Expert BSL workshop to celebrate Sign Language Week

by Kate Steel

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of participating in one of my all-time favourite activities: being a student 🤓

I joined the undergrads on my ‘Non-verbal Communication’ module for a guest expert workshop by John Mancini from Sign Jam BSL – one of the UK’s most experienced BSL teachers. We explored the linguistics of British Sign Language: how BSL grammar differs from what the students know about English grammar, and how visual languages differ from spoken languages. Finally, John guided us through some basic sign language.

Equally valuable was the opportunity for the students to improve their Deaf awareness. John emphasised the pride and strong social ties that characterise the Deaf community – and shared his insights into how best to interact with profoundly Deaf people. John’s interpreter was Dan Hunt, President of UWE’s BSL Society and a Paramedic Science student.

We at Bristol Centre for Linguistics are grateful to John for treating our students to a truly inspiring session, and to Dan for organising it!

~ Kate

Professor Patrick Hanks, 1940-2024

By Professor Richard Coates, Bristol Centre for Linguistics

Patrick Hanks was Visiting Professor in the Bristol Centre for Linguistics from 2016 until his death on 1 February 2024 at the age of 83. He was a scholar acknowledged by his peers as a true world leader in lexicography and corpus linguistics, as a theoretician of vocabulary, and in the design of huge projects dealing computationally with linguistic material.

I met him for the first time at a conference in Bristol in 2006, accompanied by a firework display on the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which was put on to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Brunel’s birth, but turned out to be a useful omen for what was to follow in my life. He told me about his plan for a new historical dictionary explaining the origins of British and Irish surnames. Such a dictionary already existed, but the data it was based on were collected half a century or more before, and it didn’t match up to Patrick’s embryonic idea. That was because it was really a dictionary of medieval surnames, some of which had died out, many others, as we now know, had been explained wrongly, and many did not feature in it. Patrick’s vision was to create a database founded on this ancient material and to add vast amounts of data from more modern records, so that the new dictionary would be a dictionary of names that still existed, and whose history could be traced from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This was heady stuff. Nobody had tried to do this on such a grand scale before, if at all. I got very excited and proposed trying to get funding to run the project. At the time I was at the University of Sussex, but within a few weeks I had moved to take up a position at UWE, and the project was successfully planned to be at home in the newly founded Bristol Centre for Linguistics. To cut a long story short, funds eventually arrived, and the project ran for nearly seven years, resulting in the published 4-volume Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, whose copyright prestigiously rests with UWE. A lot of work towards a second edition is still going on behind the scenes, coordinated here, and what drives it is still Patrick.

The idea for this was typical of Patrick’s enormous breadth of vision. It rapidly expanded even further beyond the scope of the older dictionary to include surnames that had arrived in these islands by mass immigration since the 1880s. He harnessed leading experts in nearly all the languages represented in the surnames you can currently find here – not just English and Irish, but Italian, Greek, Yiddish, Turkish, Mandarin and Cantonese, Yoruba, Hindi, Tamil, Arabic …. He knew what he wanted; he knew who to recruit to bring the product to the standard he craved and expected, and how to sweet-talk them till they were onside.

This is where I knew him best, as a scholar of enormous vision and mastery of the technical methods needed to underpin his projects. Near the end of the surnames project, he asked me tentatively whether I would be interested in being involved with a dictionary of WORLD surnames. I drew the line there. My visions are a lot smaller! But that is really what his Dictionary of American Family Names is, the massive work whose second edition (OUP, 2022) he conceived and created with Simon Lenarčič and Peter McClure and a host of specialists, and with which he continued to be involved even as his health declined towards the end of his life.

It’s hard to sum Patrick up as a scholar without diminishing him. He could work on several big projects at once. He wasn’t only a surnames man, or even a dictionaries man, as he had famously been for a long time before I knew him. He also had a broad understanding of language in general, especially words and the way they are used, and his ideas in semantics and pragmatics have influenced mine. But then again he wasn’t only academically gifted – he was a man who could network like a spider and lure anyone that he thought should have half an interest into his schemes. He could collaborate with many people and, being an exacting team leader, he could eat a few as well. He could do what he did because of his massive and enviable self-confidence, the high standards he expected from and drew out of others, and the personal charm that was never very far from the surface. He has been a hugely significant player in my life and in the history of BCL and UWE, and like so many others I’ll miss his physical presence greatly. His spirit, at least in part, will still energize BCL, and BCL is privileged to have hosted him.

