A Tour of U.S. Accents: Bostonian, Philadelphese, Gullah Creole & Other Intriguing Dialects

in English Language, Language | February 11th, 2021

You don’t have an accent — or rather, every­one has an accent, but we don’t notice our own, espe­cial­ly if we asso­ciate most­ly with peo­ple of sim­i­lar cul­tur­al back­grounds. For how­ev­er we might like to describe our­selves, the way we speak reveals who we are: as dialect coach Erik Singer puts it in the Wired video above, “Accent is iden­ti­ty.” Among the forces shap­ing that iden­ti­ty he names not just geog­ra­phy but socioe­co­nom­ic back­ground, gen­er­a­tion, eth­nic­i­ty and race, and oth­er “indi­vid­ual fac­tors.”  The result is that a large and var­ied con­ti­nent like North Amer­i­ca has giv­en rise to a wide vari­ety of accents in the Eng­lish lan­guage alone.

In the video Singer and four oth­er spe­cial­ist lan­guage experts demon­strate a great many of these North Amer­i­can accents, iden­ti­fy­ing the most dis­tinc­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics of each. The clas­sic Boston accent, for exam­ple, is “non-rhot­ic,” refer­ring to the drop­ping of “R” sounds that make pos­si­ble such clas­sic phras­es as “pahk yah cah in Havahd Yard.” It dif­fers in many ways from those com­mon in places like Rhode Island and New York City, rel­a­tive­ly close togeth­er though all three areas may seem: the diver­si­ty of accents on the U.S. east coast ver­sus its more recent­ly set­tled west coast under­scores the fact that region­al accents need time, usu­al­ly a mat­ter of gen­er­a­tion upon gen­er­a­tion, to emerge.

The way Philadel­phi­ans talk illus­trates what Singer calls “the ‘on’ line,” north of which most pro­nounce “on” as if it rhymes with “don,” and south of which — Philly and below — most pro­nounce “on” as if rhymes with “dawn.” You don’t even have to cross the Penn­syl­va­nia bor­der to find anoth­er unique accent. Only in Pitts­burgh do peo­ple “smooth the ‘mouth’ dipthong,” a dipthong being a syl­la­ble com­posed of two dis­tinct vow­els — here, the “ou” in “mouth” — the “smooth­ing out” of which turns it into a sin­gle (and to non-Pitts­burghers, unusu­al-sound­ing) vow­el.

By the end of these 20 min­utes, Singer and his crew have made it only as far as the “Piney Woods Belt” of the Amer­i­can south, whose accents bring to many of our minds the voice of Scar­lett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois. They’ve also touched on such lin­guis­tic curiosi­ties as Gul­lah cre­ole; the Eliz­a­bethan inflec­tion of Ocra­coke Island, North Car­oli­na,” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture; and in some ways the most curi­ous of all, the broad­ly des­ig­nat­ed “gen­er­al Amer­i­can” speech that has emerged in recent decades. This is only the first video of a series [update: it’s now avail­able below], so keep an eye on Wired’s Youtube chan­nel for the next install­ment of the lin­guis­tic jour­ney — and keep an ear out for all the sub­tle vari­eties of Eng­lish you can catch in the mean­time.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Map­ping the Dif­fer­ences in How Amer­i­cans Speak Eng­lish: A Geo­graph­ic Look at Words, Accents & Dialects

A Brief Tour of British & Irish Accents: 14 Ways to Speak Eng­lish in 84 Sec­onds

One Woman, 17 British Accents

The Speech Accent Archive: The Eng­lish Accents of Peo­ple Who Speak 341 Dif­fer­ent Lan­guages

Meet the Amer­i­cans Who Speak with Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish Accents: An Intro­duc­tion to the “Hoi Toi­ders” from Ocra­coke, North Car­oli­na

Why Do Peo­ple Talk Fun­ny in Old Movies?, or The Ori­gin of the Mid-Atlantic Accent

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch 36 Short Animations That Tell the Origin Stories of Mexico’s Indigenous Peoples in Their Own Languages

in Animation, Language, Travel | February 2nd, 2021

In our efforts to pre­serve endan­gered species we seem to over­look some­thing equal­ly impor­tant. To me it is a sign of a deeply dis­turbed civ­i­liza­tion where tree hug­gers and whale hug­gers in their weird­ness are accept­able while no one embraces the last speak­ers of a lan­guage.

 — Wern­er Her­zog, Encoun­ters at the End of the World

Trees and whales aside, we sus­pect the ever quotable Her­zog would warm to fel­low direc­tor Gabriela Badil­lo’s 68 Voic­es, 68 Hearts, a series of one-minute ani­ma­tions that pre­serve indige­nous Mex­i­can sto­ries with nar­ra­tion pro­vid­ed by native speak­ers.

