Language fun
Mar. 31st, 2019 06:13 pmCourtesy of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cosmolinguist, another cool regional dialect quiz. This one is helping students practise linguistic research.
What's cool about it is that it shows each individual response as a dot on the map, instead of shading regions like the other one that was doing the rounds recently. And it separates out regional words for different things, accent and pronunciation variations, and variations in grammar. So even if you can't do the survey, they have some really fun results to explore. (There are tabbed menus that give you the actual data; the landing page confused me briefly because it's just an image of a map and not itself clickable.)
The reasons you might not be able to answer the survey are two-fold: one, it's only for people who spent most of their childhood in the UK. They're a bit short of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish responses compared to English, though, so readers from the nations are especially encouraged to play. And two, it's only for people who are willing to identify as either male or female (you can decline to give a gender at all, but you don't have any other options). So apologies to NBs and speakers of non-UK English.
Meanwhile, in a personal linguistic report from the youth: I said to my 10-year-olds the other week, "OK, that's enough gossip, time to concentrate on the lesson". And they laughed at me: "I can't believe you actually say gossip!" I asked what word they would use instead, and they only said that "It's like saying 'Ell Oh Ell' out loud". But I couldn't get an explanation of how the word 'gossip' is like pronouncing 'LOL', beyond that they're both uncool. Does anyone who has either academic or practical knowledge about how kids speak know what's wrong with the word gossip? In my head it's a normal word, it's not slang or something that marks a particular subculture.
cosmolinguist, another cool regional dialect quiz. This one is helping students practise linguistic research. What's cool about it is that it shows each individual response as a dot on the map, instead of shading regions like the other one that was doing the rounds recently. And it separates out regional words for different things, accent and pronunciation variations, and variations in grammar. So even if you can't do the survey, they have some really fun results to explore. (There are tabbed menus that give you the actual data; the landing page confused me briefly because it's just an image of a map and not itself clickable.)
The reasons you might not be able to answer the survey are two-fold: one, it's only for people who spent most of their childhood in the UK. They're a bit short of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish responses compared to English, though, so readers from the nations are especially encouraged to play. And two, it's only for people who are willing to identify as either male or female (you can decline to give a gender at all, but you don't have any other options). So apologies to NBs and speakers of non-UK English.
Meanwhile, in a personal linguistic report from the youth: I said to my 10-year-olds the other week, "OK, that's enough gossip, time to concentrate on the lesson". And they laughed at me: "I can't believe you actually say gossip!" I asked what word they would use instead, and they only said that "It's like saying 'Ell Oh Ell' out loud". But I couldn't get an explanation of how the word 'gossip' is like pronouncing 'LOL', beyond that they're both uncool. Does anyone who has either academic or practical knowledge about how kids speak know what's wrong with the word gossip? In my head it's a normal word, it's not slang or something that marks a particular subculture.
