̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - David Willis

Welsh Twitter: capturing language change in real time

lw355 — Wed, 29 May 2013 07:50:07 +0000

Twitter keeps millions of people in touch, whether it’s sharing their politics with followers or updating their mates with the trivia of everyday life. These tweets are in Welsh: ‘loaaaads o gwaith i neud a di’r laptop ’cau gwithio!’, ‘dio cau dod on!! Mar bwtwm di tori.’ Roughly translated, they read: ‘loads of work to do and the laptop won’t work’ and ‘it won’t come on!! ̽��ֱ��button’s broke.’

How do you capture changes as they take place in the language we use in everyday life – from buzz words such as ‘sweet’ to tags such as ‘innit’? One answer is to look at tweets. Because they don’t follow the conventions of written language, tweets provide an authentic snapshot of the spoken language. By analysing the content of the 140-character messages, linguists can get to grips with the dynamics of the language played out in real time.

Welsh is spoken by 562,000 people in Wales; 8% of the country’s children learn it at home as their first language and 22% are educated in Welsh.

Like all living languages, Welsh is constantly changing and new varieties are emerging. When Dr David Willis from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics set out to research the shifts taking place in Welsh, he used a database of Welsh tweets as a means of identifying aspects of the language that were changing, and then used that information to devise the questionnaires used for oral interviews.

He explained: “When your intention is to capture everyday usage, one of the greatest challenges is to develop questions that don’t lead the respondent towards a particular answer but give you answers that provide the material you need.”

“If I want to find out whether a particular construction is emerging, and where the people who use it come from, I would normally have to conduct a time-consuming pilot study, but with Twitter I can get a rough and ready answer in 30 minutes as people tweet much as they speak,” he said. “My focus is on the syntax of language – the structure or grammar of sentences – and my long-term aim is to produce a syntactic atlas of Welsh dialects that will add to our understanding of current usage of the language and the multi-stranded influences on it. To do this relies on gathering spoken material from different sectors of the Welsh-speaking population to make comparisons across time and space.”

In the late 17th century, the antiquarian Edward Lhuyd conducted an investigation into the dialects of Wales. By the 19th century, Welsh was attracting the attention of European historical linguists such as Johann Kaspar Zeuss. Later, scholars all over Europe, realising that local dialects were receding in the face of industrialisation, sought to record variations in language. Large dialect atlases were undertaken in Germany and France, and speech archives were begun, such as the one that laid the foundations for the National History Museum at St Fagan’s near Cardiff.

In the 1960s the attention moved away from rural areas to the cities where most people by then lived – and researchers started to look at sentence structure, an area of language that presents particular challenges for investigators. Willis’s interest in syntax stemmed from his study of a wide range of minority languages, including Breton, which is, like Welsh, a Celtic language. To create the biggest possible picture of syntactic changes in Welsh as it’s spoken today, he decided to take an inclusive approach and set out to investigate day-to-day speech patterns of a broad range of speakers, aged 18–80.

British Academy funding for a year-long study has enabled Willis and assistant researchers to interview around 160 people across Wales, beginning his analysis with North Wales where the language is thriving and a significant number of children use Welsh as their home language. ̽��ֱ��study included both those who had acquired Welsh at home and at school.

̽��ֱ��spoken questionnaire asked interviewees to repeat in their own words sentences that were presented to them in deliberately ‘odd’ Welsh that mixed different dialects, inviting the interviewee to rephrase the awkwardly phrased sentence to sound more ‘natural’. An example in English might be ‘we’ve not to be there yet, don’t we?’ which a British speaker might be expected to rephrase as ‘we haven’t got to be there yet, have we?’

̽��ֱ��data from these interviews are a treasure trove of information in terms of the light their content can shine on how and why the structure of language shifts over time – and give the researcher a valuable database not just for the present study but also for future research.

Changes identified so far include use of pronouns and multiple negatives. An analysis of usage of the Welsh words for ‘anyone’, ‘someone’ and ‘no-one’ reveals that there are differences between those who learnt Welsh in the home (who are more likely to say the equivalent of ‘did someone come to the meeting?’ and ‘I didn’t see no-one’) and those who learnt it at school (who are more likely to say ‘did anyone come to the meeting?’ and ‘I didn’t see anyone’).

