Understanding Multidimensional Analysis

Multidimensional Analysis is a quantitative framework to study register variation developed by Douglas Biber. These slides present a very basic introduction of this methodology and its assumptions.

Language and Ideology

This presentation was created for Applied Linguistics class in our M Phil 2nd Semester. It covers two aspects regarding language and ideology: ideology about language or language attitudes; and language as a tool to project ideology, exercise social power and create hegemony.

Language Contact and the Formation of Pidgins and Creoles

These slides were our group presentation in Bilingualism, which I am going to share here. Hopefully it'll clarify the concepts like Pidgin, Creole, Pidginization, Creolization, Pidgin to Creole Formation and some related researches on Pidgin and Creole Languages.

Bilingualism

Bilingualism is a phenomenon in which a person can speak more than one languages. Sometimes Bilingualism is contrasted with Multilingualism. The former one is used to refer to 2 languages as 'bi-' means two, while the latter is used to refer to more than two languages. Another distinction which is granted to these two terms is that Bilingualism refers to individual phenomenon of speaking more than one languages, while Multilingualism is used for societal Bilingualism i.e. the situation in which whole societies are Bilingual examples are Pakistan, India and Canada etc. More recently, however, the term Multilingualism is being used less frequently as compared to Bilingualism which is now used to cover all situations in which more than one languages are being spoken whether that situation is at individual level or at society level.

The person who can speak more than one languages is referred to as a Bilingual or Multilingual. Bilinguals have different kinds. The most traditional kinds were given by Weinreich (1963). A brief introduction of each kind is provided below:

• Co-ordinate Bilinguals are those people who have learnt both languages in different environments. The languages would most probably be used for different functions. If a person learns Urdu in Pakistan and English from the Britain, then he will be called a Co-ordinate Bilingual. Such people have separate systems for each language in their minds. So the words and concepts of each language will be kept in the mind separately.
• Compound Bilinguals are those people who have learnt both languages from the same environment. The languages would not have separate system in the mind, but the they will have one system. The concepts would be kept in one box in their minds, while the words will be different for both languages. We can see Urdu and Punjabi as an example. Both are learnt in the same environment, and thus it can be said that we, the Punjabi speakers of Urdu, are Compound Bilinguals i.e. we have same system of concepts in our minds but the only thing which changes is the words or vocabulary items of two separate languages.
• Subordinate Bilinguals are those people who have learnt a second language and cannot understand it without the help of their first language. Such people will translate the words of second language in their mother tongue, then they would be able to understand them. Thus we can say that the concepts in mind will remain in one system i.e. the system of mother tongue, but an additional language is attached to that system through mother tongue.

A visual representation of Weinreich's kinds of bilinguals. 

Now a days only first two kinds i.e. Coordinate and Compound are endorsed by the researchers and experts in the field, while the third one is dropped.

Bilingualism is a social, psychological as well as linguistic phenomenon. Whenever there are more than one languages in a society, the issues of language identity, promotion or selection of a language and educating children in a particular language arise. All these issues are related to social aspect of Bilingualism. On the other hand, the researchers try to find out "how the two or more languages are stored in mind", "whether knowing more than one language is beneficial", "Bilinguals are different from monolinguals or not". All these issues are related to the psychological aspect of Bilingualism. And lastly, there are questions regarding code switching and code mixing (how the bilinguals are able to mix two different languages) which come under the heading of linguistic aspect of Bilingualism.

Language and Social Variation (Sociolinguistics)

These slides cover basic topics regarding sociolinguistics e.g. Speech Community, Sociolinguistics, Age and Occupation, Social Dialect or Sociolect, Social Markers, Style and Style Shifting, Slang, Register, Jargon, Speech Accommodation: Convergence and Divergence, Language and Gender, Language and Ethnicity and African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

Language and Regional Variation

These slides are based on a chapter of The Study of Language by George Yule. The topics covered are Dialect, Dialectology, Isogloss and Dialect boundaries, Standard Language, Bilingualism, Diglossia, Language Codification and Standardization, Pidgins and Creoles.