Calling all our students! Fancy putting your video skills to the test to win £100? 💰

We at Bristol Centre for Linguistics (BCL) have today launched a student TikTok contest! As well as lining your pockets, our aim is to generate more public interest in Linguistics, from the perspective of people who are learning all about it. …That’s you! 

Here’s what you need to know:

• BCL is inviting all UWE English Language and Linguistics students to produce a 30-60 second TikTok video on a Linguistics topic of their choice, with the aim of engaging the public’s interest – especially young people. 
• The videos can be funny, quirky, informative – whatever you like, as long as:
  • your language is relatively clean (e.g. no swearing, unless the video is about swearing!) and inoffensive, with content warnings used if needed;
  • the content is appropriate and could be shared by University social media channels, e.g. no nudity;
  • no identifiable human research data are shown, e.g. identifable human data from dissertations;
  • there’s no video or audio of other people (members of the public, friends, family) recorded without their informed consent… It’s preferable that the video shows just you (and classmates if they’re involved);
  • no copywright protected material is included (e.g. clips from documentaries, music videos).
• Once you post your videos and share them with us on TikTok (@uweling), the teaching team will first vet the videos to ensure there’s no inaccurate or inappropriate content. We’ll then share them on our TikTok and Instagram profiles (and Twitter/X and LinkedIn, if suitable). 
• 🤑 At the end of the academic year:
  • the video with the most likes and/or reposts on TikTok and Instagram combined will get £100
  • the video that is the teaching team’s favourite will also get £100

Some potential FAQs:

What if I don’t use TikTok?!

You may have another student post your video via their profile, as long as it’s clearly identifiable as your video.

But there are so many interesting Linguistics topics! Can I make more than one video?

Absolutely. Our mission is to spread the word about Linguistics, so each student/team can produce or be involved in producing as many videos as you want.

Can we work together on this?

We welcome collaborations! If you work as a team, any winnings must be split between team members, so it’s your responsibility to organise this and avoid disputes. 

But I’m so busy!

Although the videos will be primarily produced in students’ own time, there may be space in some modules to allocate some class time. This is a discussion to have with your individual lecturers.

If I send you a video, can you turn it into a TikTok post?

Nope. This is a student-led social media campaign, so you will need to produce finished posts, including captions. Staff will not be creating or editing any TikTok videos.

Can you give me an example video?

You may already be familiar with TikTokers who produce similar content that you could use for inspiration. The staff are less TikTok-savvy, but we found this example of a linguist who posts a lot: https://www.tiktok.com/@linguisticdiscovery. He explains concepts from academic literature in simpler terms, so this is a great model of how to translate your understanding of linguistic concepts into a short, engaging video. 

Just get in touch with Kate if you have any questions that aren’t answered above!

🍀 GOOD LUCK 🍀

📣 iMean7 conference on Language & Inclusion: 19-21 June 2024 at UWE Bristol

iMean is back! 
We are delighted to announce that after a protracted pandemic-related pause, the iMean conference returns in 2024. Hosted by the Bristol Centre for Linguistics at UWE’s Frenchay Campus, the conference adheres to its original broad theme of ‘meaning in social interaction’ with a particular focus on language and inclusion.

I. Social Inclusion mediated through Language
Language can (be used to) increase or decrease an individual’s or group ’s sense of social inclusion. The history of the 21^st century thus far shows little evidence of any progress made in the direction of greater equality or social justice. The conference thus welcomes papers which analyse the way that language can help or hinder inclusion, or potentially result in exclusion. This includes, but is not limited to, empirical studies of:

• how the justice system, politicians, news outlets and social media use language to cast events in a particular light 
• perceptions of the non-standard language used by language learners and children with speech and language impairment.

II. Language Structure shaped through Social Inclusion 
But the desire for inclusion can also shape language, through the development of particular language policies aimed at promoting greater equality – the loss of grammatical gender in Dutch and the use of particular pronouns such as ‘they, them’ in English spring to mind. The conference thus also welcomes studies which look at such developments in the language – and in the criticism which is sometimes evoked by such developments with epithets such as ‘politically correct’ or ‘wokism’, serving to try to undermine legitimate attempts to combat discrimination. In a similar vein, we welcome reports of studies which look at the way that social inclusiveness has an impact on language structure, at various levels of linguistic analysis. 