One example of multiple negatives reveals a shift in meaning of the Welsh word for refuse, ‘cau’. “We knew that people in the north used the word ‘cau’ to mean ‘won’t’, saying the equivalent of ‘the door refuses to open’ for ‘the door won’t open’. Negative concord – such as saying ‘I haven’t not seen no-one’ for ‘I haven’t seen anyone’ – is a strong feature of Welsh. We’ve now identified two groups in the north: one that still says ‘the door refuses to open’ and the other that have begun to say ‘the door doesn’t refuse to open’. ̽��ֱ��next step is to work out when and how this change occurred.”

In tracking shifts in the language, GIS mapping is used to plot where interviewees were brought up and enables researchers to look at the geographical spread of particular aspects of syntax, making comparisons between age groups, gender and mode of acquisition.

̽��ֱ��research has revealed that, while Welsh does not vary much by social class, there are interesting differences between the variety of Welsh spoken by those who learn it as their first language in the home and that spoken by those who are first exposed to it in nursery or primary school.

“Those who acquire Welsh once they reach school are more likely to use English sentence constructions, which are perfectly good Welsh but differ significantly from the constructions used by those who acquired Welsh at home. For example, they tend to prefer standard focus particles – words that correspond to a strong stress in English sentences like ‘I know YOU’ll be on time’ – over the ones from their local dialect,” said Willis.

With around 22% of the Welsh population educated in Welsh at school, and all children learning it as a second language, data on this aspect of language acquisition may prove valuable in developing Welsh teaching policy – for example, in determining which forms to teach second-language learners or in promoting both dialect and standard written Welsh in schools.

Inset image credit: Howard Beaumont

A database of Welsh tweets is being used to identify the characteristics of an evolving language.

If I want to find out whether a particular construction is emerging, I would normally have to conduct a time-consuming pilot study, but with Twitter I can get a rough and ready answer in 30 minutes

David Willis

̽��ֱ��District

Welsh Twitter

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

It's 'not' history

lw355 — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:00:01 +0000

What would we do without the word ‘not’? Language depends on negation: ‘the defendant is not guilty’, ‘it’s not fair’, ‘it’s not you, it’s me’. Not can impart a subtlety of meaning to speech, as in the chastising ‘are you not home yet?’ compared with the query ‘are you home yet?’ But little do many of us realise that the word has a fascinating linguistic history, involving a pattern of change that has been echoed again and again in languages across the globe.

Now, research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has traced how and why the words used to express negation have changed in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean over the past millennium. Led by Dr David Willis at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, the study is the first comprehensive attempt to look for patterns across such a breadth of languages and over such a timescale. It has also involved the first systematic analysis of the history of negation in languages such as Arabic, Berber, Breton and Welsh.

Not only does the new research on the history of 'not' provide a better insight into how languages evolve, and indeed provides a marker of the stage at which a language has reached in the evolution of negation, but it also sheds light on how emphatic words such as 'literally' creep into common parlance.

Jespersen’s cycle

It was at the turn of the 20th century that a linguist named Otto Jespersen discovered a cyclical pattern in how languages express negation. Put simply, the cycle moves from a single word meaning not, placed before the verb (stage I), through a stage in which two words are used either side of the verb (stage II) and then back to a single word after the verb (stage III).

Jespersen’s idea was that at some stage the original negative word is found to be insufficient to express negation and becomes strengthened by a second, emphatic word. In due course, the emphatic word is used so frequently that it becomes the only word needed to express the negative view and the first word drops away.

Many different languages have independently gone through this cyclical evolution, and have done so at vastly different times in history. Take French, for example. To say 'I don’t know' in Old French, ne was used before the verb (as in 'Je ne sais') until about 800 years ago, when it became strengthened to the ne…pas version ('Je ne sais pas') that we recognise today. And this is largely how it has remained: “Standard French is effectively at stage II of the cycle,” explained Willis. “In everyday spoken French, people are losing the ne, but children are taught to use the full two-word form of the negator. With this conservative influence, it will be interesting to see whether the language will complete the cycle or stay indefinitely at stage II.”