Hollywood Dance Movies

I am kind of stuck with movies these days. I keep on watching movies. First they were action. Then I turned to romance. And now I am obsessed with dance movies. They are dance movies but romance is a plus, kind of buy one get one free.

I turned to dance movies from romance movies watching Footloose (1985). That was a fantastic movie. Then I got idea of Step Up 3D during my search of movies on google. Downloaded it and watched a dozen times. I love it man. What a fantastic movie this is. The first two part are not as good as third one is. But kind of cool ones. I liked this movie.

And then comes step three when I turn to other dance movies. I go to google and ask it to gimme a list of God damn dance movies like Step Up. And it provided me a list of dance movies (and of course romance was free with each one). So for last 2 days I am kind of screwed up by these movies. I watch, and watch and keep on watching. One turns off, another has completed download and I get stuck with another one. This is second night I am on for late night. And tonight I am writing this post as well.

I never knew about dance so well before these 2 days. It is a whole world and kind of cruel world. But these movies, the ones I've watched so far show two kinds of worlds or worlds of dance. As I am a linguistics learner as well, and Discourse Analysis is one of my favourite areas in my field. So I always seek to find patterns, commonalities and structures. So here again, I could not stop myself analysing all the stories and find out common areas. And I got quite a success. I've found some very interesting points.

As I told in last paragraph there are two kinds of worlds presented here. One is prefect, rigid and requires perfection beyond the abilities of the dancer, and is the elite world of dancing as well, and that is Ballet Dance (pronounced as /ˈbæl.eɪ/). It is special for girls, specially white girls ( I found only 1 black ballet dancer so far in movies). There are large companies who run Ballet Dance theaters and like that stuff. On the other hand there is imperfection, lower class, street dance which is said to be unique and different from person to person, and that is Hip Hop (at least what I could figured out from characters' discussions). The dancers are poor and lower class teens who dance in clubs or streets, they bet on dancing with dollars or take part in competitions to win money. And most street dancers are black, sometimes white as well.

The stories are 99% related to winning a championship or a final performance which will give you a job thus save your career as a dancer. The dancers get scholarships or work hard for the final event. There might be a group of dancers or a solo male or female dancer in leading role. They'll train during the whole film. There would be minor skirmishes during this, a few villain kind of guys hanging around, a few gun fires and perhaps a killing. In the meantime the leading character would find a lover, or s/he will get the other one because s/he has broken up. If they are a group, they'll work together to win dance competition otherwise the other one would help the leading character to win the final event. And at the end (in middle as well actually) there is always a big long kiss (not always that long though). So the story ends, and if there is a sequel the next movie would start with a familiar character from last movie or story would continue with same characters (played by new actors) or it would start or take place on same place.

Probably you've noticed the kind of language I've been using in this post. This is another aspect of these movies. They are related to American teens, specially black teens. So the informal slang is being used throughout the story by the characters. And eventually the watcher also gets his tongue polluted. So I am screwed up here man. These dance movies really suck but I've to keep on watching until my list of movies completes. And in the mean time if you get some time, try Step Up 1, 2 and 3 man. This trilogy really cool dude. Trust me. ;-)

Regional And Social Dialects

The presentation explains the term 'dialect' and its various sub kinds. It has very details information on dialects, social dialects and language variation.

 

Multi/Bilingualism in Pakistani Punjab

The motive was to highlight the bilingual attitude of local Pakistani especially Punjabi Urban Speakers regarding three languages they use in daily life i.e. English, Urdu, Punjabi. I was pre-mature at that time, but the effort was done to create quality content. Of course it was an assignment.

Bilingualism

Bilingual or multilingual is a person who can speak two or more than two languages with equal or less equal proficiency. A society is called bilingual or multilingual if the people there speak more than one language.

