Tag Archives: English

Following on from Lynne Murphy’s recent focus paper about global Englishes, the CIEP information team asked if I’d write a piece about my native variety, Australian English. Of course, Australian English is spoken by around 25 million people over a huge area, and there are some small regional differences, but much less than with UK English. Most of the differences are simply a handful of different words, and it’s generally impossible for one Australian to tell which part of Australia another speaker is from just from their accent, though there are potentially one or two subtle signals: for example, if someone talks about Malbourne [æ] rather than Melbourne [e], they’re likely to be from Victoria; but many Victorians say Melbourne in any case. Leaving aside pronunciation, though, what is written Australian English like, and what sources would an editor use to copyedit it?

UK- or US-focused?

The conventions of Australian English tend to be UK-based rather than US-based, although this is perhaps gradually changing. So spellings such as centre, theatre and defence are usual, and you would normally find traveller rather than traveler. Equally, in cases where there is no single UK English convention, the same is true of Australian English: for example, the verb suffix is more likely to be -ise (and this is required by the Australian Government’s Style Manual and is given first in the Macquarie Dictionary), but -ize is also common.

There are some peculiarities. One of the most notable relates to -our versus -or. The standard convention in Australian English follows UK English, with -our, although one of the major newspapers, The Age, used -or until the 1990s (when, I suspect, stories began to be more commonly written for several newspapers with the same owner, requiring consistency across different newspapers). However, for historical reasons that no one is entirely certain of, one of the two largest political parties in Australia is the Australian Labor Party, with no u. (The other large party is called the Liberal Party of Australia, although it is the equivalent of the UK Conservative Party; this leads to Australians talking about small-l liberal values when they need to make it clear they don’t mean conservative ones.)

Then there’s program(me). Leaving aside computer programs, and simplifying the story, the spelling program became usual in government documents by the 1980s. Following that, the word became a political football, with a more conservative prime minister insisting on the government having programmes, then with a change of government there were programs again, then programmes, and now things seem to have settled back with programs. This means that if you want to find out, for example, about the Australian Government Reef Programme, you need to consult the website of the National Landcare Program. For a while there, you could tell someone’s political leanings on the basis of their spelling …

Australian words

Apart from pronunciation, the most obvious differences between UK and Australian English relate to vocabulary items. Of course, there are the names of animals and plants found only in Australia, but authors and editors are much more likely to trip up on concepts which are shared but where there are different words to refer to them, particularly when the same words are used with different meanings in the two varieties: the fact that an Australian can be entirely respectable when dressed in nothing but a T-shirt, pants and thongs sometimes amuses the British, for example, although why being dressed in a T-shirt, trousers and flip-flops should be amusing, I don’t know.

One minefield for authors and editors relates to words used in reference to the Indigenous peoples of Australia: as you might expect, there have been changes over time and it is a vexed issue. Probably the earliest modern position was that represented by the 1988 version of the Australian Government’s Style Manual, which recommended Aboriginal as the adjective but Aborigine(s) for the noun to refer to Indigenous Australians; but some people preferred Aboriginal(s) as the noun, on the basis that this was simply saying something about the person in question, rather than categorising them. This debate continues, and it is often avoided in practice by ensuring that the word always modifies some other noun. However, there are also entirely separate groups of Indigenous Melanesian people on Australian territory, the various Torres Strait Islander peoples, who historically were often mistakenly referred to using the term Aborigines. By the time of the development of the (now disbanded) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 1990, it had become common to explicitly link the two sets of groups, especially in more official contexts; and health or census forms commonly ask ‘Are you of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander origin?’ The term Indigenous Australians is relatively neutral, but some Indigenous people consider that this is an external, bureaucratic, imposed label, and prefer to refer to themselves as First Australians or First Nations Australians; many will often also use the term Black, although because of its history, that can be considered offensive if used by non-Indigenous people to refer to Indigenous Australians.

In fact, before the European settlement of Australia, there were over 250 groups of Aboriginal peoples, and there are 14 inhabited islands in the Torres Strait, so the search for a general term is often a little like trying to decide whether Asians would be the appropriate term to use when introducing a woman from Indonesia together with a man from Israel. Modern usage is generally to follow the preference of any individual, and otherwise to use the most specific possible term: a Pitjantjatjara man, one of the Kaurna people. To complicate matters, there are also approximately state-based terms used by many Indigenous people themselves (and by others), such as Koori for an Aboriginal Australian from Victoria or New South Wales, or Murri for an Aboriginal Australian from Queensland or northwestern New South Wales. (See the Style Guide for a more in-depth discussion.)