“It was cre­at­ed in order to help fos­ter pride, respect, and the use of indige­nous Mex­i­can lan­guages between speak­ers and non-speak­ers, as well as to help reduce dis­crim­i­na­tion and fos­ter a sense of pride towards all com­mu­ni­ties and cul­tures that are part of the cul­tur­al rich­ness that makes up Mex­i­co,” Badil­lo says in an inter­view with Awasqa.

The project stemmed from a real­iza­tion in the wake of the death of her grand­fa­ther, a Max­canu from Yucatan:

Aside from los­ing a loved one, I real­ized that an enor­mous wis­dom had also been lost: a lan­guage, sto­ries, tra­di­tions and cus­toms, a whole world had dis­solved with him.

Each ani­ma­tion involves col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Nation­al Insti­tute of Indige­nous Lan­guage and the com­mu­ni­ty whose sto­ry is being shared. Com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers choose the sub­ject, then sup­ply nar­ra­tion and trans­la­tion. Their chil­dren draw scenes from the select­ed sto­ry, which steers the style of ani­ma­tion.

Pri­or to being released to the gen­er­al pub­lic, each film is pre­sent­ed to its com­mu­ni­ty of ori­gin, along with a book­let of sug­gest­ed edu­ca­tion­al activ­i­ties for par­ents and teach­ers to use in con­junc­tion with screen­ings. Box­es of post­cards fea­tur­ing art­work from the series are donat­ed to the com­mu­ni­ty school.

Some of the entries, like the above About Earth­quakes and the Ori­gin of Life on Earth, nar­rat­ed in Ch’ol by Euge­nia Cruz Mon­te­jo, pack a mas­sive amount of sto­ry into the allot­ted minute:

They say many years ago Ch’u­j­ti­at, the Heav­en’s lord, cre­at­ed the Earth with 12 immor­tal men to car­ry it. And it is when they get tired that the Earth moves, pro­vok­ing earth­quakes.

At the same time he cre­at­ed the first men, who were ungrate­ful, so Ch’u­j­ti­at sent the flood and turned the sur­vivors into mon­keys, and the inno­cent chil­dren into stars. He then cre­at­ed our first par­ents, na’al, Ixic y Xun’Ok, who mul­ti­plied and pop­u­lat­ed the Earth. 

That’s how life on Earth began.That’s how the Ch’oles tell it.

Vari­ants of “that’s how we tell it” are a com­mon refrain, as in the Cora (also known as Náay­eri) sto­ry of how the Moth­er God­dess cre­at­ed earth (and oth­er gods), nar­rat­ed by Pedro Muñiz López.

Here is the writ­ten ver­sion, in Cora:

E’itɨ tiuséi­jre cháana­ka

Yaapú ti’nyúukari tɨkɨn a’najpú ɨtyáj nái­mi ajnáana Náa­sisaa, Téijkame jemín ɨ cháana­ka ajtá ɨ máxkɨrai, góutaaguaka’a ɨ tabóu­jsimua yaati’xáata tɨkɨn mata’a já guatéchaɨn majtá tyuipuán iyakúi cháana­ka japuá.

Muxáj kɨmen­pú góutaaguaka’a tɨ’kí nájkɨ’ta gojoutyáj­tua. Áuna me’séira aɨjme tabou­jsimua matákua’naxɨ.

Tɨ’kí aɨj­na tanáana Náa­sisaa, ukɨpuapú guatákɨɨnitya’a, yán guajaikagua’xɨjre uyóu­j­mua matɨ’jmí jet­sán guatyáakɨ yán miye’ntiné tajapuá. Kapú aɨn jé’i, matákua’naxɨ máj akábibɨɨ yán juté’e, makaupɨxɨɨ ujet­sé matɨ’jmí chuéj kɨj ten­tyóu metya’úrara, ajtá ɨ Taja’as xu’rabe’táana tiuɨrɨj tyau­tyáj­tua ajpúi tanáana Náa­sisaa tsíikɨri guatyákɨs­ta­ka ukɨpuá kɨmen. Japuan­pú aɨj­na chuéj utía­j­ka tɨ’kí goutaíjte aɨjme tabóu­jsimua guatái­jte máj atapa’tsaren metya’tanya’tɨkɨ’káa ayaapú tiutéjbe máj tiunéi­tan.

Ayaapú tiuséi­jre cháana­ka. Ayáj tigua’nyúukari Náay­eri.