Plenary speakers 
💡Aditi Bhatia, Hong Kong Polytechnic University 
💡Innocent Chiluwa, University of Freiburg 
💡Federica Formato, University of Brighton 
💡Rodney Jones, University of Reading 
💡Yvonne Wren (BSLTRU), Bristol Speech & Language Therapy Research Unit 

PROPOSALS 
We welcome proposals for papers which address the following questions:

🔎 how is language used in society to promote or inhibit inclusion? 
Here we would expect focused studies in e.g. the forensic, media, educational, health or justice fields.

🔎 how does the way that language is used for inclusivity impact on its structure? 
Here we would expect detailed studies at the phonological, grammatical, semantic and discourse-pragmatic levels.

Panels 
The conference will host the following panels to which you can propose a paper:

• Jo Angouri and Meredith Marra: Advancing Inclusion in the Workplace
• Kate Beeching: Discourse Markers and Inclusion
• Kate Steel: Language, Inclusion and the Law
• Yvonne Wren (BSLTRU): Promoting Inclusion through Speech & Language Therapy 

Please indicate your preferred panel at the top of your abstract.

Panel descriptions will be provided on our website – coming soon! In the meantime, for further information or to propose your own panel (with a minimum of 4 thematically focused papers), contact Kate.Beeching@uwe.ac.uk.

Posters 
We also welcome proposals for posters.

Abstract submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=imean7

Abstract submission deadline: 14 November 2023

(The conference website is being finalised… Watch this space!)

My UWE Placement

My name is Annabel and I’m an English Language and Linguistics student. I’m currently undertaking a placement at UWE Bristol in the Careers and Enterprise (C&E) department. This involves working on the front desk, helping with events such as career fairs and open days, running social media accounts, working with external organisations, and more.

I’d been searching and applying for placements unsuccessfully for months before I found this opportunity, when a lecturer emailed it to me. My favourite and least favourite thing about my course can be summed up in one line, ‘this course can apply to any job’. The great thing about English is that you can use it anywhere, and for someone who didn’t want to be stuck on one path this was amazing. However, this also meant finding a placement was slightly more difficult as there are no specific ‘English’ placements. However, the careers team at UWE were really helpful and we found loads of opportunities that I could apply my degree to.

UWE has a list of where previous placement students from each course went. Many from my course went into speech therapy, journalism, or social media. But I had no interest in speech therapy and when applying to these placements I was up against students who had degrees in journalism and marketing. I didn’t know how to sell myself and prove that my degree was just as relevant for these jobs, which it was. In retrospect I’d advise anyone interviewing for these placements to have more confidence in their abilities.

This placement has given me a great opportunity to see just how my degree can be used to enhance my career prospects. I use my understanding of brand tone of voice every day on the C&E social media, I use my communication skills when talking to students, staff, and external organisations.

When I first sat down for my online interview I felt sick. I hate interviewing even though I know I’m quite good at it; maybe it’s the English degree but I can waffle a convincingly good answer to most questions. After my interview though I felt less confident than I usually do. This job was my last chance to get a placement, or I would have to go into my third year and couldn’t put off writing a dissertation any longer. But the interview apparently went well as I was called back later that same day and told I got the placement. I instantly told my dad whose response was, ‘Of course you did, but how much are they paying you?’

The great thing about having a placement with UWE is that they genuinely care about your development and making sure you’re getting as much out of your time here as possible. There have been so many learning opportunities available to me every day. From day one I was told about all the training and learning courses I would be able to do, including a development day in Cardiff whilst being paid! I’ve found myself working with different departments and learning from people with years of experience. This has allowed me to create a clearer idea of my future career plans.

I developed in areas I hadn’t even considered before. Running the C&E Instagram account became a very large part of my job and was one I didn’t realise I would enjoy so much. We managed to grow our followers by 15% in 4 months and have maintained good engagement across all posts. Becoming a social media manager is now something I am looking into as a career which I never would have considered before. This was also well-supported by my line manager who encouraged me to look for the skills that that job required and try to improve them whilst working here.