More subtle differences

While complex, all of the issues above are relatively easy to notice, if sometimes hard to resolve. Trickier for an editor are the more subtle differences between Australian English and UK English.

Some of these differences stem from geography and social history. I’m still always startled when in the UK I’m told someone is Asian, and then they invariably turn out not to be from China, Thailand or Vietnam, the default meaning of Asia in Australian English (like in US English); and while Australia has one of the most urbanised populations in the world, there is a strong cultural attachment to the bush and the outback, words that tend not to be used in the way non-Australians think.

The outback, not the bush. The view from Chambers Pillar, a sandstone formation near (ie 100 miles away from) Alice Springs.

Australians also think of distances in a different way from Britons, and the realities of travel in an often highly mobile population add to this. Not everyone in Australia has my experience while growing up of alternate holidays consisting of driving north for 10 hours to visit my paternal grandparents or west for 13 hours to visit my maternal grandparents, but it’s not considered particularly unusual (and in each case, isn’t even a third of the way across the country). So Australians are entertained by my anecdote about queuing behind a woman at Sainsbury’s who was justifying buying two packets of lollies (well, she was English not Australian, so she said sweets) because she had to keep the children happy during a ‘long’ drive the next day; it turned out she was going slightly less than two hours away.

Then there are those subtle differences that are inexplicable, and sometimes almost unexplainable. In both Australian and UK English, collective nouns such as committee and government can come with singular or plural verb agreement; but as an Australian, I often hear the singular used in UK English where I would be expecting the plural. And plural nouns are more commonly used in the UK pre-modifying other nouns: you wouldn’t expect a charity to be called the Cats Protection League in Australia; instead, you have the Cat Protection Society of NSW.

Style guides and dictionaries

Just like in the UK, there is no overall authority on what formal Australian English writing should look like. The most widely known style guide is the Style Manual, originally published in 1966, which has gone through a number of editions, with changing recommendations. The manual is only intended for publications written by public servants (civil servants) who work for what more recent editions refer to as the Australian Government, but earlier ones refer to as the Commonwealth Government; the manual is not even used (explicitly) by the governments of the different states and territories. The online beta version of the 7th edition is currently getting quite a lot of publicity (including on the CIEP forum!), with one of most controversial suggestions being that one should ‘generally write numerals for 2 and above’. This reflects the fact that this recent edition takes an explicit ‘digital-first approach’, with many of the suggestions based on readability guidelines that were developed specifically for web-based content.

As an alternative, there is also the Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage (previously the Cambridge Australian English Style Guide), written by Pam Peters. However, this is very much more like Fowler’s, with an alphabetical listing of points you may wish to be aware of, and which might be debatable, rather than a style to follow.

Through much of the 20th century, there were ‘Australianised’ editions of major UK dictionaries, particularly the smaller versions, and these still exist (eg the 6th edition of the Australian School Oxford Dictionary appeared in 2016). However, in 1981 the first edition of the Macquarie Dictionary appeared, the name relating to the fact that the editorial committee for the original edition consisted largely of staff from Macquarie University. This dictionary, now in its 7th edition and with various different versions (eg the Macquarie Concise Dictionary, the Macquarie Dictionary Online), is now generally accepted as ‘the’ dictionary of Australian English. The larger versions contain encyclopaedic entries, including the names of many famous people and places relating to Australia.

There is also the Australian National Dictionary, originally published in 1998, part of the Oxford University Press line-up of Australian dictionaries. However, it is not a generalist dictionary, but rather one that focuses more specifically on Australianisms, with words either used only in Australia or with particular Australian-related meanings.

Antipodean English?