Badillo’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion is well served by one of our favorites, The Ori­gin of the Moun­tains. In addi­tion to moun­tains, this Cucapá sto­ry, nar­rat­ed by Inocen­cia González Sainz, delves into the ori­gin of oceans and the Col­orado Riv­er, though fair warning—it may be dif­fi­cult to restore class­room order once the stu­dents hear that tes­ti­cles and ear­wax fig­ure promi­nent­ly.

To watch a playlist of the 36 ani­ma­tions com­plet­ed so far with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles, click here.

68 Voic­es, 68 Heart’s Kick­starter page has more infor­ma­tion about this ongo­ing project. Con­tri­bu­tions will go toward ani­mat­ing sto­ries in the three lan­guages that are at the high­est risk of dis­ap­pear­ing—Akateko, Popolo­ca, and Ku’ahl.

As Badil­lo writes:

When a lan­guage dis­ap­pears, not only a sound, a way of writ­ing, a let­ter or a word goes away. Some­thing much deep­er than just a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion dis­ap­pears — a way of see­ing and con­ceiv­ing the world, sto­ries, tales, a way of nam­ing and relat­ing to things, an enor­mous knowl­edge that we should relearn because of its deep respect with nature.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

200+ Films by Indige­nous Direc­tors Now Free to View Online: A New Archive Launched by the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Peru­vian Schol­ar Writes & Defends the First The­sis Writ­ten in Quechua, the Main Lan­guage of the Incan Empire

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How to Speak: Watch the Lecture on Effective Communication That Became an MIT Tradition for Over 40 Years

in Education, Language, MIT | October 26th, 2020

In his leg­endary MIT lec­ture “How to Speak,” pro­fes­sor Patrick Win­ston opens with a sto­ry about see­ing Olympic gym­nast Mary Lou Ret­ton at a Celebri­ty Ski Week­end. It was imme­di­ate­ly clear to him that he was the bet­ter ski­er, but not because he had more innate ath­let­ic abil­i­ty than an Olympic gold medal­ist, but because he had more knowl­edge and prac­tice. These, Win­ston says, are the key qual­i­ties we need to become bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tors. Inher­ent tal­ent helps, he says, but “notice that the T is very small. What real­ly mat­ters is what you know.”

What some of us know about com­mu­ni­cat­ing effec­tive­ly could fill a greet­ing card, but it’s hard­ly our fault, says Win­ston. Schools that send stu­dents into the world with­out the abil­i­ty to speak and write well are as crim­i­nal­ly liable as offi­cers who send sol­diers into bat­tle with­out weapons. For over 40 years, Win­ston has been try­ing to rem­e­dy the sit­u­a­tion with his “How to Speak” lec­ture, offered every Jan­u­ary,” notes MIT, “usu­al­ly to over­flow crowds.” It became “so pop­u­lar, in fact, that the annu­al talk had to be lim­it­ed to the first 300 par­tic­i­pants.”

Now it’s avail­able online, in both video and tran­script form, in the talk’s final form from 2018 (it evolved quite a bit over the decades). Pro­fes­sor Win­ston passed away last year, but his wis­dom lives on. Rather than present us with a dry the­o­ry of rhetoric and com­po­si­tion, the one­time direc­tor of the MIT’s Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Lab­o­ra­to­ry offers “a few heuris­tic rules” dis­tilled from “prax­is in com­mu­ni­ca­tion approach­es that incor­po­rate Neu­rolin­guis­tics, Lin­guis­tics, Pale­oan­thro­pol­o­gy, Cog­ni­tive Sci­ence and Com­put­er Sci­ence,” writes Min­nie Kasyoka.

Winston’s research on “cre­at­ing machines with the same thought pat­terns as humans” led him to the fol­low­ing con­clu­sions about effec­tive speak­ing and writing—observations that have borne them­selves out in the careers of thou­sands of pub­lic speak­ers, job seek­ers, and pro­fes­sion­als of every kind. Many of his heuris­tics con­tra­dict decades of folk opin­ion on pub­lic speak­ing, as well as con­tem­po­rary tech­no­log­i­cal trends. For one thing, he says, avoid open­ing with a joke.

Peo­ple still set­tling into their seats will be too dis­tract­ed to pay atten­tion and you won’t get the laugh. Instead, open with an anal­o­gy or a sto­ry, like his Mary Lou Ret­ton gam­bit, then tell peo­ple, direct­ly, what they’re going to get from your talk. Then tell them again. And again. “It’s a good idea to cycle on the sub­ject,” says Win­ston. “Go around it. Go round it again. Go round it again.” It’s not that we should assume our audi­ence is unin­tel­li­gent, but rather that “at any giv­en moment, about 20%” of them “will be fogged out no mat­ter what the lec­ture is.” It’s just how the human mind works, shift­ing atten­tion all over the place.

