a real hybrid language.
Definitely.
We also borrow structures, not just words, calque or loan translations.
Like translating a foreign phrase literally piece by piece.
The example given is the Brothers Karamazov keeping that Russian possessive structure.
And this borrowing process is super fast in immigrant communities, right?
Yeah, because the need is immediate.
You're in a new country, new environment, new things, new concepts.
You grab the words you need from the dominant language and adapt them quickly.
Italian Americans saying stardo for store or morgueggio for mortgage.
Okay, so wrapping this all up.
Dialects, creels, slang, borrowing.
None of these are mistakes or errors.
Not at all.
They're the result of real social and historical processes.
They reflect group identity, power dynamics, contact and change.
It all comes back to that relationship between Lang, the abstract system and parole.
How people actually use language in the real world.
That's the core takeaway.
You can't understand language without understanding the social forces constantly shaping its use.
The system isn't static.
It's alive, constantly being pushed and pulled by us, by society.
So maybe a final thought for everyone listening.
The next time you hear a new slang term or some piece of jargon pops up at work, stop and think about it.
Ask yourself, is this a necessary loan?
Is it filling a real gap, helping us talk about something new?
Or is it more of a luxury loan?
Is it really about signaling identity, showing you're part of the in -group, adopting something for its social prestige?
It's a great lens to view language change through.
It really is.
Language is this incredibly dynamic social code we use every single day.
Thanks so much for joining us for this deep dive.
Keep listening.
Keep noticing the language around you.