How do we Know if an Apology is Sincere?

This week I’ve been thinking about apologies. It started when I looked at Facebook’s “Trending” list the other day, and saw Jonah Hill on The Tonight Show apologizing for using an offensive term when a member of the paparazzi angered him. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it below:

 

 

As I watched the clip, I started thinking about public apologies. My first reaction to the video was that this was something Mr. Hill thought was difficult, but necessary, and that his words, his tone, and his body language all made me feel he was being sincere. Many people who commented on the clip agreed, although there was the occasional dissenter (as there always is).

Being linguistically trained, I started to wonder why exactly I believed he was sincere. I thought of a few specific moments:

• At the beginning, Mr. Hill tells the story of the incident in a clear and succinct way, which implies that he’s thought about what he wants to say and has planned it. But at around the 1:00 mark, he pauses, says, “I think that,” stops talking briefly, says, “Sorry, I think that” and pauses again. He also pauses at several other points later in the clip. These pauses and repetitions are more conversational in tone, rather than part of a carefully planned speech, and imply “spontaneous and heartfelt” rather than “planned and calculated.”

• At 1:56, Mr. Hill lifts his eyes directly to the camera to address those watching the show on TV (or the computer). About 15 seconds later, he looks at the camera to say, “Use me as an example of what not to do.” For most of the clip he avoids looking up at the camera, and so this deliberate shift seems significant.

But these are just my quick thoughts, based on what I know about body language, repetition, and pauses in general. Wouldn’t it be great if a linguist looked at apologies in greater depth?

As if in answer to my thoughts, today I discovered that a linguist has in fact done this very thing! Edwin Battistella, a linguistics professor at Southern Oregon University, has written a book titled Sorry About That, which looks at the language of public apologies, based on many hours of reading transcripts (and other written documents) and watching YouTube videos very much like the one I talk about above.

I’m adding this book to my reading list, and will discuss it in a future blog post. And FYI: the article states that this book is “written in layman’s terms” because the author, “really like(s) the idea of professors writing for the general public, as well as for one another…” which is an idea I wholeheartedly agree with!

Young Women Are Changing What It Means To Be Called a “Slut”

Last Friday, the 23^rd, Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree near the University of California, Santa Barbara campus. As an explanation for what drove him to such violence, police turned to his YouTube channel and a written manifesto, which revealed a hatred for women who had rejected him (and by extension all women) and men who seemed more sexually successful. In the days that followed, a hashtag appeared on Twitter, #YesAllWomen, which was used to draw attention to the fact that many, MANY women have had to deal with men who felt that they were entitled to a woman’s attention and who react with anger when told no. From cat-calls, to policies regarding appropriate clothing that are biased against women, to rape, to honor killings by family members, many women know the feeling of being objectified.

Yes, sexual persecution of women by men exists, and hopefully #YesAllWomen will help start a dialog, and this horrible tragedy in California will be a catalyst for change. But what about persecution of women by other women? As the great Tina Fey says in Mean Girls:

“Ok, so we’re all here ’cause of this book, right? Well, I don’t know who wrote this book, but you all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores. Who here has ever been called a slut?”

Source: (IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377092/quotes)

 

I found a very interesting article about this very topic in Slate this week, titled, “Are You a Slut? That Depends. Are You Rich?” The study conducted by two sociologists interviewed women from one dorm at a Midwestern University over the course of their college careers. Part of the study examined how the term “slut” is utilized and interpreted (the term “slut narrative” is used), and they determined that it has more to do with social class and money than sexual activity. Calling other women a “slut” was “more about policing women’s looks, fashion, and conversational styles than criticizing the notches on their bedposts. And the vagueness and ubiquity of the term “slut” on campus allowed these women to effectively police each other without denying themselves actual sex.”

I’m always interested in how social systems affect the language (vocabulary and conversational style) of the members of that particular society. In this study, there are two groups separated by class, each with their own rules for behavior and language use relating to sexuality: calling someone a “slut” had more to do with the social status of a girl’s romantic partner, and less to do with the number of sexual partners.

I think Tina Fey was right. And I also think that some women have found a way to change the understanding of what terms like “slut” and “whore” mean when used by female peers, and to deprive them of their power when it comes to female sexual choices. But outside these gender specific groups, these negative connotations can come roaring back, and I wonder if anyone over the age of 13 still believes that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

#CancelColbert: Why Context is Important, and So Can You

Recently, there was quite the Twitter backlash to a tweet sent by @ColbertReport. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then read this, or just Google “#CancelColbert, because if this whole kerfuffle has taught us anything, it’s that context is important.