People sometimes talk of Australasian English or Antipodean English, and there are similarities between Australian English and New Zealand English. Both are UK-focused in stylistic terms – NZ English probably more so than Australian English – and there are some words used in the two varieties and not in other Englishes. But each has its own peculiarities: possibly most famously, Australians wonder why New Zealanders call an esky a chilly bin, and NZers wonder why Australians call a chilly bin an esky, while the rest of the world wonders what on earth we’re on about (a cooler or cool box). There are also differences relating to the historical presence of only a single Indigenous language, Māori, on the main islands of NZ/Aotearoa, and the declaring of this language as a national language in 1987. But we’d need an editor from NZ to elaborate on this, whether they were Māori, Pasifika (with ancestors from other Pacific islands), Pākehā (of European descent) or other – anyone out there willing to take it on?

Tim Curnow grew up in Canberra (apart from a year in Ecuador, a year in Colombia and a year backpacking around Europe), then worked as a linguist and applied linguist at universities in Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. Then he moved to Royal Leamington Spa in the middle of England and started TJC Editing so that he could copyedit other people’s academic work instead of having to write his own.

Wise owls: Dialects in England

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There are many different Englishes – and there are Englishes within Englishes. The wise owls have turned their thoughts to their favourite features of dialects in England.

Louise Bolotin*

I’ve been a sucker for a flat northern vowel ever since I watched Coronation Street as a kid (long ousted for EastEnders, whose mockney lacks the same appeal). I’m a southerner by birth so when I moved to Leeds in the 1980s I was thrilled to be called ‘duck’ by the Loiners and hear them rhyme bath with math(s). I have an unconscious tendency to mimic other people’s accents, so it wasn’t long before I started flattening my own vowels when in the company of northerners. I quickly added owt, nowt and summat to my verbal repertoire, and have been using them ever since because, well, they are just so much more succinct.

What I also love about northern dialects is the rich vocabulary – I’ve been in Manchester for more than 12 years now and I’m still learning the lingo. Words like bobbins (rubbish) and brew (a cup of tea) roll off my tongue as easily as fookin’ hell (no one swears quite as awesomely northernly as Liam Gallagher), often shortened to ‘kinell. However, I doubt my stepson would approve if I called him ‘our kid’. My absolute favourite is ‘out out’, as in ‘Are we going out, or out out?’ This is Mancunian for deciding how dressed up you ought to be for a night on the tiles.

Obviously, I still get confused when Mancunians say dinner when they clearly mean lunch; I’ve had some awkward attempts to diarise meetings thanks to that. But when I turn up for lunch/dinner, I’m as likely to greet my companion with ‘Yallright?’ as I am to say hi. I’ve lived far longer in the north of England, or Oop North, as I call it, than I have anywhere else, so the accents and vocabulary have left a bigger imprint on my brain than those of all the other
cities and countries I’ve lived in. And that’s not bobbins. Maybe one day I’ll be taken to be proper Manc.

Hazel Bird

A variant of dialects that I find interesting is idiolects, which are
uses or coinages of words particular to individuals or small groups (such as friendship groups or families). They tend to grow organically out of day-to-day interactions, and unlike dialects they can be
cross-regional.

For example, I have just looked up the term ‘hoon’ in the Oxford English Dictionary and learned that it is an Aussie/Kiwi term for ‘behav[ing] in a loutish or irresponsible way; spec. to drive fast or recklessly’. However, by way of a link with rally car culture, my family has come to use it to refer to ruminant animals’ prancing across a landscape. Our definition is quite precise: sheep can hoon; cows, horses and such cannot.

We also use the word ‘puggle’ to refer to (1) the act of moving foodstuffs around a cooking pan to prevent them from adhering to the bottom or (2) fussing a cat. The OED has the meaning ‘to poke out’, which bears passing resemblance to (1) but not to (2). How we came to adopt these meanings is a mystery.

Another oddity is the spelling ‘baout’ (pronounced with extreme emphasis on each vowel) for ‘boat’. A baout can be a water-worthy object of any description, with the word denoting a sense of longing. However, like many dialect and idiolect words, it has a shared significance that is hard to put into words.

I often encounter dialect and idiolect words in my creative non-fiction editing work. When
used well, their effect can be powerful, conveying intimacy, alienation or a little of both.
They can make the reader the author’s closest confidante or deliberately shock them into
a new perspective.

Melanie Thompson

Nah then, mardy bum! There are often discussions in the CIEP forum about whether it’s permissible to quote song lyrics, but in this case the famous line is part of my childhood vernacular, and if you tell me I can’t write it, I’ll get a reyt face on.