Like all great works on effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Winston’s talk illus­trates his meth­ods as it explains them: he fills the lec­ture with mem­o­rable images—like “build­ing a fence” around his idea to dis­tin­guish it from oth­er sim­i­lar ideas. He con­tin­ues to use inter­est­ing lit­tle sto­ries to make things con­crete, like an anec­dote about a Ser­bian nun who was offend­ed by him putting his hands behind his back. This is offered in ser­vice of his lengthy defense of the black­board, con­tra Pow­er­Point, as the ulti­mate visu­al aid. “Now, you have some­thing to do with your hands.”

The talk is relaxed, humor­ous, and infor­ma­tive, and not a step-by-step method. As Win­ston says, you can dip in and out of the copi­ous advice he presents, tak­ing rules you think might work best for your par­tic­u­lar style of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and your com­mu­ni­ca­tion needs. We should all, he empha­sizes, hone our own way of speak­ing and writ­ing. But, “while he nev­er explic­it­ly stress­es the ulti­mate need for rhetor­i­cal devices,” Kasyoka points out, he demon­strates that they are imper­a­tive.

Pro­fes­sor Win­ston mas­ter­ful­ly uses per­sua­sive tech­niques to ham­mer on this point. For exam­ple, the use of anadiplo­sis, that is the rep­e­ti­tion of a clause in a sen­tence for empha­sis, is very man­i­fest in this snip­pet from his talk: “Your careers will be deter­mined large­ly by how well you speak, by how well you write, and by the qual­i­ty of your ideas… in that order.” 

How do we learn to use rhetoric as effec­tive­ly as Win­ston? We lis­ten to and read effec­tive rhetoric like his. Do so in the video lec­ture at the top and on the “How to Speak” course page, which has tran­scripts for down­load and addi­tion­al resources for fur­ther study.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lit­er­ary The­o­rist Stan­ley Fish Offers a Free Course on Rhetoric, or the Pow­er of Argu­ments

Nov­el­ist Cor­mac McCarthy Gives Writ­ing Advice to Sci­en­tists … and Any­one Who Wants to Write Clear, Com­pelling Prose

The Shape of A Sto­ry: Writ­ing Tips from Kurt Von­negut

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Groundbreaking Linguistic Theories

in Language | July 2nd, 2020

Most peo­ple who know Noam Chom­sky know him equal­ly as a giant in aca­d­e­m­ic lin­guis­tics and a long­time left­ist dis­si­dent and polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor. Only a com­mit­ted few, how­ev­er, read much of his work in either—or both—fields. He is one of those thinkers whose major con­cepts enter the dis­course unmoored from their orig­i­nal con­text. Phras­es like “uni­ver­sal gram­mar” and “man­u­fac­tured con­sent” tend to pop up in all kinds of places with­out ref­er­ence to Chomsky’s mean­ings.

If you sim­ply haven’t got the time to read Chom­sky (and let’s face it, there’s a lot going on in the world these days), you might famil­iar­ize your­self with his media the­o­ry in an amus­ing video here. For an entry into Chomsky’s work in lin­guis­tics, see the brief ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above. The explain­er revis­its the Chom­skyian rev­o­lu­tion of 1957, when he artic­u­lat­ed his ideas about the uni­ver­sal prop­er­ties of lan­guage in his first book, Syn­tac­tic Struc­tures.

Chom­sky, the video says, explored the ques­tions, “are there uni­ver­sal gram­mar rules and are they hard­wired into our brains?” He did not invent the con­cept of “uni­ver­sal grammar”—the idea can be found in the 13th cen­tu­ry writ­ing of Roger Bacon—but Chomsky’s spe­cif­ic mean­ing of the term applies unique­ly to lan­guage acqui­si­tion. Rather than sug­gest­ing that lan­guage exists as an abstract uni­ver­sal prop­er­ty, Chom­sky argued that its basic struc­ture, shared across the world, derives from struc­tures in the brain that take shape in infan­cy.

Humans phys­i­cal­ly evolved to acquire and use lan­guage in strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar ways that accord with uni­ver­sal­ly observ­able and applic­a­ble rules, Chom­sky argued. As the les­son points out, a claim this broad requires a moun­tain of evi­dence. At the time, many lan­guages around the world had not been suf­fi­cient­ly stud­ied or record­ed. Since Chomsky’s ini­tial argu­ments, ideas about lin­guis­tic sim­i­lar­i­ties have been sig­nif­i­cant­ly revised.