Sociolinguists know that context matters. It helps us make sense of what we hear. If someone uses a pronoun, but hasn’t made clear that the pronoun refers to a specific person at some recent point in the conversation, then you might have this kind of exchange:

“She told me that the skirt was too expensive”

“Who’s she?”

“Oh, Amy told me”

Not only is this an example of repair (where there’s a problem with understanding that needs to be addressed and fixed before the conversation can continue), it’s also an example of a mental mismatch between the people talking.

(((Side note: Isn’t it amazing (and awesome, in a lingustic-y, nerd-tastic way) how much there is to be studied in just three lines?)))

Back to context and #CancelColbert.

Without knowing that the @ColbertReport tweet was an intertextual reference to something that had happened earlier (intertextual in this sense means that interpreting what was said requires some prior knowledge that the speaker–or in this case writer—expected the reader to know), then it’s easy to see how the basic text, taken out of this context, could incite such backlash.

Of course, this all relates to the problem of sentiment analysis in online communication. It’s why we use emoticons, emojis, exclamation points vs. periods vs. no punctuation, “okay” vs “k”—we want to give “non-verbal” cues in our online communication, because while texting and tweeting may sound more conversational than traditional written text, it’s missing those vital clues to interpretation that we take for granted when we interact face-to-face.

Colbert may have apologized for the tweet, but I highly doubt it’s the last time that lack of context causes so many misunderstandings.

 

***If you read the title and description of intertextual references, and recognized that I was referencing Colbert’s book, then bask in your intertextual awareness!***

Power of the Language of Power (Part 1)

Two articles crossed my desk this week that I thought were worth writing about, and they both have the same idea at their heart: language and how it relates to power. The first, about the Ukraine, I’ll discuss today, and the second, about women directors specifically and gender in the arts more broadly, I’ll write about next week.

I’ve found a few articles about the uprisings/unrest in the Ukraine that mention the importance of the language and cultural differences between Western, European-leaning-and-Ukrainian-speaking Ukraine, and Eastern, Russian-leaning-and-speaking Ukraine. I’ve chosen to share this one from the International Business Times, primarily for the last few paragraphs. They explain that while the languages are “closely related Slavic tongues…they are also distinct languages with separate ethnic and national identities” and how the language you speak can determine whether you’re viewed as a second-class citizen.

Knowing the linguistic and cultural differences can help explain why certain Ukranian citizens prefer to think of themselves as more Russian than Ukrainian, particularly those in Sevastopol with its Russian Naval presence. And why they view intervention by Russian military forces as welcome, rather than as an invasion.

Linguistics and how it relates to the concept of national identity has been studied by several sociolinguists, including work focusing on the many countries formed after the fall of the Soviet Union. When politics or economics draw boundary lines, they don’t always take the more personally and socially relevant concepts like language and culture into consideration. And as we’re seeing in the Ukraine, the resulting clashes will be heard around the world.

“House of Cards” and the Art of Interviewing

I’ve started watching House of Cards on Netflix again, and several recent episodes have reminded me of some of the ways in which Journalists and Sociolinguists are a lot alike. Primarily it’s because both groups often use interviews to gain insight and information, but what really struck me is that usually the most interesting information isn’t always what they were searching for.

Sociolinguists (i.e. those who study language in the context of culture) often conduct interviews in the course of their research.

We can do ethnographic interviews, because if you want to know how language is used, you have to understand both the language AND what cultural information is relevant to fully appreciate and comprehend what’s being said.

We can also do sociolinguistic interviews, where we try to elicit various examples of a particular word or sound. These interviews can range from asking people to read pairs of words (think ‘cat’ and ‘bat’), to reading paragraphs, to recording a conversation between the interviewer and subject, or recording conversations between the subject and other people without the interviewer being present (making sure everyone knows they’re being recorded—ethics and personal rights are a big deal!).

If you’re not a journalist (like me), your understanding of journalistic interviews probably comes from being a media consumer. So I’m going to make some assumptions here, and say that journalists use interviews to explicitly ask a subject about something specific, and record their answers for later publication. Or sometimes interviews are used to gain a deeper understanding of a topic so that what is written or reported on is more comprehensive or correct.

