In the name of the law, stop the disrespect! The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis USA in May 2020 raised questions about the impartiality of police officers when dealing with the public and particularly those from black and ethnic minorities.  Six years earlier, in 2014, a team of researchers from Stanford University investigated exactly this issue by using footage from police body-worn cameras to analyse the language they used during routine traffic stops in the multiethnic city of Oakland in California.  The researchers transcribed footage from 981 traffic stops of both bla ..read more

The past year has affected all of us in one way or another but have you ever thought about what effect it may have had on our language?  Philipp Wicke and Mariana Bolognesi did just that in their study of thousands of tweets posted during March and April 2020. Due to social distancing measures, people were quick to use social media platforms like Twitter to connect with others and express their feelings, sending around 16,000 tweets an hour with hashtags like #coronavirus, #Covid-19 and #Covid. The researchers wanted to explore this online discourse and were particularly interested in how ..read more

To understand what a metaphor is, let’s start by considering a real world example. For tipping point, we might imagine an object that should be kept upright, such as a vase of flowers, at risk of falling when it loses its centre of gravity. As the tipping point is not the vase’s natural state, we assume something has caused the unbalance e.g. a curious cat, or an earthquake. We also realise that there will be consequences when this tipping point is reached, and we expect these will be negative. The glass is likely to smash, causing danger to bare feet, and destroying the vase. The contents wil ..read more

When we talk to each other, we don’t just rely on words. Emotion is embodied, and our expressions, our body language, our tone of voice are all used to convey our feelings and affect how our words are interpreted. But for online written communication, we can’t rely on these details. As discussed in the previous post, punctuation can be helpful to represent tone of voice, but often there is still something missing. In the fifth chapter of her pop linguistics book Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch explores how emoji became popular as a way of replicating gestures in online communication. Emo ..read more

As a result of technology, many of our casual, everyday conversations now take place online, in written form. This has in turn changed how we write informally, which is the topic of Gretchen McCulloch’s 2019 book Because Internet. This book focuses on how the internet is changing language and is written for a general audience. Chapter 4 discusses how we convey our emotions through written language, and the history of these conventions. Conversational writing has caused us to find innovative ways of replicating our speech in our writing, both our words, and our tone, which McCulloch calls typog ..read more

The 2013 trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin is well-known as the court case that sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the USA. 17-year-old Martin was shot dead by Zimmerman, who claimed he was acting in self-defence and was eventually acquitted of all charges. The outcome of the trial caused outrage among the Black community over racial profiling, police brutality and inequality in the criminal justice system, and prompted the founders of #BlackLivesMatter to use the hashtag for the very first time. It’s less well-known that the case also s ..read more

I once heard that how someone treats a waiter can say a lot about their character. What about the way a waiter responds? Researcher Larssyn Rüegg thinks that there may be differences in how waiters respond to their customers’ thanks, based on the kind of restaurant they are in. While previous research has looked into how various languages may differ in this pragmatic function of the thanks response, none so far has looked into how thanks response might vary within a single language. Rüegg's research is based in part on a previous work by Klaus Schneider who typified different forms of th ..read more

"Ma-ma, ba-ba, da-da" - you probably associate sounds such as these with babies, in particular the babbling that babies make when they're first acquiring language. But what do these sounds do? And why do babies babble? This is a question that some recent research has addressed. In their recent research report, Elminger, Schwade and Goldstein examined the function of babbling in infants’ language development.  They explored the idea that a caregiver’s response to their child’s vocalizations is key to the beginnings of communication and found that infants themselves may actually be in charge ..read more

Continuing our series of posts related to the 'Accent Bias in Britain' project, in this blog post we discuss some findings from our research which investigated current attitudes to accents in Britain. In our last blog post, we explored some of the findings of the second part of our study which investigated how the UK public evaluated 5 different accents in mock interviews. The third part of our study, detailed here, investigated whether people in positions of power such as recruiters would exhibit the same type of accent biases.  Our study focuses on a profession that has been previously d ..read more

Continuing our series of posts related to the 'Accent Bias in Britain' project, in this blog post we discuss some findings from our research which investigated current attitudes to accents in Britain. In the most recent blog post, we explored the findings of the first part of our study which investigated attitudes to accent labels. The second part of our study, detailed here, investigated how people responded to recordings of speakers with different accents to see if the same accent bias exists in speech.  To examine these questions, we recorded 10 speakers of 5 different accents (2 spea ..read more