Sev­er­al crit­ics have argued that no amount of data can ever pro­duce “uni­ver­sal” rules. After decades of cri­tique, Chom­sky revised his the­o­ries, explain­ing them in dif­fer­ent terms as “Prin­ci­ples and Para­me­ters” that gov­ern lan­guages. He has fur­ther sim­pli­fied and spec­i­fied, propos­ing one uni­ver­sal cri­te­ri­on: “Recur­sion.” All lan­guages, he argues, can nest ideas inside oth­er ideas.

Recur­sion, too, has been force­ful­ly chal­lenged by the study of an Ama­zon­ian lan­guage that shows none of the char­ac­ter­is­tics Chom­sky glob­al­ly out­lined. The oth­er part of Chomsky’s the­o­ry of uni­ver­sal grammar—the idea that the brain devel­ops innate, iso­lat­ed lan­guage-mak­ing faculties—has also been refut­ed by neu­ro­sci­en­tists, who have not found evi­dence of any such spe­cif­ic struc­tures.

Why, then, is Chom­sky still so crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant to lin­guis­tics, cog­ni­tive sci­ence, and oth­er fields of study? For one thing, his work encour­aged the study of lan­guages that had been neglect­ed and ignored. The debates Chom­sky gen­er­at­ed pushed the field for­ward, and broke the spell of the Behav­ior­ism that dom­i­nat­ed the human sci­ences into the mid-20th cen­tu­ry. Even where he was wrong, or over­con­fi­dent, his work remains an essen­tial ref­er­ence for the kind of think­ing that rev­o­lu­tion­ized lin­guis­tics and brain sci­ence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Talks About How Kids Acquire Lan­guage & Ideas in an Ani­mat­ed Video by Michel Gondry

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent and How the Media Cre­ates the Illu­sion of Democ­ra­cy

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Peruvian Singer & Rapper, Renata Flores, Helps Preserve Quechua with Viral Hits on YouTube

in Language, Music | May 4th, 2020

Ten years ago, a study by David Har­mon and Jonathan Loh showed that in 30 years’ time, the world had seen a twen­ty per­cent decline in lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty. Indige­nous lan­guages and local dialects have con­tin­ued to dwin­dle, in the U.S. and around the globe. “There are a lot of pres­sures in the world that are entic­ing or even forc­ing peo­ple to switch from gen­er­al­ly small­er, more geo­graph­i­cal­ly restrict­ed lan­guages, to larg­er lan­guages,” Har­mon told Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, “espe­cial­ly glob­al lan­guages like Man­darin Chi­nese, Eng­lish, or Span­ish.”

This pres­sure has been exert­ed on indige­nous lan­guages for cen­turies. Yet hun­dreds have sur­vived, includ­ing Quechua, a fam­i­ly of lan­guages descend­ed from the Inca, and spo­ken by almost 4 mil­lion peo­ple in Peru alone. With many more speak­ers in Bolivia, Argenti­na, and else­where, it is Latin America’s most wide­ly spo­ken Indige­nous lan­guage.

It may seem to be thriv­ing, but Quechua speak­ers are wide­ly treat­ed with con­tempt in Peru, though they make up rough­ly 13% of the pop­u­la­tion. They are the country’s poor and ignored. Quechua has been gross­ly under­stud­ied in acad­e­mia and until recent­ly has had almost no major media pres­ence.

The language’s absence from cen­ters of pow­er has made it less acces­si­ble to new­er generations—whose par­ents would not teach them Quechua for fear of stig­ma­tiz­ing them—and more like­ly to die out with­out inter­ven­tion. It became “syn­ony­mous with dis­crim­i­na­tion” and “social rejec­tion,” says Hugo Coya, direc­tor of a recent Peru­vian news pro­gram entire­ly in Quechua. Coya aims to change that, as does Peru­vian schol­ar Rox­ana Quispe Col­lantes, who defend­ed the first Quechua doc­tor­al the­sis last year. Their work will sure­ly have sig­nif­i­cant impact, but per­haps not near­ly as much as the debut of a 14-year-old Peru­vian singer and rap­per, Rena­ta Flo­res, who had a viral hit five years ago with her Quechua cov­er of Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel” (top).

Flo­res, now 19, has fol­lowed up with a string of songs in Quechua that have “brought huge suc­cess,” writes Vice, “mil­lions of views on YouTube; fea­tures and inter­views in Peru­vian media and for­eign press like The Clin­ic, Tele­mu­n­do, El Paid, AJ+ Español, CNN, and BBC; fans in Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Argenti­na, Guatemala, Domini­can Repub­lic, Cos­ta Rica, Puer­to Rico, Mex­i­co, the Unit­ed States, Spain, Italy, Chi­na, Alge­ria, and count­ing. And with it, Flo­res is chal­leng­ing the very way peo­ple val­ue lan­guages, espe­cial­ly indige­nous ones.” Her music may speak the lan­guage of a spe­cif­ic region, but does so in a glob­al idiom, com­bin­ing “trap, hip-hop, and elec­tron­ic influ­ences with Andean instru­ments.”