            Bilingualism and multilingualism are referred to same thing mostly. Bilingualism may mean that the users of language are using more than two languages and multilingualism may also mean that the speakers are using two languages in the community or society.

            About half of the world's population is multi/bilingual. It is, in fact, very hard to find a monolingual community or society like Japan etc. While talking about sub continent in general and specially Pakistan we come to know that we are a multilingual community. We use Urdu as a language of communication between different domestic language speakers, thus Urdu working as a lingua franka, we use domestic languages at local level such as Punjabi, Hindko, Barahwi, Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi, Saraiki, Kashmiri etc and we use English also as a foreign language. People of Pakistan are bilingual/trilingual or generally multilingual.

            Bilingualism is believed to be a gradeable system so we can distinguish among its various kinds. Here it will be tried to discuss some concepts relating to multilingualism and then it will be tried to relate them to the local context of Pakistan specially Punjab. As the assignee is a Punjabi, Urdu and English speaker so the examples will be related to these languages mostly, although they will be almost valid for other domestic languages also.

           

            First distinction can be made in bilingualism is that the speaker have equal proficiency in both or all the languages he can speak or write. Such a bilingual is called a balanced bilingual or equilingual. This is not the absolute criteria, there may be some situations where a bilingual's abilities in a given language suffer due to pressure of situation etc. There may also be a situation of more receptive knowledge of once language and more active knowledge of another i.e. he may understand a language but may not speak it and he may speak and understand other language very well. There are also some situations in which bilingual is familiar with the spoken system of one language and written system of another.

            If we compare this kind of bilingualism distinction with our situation we can find certain similarities. Punjabi and Urdu are two languages which are believed  to be known by a person living in Punjab. A Punjabi speaking child learns Urdu along with Punjabi at almost same age. Exposure of both languages at the same time enables him to be proficient in both languages almost equally. But here we come to the point of above para. The difference of reading and writing system hinders here.  A Punjabi speaking child is not necessarily believed to learn writing Punjabi also. He writes in Urdu and it is considered sufficient for him/her. In particular situations where the learner optionally learns Punjabi at school enable him/her to read and write it otherwise it is seen that young speakers of Punjabi avoid reading or writing Punjabi and they feel it convenient to do it in Urdu. So their proficiency suffers here in Punjabi in writing and reading while in Urdu they are proficient in all fields reading, writing, speaking and listening.

            Second kind of distinction in bilingualism can be drawn by the acquisition of language. There are two main processes to learn a language. Acquisition and learning are two methods to learn languages, former is natural and primary while the later is artificial and secondary. A language acquired by a person interacting with his parents, sisters, brothers and friends etc at home will be the native language. Another language he learns at some institute by formal education will be called a foreign or a 2^nd or 3^rd language. Former bilingual will be called primary and later will be called secondary bilingual.

           

            In case of Urdu and Punjabi we are primary bilinguals. We learn these languages at home, from our surroundings in typical natural situations. While in case of Urdu and English or Punjabi and English we are secondary bilinguals because we learn former from home and later from an institute usually a school.

            A third kind of bilingualism distinction is socio-psychological distinction. The people may feel it additive having another language which enrich their ideas and knowledge. And they may feel it subtractive or loss of their language and culture by another languages (usually a dominant language). In our context this thing is applied to Urdu and English connection in both ways. People feel it additive to their knowledge, considering English as a language of latest knowledge and information and thus enriching their knowledge. People also feel it subtractive in a sense that English is acquiring the place of Urdu in our local life, its words are used and those of Urdu are ignored. So it can be a cause of loss of our culture and identity and there are people who are against its usage.