One of the biggest thrills of my life was to hear that line sung at full throttle by the passengers on the crammed tram conveying myself and my (then) teenage son to hear Arctic Monkeys play in their (and my) home town: Sheffield.

Unlike the next-most-famous city band (the Human League) who adopted the ubiquitous
1980s musicians’ twang, Arctic Monkeys are proper tykes who know how to pronounce Beauchief (Beechiff) and will know that they need to pack their brollies if someone tells them
it’s silin’ it dahn.

Lots of people think they can ‘do’ a Yorkshire accent by splatterin’ apostrophes awl o’er t’ro-ad but Sheffieldish doesn’t work quite like that. Indeed, there are regional variations even within the city boundaries depending on whether the speaker hails from the northern or southern side – and it’s nothing to do with whether they support the Owls or the Blades.*

TV and radio programmes often fail to do the Sheffield accent justice: not all shows can afford Sean Bean (sadly!). But to hear a bit of authentic Sheffield banter, try Tom Wrigglesworth
and ‘family’ on BBC Radio 4. Every time I hear Tom’s fictitious dad answer the phone with ‘Sheffield 973629’ I am transported 150 miles north! (Why do my older northern relatives recite their number?)

I had the full force of my Sheffield accent elocutioned out of me, as a teenager, but my dad is an aficionado. This has been known to cause major confusion among his southern careworkers, but the fuss is usually somert and nowt, such as a mix-up between putting something o’r’ere or o’r theer.

To me, dialects are not just about words and pronunciation, but a way of life – some of which is sadly now dwindling.

Back in the day, my nannan used to gerron t’bus to go shoppin’ dah’n’t’cliff armed wi’a bag o’spice to share with the other passengers! She’d gerroff and buy some breadcakes, peys, a pound of tripe and a bottle of Hendo’s, then reverse the journey to be home in time for dinner.**

As I set off out to play, my mum might have told me not to get my clo’e’s loppy from scrawmin’ around in’t’ gennel; and if a friend later called round for me, the response would be ‘She in’t-in’.

Dialects can be problematic in formal writing and speaking, but they are a matter of great local pride and shouldn’t be regarded as a lesser form of English, in the right context. Nuff said?

Ah’ll si’thi’!

* Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United football teams

** My grandmother would get on the bus to go shopping at Attercliffe, carrying a bag of sweets … to purchase bread, peas, tripe and the local delicacy Henderson’s Relish [try it on pie!], and return in time for lunch.

Sue Littleford

It is my abiding regret that I wasn’t born in my grandmothers’ generation so far as dialect goes, to hear their grandmothers speak. Alas, I am a child of the Fifties, by which time dialect was fading rapidly, and almost gone from my little corner of Hyde, a Pennine foothills mill town eight miles east of Manchester. We were in that select group of people that says scoan, not sconn (much smaller geographically than I ever imagined), and we had ginnels (though not as generally defined – ours were always covered). A buffet (pronounce that T!) was a broad, low wooden stool, an exceedingly useful article, especially for a tiny kid as, if you turned it upside down, you could sit on the underside, surrounded by rather solid framework, and pretend it was a rowing boat. I’m delighted to find it in Oxford Dictionaries at definition 3 (sans boat) and the etymology appears to be Old French into Middle English 600 years ago.

Mum kept an odd bit of grammar going well into the present century. She’d say ‘When I’m waken’ for ‘When I awoke’. And I distinctly recall a small schoolfriend (we must only have been six or seven) tell someone to ‘Stop thy skrikin’ ’ – a term that wasn’t used in my house, a couple of hundred yards away (not metres, back then), but was easy enough to figure out (‘Cease that noisy crying, forthwith!’) and if you couldn’t, well, it’s in Collins. Its etymology is harder to find, but it looks like being Old Norse for, not very excitingly, to scream or cry. We were just within the Danelaw, back in the day, so that sounds about right. Of course, the people around me didn’t speak a dialect, just as we didn’t have an accent – we just spoke how we spoke, but we knew it wasn’t like those posh folk on the wireless or telly – unless it was for comic effect and Marriott Edgar was being recited (I gave this monologue at a school show, and that was accent, really, not dialect). I’ve been living away for too long now to retain any strong linguistic links to home, and though I do still rhyme grass with crass, and bath with math, I no longer rhyme book with souk. Thanks for a lovely nostalgia trip!

