Language fun

[liv]

Courtesy of 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.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Among the late teens/early twenties of my acquaintance, it tends to be said as 'goss' rather than gossip, so using the full word is like saying Ell Oh Ell, instead of just LOL.

[liv]

Aha! That would make a lot of sense of why my Sunday school kids were unimpressed with my word choice. Thank you :-)

[antisoppist]

I was going to suggest perhaps it was meant to be "goss" but I checked with the 17 year-old and 11 year-old and they both said no "goss" would be "even more cringey" than "gossip". But who knows, these things are specific to particular groups and change really fast.

[blue_mai]

This year I have noticed much more than before how a large proportion of my students don't know what I consider to be quite common vocabulary. I am also often asking them what the common slang terms they use mean. Eg. "Ugh. That's so long." "What does "long" mean?" "It's... y'know when something's like really *looong*. Like, long."
(So far I think it's something like tiresome/arduous.)
They find it quite amusing that I don't automatically understand those common words.

[ayebydan]

Gossip has gone out of fashion? I feel old.

I did that survey! It is a really fun and interesting one. Especially given you can say 'I've heard of that but noooo'.

I decided to bite back my irritation and just stamp myself as female in order to help the survey because far too often Scottish people don't get enough of a showing on such things. I am also apparently linguistically interesting as given where I live standard English has more of an influence than in other parts of the country but our version of Scots is a bit random too. (I think that basically means I talk a load of shite which....yeah.) I was sure I had shared this too but seemed I didn't. I will do so now.

[jack]

I still don't quite get what was up with "gossip". It feels like, there's maybe some new or shifted usage of the word they're familiar with, which doesn't make sense in the context you used it. But a bit of a google and urban dictionary didn't turn anything up.

I wonder if they have an idea who WOULD say gossip, or when? Like, is it just "an old-fashioned word we only hear in old books"? Or is it "slang that used to be current five years ago?" Or something else?

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

I can't see any response, let alone dots! Just 'thank you for contributing to our research'. And I got asked whether I say thin and fin the same (I hear them the same but produce them differently) but not whether something rhymes with ring or rink. I guess that's one where I'm destined to be uncounted.