            A very useful way to describe the bilinguals is the domain specification. A domain is an empirically determined cluster of consisting a location, a set of role relationships and a set of topics. For each domain the bilingual has a pre-defined language to be used. We can see it in this table

Location	Role-relationships	Topics
Home	Mother, Father, Son, Daughter etc	Domestic, Personal etc
Neighborhood	Neighbour, Shop-keeper, street-cleaner	Weather, Shopping, social greetings
School	Teacher, student, principal	Social greetings, educational
Mosque and Religious Places	Imam, Muqtadee, Listener of Sermon etc	Sermons, Prayers, Social talks etc
Work	Boss, Subordinate, Peer	Professional Matters etc

           

            By comparing this theory with our practical use of language we can see what languages we use at each domain. Most likely we use Punjabi at home, talking with parents and other family members on different domestic and even non-domestic issues. With neighbours we also use Punjabi talking with them in different relations. At school the language changes to Urdu, when we talk to our teachers, co-teachers, principle or junior staff and peers etc. At mosque and religious gathering once again we use Urdu usually, sometimes local language is used for better interaction (specially in villages Punjabi is used). At work level or at higher education institutes our talks are a mixture of Urdu and English switching to English when talking in meetings and very formal sittings.

Code Mixing and Code Switching

            In a situation, community or a society where there are bilinguals and they interact with each other in more than one languages, due to the factor of language contact a situation arises which is called code mixing and code switching. This situation can lead towards the language interference in which a language is influenced by another language on the levels of semantics, grammar and phonology.

            A bilingual can talk to another bilingual in each language common between them. He can also use the words of one language into other, knowing that the listener  understands the other language as well. Such kind of mixing is called code mixing.

            Code mixing is also called conversational code switching. Code mixing takes place usually in spoken language as we are less conscious about our language and we have not much time to replace foreign words with native ones. We take it forgranted that other person is understanding us. Code mixing is not only the mixing of words but clauses are also included in it, a part of sentence from one language and other part from other language, and in similar syntactic structured languages such as English and Spanish the grammatical inflexions are also mixed.  It is very much related to domains and situations. At a very formal situation bilinguals can use a mixed code of formal and informal variety in their leisure time. The language in which education is received also influence the choice of words from another language and people tend to code mix who are high educated and specially in a foreign language. It is observed in many countries that teachers having degree from a foreign institute mix their code while delivering lecture.

            If we consider our situation we can find that domains related to education, media and profession are those where people use to mix the code. This code mixing is of two high level formal languages of the community i.e. Urdu and English. Teachers while talking in classroom use frequently the terms of the discipline from English. Media men and specially hosts at TV and radio etc mix the code frequently. They use a blend of Urdu with English and English with Urdu in talk shows and live programmes. An example of a female host from government tv channel PTV is quoted here.

اس وقت آپ کو لگ رہا ہوگا کہ میں بہت ہائپر ہورہی ہوں بڑی ایکسائٹڈ ہورہی ہوں ویسے تو میں ہر وقت ہورہی ہوتی ہوں  نہیں بھی ٹی وی کے سامنے ہوتی تو ہر وقت باتیں کررہی ہوتی ہوں لیکن ہمارے سٹوڈیوز میں بڑے سپیشل دو گیسٹس موجود ہیں انھیں میں سلیبریٹی کپل بھی کہوں  گی تو بالکل بھی غلط نہیں ہوگا۔

            She is mixing English noun, adjectives and verbs in Urdu frequently. We can see the plurals as well used as they are  in Urdu from English.

            Code switching is the umbrella term as compared to code mixing. It involves code mixing as well as the switching of language. Code switching is distinguished from code mixing as here people switch to other language for relatively large chunks of language.

            In our context, if we see, even in classrooms of heigher education levels, the teachers switch to and from the native to foreign language  during their lecture. Similarly media men, professionals also mix and switch their code highly while talking. Here is an example from Pakistani filmstar Javed Sheikh's interview. He is mixing the code and at the end totally shifts to English.