*Louise Bolotin died in October 2022; her contributions are much missed.

The wise owls pop up on the blog every couple of months to reflect on their experiences on various topics. All are Advanced Professional Members of the CIEP.

Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator (who is quite a fan of bishy barnabees).

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Of Indian Englishes, eating heads and doing the needful

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By Ayesha Chari

‘I can’t get it done on time if you eat my head from the morning!’ Words I said aloud to my other half just before sitting down to write this. (Unusual, given that I’m the one who’s generally doing the nagging.) I am glad no one asked me to prepone submission.

Indian Englishes are as diverse as the people who speak them, and the buildings those people inhabit.

Indian English, as is widely acknowledged, comes in as many colours and variations as people in the sub-continent. It is not the equivalent of Hinglish, not the sole domain of Bollywood, nor the caricatured ‘incorrectness’ painted eloquently in English language literature. It seeps effortlessly through urban, semi-urban and rural terrains in the spoken and the written, and is accepted as the glue binding the 22 constitutionally ‘scheduled’ Indian languages and hundreds of other language-dialects, recognised or otherwise. Not without contention, of course, perhaps highlighted most by the ‘non-native English speaker’ label forced on the nation’s people by bureaucratic forms in all fields and worldwide.

Historically, introduced to the Indian elite via the East India Company, the formal teaching of the English language was established with Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education and the English Education Act of 1835. Taking a shape of its own in post-colonial South Asia, ironically English became the tape for a linguistically and culturally fragmented nation and its Indian diaspora. Among the earliest documented works on the characteristics of Indian English is linguist Braj Kachru’s 1961/62 thesis, available from the University of Edinburgh Research Archive (Prof Kachru’s The Indianization of English and The Alchemy of English are widely used as references in the field). The controversial 2019 Draft National Education Policy re-emphasises the three-language formula first introduced in 1968, leading to questions on the role of English as a link-language for bilingual citizens of a multilingual nation.

A basic internet search on Indian English will throw up scores of researched articles and resources (old, not-so-recent and more recent) on:

the history: British, but also Portuguese and Dutch influences;
extent of use: exponentially growing, as I write;
characteristics:
- British in formally taught style, grammar, spelling and punctuation – a legacy of colonisation
- increasingly American in business, spoken and other forms of quick communication – the unquestionable influence of TV, social media and globalisation of the sub-continent’s ‘service face’
- respectfully Indian in colloquial usage written and spoken – expansively mixed in idiomatic usage and everyday writings;
vocabulary, phrases, expressions, idioms and pronunciation: all distinctly Indian, reflective of regional vernaculars, all as diverse as the nation itself.

It won’t come as a surprise, then, if I say there are no standard resources, manuals, guides or websites to help editors edit.

For useful discussions on the myriad issues, pop in to the Facebook groups Indian Copyeditors Forum and the Editors’ Association of Earth. To keep up with contemporary urban lingo, bookmark Samosapedia. Interesting, informative reads include Kalpana Mohan’s An English Made in India (2019), Binoo K John’s Entry from Backside Only (2013) and the multi-authored Chutnefying English (2011).

And then there is the kaleidoscope of Indian English literature: from the traditionally recognised writings of Salman Rushdie, Mulk Raj Anand, RK Narayan, Ruskin Bond, Anita Desai, Nirad C Chaudhuri and Vikram Seth to the engaging, controversial, academic, popular (yet, often, quieter, less talked-about) and/or award-winning literary works of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Kamala Markandaya, Arundhati Roy, Arvind Adiga, Vikram Chandra, Jeet Thayil, Amitav Ghosh, Nissim Ezekiel, Gieve Patel, Kamala Das, Anuja Chauhan and Chetan Bhagat, to those of Jhumpa Lahiri and Amit Chaudhuri, writing in English but not agreeing with the label of the genre, the list is endless and reveals there is no standard written form. And new tales continue to be embraced over chai and aadda.

Bottom line: Being aware of regional sensitivities, variations, expressions and context is key to recognising and understanding ‘Indian Englishes’ for their own sake. Because we are like this only.

Dear Ms Cathy,

Thank you to blog team for asking me to write up.
Please find herewith my draft blog contribution.
Please let me know if you wish to know any further. I will do the needful and revert back.