English, on the other hand, had finished its cycle by the mid-14th century, moving from the Old English ne before the verb, to the strengthened ne…nawit (nothing) in Middle English, to the simplified, post-verbial not of Early Modern English. And some languages completed the cycle even earlier, such as Scandinavian, which had completed the cycle before written records began, as shown through the reconstructed history of the language. Other languages such as Spanish or Russian have yet to begin the cycle.

“Cycles of usage such as that seen in negation appear to be a normal part of language development,” continued Willis who carried out the research with Dr Anne Breitbarth and Dr Chris Lucas. “We are interested in what these cyclical developments are and what they tell us about why languages change. ̽��ֱ��results have helped us draw out a new understanding of how language contact, language acquisition, and psychological and social factors might influence the evolution of language in the past and in the future.”

Patterns and pathways

To complete the study, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is resulting in a series of publications including a two-volume book in 2012, vast amounts of written texts were analysed for examples of stage I, II or III expressions. Up to a thousand years of linguistic history were interrogated to observe Jespersen cycles in some languages. Fieldwork interviews were used to resolve how negation is used in spoken Arabic, where the written form is distinct and conservative.

“One of our greatest difficulties was working out when a change in the expression of negation was meant emphatically or not,” said Willis. “This can tell us at what stage the language is at. At the transition between stage I and II, a second word starts being used as a means to emphasise the negative. When it is used more frequently, the language progresses to a stage when the first word is dropped, and stage III is complete.”

For Welsh, the researchers identified the emphatic use of the negative by comparing Welsh and English versions of the Bible. “In Welsh, ni was the first negator, with dim or ddim coming into use sporadically for emphasis from the end of the 13th century. In the 16th and 17th centuries, usage went up enormously. Welsh then remained in stage II for about 200 years and then moved into stage III, dropping the use of ni around 1820.”

̽��ֱ��team’s discovery that Welsh only began Jespersen’s cycle at the time that English had completed it helps to answer why different languages show different cycle lengths. In some cases, the researchers can point towards one language influencing the development of a nearby language. For example, the initiation of Jespersen’s cycle in North African Arabic dialects was triggered by contact with Coptic in Egypt at the end of the first millennium. But just as often, as in the case of Welsh and English, contact seems to have no effect and Jespersen’s cycle progresses independently. “We believe that stage II is generally unstable and that prescriptive pressure, as seen in French, can sometimes retard progression from stage II to stage III,” said Willis.

̽��ֱ��influence of emphasis

One question the study has considered is how a word that is used emphatically to strengthen certain phrases becomes mainstream. ̽��ֱ��researchers believe that language acquisition by children has a role to play in this type of language change, as Willis explained: “We suggest that adults initiated using the second negator emphatically for certain verbs, usually as part of a measure phrase, as in 'It didn’t help a bit', but that children misinterpreted this, and extended use of the emphatic negator to all phrases.” ̽��ֱ��effect is called bleaching: essentially where the meaning of a word is reduced or broadened.

An example of bleaching that many will be aware of today is the linguistic misuse of the word literally (as in 'I literally ran all the way'). “Although it strictly means the literal use of a word, for some it now means that they have a strong emotional commitment to what they are saying,” explained Willis. “ ̽��ֱ��word has caught the eye of prescriptivists, who dispute its overuse as an emphatic, and it has also become quite generally overtly stigmatised. This may well impede a natural linguistic development of just the same kind that we have seen time and time again for the development of negation in different languages across the whole of the last millennium.”

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge linguists have pieced together the curious evolving history of the word 'not' across the languages of Europe. In doing so, they suggest that overuse of words such as 'literally' may be a natural linguistic development.

Cycles of usage such as that seen in negation appear to be a normal part of language development.

Dr David Willis

̽��ֱ��Principal and Fellows of Jesus College, Oxford

Early example of the Welsh word for not (dim, line 5) in the 14th-century Mabinogion

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes