Tag Archives: language

American language about government policy and economic life shifts from community to individualism

Posted on by

Here is an interesting argument about how common American discourse about public policy and economic life has shifted since the 1930s:

In 1934, the focus was on people, family security and the risks to family economic well-being that we all share. Today, the people have disappeared. The conversation is now about the federal budget, not about the real economy in which real people live. If a moral concept plays a role in today’s debates, it is only the stern proselytizing of forcing the government to live within its means. If the effect of government policy on average people is discussed, it is only as providing incentives for the sick to economize on medical costs and for the already strapped worker to save for retirement.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, as the Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers demonstrates in his recent book, “The Age of Fracture,” American public discourse was filled with references to the social circumstances of average citizens, our common institutions and our common history. Over the last five decades, that discourse has changed in ways that emphasize individual choice, agency and preferences. The language of sociology and common culture has been replaced by the language of economics and individualism.

In 1934, the government was us. We had shared circumstances, shared risks and shared obligations. Today the government is the other — not an institution for the achievement of our common goals, but an alien presence that stands between us and the realization of individual ambitions. Programs of social insurance have become “entitlements,” a word apparently meant to signify not a collectively provided and cherished basis for family-income security, but a sinister threat to our national well-being.

Over the last 50 years we seem to have lost the words — and with them the ideas — to frame our situation appropriately.

This is a fascinating line: “The language of sociology and common culture has been replaced by the language of economics and individualism.” This reminds me of the findings about how public opinion changes when asked about “welfare” versus “assistance for the poor.” The concepts are similar but the connotations of the specific terms matter.

Is the end argument here that changing the language will lead to more communal understandings or does reversing the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon have to come first? It would be helpful to know what exactly these commentators think happened in this period beyond simply the change in language. Could we argue that the success of the community-oriented policies of the mid 1900s that led to a booming economy, rising incomes, suburbanization, and homeownership was “too successful” in that it led to these shifts in language and focus?

Majority of young adults “see online slurs as just joking”

Posted on by

A recent survey of teenagers and young adults suggests that they are more tolerant of offensive or pejorative terms in the online realm:

Jaded by the Internet free-for-all, teens and 20-somethings shrug off offensive words and name-calling that would probably appall their parents, teachers or bosses. And an Associated Press-MTV poll shows they don’t worry much about whether the things they tap into their cellphones and laptops could reach a wider audience and get them into trouble.

Seventy-one percent say people are more likely to use slurs online or in text messages than in person, and only about half say they are likely to ask someone using such language online to stop…

But young people who use racist or sexist language are probably offending more people than they realize, even in their own age range. The poll of 14- to 24-year-olds shows a significant minority are upset by some pejoratives, especially when they identify with the group being targeted…

But they mostly write off the slurs as jokes or attempts to act cool. Fifty-seven percent say “trying to be funny” is a big reason people use discriminatory language online. About half that many say a big reason is that people “really hold hateful feelings about the group.”…

It’s OK to use discriminatory language within their own circle of friends, 54 percent of young people say, because “I know we don’t mean it.” But if the question is put in a wider context, they lean the other way, saying 51-46 that such language is always wrong.

This would seem to corroborate ideas that anonymity online or comments sections free people up to say things that they wouldn’t say in real life. Perhaps this happens because there is no face-to-face interaction or it is harder to identify people or there are few repercussions. In the end, the sort of signs, verbal or non-verbal cues, that might stop people from saying these things near other people simply don’t exist online.

I would be interested to see more research about this “joking” and how young adults understand it. Humor can be one of the few areas in life where people can address controversial topics with lesser consequences. Of course, there are limits on what is acceptable but this can often vary by context, particularly in peer-driven settings like high school or college where being “cool” means everything. These young adults likely know this intuitively as they wouldn’t use the same terms around parents or adults. Are these young adults then more polite around authority figures and save it all up for online or are they more uncivil in general as some would argue?

For an important issue like racism, does this mean that many in the next generation think being or acting racist is okay as long as they are among friends but is not okay to exhibit in public settings? Is it okay to be racist as long as it is accompanied by a happy emoticon or a j/k?

Knowing that this is a common issue, what is the next step in cutting down on this offensive humor, like we are already seeing in many media sites’ comments sections? And who gets to do the policing – parents, schools, websites?

French language losing influence, speakers

Posted on by

In the global realm of languages, French has been losing ground:

Across Europe, French has gradually declined from being the lingua franca to falling behind German and English. English is spoken by 41% of Europeans, while only 19% speak French. English is now the language of business in Europe, a fact which even French ambassador for international investment Clara Gaymard was forced to admit. And French has fallen so far behind in Eastern Europe, in particular, that it is the third-most studied language, behind English and Spanish.

