[Linguistic Anthropology] Teenage Language, by Chad Nilep

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Nice write-up!
Are "youth language skills" becoming a political issue in the UK? The fact
that "claims that
contemporary young
people<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/5402896.stm>are
failing
to live up to<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1938314,00.html>the
standards
achieved by their
elders<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/3946009.stm>"
attract readers isn't surprising in and of itself but it's interesting to
note that those claims are made, in prominent British media, within a
relatively short period of time seems to suggest that there might be a
specific social/political significance for language education in the current
context of British society.
On the other hand, it might just have to do with the news cycle related to
the school calendar.
(BTW, my last name is "Enkerli"...)

On 12/29/06, Leila Monaghan <monaghan at indiana.edu> wrote:
>
> Does BBC News cause "technology isolation syndrome"?
>
> On 15 December 2006, Nate Anderson posted a piece on the online journal Ars
>
> Technica <http://arstechnica.com/> entitled "Are
> iPods shrinking the British vocabulary?"<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061215-8431.html?tag=nl.e777>In it, Anderson reports on
> research by Lancaster University linguistics professor Tony McEnery.
> According
> to the Ars Technica report:
>
> McEnery found that one-third of most teenage speech was made up of only 20
>
> common words like "yeah," "no," and "but." This
> is problematic for teenagers seeking jobs in the corporate world, where at
> least
> some level of professionalism is required when communicating with others.
>
>
> The report finds that "technology isolation syndrome" is part of
> the problem. Teenagers spend increasing amounts of time immersed in
> television,
> video games, and music from their iPods-activities where they listen
> rather
> than speak. As a result, they don't get much practice at communicating
> clearly
> with others, and they aren't exposed to a wide vocabulary.
>
>
>
> This appears, on first blush, to be very striking news. Are iPods,
> television, and video games destroying young Briton's ability to
> communicate?
> Are teenagers' vocabularies shrinking?
>
> Probably not.
>
> A striking aspect of the Ars Technica report is that it does not link to McEnery's
>
> work at Lancaster University<http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/tony/tony.htm>.
> Instead, it refers to a similarly alarmist
> report from BBC
> News <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6173441.stm>.
>
> The unnamed reporters from the BBC appear to have interviewed Professor
> McEnery,
> and to have consulted a press
> release from Lancaster University<http://domino.lancs.ac.uk/info/lunews.nsf/r/47f2>.
> According to the BBC report, teens have
> an average vocabulary of about 12,600 words, compared to about 21,400
> words
> for young adults aged 25-34. Of particular interest to the BBC reporters
> is
> this claim attributed to McEnery: "[The words 'no' and 'but'] occur in
> the sequence 'but no' or 'no but' almost twice as frequently in teenage
> speech
> as it does in young adult or middle aged speech."
>
> These collocations are of interest since they are used to parody
> British teen speech <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFg8pxxvRjc> in the television
>
> program "Little Britain" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moEyOhZ7B44>. The
> BBC reporters can thus provide 'scientific
> proof' that the parody reflects reality. They quote linguist McEnery as
> saying,"When
> things are funny it is because they ring true with people."
>
> What, then, should we make of the claims presented by Ars Technica and the
>
> BBC? Let me take what I see to be three central claims, each in turn.
>
> 1. *One third of most teenage speech is made up of twenty common words.*
>
>
> This claim is probably true. If so, however, it is utterly unremarkable.
> As
> early as 1935, George Kingsley Zipf noted that the most frequent word
> types
> in a natural language account for the majority of word tokens. (In corpus
> linguistics,
> *type* refers to the general category - say, every instance of the word
> *the* - while *token* refers to one instance of the type.) Zipf's
> law states that the most frequent word will occur twice as often as the
> second
> most frequent, which will occur twice as often as the fourth most
> frequent,
> and so on. It is not surprising, then, that a small number of word types
> accounts
> for most of the tokens produced.
>
> In fact, in collections of English speech and writing such as the Brown
> Corpus <http://icame.uib.no/brown/bcm.html> or the British National Corpus<http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/>
> the top twenty words usually account for about a third of all words in the
> corpus,
> depending, among other things, on how you define "word".
>
> Linguists Mark<http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003921.html>
> Liberman<http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003976.html>,
>
> Geoff
> Pullum <http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003922.html>,
> and Arnold
> Zwicky <http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003914.html>have recently written quite a lot about the treatment of this non-story
> by the BBC in their blog, Language
> Log <http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/>, including a response
> from Tony McEnery<http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003926.html>.
> I'll say no more about it here.
>
> 2. *Teens have an average vocabulary of 12,600 words, compared to 21,400
> words for adults.*
>
> This is a very difficult question to address given the difficulty of
> defining
> *vocabulary* and *words*. What does it mean to have an item in one's
> vocabulary? Does recognizing it in context (called *passive vocabulary*)
> count? Or must one be able to speak or write it (called *active vocabulary
> *)?
> The *Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language* (Crystal 1995) refers
>
> to an apparently unpublished study in which three subjects, an office
> secretary,
> a business woman, and a university lecturer, estimated their active and
> passive
> vocabularies by marking the number of headwords in an unspecified
> dictionary