جن کو مجھ پہ کانفیڈنس ہے میرے لیے یہ بہت ضروری تھا کہ ان کا یہ کانفیڈنس برقرار رہے۔ اللہ تعالٰی کا کرم ہے کہ میں نے جو بھی کام کیا ہے “کھلے آسمان کے نیچے” میں   انشاءاللہ Every Pakistani will be proud of it

Borrowing

            Borrowing is very closely related to code mixing and switching. A single person using a foreign word is code mixing while lots of people doing this is called borrowing. Borrowing is to get a foreign language word into native language. In this process its pronunciation may be changed or it can be kept as in Urdu we use English word Policy as palicy. Borrowing can be at semantic level translating certain concepts from foreign to native language. It can be at syntactic level or morphological level to adopt certain language systems in native language.

            Borrowing has a very interesting problem. The meanings of words are changed some times from native meanings and word is used in local language in a different sense. An EFL teacher at Korea reports such problem on his blog. He says that people are using English words in Korean in different sense, these words are when spoken to native speakers of English in local meaning create problems of understanding. In Urdu we have some examples of change in meaning of a borrowed word. Committee is an English noun used in Urdu also as a noun but it is used as a verb also. کمیٹی ڈالنا is a verb which has totally different meanings as compared to the native meaning.

            Code mixing, switching and borrowing is also taking place in domestic languages but it is relatively rare as compared to Urdu. But we can find such examples while traveling in a local bus or standing at a stop.

            اینہوں کنٹرول چ کر

            This is utterance of an old man, who is using an English borrowed verb in Punjabi as a verb and applying the grammar of Punjabi very unconsciously.

            Inter language mixing of Urdu and domestic languages is also taking place. People in cities are tending to use Urdu words to purify  their domestic language. Specially in cities like Karachi it is reported that words of Urdu are frequently spoken in domestic languages like Pashto. The young Pakhtoons are marked by their Urdu-mixed Pushto when they visit Peshawar or the domestic areas of their parents. 

           

            Considering our language situations a diglossic community we can make a continuum of languages according to their formality level.

Bibliography

 Sociolinguistics by R.A. Hudson

 Sociolinguistics by Bernard Spolsky

 The Linguistics Encyclopedia edited by Kristen Malmkjer

 Introducing Language and Society by Peter Trudgill

 http://eflgeek.com/index.php/eflgeek/comments/time-to-clean-up-cunning-konglish/

Oka: A variant form of Okay, O.K. prevailing in Punjabi Youth

When I first heard this phrase "oka fer" (okay then) I laughed for hours because it was too funny for me. I remembered it again after few minutes and again started laughing but after that I forgot the laughing. Now I use this word quite frequently with my close friends, class fellows and collegues.
O.K or Okay is a word used for affirmation in colloquial English. The history of this word tells that its usage was started from America, perhaps some American president wrote o.k. on a file and then it "officially" came into being. It is also used as a discourse marker along with right, etc. It is pronounced as:

• (RP) IPA: /ˌəʊˈkeɪ/
• (US) IPA: /ˌoʊˈkeɪ/

 /k/ in this word is as usual aspirated like /k^h/ by native English speakers of American and British origin.

As per the suggestion of Wikipedia, this word is used in colloquial English and adopted in several languages of the world. This word is also borrowed by local languages of Pakistan like Punjabi and the National Language (Urdu). In Urdu it is pronounced as "okay" same is the case with Punjabi. But there is a variation in Punjabi. As Punjabi is a more informal language and used among closed friends, at homes etc., an informal use of okay is prevailing in Punjabi youth specially young boys. They use it as fun, while saying "oka" they initially have a smile on their faces but after that they accept it as a form of okay and try to use this new word in their friends' company. It can be called a slang word because it is being used informally only by youngsters in their sittings but the change is underway. It is being used by young university girls also with their close male friends and collegues in informal situations. They are also using it more frequently within female to female interactions. Another variation "oki" among girls and "oku" among boys is used at rare occasions when motive is to create more fun and laughter.

Variation is underway which is the destiny of language. Continuing our discussion on variation I would like to document the variation in romanized variety of Urdu and Punjabi which is being used in text messages specially by youngsters and university students while messaging their peers and friends.