Either way, Journalists and Sociolinguists seek out interview subjects, and approach them with a certain agenda, whether it’s questions they want to ask, or sounds/sound bites they want to hear.

But as I mentioned above, sometimes our subjects surprise us. Sometimes they don’t interpret the question the way we assumed they would. Sometimes they refuse to answer a question that we thought was innocuous. Sometimes, they tell stories or ask questions in return. Anytime this happens to me, what the subject says is always WAY more interesting than if they had just answered my prepared question. I saw this happen several times in the last few episodes of “House of Cards.” Yes, I know, it’s a scripted show and they’re doing it on purpose. But it’s based in reality, because if it’s happened to me, it must happen to lots of other people.

So what’s the lesson here?

If you do any kind of work where you interview people (as a journalist, a linguist, a market researcher, etc) and you come in with an agenda or list of questions, be wise enough to realize that going “off-topic” isn’t always a bad thing. That maybe “off-topic” is exactly where you want to be.

The Duality of #SpeakAmerican

If you didn’t watch the Super Bowl, there’s still a good chance that you heard about the controversy surrounding Coca-Cola’s commercial where “America the Beautiful” was performed by various singers, with different lines sung in different languages. If you missed it, you can watch it below.

The controversy I’m talking about was the backlash centered on the trending hashtag #SpeakAmerican. It was used by two groups: those who felt offended by the multilingual ad, and those responding to these complaints as a means to show solidarity and support the diversity celebrated by the ad. While I believe that everyone has a right to express their opinions, it definitely saddened me to see such negativity directed towards every language other than English.

In grad school, one of my first projects was to research and debate the Pro “English Only” movement in the U.S. I chose to debate the “pro” side primarily because I felt I would learn more by researching an opinion that was different from my own. In case you aren’t aware, one of the goals of the “English Only” movement, and other movements like it, is to make English the official language of the U.S. because currently, there IS no official language. Not surprisingly, many of the negative #SpeakAmerican tweets I saw brought up the idea of English, or American English, as being official. Sorry to burst your bubbles, guys.

Indeed, using #SpeakAmerican, rather than #SpeakEnglish, is telling. English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, and it’s probable that many of the singers in the ad were fluent in more than one language. In fact, being multilingual is the norm for much of the rest of the world—this week alone I’ve watched several Olympic interviews with athletes from various countries that were conducted in English. So why is multilingualism seen by some people as such a negative?

My thought is that maybe the fact that the United States is made up of such a wonderful mix of people, with such a variety of languages and cultures, maybe this variety is interpreted as threatening. That those who do not (outwardly at least) seem to adopt or adapt to a homogeneous language and culture are thought to be the enemy, because they are holding onto traditions that tie them to another place.

But as many of the supporters of the commercial pointed out, to #SpeakAmerican IS to speak multiple languages. That the fact that there is no official language means that all languages should be considered equal, and therefore all speakers are considered equal. In fact, the song chosen, “America the Beautiful,” was extremely appropriate: its first verse is about the wide expanse of the land itself, the second about the first immigrants—the pilgrims, and the third about those who died to create a free nation. With all these verses celebrating various forms of freedom, adding a nod to the freedom to speak all languages is a perfect cherry on top.

Dialects in “The Help” or Why Viola Davis’ Voice is Worth a Thousand Words

I recently (finally) read Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. I’ve seen the movie several times, but everyone knows the book is always better than the movie version, so here we are.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that there is a difference in the voice given to Aibileen and Minny, versus Skeeter, Hilly, Elizabeth and Ceclia.

If you haven’t read the book, what I’m describing is a use of a non-standard English dialect for the chapters written from the African-American maids’ point of views.

Although I’m not able to give a thorough description of AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), the phonological and syntactic structures of the Aibileen and Minny chapters appear to contain some aspects of AAVE. I found a few blog posts discussing this dialectal choice, and I encourage you to check them out here, for more detail:

dialectblog’s “You is Smart:” Dialect Gripes About “The Help”

pagelady’s Analyzing “The Help” Dialogue

My post today isn’t going to go into the more specific linguistic details. Instead I want to ask a question and raise a few ideas to debate.