A few weeks into my job I was asked to make some objectives, things I wanted to work on and improve during my time here. I also needed to plan how I would achieve these and how I would evidence any improvement. The main thing I wanted to focus on was my confidence. Having no real experience in a professional working environment I was quite nervous coming into this role. My line manager helped me set my first goal, to speak up 3 times in meetings over that week. It’s hard to believe that just 3 months later I was running meetings of my own, where I was the ‘expert’.

The other thing I really loved about this placement was how it was set up. Three other placement students started at the same time as me, each of us with the same training to do and similar roles. It was comforting knowing that we all had people we could talk to and rely on, and we quickly became good friends both in and out of work.

Having been a student here for two years I felt confident that I would recognise the inner workings of the university quite well. I was very wrong. Not only did I end up working with a team I didn’t even know existed, the roles I was aware of were different from what I imagined. Every department was much more interconnected than I would have assumed and no one’s role could be summed up with just one title.

I now find myself most often working at the careers and enterprise front desk which I had been too awkward to approach for two years. And helping to organise events I can’t believe I never fully took advantage of as a student!

Overall, I would highly recommend a placement to anyone who is considering it. I knew a placement would look good on a CV, but I had no idea how much it would help me develop my character. This placement has given me a sense of confidence and competence that will help me not only for my 3^rd year of uni but all future careers. It will be hard work but so rewarding, not just academically and professionally but personally as well.

My first year at UWE – English Language and Linguistics

By Hector Jessop

A year ago, as I counted down the days until I would move to Bristol and become a student, I felt both excited and nervous in the face of what would be an entirely different experience. I was a 23 year old who had been out of education for almost half a decade, who after finishing college with mediocre results and no real plan had found work and settled into a routine. It felt like a big risk to give up that stability and return to studying, and being an older first-year student and not naturally outgoing, I worried that I might struggle to find friends here or to keep up with other students who had come straight from A-levels. I took a step out of my comfort zone to even put an application together though, and that turned out to be an excellent decision! So in preparing to come to UWE I promised myself I wouldn’t turn down any opportunity because of a lack of confidence.

Looking back at this year, that’s turned out to be a pretty good approach, both in and out of the classroom. It felt strange for me to be back in education after so long away, but definitely in a good way! Everyone has been really friendly, and lecturers have been so supportive not just in those first few weeks, but throughout the year as well. Of course there’s been ups and downs and different people enjoy different modules, and that’s part of the appeal of first year – being introduced to many different aspects of Linguistics that maybe you haven’t heard of before, and finding where your interests are.

Even beyond the set modules and lectures though, there are other opportunities offered and these are where it’s important to go for it. In each module, for a start, a course-rep will be chosen to communicate the thoughts of the class to lecturers and vice-versa. It’s a really good opportunity to get to know your lecturers and other students better, and to make a difference to the way lectures are delivered (I actually didn’t take this one as I had other projects lined up, but in hindsight I wish I had).

We were also introduced to several opportunities to help with research projects run either by staff or older students; one of these, which involved working with children to collect data for a PhD student, appealed to me so I registered my interest and ended up being selected. This I would say was the first test of my promise to not shy away from opportunity! I really wasn’t sure I was up to the expectations of the project but I went ahead with it anyway and it turned out to be great fun. Being involved in this project taught me a huge amount about real-world applications of linguistic research methods and I gained another experience to add to my CV.

Fast forward to the end of the year, and an opportunity was advertised for a ‘linguistics internship’ which would involve working with the UWE Linguistics team over the summer, on various projects according to their needs. This one definitely got my attention, and I asked for more information. I was told that it would usually go to a 3^rd or maybe 2^nd year student, but I should apply anyway as it would demonstrate enthusiasm and give me a better chance next year. Then, when I applied and was given an interview. I was told that I’d done well to get through as a first year and I should definitely go ahead with it as practise for applying again next year. On that basis I took a deep breath, did the interview fully expecting to be rejected – and now, here I am writing a blog as part of the internship I never expected to get.