While once the language of culture, French has been pushed off the global stage. Perhaps the most symbolic example of this was in 2008 when Sebastian Tiller, the French representative at the Eurovision contest, planned to sing ‘Divine’ almost exclusively in English. That the French singer did not choose to represent the jealously guarded language of his country internationally came as a shock to many. This cultural decline was mirrored when New York’s Metropolitan Opera decided to reject the libretto of the musical star Rufus Wainwright (who was raised in Canada), because he chose not to translate his opera into English.

The calamitous decline in French seems irreversible, even to the French. In 2008, the budget of La Francophonie, the governing body of the French language, was six million euros; in contrast, the British Council announced it would spend 150 million euros in efforts to advance English.

Who knew that there organizations that spent millions of dollars a year to advance particular languages?

I would guess that this is tied to France’s standing in the world today. No longer a colonial nation and no longer the world’s leading culture (as it was considered to be in the late 1700s/early 1800s), the language then becomes less attractive. But this story also sounds like it is about the rise of English. If people can around the world can only pursue a certain number of languages in their lifetime, it sounds like French is simply being crowded out.

h/t Instapundit

Basic sociological question: “what does civilization as we know it rely on?”

Posted on by

Big questions about society can be great for Introduction to Sociology courses. Here is are the sorts of questions that I think could work quite well:

So, what sort of machines do you need to create an industrial civilization—kind of like the ones we have now, but more sensibly sourced. I remember taking a sociology course years ago where we started out with a similar question, although we conceived the question more broadly—what does civilization as we know it rely on? The answer then (decades ago, before the impact of The Whole Earth Catalog had been felt) was something along the lines of “technology.” But this is a much better question.

If we stuck with the second question here, “what does civilization as we know it rely on?”, I could imagine a class could generate a lot of answers:

1. The Internet. In the vast scope of human history, this may seem silly. But for people raised in the Internet era, it would be pretty hard to imagine life without it.

2. Electricity. This makes all sorts of things possible.

3. The steam engine. This helped give rise to the Industrial Revolution.

And so on. But these are all technological changes that could go back to the plow and the wheel and illustrate the human capacity to create and utilize tools. We just happen to live in an era where such technological change is rapid and our daily lives are full of machines. But what about more cultural or sociological phenomena?

1. Language. The ability to communicate in formalized ways gave rise to oral traditions, writing, etc.

2. Government. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean the big bureaucracies of today that impressed Max Weber. But just a form of ruling or authority that helped bring about communities.

3. Sustained agriculture. This has been the traditional answer to how humans were able to create more complex societies in the Fertile Crescent. This is now being challenged by a new argument based on evidence of early religion in Turkey.

I’ll have to think about using these questions in class. They seem particularly good for helping students consider the basic building blocks of human social life before diving into specific sociological phenomena.

Talking about Twitter language and what it reveals about the world

Posted on by

It may seem like common sense that people’s regional dialects show up in their online communication. According to a new study that examined “380,000 messages from Twitter during one week in March 2010,” people in California say “coo” for “cool,” southerners still say “y’all,” and New Yorkers are more apt to say “suttin” instead of “something.”

But I think the study does just go beyond common sense in some of its other conclusions:

Eisenstein said some of the online “accents” mirror those in the spoken language, but not all. For example, many people in the Great Lakes region tend to have similar accents when speaking, but that wasn’t necessarily found to be true in the study, he said.

“One thing I think that it shows is that people really have a need to communicate their identity — their cultural identity and their geographic identity in social media,” he said.

This is interesting: how exactly do people portray their identity through their online language? On mediums like Twitter, people make very conscious choices about how to speak. People of different regions and dialects can choose to use their typical speech patterns or not. And why do they make these choices?

A broader question to ask is how much do posts on Twitter represent reality? What sort of picture of the world does Twitter deliver? This study can help us understand what Twitter behavior is like but can it tell us much about the broader world?

Google offers tool to analyze texts going back to the 1500s

Posted on by

Among other projects Google has been working on, they recently opened a new online tool that allows users to search for certain words in texts going back to the 1500s:

With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.

The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen. It consists of the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian…

“The goal is to give an 8-year-old the ability to browse cultural trends throughout history, as recorded in books,” said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard…

“We wanted to show what becomes possible when you apply very high-turbo data analysis to questions in the humanities,” said Mr. Lieberman Aiden, whose expertise is in applied mathematics and genomics. He called the method “culturomics.”