When my mom read the book, she mentioned that she occasionally had a hard time understanding the Aibileen and Minny chapters, because they were written in a non-standard dialect. When I read it, I didn’t experience the same problem, and I have two possible reasons why:

a. Since I saw the movie first, when I read these chapters, in my head I hear the voices of the actors who portrayed them onscreen, particularly Viola Davis who played Aibileen. Since I have a definitive voice other than my own reading the lines, with a reference to how they would sound when spoken aloud, it was easier for me to look beyond the non-standard structure.

b. Having learned about how non-standard dialects can affect the perception of the speaker (meaning non-standard dialects, when written, can make the speaker appear unintelligent or uneducated), I am more conscious of this effect and less prone to this assumption.

Frankly, I’m inclined towards the first one, only because when I read the book, not only did I hear the actors’ voices, I also couldn’t picture the characters any other way, despite the book’s description of Skeeter being blonde and Emma Stone being a redhead. The movie version had a huge influence on how I viewed the characters, because it was my first introduction to the story.

But here’s my other thought: With a book, an author has only words to develop a cohesive narrative with complex, realistic characters that we care about. Rather than falling into the Lil’ Abner trap* where non-standard representations are meant to make someone appear less intelligent or educated, I would argue that Ms. Stockett is using one more tool to show how different the lives of these women are, while also showing how they are completely intertwined, often co-dependent, and similar in so many ways.

When reading, I never got the sense that Aibileen and Minny were less intelligent than college-educated Skeeter. On the contrary, in many ways it was Aibileen and Minny who had to educate Skeeter on the way her world actually functioned. But because in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s, the African-American race and culture was under such pressure, and holding onto their history and their way of speaking was a way to take control, a way to show that they were individuals with rich lives, worthy of respect and consideration.

 

*This is a reference to a work I was first introduced to in my Discourse Analysis: Conversation course. Here’s the full citation:

Preston, Dennis R. “The Li’l Abner syndrome: Written representations of speech.” American Speech 60, no. 4 (1985): 328-336.

Accents (Take Two)!

This past week, it seemed like accents were following me everywhere. While visiting family in Pittsburg this weekend, we got into a discussion about Pittsburghese, which lead to someone finding this talk by Barbara Johnstone at Carnegie Mellon University. We also joked about the part in Waiting for Guffman when the main character, Corky St. Clair, talks about how he is practicing for an upcoming audition for My Fair Lady by dropping his H’s (‘ello. ‘ow are ‘ou). Even a rerun of The Big Bang Theory got into the act, with Raj practicing his “American” accent.

Having had to perform several accents during my career onstage, I’m familiar with how and why accents are often used in movies, TV, and theater: accents are a shortcut—a way for people to make assumptions about a character, or to make a character sound more “believable.” So, if someone “sounds British” to an American audience, we make certain assumptions about where that character is from. Later, if we find out the character is from Miami, we start trying to figure out why he sounds that way. Suddenly that bit of information becomes an even more important piece of the puzzle, because why would the director want him to sound that way if it wasn’t important to our understanding of the story?

And what if the accent just doesn’t sound right somehow? My dad was watching a commercial about New York City’s Superstorm Sandy recovery efforts. He turned to me and said, “That guy doesn’t sound like he’s from Brooklyn. Doesn’t he sound more like he’s from Boston?” I told him I’d have to listen more closely next time, but it got me thinking about how accents also help us to decide if someone is who they claim to be.

A few weeks ago, on Halloween, I wrote about dialects, and how people use them to make assumptions about people. Today, I want to elaborate a bit about what kind of assumptions can be made (in addition to the one above, about whether or not people really are who they claim to be, or grew up where they said they did).

When we say someone has an accent, what we mean is that they pronounce certain words differently than we do. Sometimes the accent sounds very pronounced and distinct, sometimes they are far more subtle. Either way, here is a bit of truth for you:

Everyone speaks with an accent. There is no linguistically “correct” way of speaking any given language, against which all other accents are compared. 

Accents are another way of categorizing people—of putting people in the “us” box or the “them” box. If people sound like us, then the likelihood that we share other things increases. Things like similar cultural backgrounds or traditions, histories, geographical understandings, morals and ethics, even certain vocabulary words (pop vs. soda, anyone?). If people sound heavily accented to us, then it is more likely that they are different from us in all the ways listed above. And that’s where assumptions and stereotypes come in.

If we assume new people are like us based on how they talk, then it seems like we give them the benefit of the doubt. Because we know people like them already—we know we have some similarities, and so we think the differences are relatively minor in comparison.

