FEATURE A NEW WORLD OF WORDS
A new world of words T
HE WORDS THAT speakers of British English use in casual conversation have changed radically over the last two decades, according to preliminary results of an ongoing study by researchers at Lancaster University’s Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and Cambridge University Press. Such changes reveal not only what is, or was, important to British English speakers in the 2010s or 1990s, but how public attitudes towards key issues in society have changed between those periods of time. The study is known as the Spoken British
National Corpus 2014, and its researchers have set out to collect a ten-million word collection of conversations between people from across the UK whose first language is British English. This is being done by inviting participants to record conversations from their home life, using the audio recording feature on their mobile phone, and to email them to the researchers. Recordings are being accepted from any and all settings, including family meal times, meeting friends for a coffee, visiting grandparents, car journeys, or simply relaxing in the living room. The researchers then transcribe the conversations and add them to their electronic collection, or corpus, of real-life language data. So far, the researchers have collected and
transcribed two million words of conversations from over two hundred speakers across England. They compared this data to the original version of the Spoken British National Corpus, which was collected in the early 1990s, and found out which words had most radically decreased and increased in use between the two. The words which occurred relatively much less in the new data compared to the old data, and which are said to characterise the conversation of the early 1990s when compared to today, include fortnight, marvellous, fetch, walkman, poll, catalogue, pussy cat, marmalade, drawers, and cheerio. In contrast, the words which, relatively, are much more frequent in the new data, and as such characterise the conversation of today when compared to the early 1990s, include facebook, internet, website, awesome, email, google, smartphone, iphone, essentially, and treadmill. These words suggest that the ubiquity of digital communication, and perhaps American culture, have influenced the conversation of
24 SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2014
Words like marmalade are said to characterise the conversation of the early 1990s when compared to today
Researchers have transcribed two million words of conversations to see how the words we use have changed. The findings reveal what was, and is, most important to us and also how public attitudes towards key issues in society have changed
the British speakers of today’s society. “These very early findings suggest the things that are most important to British society are indeed reflected in the amount we talk about them. New technologies like Facebook have really captured our attention, to the extent that, if we’re not using it, we’re probably talking about it,” says Lancaster University’s Professor Tony McEnery, who is leading the study with Dr Claire Dembry of Cambridge University Press. The research team have found so far that the
word Facebook is now spoken more often than the words computer, internet, and even television. Furthermore, while the speakers in the data collected so far spoke about Facebook more than social media rival Twitter, the researchers suggest that the latter has been more successful at adapting the meaning of an existing word for the purposes of describing the activity of its users. The word tweet occurs only in the context of birdsong in the original Spoken British National Corpus, and in the new data this is said to have been entirely replaced by discussion of Twitter activity. The researchers claim that in this way, more so than any words in the ‘vocabulary’ of Facebook users (words such as status, comment, and wall, etc, which have retained earlier
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