Even that though, is just a taste of what my time at UWE has offered. Outside of the course itself, I challenged myself to join the climbing society, despite having almost no experience, and I’ve now found a new hobby, made a bunch of great friends and had loads of fun nights out in Bristol. It also gave me the opportunity to go climbing on a Welsh mountain in November, which mainly taught me climbing is harder with numb fingers! But it was great fun anyway. During my first year I’ve also managed to find time to fly around Europe from Bristol Airport. I’ve had great fun and have also been able to immerse myself in other languages, having spent a week in Germany, a week in France and two weeks in Spain this year, which of course ties in nicely with a linguistics degree.

My hope in writing this piece then, is that it will perhaps strike a chord with people preparing to come to university this September, who may not be the most confident, the most outgoing, but who want to make the best of their time here. To those people, I would say this: each time an opportunity to try something new comes up at university – and there will be plenty – ask yourself if it’s something you’d enjoy, and if it will benefit you, but don’t let nervousness hold you back. Take the leap, and the confidence will come later.

Where does the expression ‘as p***ed as a newt’ come from?

By Kate Beeching and Laura Welsh

On Monday afternoon (27th June 2022), A.Prof. Kate Beeching (Visiting Fellow at the Bristol Centre for Linguistics) was asked to appear on BBC Radio Bristol to respond to a listener’s query about the origins of the phrase ‘p***ed as a newt’. (Note, that the P word could not be mentioned on the BBC and had to be replaced with ‘Hmm as a newt’!).

You can hear Kate’s appearance on BBC Radio Bristol with John Darvall on BBC Sounds (from 3:19:50)

Kate highlighted some of the 3,000 or so words used to talk about being drunk in English. They range from tiddly, tight, a few too many, a bit under the influence or half cut, to pickled, bevvied, sloshed, smashed, mortal fou (in Scotland) or tired and emotional (a term coined as ‘tired and overwrought’ in the British satirical magazine Private Eye on 29th September 1967 to refer to the British Labour politician George Brown). There are also a number of other comparative phrases similar to ‘p***ed as a newt’ including drunk as a lord, drunk as a skunk, high as a kite and tight as an owl. It is evidently a highly productive pattern.

But the question is: How did the newt, a graceful and agile creature, come to be regarded as an index of inebriation?

Kate could not give an authoritative answer to this question as the Oxford English Dictionary is silent on the matter, but she was able to provide an informed view on the likelihood of various more folklinguistic explanations:

• One possible explanation has to do with the way a newt walks – wobbling along (much like a person who has had too much to drink and is unable to walk straight).
  
• In an exchange of views on the Guardian website, one commentator suggested that it is a Scottish expression developed after the habit of using newts to test the strength of whisky, in a similar way that Mexican beer is tested using a worm. The idea is that if the newt is dead before it hits the bottom of the bottle, the whisky is strong enough. Radio Bristol host, John Darvall, suggested that was quite mean to newts! Indeed, the writer admitted that he had made up this explanation, showing how easy it would be for a fake explanation to circulate!
  
  
• The most plausible explanation seems to be that in Nelson’s time, Royal Navy ensigns were known as ‘newts’. Being so young, it didn’t take much rum for them to become inebriated. Hence the expression ‘p***ed as a newt’. John Darvall, having an interest in Lord Nelson and the Navy at that time, agreed this was a likely explanation saying, “I like that, that makes sense”, “those junior ensigns, midshipmen and what have you, they were very young lads, they were in their early teens some of them and they were called newts so that makes sense”.

We’ve been doing some further research and have come across the following additional explanations:

• ‘p***ed as a newt’ could originate from the mishearing of “an Ute,” as used by US Army personnel in Britain during the Second World War. The ‘Utes’ were an American Indian tribe who were celebrated for their drunkenness to the point the US Government banned the sale of alcohol in their reservation.
  
• The phrase might have first been used at a banquet for King Henry VIII. Apparently, “half-way through a banquet the king inquired as to what brew one young reveller had been partaking of, to be begged by the young man’s father to “forgive him, Sire, he is but a youth and as for wine he is new to it!” (The Guardian, 2013). It is then possible that this expression ‘p***ed as a new to it’ soon became ‘p***ed as a newt’.
  