On the other hand, if people sound differently, and therefore we assume they come from a different cultural background, then what knowledge do we rely on to understand where they’re coming from? We draw on previous interactions with someone we decide was like them or stereotypes that we’ve heard. For example, “if so-and-so was a jerk, and they sounded like this new person, then this new person is also a jerk, because it must be cultural” (doesn’t that sound awful?).

Ultimately, the more diversity we can cultivate in our interactions, the less likely we are to resort to assumptions.

Bringing it Back: The Revival of a Lost Language (Thursday Thoughts, March 22nd 2012)

Just a warning: this may be one of my nerdier posts.

Having decided to give up cable when I moved to Virginia, to compensate I now watch a lot of PBS. Living in the DC area gives me about 5 different public broadcast stations from which to choose, and I also have an app on my iPhone that lists the daily schedule, plus previews of the major programs (like Downton Abbey)!

I am a nerd, and I am okay with this.

This past Sunday, I happened to catch a program called Independent Lens. This isn’t one of the shows I normally follow, but in this case the program was, you guessed it, linguistics themed.

Here’s a preview:

We Still Live Here-Preview

It was called We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân, and it was about the revival of the language of the Wampanoag. The Wampanoag were the native people indigenous to the southeastern part of Massachusetts and they were the ones who were instrumental in the survival of the Pilgrims. Their spoken language disappeared due to colonization and disease, but a written record survived (the irony? the written record was made up of two parts: one was the Bible translation used by missionaries to convert the Wampanoag to Christianity, and the other consisted of legal documents which were part of the court system established by the colonizing Europeans whose main goal was to put a sheen of legality over their “purchase” of the Wampanoag’s native lands).

Now, here’s what I thought was cool, and I’m hoping the non-linguists out there will follow me on this. The spoken language has been revived! A Wampanoag woman named Jessie Little Doe went to MIT and worked with the linguists there to use those written documents to recreate the spoken language! Not only did she earn her linguistics degree in the process, but she is teaching her daughter to be the first native speaker in 7 generations.

And it gets cooler!

One of my favorite parts of this movie, made by Anne Makepeace (and containing some really cool animation), was when they talked about how to find the words and pronunciations for terms not found in the written record. Jessie Little Doe used the fact that Wampanoag is part of the Algonquin family of languages, several of which are still spoken today. She would find a known word in another language of this family, and converted the sounds to corresponding ones used in Wampanoag, to recreate the word.

One of the things we learn about as we study sociolinguistics is language death. There are thousands of languages that are currently considered to be “endangered” and many many more that will never be spoken again. How brilliant is it to know that a language, once considered lost, has been brought back to life?

In the interviews, several of the people making the effort to learn Wampanoag as a second language mentioned the connection they felt to their history and their culture. So not only is a language being revived, but also a cultural tradition, full of myths and knowledge spanning thousands of years that would have been gone forever.

Jessie Little Doe: you are a linguistic hero.

Like, you know, whatever! (Thursday Thoughts, March 1st, 2012)

A New York Times article this week discussed how young women are linguistic trendsetters. In the article, several linguists comment on language trends, from “like” used as a discourse marker (similar to using a phrase such as “you know”) to “vocal fry,” and how young women (the 18-25 bracket) seem to be leading the charge when it comes to widespread usage.

The linguists mentioned  offer several theories as to what the young female speakers are attempting to do with “vocal fry,” but what I want to mention/reinforce here is the following:

1. These trends reinforce the idea that language is always changing.
2. There are often negative connotations associated with a few of these trends (such as “uptalk,” where every sentence ends with rising intonation. So, every sentence sounds like a question? Instead of a declarative statement? You get the idea). However, automatically assigning a negative attribute is to not take into account what the speakers are really attempting to do, which is build rapport.

Repetition in conversation can do a lot of work, including showing someone that you’re involved in what they’re saying. And repeating the prosody (aka, the tones of the words and phrases) can reinforce this.

In the world of young women, where friendships are a vital part of daily life, the idea that someone somewhere made a prosodic choice (like “vocal fry”) that was noticed and repeated by her peers on several occasions seems pretty plausible, and a trend was born.

And bonus points to anyone who recognized the title of today’s post as a line spoken by Lisa Simpson in the episode “Summer of 4 ft. 2” where Lisa practices that phrase in order to fit in with a new group of friends!