Flo­res’ suc­cess in bring­ing such wide­spread atten­tion to Quechua shows anoth­er major cul­tur­al shift of the past few years. Inter­net cul­ture, once assumed to be ephemer­al and of lit­tle last­ing val­ue, has become the coin of the realm, as aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties strug­gle, polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions implode, and jour­nal­ism fails. The joke so often goes that his­to­ri­ans of the future will have to fill text­books (or inter­ac­tive vir­tu­al real­i­ty lessons) with tweets, posts, and memes. Viral YouTube stars like Flo­res are also mak­ing his­to­ry, their videos pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments of how a lan­guage that is mar­gin­al­ized in its home coun­try reached out and found mil­lions of fans around the world.

“The mes­sage con­veyed to Quechua speak­ers” by most treat­ments of their cul­ture in Peru, “is that their iden­ti­ties are part of the region’s past,” writes Julie Turke­witz in a New York Times pro­file of Flo­res. Har­mon makes a sim­i­lar con­nec­tion: “there is a strong pos­si­bil­i­ty that we’ll lose lan­guages that peo­ple are using as their main vehi­cle of expres­sion, which they may regard as one of the linch­pins of their self-iden­ti­ty.” When nation­al nar­ra­tives, media, and edu­ca­tion rel­e­gate a con­tem­po­rary lan­guage to a pre-colo­nial past, it tells mil­lions of peo­ple they essen­tial­ly don’t exist in the mod­ern world. Flo­res, who grew up with Quechua, coun­ters that mes­sage with style.

Flo­res and oth­er Quechua singers not only reaf­firm their cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty, but they put their lan­guage in con­ver­sa­tion with con­tem­po­rary pop music and polit­i­cal con­cerns. Tak­ing on “female pow­er, gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion, war and inter­na­tion­al pop cul­ture polemics,” writes Turke­witz, Flo­res con­tin­ues a lega­cy her one-time musi­cian par­ents helped launch decades ear­li­er, a Quechua-lan­guage blue-rock move­ment called Uch­pa. Now her fam­i­ly helps her record her own songs in their music school. But like most young artists she began with cov­ers. See her play a Quechua ver­sion of “House of the Ris­ing Sun” as a 14-year-old con­test win­ner, fur­ther up; see her very first con­cert, at the same age, in her home­town of Ayacu­cho, below. And see what she’s been up to since then in the videos above and on her YouTube chan­nel.

via NYTimes

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peru­vian Schol­ar Writes & Defends the First The­sis Writ­ten in Quechua, the Main Lan­guage of the Incan Empire

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

200+ Films by Indige­nous Direc­tors Now Free to View Online: A New Archive Launched by the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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One of the Earliest Known Uses of the “F‑word” Discovered: It Appears in a 1568 Anthology Compiled During a Plague

in History, Language | April 8th, 2020

“Wan fukkit fun­ling”: as an insult, these words would today land a minor blow at most. Not so in Scot­land of the ear­ly 16th cen­tu­ry, in which William Dun­bar and Wal­ter Kennedy, two of the land’s well-known poets, faced off before the court of King James IV in a con­test of rhyme. The event is memo­ri­al­ized in the poem “The Fly­t­ing of Dun­bar and Kennedie,” one of 400 anthol­o­gized in what’s known as the Ban­natyne Man­u­script. Com­piled in 1568 by an Edin­burgh mer­chant named George Ban­natyne, stuck at home while a plague swept his city — a con­di­tion many can relate to these days — it now enjoys pride of place at the Nation­al Library of Scot­land as a cul­tur­al trea­sure, not least because it con­tains what may be the old­est record­ed use of the F‑word.

The Ban­natyne Man­u­script and “wan fukkit fun­ling” (whose appear­ance you can see in the image at the top of the post, in the sixth line from the bot­tom) play an impor­tant part in the new BBC Scot­land doc­u­men­tary Scot­land – Con­tains Strong Lan­guage. The hour-long pro­gram, writes The Scots­man’s Bri­an Fer­gu­son, “sees actress, singer and the­atre-mak­er Cora Bis­sett trace the nation’s long love affair with swear­ing and insults, despite the long-stand­ing efforts of reli­gious lead­ers to con­demn it as a sin.” Fer­gu­son quotes Bis­sett describ­ing the impor­tance of this par­tic­u­lar “fly­t­ing” (“the 16th cen­tu­ry equiv­a­lent of a rap bat­tle”) as fol­lows: “When Kennedy address­es Dun­bar, there is the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing record of the word ‘f***’ in the world.”