  
• “Abraham Newton (1631-1698) of Grantham, the presumed author of the first known treatise on the medicinal properties of the beer of Burton-upon-Trent (now unfortunately lost), was such a well-known tippler that, in his lifetime, even Londoners would use the expression ‘p***ed as Abe Newton’” (ibid.). He was apparently so famous that “when his fellow townsman, Isaac Newton, came to prominence, people would say of him, ‘no, not that Newton’” (ibid.). This confusion reached its peak in the early 1700s, so it is likely that it was around this time that the expression ‘p***ed as a Newton’ was about which was later contracted to become ‘p***ed as a newt’.

So, there are several plausible origins to the phrase ‘p***ed as a newt’…over to readers of the UWE Lingo Blog to add their own plausible explanation (just beware of fake etymologies!)

References

Parsons, D. (1975) Tenth-century studies: essays in commemoration of the millennium of the Council of Winchester and Regularis concordia. Phillimore.

The Guardian (2013) How did the newt, a graceful and agile creature, come to be regarded as an index of inebriation? Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2007,00.html [Accessed 27 June 2022].

Youridioms.com (2022) (As) pissed as a newt. Available from: https://www.youridioms.com/en/idiom/as-pissed-as-a-newt [Accessed 27 June 2022].

Welcome to Kate!

Hello! I am thrilled to be fully joining the team, having loved my time at UWE as an associate lecturer this past year. Here’s a bit of an intro to me and the work I do…

I’m a forensic linguist, which (broadly) means that I study the use of language in investigative and legal contexts. My current research focuses on first response police officers’ interactions with victims of domestic abuse at the scene of reported incidents. First response ‘call-outs’ are high-pressure, often high-emotion scenarios in which communication can easily break down. Yet the success of these encounters hinges on communication on both evidential and relational bases: officers need to find out what happened and victims need to feel supported. This is an un(der)studied setting because of the complex but crucial privacy measures involved. My research relies on police body-worn video (BWV) and the participation of the people it shows.

Because so little is known about talk in this context, I take a highly inductive approach to uncover the micro-level interactional features that contribute to what goes wrong (and right) during call-outs. Building on my PhD research at Cardiff University, I’m about to start work on some new BWV footage, with the ongoing aim of feeding these insights into police training. Beyond this, my wider research activities centre on spoken interaction in a variety of institutional contexts, with a focus on power, gender and vulnerability. I’m therefore really keen to explore some of the interdisciplinary research opportunities at UWE.

Originally from the north coast of Ireland, I caught the linguistics bug with an MA at Queen’s University in Belfast, before a job opportunity in Fiji whisked me away (as you can imagine!). I then spent ten jam-packed years working throughout the South Pacific Islands, Australia and Asia. The path back to this side of the world involved a distance MSc in forensic linguistics from Aston University, and a couple of babies…! I’ve now lived here in Bristol for the past five years and love this city.

This coming year (22-23) I’ll be teaching Language at Work, Studying Speech Communities, Constructing Languages, (Phonetics and) Forensic Linguistics, Nonverbal Communication and the second term of our shiny new module, Language, Environment and the Law. We have a brilliant community of Englist Lang & Linguistics students, and I look forward to seeing lots of familiar and new faces in September!

A new article out!

Charlotte had an article published last week –

The gendered migrant experience: A study of Family Language Policy (FLP) amongst mothers and daughters in the Somali Community, Bristol.
(ID: 2047512 DOI:10.1080/14664208.2022.2047512)

Here is a little taster of the article (i.e. the abstract!).

This article adopts a gendered take on Family Language Policy (FLP) by questioning the way that gender impacts on the issues faced by refugee woman during and after flight. For this reason, the ethnographically informed research addresses the concerns and experiences of mothers and daughters in the Somali community in Bristol, one of the fastest growing communities in the city but one that remains a ‘neglected social group … everywhere present but in many ways invisible’ (Wallace & Kahin [2017]. Somali parents and schooling in Britain (p. 1). UCL Institute of Education Press.), with little known about their experiences on or after arrival (Warfa et al. [2006]. Post-migration geographical mobility, mental health and health service utilisation among Somali refugees in the UK: A qualitative study. Health & Place, 12(4), 503–515.). The study of FLP not only contributes to our understanding of the processes of language shift and change, it also sheds light on broader language policy issues at societal levels. Analysis suggests that it is principally mothers who take on the demanding, yet invisible work of FLP in the home and that mis-matched fluency between mothers and daughters results in a fracturing of family relations with the potential for long-term emotional repercussions. The findings have implications for educational and public sector organisations involving immigrant communities.