> that they recognized and used. The three subjects had estimated active
> vocabularies
> of 31,500, 63,000, and 56,250 words, and passive vocabularies of 38,300,
> 73,350,
> and 76,250 words each. It seems clear that McEnery's methods must have
> differed
> from that used in this study.
>
> It may seem easy enough simply to count the number of words each subject
> uses
> or recognizes. However, this assumes that words are discretely defined,
> which
> is not the case. A single lexeme (the minimal unit of a lexicon) may have
> multiple
> forms. The lexeme GO, for instance, has the forms *go*, *goes*, *gone*,
> and *went*. Does this count as one word, or four?
>
> It's not clear how McEnery defined these issues for the purpose of his
> research.
> The press release from Lancaster University describing McEnery's study,
> though,
> provides a very sensible analysis of the reported difference in vocabulary
> sizes.
> According to the statement, "The research clearly demonstrated that
> teenagers
> are still developing their oral communication skills, underlining the need
> to
> ensure that they are given appropriate support by schools in doing so."
> In other words, those who are currently undertaking secondary education
> know
> less than those who have completed high school or even college. This seems
> utterly
> commonsensical, though it will probably attract fewer readers than claims
> that
> contemporary
> young people <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/5402896.stm>are failing
>
> to live up to<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1938314,00.html>the standards
>
> achieved by their elders<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/3946009.stm>
> .
>
> 3. *"Technology isolation syndrome," caused by over-use of television,
> video games, and iPods, is part of the problem.*
>
> This is the issue that first got linguistic anthropologists - or at least,
> some
> contributors to this blog - interested in the claims. Alexandre
> Ekerli <http://enkerli.wordpress.com/> suggested that the Ars Technica
> piece presented a reductionist form
> of linguistic
> determinism <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism>. Ekerli
> noted that coverage of the study seemed to reiterate
> tired 'kids these days' discourses without using the study "as an
> opportunity
> to see the actual connections between technological developments, social
> changes,
> and language change." It seems that press coverage not only played up the
> technology angle - it introduced it.
>
> As with other elements of this story, "technology isolation syndrome"
> appears to originate not from any academic study, but from the 12 December
> BBC
> piece. The Lancaster University press release makes no mention of the
> supposed
> syndrome, and it is not mentioned in any academic studies I can find. A Google
>
> search<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22technology%2Bisolation%2Bsyndrome%22&btnG=Google%2BSearch>for "technology isolation syndrome" finds fewer than 400
> references, all apparently variants of the BBC piece.
>
> None of these reports is very close to descriptions of the study by Lancaster
>
> University News <http://domino.lancs.ac.uk/info/lunews.nsf/r/47f2> or Tony
> McEnery. (The research itself was carried out for
> a private sponsor and is confidential.) In fact, it appears that only one
> source,
> the BBC, had any direct contact with McEnery or his research. The other
> sources,
> mostly technology-related blogs, relied on the BBC report. That report
> contains
> several quotes from McEnery, which reflect a desire to improve the
> teaching
> of speech in British schools.
>
> As the story has moved to technology-blogs, this focus on the teaching of
> spoken
> English has largely disappeared. Instead, one off-hand comment gets all
> the
> press: "This trend, known as technology isolation syndrome, could lead
> to problems in the classroom and then later in life."
>
> Nowhere does McEnery mention television, video games, or iPods. The
> original
> study was, however, based on a corpus of speech (10,000,000 words) plus
> writing
> in blogs (100,000 words). This may be the slim foundation on which the
> edifice
> of "technology isolation" reporting rests.
>
> According to McEnery<http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003926.html>,
>
> "[The] work itself was widely misrepresented in the press. I wrote a study
>
> looking at difference and, predictably, the press translated that into a
> discourse
> of deficiency." He directs interested parties to the Lancaster press
> release,
> which he says is "something closer to the spirit of the original report."
>
> According to that press
> release <http://domino.lancs.ac.uk/info/lunews.nsf/r/47f2>:
>
> New research by Professor Tony McEnery of the Department of Linguistics
> and
> English Language argues that it is important that we remember that
> teenagers
> are still developing their linguistic skills not merely in reading and
> writing,
> but also in oral communication. Schools need to focus on the development
> of
> speaking skills just as much as they need to focus upon the development of
> reading
> and writing.
>
> ...
>
> Professor McEnery's research looked at the communication skills of 200
> teenagers
> with an examination of 10,000,000 words of transcribed, naturally
> occurring
> speech from across the UK collated in a language database as well as
> 100,000
> words of data gathered from blogs written by teenagers. The research
> clearly
> demonstrated that teenagers are still developing their oral communication
> skills,
> underlining the need to ensure that they are given appropriate support by
> schools
> in doing so.
>
>
> This is sensible enough, with no trace of linguistic determinism,
> techno-phobia,
> or the fall of British society. On the other hand, it probably won't sell
> much
> advertising.
>
> Crystal, D. 1995. *The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English
> language*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
>
> Zipf, G.K. 1935. *The psycho-biology of language; an introduction to
> dynamic
> philology*. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
>
>
> --
> Posted by Leila Monaghan to Linguistic Anthropology<http://linganth.blogspot.com/2006/12/teenage-language-by-chad-nilep.html>at 12/29/2006 03:10:00 PM
>



-- 
Alexandre
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
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