“In the poem, Dun­bar makes fun of Kennedy’s High­land dialect, for instance, as well as his per­son­al appear­ance, and he sug­gests his oppo­nent enjoys sex­u­al inter­course with hors­es,” writes Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Jen­nifer Ouel­lette. “Kennedy retal­i­ates with attacks on Dun­bar’s diminu­tive stature and lack of bow­el con­trol, sug­gest­ing his rival gets his inspi­ra­tion from drink­ing ‘frogspawn’ from the waters of a rur­al pond.” All high­ly amus­ing, to be sure, but giv­en how few of us Eng­lish-speak­ers will imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nize in “wan fukkit fun­ling” the curse with which we’ve grown so inti­mate­ly famil­iar, does this real­ly count as an exam­ple of usage in Eng­lish?

‘To me, that looks more like Scots than Mid­dle Eng­lish,” writes Boing Boing’s Thom Dunn, “although both lan­guages were derived from Olde Eng­lish.” (He also reminds us not to con­fuse Scots with the sep­a­rate lan­guage of Scot­tish Gael­ic.) Medieval his­to­ri­an Kristin Uscin­s­ki writes in to Ars Tech­ni­ca to point out a cer­tain “Roger F$#%-by-the-Navel who appears in some court records from 1310–11” — pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured, of course, here on Open Cul­ture. His­to­ri­ans and lin­guists will sure­ly con­tin­ue doing their own kind of bat­tle to deter­mine what counts as the first true F‑word, mak­ing more dis­cov­er­ies about the Eng­lish lan­guage’s her­itage of swear­ing along the way. One thing is cer­tain: if any nation has made a rich use of that her­itage, it’s Scot­land.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ear­li­est Known Appear­ance of the F‑Word, in a Bizarre Court Record Entry from 1310

The Very First Writ­ten Use of the F Word in Eng­lish (1528)

Steven Pinker Explains the Neu­ro­science of Swear­ing (NSFW)

Stephen Fry, Lan­guage Enthu­si­ast, Defends The “Unnec­es­sary” Art Of Swear­ing

Read A Clas­si­cal Dic­tio­nary of the Vul­gar Tongue, a Hilar­i­ous & Infor­ma­tive Col­lec­tion of Ear­ly Mod­ern Eng­lish Slang (1785)

A Lec­ture About the His­to­ry of the Scots Lan­guage … in Scots: How Much Can You Com­pre­hend?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Discover the Disappearing Turkish Language That is Whistled, Not Spoken

in Language, Life | January 28th, 2020

We so often priv­i­lege indi­vid­u­als as the pri­ma­ry dri­vers of inno­va­tion. But what if tech­nol­o­gy is also self-orga­niz­ing, devel­op­ing as an evo­lu­tion­ary response to the envi­ron­ment? If we think of whis­tled lan­guage as a kind of tech­nol­o­gy, we have an excel­lent exam­ple of this self-orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple in the 42 doc­u­ment­ed whis­tled lan­guages around the world.

As we not­ed in a pre­vi­ous post, reports of whis­tled lan­guages go back hun­dreds of years in cul­tures that would have had no con­tact with each oth­er: Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co, north­ern Africa’s Atlas Moun­tains, the Brazil­ian Ama­zon, north­ern Laos, and the Canary Islands.

These are “places with steep ter­rain or dense forests,” writes Michelle Nijhuis at The New York­er, “where it might oth­er­wise be hard to com­mu­ni­cate at a dis­tance.” Such is the case in the vil­lage of Kuşköy, in “the remote moun­tains of north­ern Turkey,” notes Great Big Sto­ry:

“For three cen­turies” farm­ers there “have com­mu­ni­cat­ed great dis­tances by whistling. It’s a lan­guage called kuş dili that is still used to this day, though few­er peo­ple are learn­ing it in the age of the cell phone.” Also called “bird lan­guage” by locals, “for obvi­ous rea­sons,” this sys­tem of vocal tele­pho­ny, like all oth­er exam­ples, is based on actu­al speech. Nijhuis explains:

Kuşköy’s ver­sion [of whis­tled lan­guage] adapts stan­dard Turk­ish syl­la­bles into pierc­ing tones that can be heard from more than half a mile away. The phrase “Do you have fresh bread?,” which in Turk­ish is “Taze ekmek var mı?,” becomes, in bird lan­guage, six sep­a­rate whis­tles made with the tongue, teeth, and fin­gers.