Enjoy!

“To-foo are you calling inanimate?”

Veganuary, linguistics, and the words we use when discussing animals. 

By Taryn McDonnell 

UWE English Language and Linguistics (2018-2021)
 

After a month of Christmas inspired decadence, many of us will be turning our palates – and our wallets – towards the ever-growing variety of plant-based alternatives within our supermarkets, all in the name of the 30-day annual change, ‘Veganuary’. As such, it seems like a fitting time to discuss the perhaps inconspicuous links between linguistics and veganism, and to explore how even seemingly small things, such as the language that we use when discussing animals, may in fact influence how they are treated by human society (Stibbe, 2001). 

To begin to understand these links, we must venture back to 1975, the year in which Peter Singer released his bestseller and definitive classic of the animal rights movement, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. Viewed as a radical departure from the anthropocentric philosophies that had dominated human thinking for millennia, Singer critically analysed modern farming practices, the media, and our role as humans in perpetuating unnecessary animal suffering. Singer centred his thinking around a core principle that it is unjust to cause suffering to any being which has an interest in – at the bare minimum – not suffering. Singer’s book sparked an animal liberation movement and created a compelling argument which has stood the test of time against numerous moral philosophers wishing to challenge it (Villanueva, 2017). 

This is all very interesting, I hear you say, but what does any of this have to do with language and linguistics?  

Singer was in fact, one of the first philosophers to explicitly note how our vocabulary serves to conceal our food’s origins. He explained how we eat pork not pig, beef not cow, and how even the noun ‘meat’, which once meant any solid food, is now used to disguise the fact that we are eating the flesh of an animal. Subsequent research within the fields of journalism studies, eco-linguistics (see Stibbe, 2001), and critical animal studies have further explored how language can be used by institutions such as the government, the animal industries, and the media, to sustain and perpetuate animal suffering. 

As a life-long animal advocate and final-year linguistics student desperately searching for a dissertation topic which would not drive me to despair, I chose to critically analyse all farmed animal articles appearing in UK National Newspapers for the year 2020, with an aim of discovering how and to what extent they reinforced speciesism. 

“Speciesism – a prejudice characterized by morally favouring one species – usually homo sapiens – over others.” 

Inspired by the following quote from Jepson – ‘the killing of animals is the most extreme and significant expression of human power over them’ (2008, p.127) – I chose to critically analyse the verbs that we as humans use to denote the act of killing an animal. In doing so, I made some striking discoveries. A small excerpt regarding the killing verb ‘destroy’ and how it’s use reflects a speciesist ideology is given below… 

 
“The killing verb ‘destroy’ appears in 3 articles, all of which also feature the verb ‘culling’. Destroy, as noted by Jepson (2008, p.141) is derived from ‘a basic meaning that refers not to human beings but to inanimate objects’. It is symbolic, therefore, of the ways in which we classify varying levels of animacy. We can destroy sandcastles, but we cannot kill them, and as humans we can be emotionally or even physiologically destroyed, but we cannot be destroyed in the literal sense of killed. The use of destroy as a killing verb therefore not only refers to the murder of animals, but simultaneously conspires to relegate their classification from living, sentient beings, to that of emotionless, inanimate objects.” (McDonnell, 2021). 

I also found similar instances for other killing verbs such as, ‘cull’, ‘harvest’ and ‘depopulate’. Even the word ‘slaughter’ (frequently used to describe the killing of animals) can be viewed as evidence of a speciesist ideology when we realise that ‘animals are slaughtered, humans are murdered’ (Stibbe, 2001, p.07). 

I am afraid that this blog post has taken somewhat of a dark turn, but I truly believe that it is important for us to question why we use the words that we do to discuss animals. Who serves to benefit from concealing our foods origins from us? Why would institutions use words that reduce an animal’s sentience to that of an inanimate object?  

Perhaps now, whilst our fridges our full of tofu and our bellies with broccoli, we may take some time to question how justified our dominion over animals really is, and how even our everyday vocabulary may be concealing something more sinister.