The article mentions some projects that use this database and sound interesting. And it sounds the dataset can be downloaded and analyzed by users on their own computers.

But thinking about the methodology of this all, I would have some questions.

1. Do we know how well these digitized texts represent the full population of texts? This is a sampling issue – could there be some sort of bias in what kind of texts ended up in this database?

2. Studying word frequency by itself is tricky. Simply counting words and when they appear is one measurement while trying to assess the importance placed in each word is another task. Do the three little “culturnomics” graphs on the left side of the online story really tell us much?

3. It sounds like this would be best for looking at how language (grammar, word choices, structure, etc.) has changed over time.

Language style matching in relationships

Posted on by

New research suggests that people, particularly those who are happy in relationships, tend to match their language to those of those around them or to authors they have just read. Here are some of the findings:

Pennebaker and his colleagues tracked language use by 2,000 college students responding to class assignments written in different language styles. The results confirmed that language style matching extends to the written word. When an essay question was written in a dry, confusing tone, students responded with dry, confusing answers. If the question took a flighty, casual tone, students responded with “Valley girl”-like answers peppered with “like” and “sorta.”

Next, the researchers used historical figures to find out if language style matching could reveal schisms or closeness in a relationship.

They began with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, psychologists who corresponded almost weekly for seven years. Using style-matching statistics, the researchers were able to chart the two men’s tempestuous relationship from their early days of joint admiration to their final days of mutual contempt by counting the ways they used pronouns, prepositions and other words, such as “the,” “you,” “a” and “as,” that have little meaning outside the context of the sentence. Such words can be indicators of a person’s style of writing (and speaking)…

Married Victorian Poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, along with 20th century poet couple Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, also revealed more in their poetry than they perhaps realized.

I’ll have to watch for this. How much do others typically pick up on this when being around people who are matching each other’s language? Is this how we know people “are good together”?

How language affects our perceptions of the world

Posted on by

The New York Times considers new research regarding Benjamin Whorf’s 1940 idea that language affects how we see reality. Whorf suggested language limited the abstract thinking abilities of its speakers. More recent research suggests this is not the case but language still is a powerful shaper of our perceptions. The conclusion:

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives… The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

Language is part of a package of culture that we all learn, particularly as young children. This framework affects our responses to reality, particularly our responses to human actions.

So much technology, so little writing

Posted on by

Some students in China and Japan are finding that they are losing the ability to write. It sounds like they can see the words and know how to spell but they are losing the ability to remember the characters:

Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as “embarrassed” have slipped from her mind.

“I can remember the shape, but I can?t remember the strokes that you need to write it,” she says. “It’s a bit of a problem.”

// http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?correlator=1282875022791&output=json_html&callback=GA_googleSetAdContentsBySlotForSync&impl=s&a2ids=nNig%2C%2C&cids=Ma7suA%2C%2C&client=ca-pub-9229289037503472&slotname=news_story_instory&page_slots=news_leaderboard%2Cnews_ticker2_article%2Cnews_story_left_sidebar%2Cnews_story_instory&cookie=ID%3Df01e45cf8978caf8%3AT%3D1276826076%3AS%3DALNI_MaGB4mghL9RjxYkg9f8sVJAgmWfgw&ga_vid=781243341.1276826110&ga_sid=1282875023&ga_hid=1520999684&ga_fc=true&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Farticle.php%3Fid%3DCNG.74f06613ea91a1f1041b96c96477427f.561%26show_article%3D1&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fdrudgereport.com%2F&lmt=1282875020&dt=1282875024371&cc=100&biw=1008&bih=581&ifi=4&adk=4071414684&u_tz=-300&u_his=2&u_java=true&u_h=768&u_w=1024&u_ah=738&u_aw=1024&u_cd=16&u_nplug=16&u_nmime=105&flash=10.1.53

Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed “character amnesia”, is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system.

Young Japanese people also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems.

I don’t know how much of a problem this might be. If one is engaged in one media realm (texting, the Internet, etc.), it makes some sense that writing skills would decline and perhaps disappear. While I still remember how to write letters, I have found my writing endurance has declined. Particularly for people younger than me, I imagine writing might seem pretty archaic compared to the quickness of digital technology.

There is a suggestion later in the article that this might affect reading skills. There are also suggestions that the Chinese language is changing with the advent with new technology. Ultimately, languages and communication options do change over time. This is a great example of how changing technology can affect and alter language.