The method may be avian, but the mes­sages are human, albeit in sim­pli­fied lan­guage for ease of trans­mis­sion. In the video above Muazzez Köçek, Kuşköy’s best whistler, shows how she trans­lates Turk­ish vocab­u­lary into melodies—turning words into music, an act of cod­ing with­out a com­put­er.

That this bio-tech­no­log­i­cal feat arose spon­ta­neous­ly to solve the same prob­lem the world over shows how us how humans col­lec­tive­ly prob­lem-solve. But of course, indi­vid­u­al­ism has its advan­tages. Despite the huge amount of data they gath­er on us, mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nolo­gies have met one par­tic­u­lar human need.

In Kuşköy, “bird lan­guage is rapid­ly dis­ap­pear­ing from dai­ly life,” writes Nijhuis. “In a small town filled with nosy neigh­bors, tex­ting affords a lev­el of pri­va­cy that whistling nev­er did.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Whis­tled Lan­guages of the Canary Islands, Turkey & Mex­i­co (and What They Say About the Human Brain)

Speak­ing in Whis­tles: The Whis­tled Lan­guage of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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What Shakespeare’s English Sounded Like, and How We Know It

in English Language, Language, Literature | January 17th, 2018

A com­mon joke has Amer­i­cans over­awed by peo­ple with British accents. It’s fun­ny because it’s part­ly true; Yanks can grant undue author­i­ty to peo­ple who sound like Sir David Atten­bor­ough or Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch. But in these cas­es, what we gener­i­cal­ly call a British accent should more accu­rate­ly be referred to as “Received Pro­nun­ci­a­tion” (or RP), the speech of BBC pre­sen­ters and edu­cat­ed Brits from cer­tain mid­dle- and upper-class areas in South­ern Eng­land. (If you like Received Pro­nun­ci­a­tion, you’re going to love “posh” Upper RP.) Received Pro­nun­ci­a­tion is only one of many British accents, as come­di­an Siob­han Thomp­son shows, most of which we’re unlike­ly to hear nar­rat­ing nature doc­u­men­taries.

RP is also some­times called “the Shake­speare accent,” for its asso­ci­a­tion with famous thes­pi­ans like John Giel­gud and Lau­rence Olivi­er, or Ian McK­ellen and Patrick Stew­art. But as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed in a post on the work of lin­guist David Crys­tal and his son, actor Ben Crys­tal, the Eng­lish of Shakespeare’s day sound­ed noth­ing like what we typ­i­cal­ly hear on stage and screen.

What lin­guists call “Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion” (OP), the actu­al Shake­speare accent, had a fla­vor all its own, like­ly com­bin­ing, to our mod­ern ears, “flecks of near­ly every region­al U.K. Eng­lish accent,” as Ben Crys­tal tells NPR, “and indeed Amer­i­can and in fact Aus­tralian, too.”

You can see the Crys­tals explain and demon­strate the accent in the video above, and make sense of many Shake­speare­an puns that only work in OP. And in the ani­mat­ed video at the top of the post, get a whirl­wind tour from Chaucer’s Mid­dle Eng­lish to Shakespeare’s Ear­ly Mod­ern vari­ety. Along the way, you’ll learn why the spelling of Eng­lish words—both Amer­i­can and British—is so con­fus­ing and irreg­u­lar. (“Knight,” for exam­ple, which makes no sense when pro­nounced as nite, was once pro­nounced much more pho­net­i­cal­ly.) The range of region­al accents pro­duced a bed­lam of vari­ant spellings, which took a few hun­dred years to stan­dard­ize dur­ing some intense spelling debates.

You’ll get an intro­duc­tion to the first Eng­lish print­er, William Cax­ton, and the “Great Vow­el Shift” which changed the language’s sound dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the course of a cou­ple hun­dred years. Once we get to Shake­speare and his “Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion,” we can see how rhymes that don’t scan for us sound­ed just right to Eliz­a­bethan ears. These lost rhymes pro­vide a sig­nif­i­cant clue for lin­guists who recon­struct OP, as does meter and the sur­vival of old­er pro­nun­ci­a­tions in cer­tain dialects.

When the Crys­tals brought their recon­struc­tion of Shakespeare’s Eng­lish to the stage in huge­ly pop­u­lar pro­duc­tions at the Globe The­atre, mem­bers of the audi­ence all heard some­thing slight­ly different—their many dif­fer­ent dialects reflect­ed back at them. Lis­ten for all the var­i­ous kinds of Eng­lish above in Ben Crys­tal’s recita­tion of Hamlet’s “to be, or not to be” speech in Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Per­formed by Great Actors: Giel­gud, McK­ellen & More

Hear What Ham­let, Richard III & King Lear Sound­ed Like in Shakespeare’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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