[Linganth] Military Standard English?

[Matthew Tomlinson]

Hi all,


A few years ago, on this listserv, I posted a question about monological military language ideologies of command-and-compliance. I received some great responses, which included the following recommendations:


Carol Cohn, "Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals." Signs (1987).


Catherine Hicks Kennard, "Redefining femininity: female drill instructors in the United States Marine Corps." SALSA VII (1999), Department of Linguistics, U. Texas at Austin, pp. 87-98.


Charlotte Linde, "The Quantitative Study of Communicational Success: Politeness and Accidents in Aviation Discourse."  Language and Society, Vol. 17, No. 3, Sep., 1988.


Although these sources vary in focus, hopefully one or two of them will be useful for your search! And my thanks again to the folks who originally recommended these.


Best regards,

Matt


https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/people/aca/mattheto/index.html


________________________________
From: Linganth <linganth-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Edwin Everhart <edwin.everhart at gmail.com>
Sent: 09 September 2019 19:34
To: Galey Modan
Cc: LINGANTH at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Linganth] Military Standard English?

This really deserves a good library search and probably a dissertation but I couldn't resist sending a quick comment from on board a train. I have recent anecdotal confirmation from a student, and from one of my cousins, that the US military *currently* has a language standardization policy. I don't know how robust it is. My interlocutors said that they sometimes struggled to understand other members of their units, and that miscommunications were resolved informally.

On the margins of my research on contemporary language standardization in Japan I have heard stories about a change in military language policy there, moving from regionally-based units to units that were intentionally made up of soldiers from all across the archipelago. Apparently this policy was instituted specifically to facilitate national (linguistic) unity.

But I'm afraid I don't have any sources at my fingertips to back this up, except for the Amtrak magazine. It looks like they've cut way back on their research budget for historiography of 20th century Japan...

Edwin K. Everhart

On Mon, Sep 9, 2019 at 12:00 Galey Modan <gmodan at gmail.com<mailto:gmodan at gmail.com>> wrote:
Has anyone ever heard of US Military Standard English? I'm doing a section on language standardization in a class; a student of mine was talking to her grandfather about it, and he mentioned that when he was in the military, the military took an active approach to standardizing both accent and grammar so that there would be no risk of miscommunication in life-or-death situations. I guess this would have been in the 60s or 70s? I'd appreciate any leads anyone might have about this, as I've never heard of this before.

thanks a lot,

Galey Modan
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Edwin K. Everhart, PhD
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