Sincerely,
Ayesha

Disclaimer: No offence is intended to native or non-native speakers of any language. All errors and inconsistencies are the author’s and the editor’s, who are both same-to-same.

Ayesha Chari is an Indian editor with ancestral, native and adopted linguistic roots in New Delhi, Benares and Lucknow (northern India), Behrampore, Dhanbad, Arrah and Calcutta (eastern India), Bombay (western India), and Madras, Madanapalle and Palakkad (southern India), not to leave out Rangoon (in now Myanmar) and Jessore (in now Bangladesh). Currently based in the UK, she has done the needful, sat on the computer and written – in true character of the topic – twice the number of words Catherine Tingle requested for this blog. When not doing timepass, she teaches her 2.5-year-old Indian English among other languages.

Lynne Murphy discusses a standard Global English and editing English for global audiences in a CIEP focus paper: In a globalised world, should we retain different Englishes?

The CIEP is no longer using the terms ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ to describe English language familiarity and competence. Where these terms appear on our site or within our materials, it will be to honour an author with relevant lived experience or to highlight their problematic use.

For more information, please read ‘”Non-native” and “native”: Why the CIEP is no longer using those terms’.

September 2021

All illustrations by Ayesha Chari.

Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

A Finer Point: The sic of ‘sick’

If ever there was a boomer

I actively snob-distanced from ‘youth language’. When I wasn’t being Brideshead Revisited, I was grimacing in sympathy with older people at all the yo-ing and sick-ing hurled about in public. Now I see that the volume would have been more objectionable than the vocabulary – notable exceptions being anything ending in ‘claat’ (which won’t appear in this article’s selected glossary – you’ll have to look that up yourself).

Neither I nor probably any of the people on whose behalf I tutted were aware, or cared, that ‘proper’ English was already awash with old words for new, contracted phrases and repurposed expressions. As long as it sounded English, it was acceptable. The wotcha, bagsy and faynights of the seventies were perfectly cushty, but not the sick, innit or wappnin’ of my peers in the eighties.

(Little did I know that a different set of peers had been gnashing their gums at wholly English-sounding neologisms. Where better than the House of Lords to shake a stick at ‘hopefully’?)

Life went on without my absurd loftiness. The Queen kept her English, my friends kept theirs, and I piped down. In the nineties, I came to admire a new generation of teens who refused to anglicise their conversations: why not answer your mum in the language she taught you and so what if people on the bus stared? Young people from minority communities went on to share language with friends from outside their ascribed ethnicities and were unfazed by the mutterings of well-intended purists, or worse, older imitators. Big up Gen Z!

Using words to make connections, rather than to mark differences, is an approach exemplified by linguist Rob Drummond. His research finds that the modern language usage of young people isn’t defined by or limited to a specific ethnicity. I’ve seen how this translates in real life and I’m intrigued. Young children (English, Eastern European, Korean, it makes no difference) can be heard insisting that their friends say ‘wallahi’. That’s an Arabic phrase, introduced to playgrounds by Somali children, and uttered by any child holding another to account. In my day, it was ‘swear on your mum’s life’.

MUBE it

Youth language, argot, ghetto grammar, Jafakin, call it what you will for now, has been documented, translated and commented on by enough (never young) people that we editors and proofreaders should have material aplenty to do what we do best: reserve non-editorial judgement and style-guide it to consistency.

But before we strike out in red and blue, what do we even call Multicultural Urban British English? (Great, that’ll do – thank you, Rob Drummond.) Be conscious, however, of ‘the responsibilities that come with naming varieties, especially as the terms are picked up by non-professionals and used in ways that might not correspond to their original denotation’. That’s also from Drummond, the boss of non-standard. Ponder, though, for the time it takes to say no, whether anybody young enough to speak Multicultural Urban British English calls it that.

Word up

MUBE is more than a lexicon. (Strictly speaking, it’s the initialism of a bank employees’ union in Malta …) It’s not news to us that language isn’t just about words and definitions, yet we flit like outsiders to Urban Dictionary, seldom looking past the written meaning. Perhaps it’s understandable that we treat youth language as we would any other jargon we come across when editing. I have spent more time thinking about the verb/pronoun choice and stress exercised by young people than I have about the significance, for those same people, of identity markers drawn from cultures I just don’t get: cf. ‘allow it’ (put a stop to it) and ‘allow that’ (don’t do it in the first place).

Having children old enough to use youth language doesn’t qualify me to speak authoritatively about the social or cultural influences behind their bantsing. (See? And I tried really hard not to mis-gerund.) It’s a good job we have Rob Drummond to make sense for us. His ‘(Mis)interpreting urban youth language: white kids sounding black?’ looks closely at how young people use ethnolects (language and dialect associated with specific ethnicities) in ways that are overlooked, parodied or misinterpreted by most mainstream media.

Drummond’s research introduces us to contemporary insights on MUBE. By contemporary, I mean also the voices of young people themselves – it’s the first time I’ve read what young people have to say about their own language usage.

But we are time-pressed (I’m hoping you read this after the worst of coronavirus has passed and you are inundated with deadlines), so let’s start with something more breezy. Andrew Osmond’s blog is a light-hearted explanation of multicultural London English. And there’s a style-over-spellcheck treat, too – more of this to come.

Standard bearing

If I’m going to attempt a broader representation of what is said or written about MUBE, I have to slide way over to David Starkey in 2011. While I disagree with his stance on acceptable sociolects and question his take on linguistics, I will defend his right to being favourably edited even if the Guardian rendered his views verbatim: ‘This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country.’

Marginally more instructive are online articles about urban language workshops for the police. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the ‘jolly japes’ tone of such reporting, but I feel it plays to a mindset that reifies youth language as a gang-related acquisition. It leaves Disgruntled of Middlesex indifferent to the code-shifting (adjusting language to suit an audience) that their own children are doing like a pro. You might not be able to tell grunge idioms from grime and it’s safe (hint: safe) to assume you’re not sure which adjectives also serve as affirmatives, but your children fluently navigate languages they weren’t taught at school. Oh, go on then, google ‘police beef ting’.

Once you’ve bare embarrassed yourself saying peng and wagwan out loud, and done that Westside hand gesture, please read anything by language expert David Shariatmadari to reassure yourself that the linguistic habits and word choices favoured by young people (aks instead of ask, and like with everything) are examples of processes native to standard English. Actually, his work deserves more than a passing reference; please buy Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language.

Word count

Of course we understand how language works – we’re editors and proofreaders – can we just get on with attending to the words? So where, if its usage is so prolific, is all the MUBE content?

What are young people reading these days? That’s where all the editing contracts should be. My convoluted internet searches suggest publications like Nylon. But I couldn’t find any youthy words in the issues I looked at. Ditto for Accent and LADbible. I found a mandem and a few droppings elsewhere, but so far, so sparse. And then I asked a young person.

Write, right, rite

Young people are their own authors. I think they might even be curators. The provenance of their language isn’t up to them, but they own the rendering of their words in a way we mostly do not (I dare you to defy punctuation). And they don’t care or ask for our intervention. The content that they upload, even if the bulk of it seems to be captured on a phone in front of a mirror, is written up, or at the very least captioned. And boy is there some idiolect happening!

Even I’ve heard of Instagram, but rinsta and finsta? Do you know which one is interchangeable with sinsta? I’m quite impressed with the audacious exclusivity of young people’s usage. If you need a word spelled out, if you’re querying camel hump compounds, you’re not the target audience. The most recent article I could find on sta-breviation uses initial caps but is almost a year old; maybe it’s no longer a thingsta.

But how did it all go #?

Writing, says linguist Gretchen McCulloch, ‘has become a vital, conversational part of our ordinary lives’. Online writing is still edited but, as she observes in Because Internet, we are now reading words that were once only spoken.

McCulloch sees patterns in ‘beautifully mundane’ online language that can tell us more about language in general and how new words enter usage. From how we punctuate emails and texts differently (yes, I know you don’t) to keysmash (try it, I got: ajndasj.lbndf.as) to the melodic evolution of ‘mm-hm-mm’ for ‘I dunno’, this book will take you closer to understanding internet linguistics and its designated drivers: young people.

But still …

We seek order. The lens through which we look at non-standard text is held by a standard-steadied hand. For every new project, we sift through for common usage, consistency and clarity, don’t we?

Granted, when young people write for other young people, they don’t need our editorial expertise, but what about when we, #genfogey, write about young people? For each writer I’ve mentioned, I’ve triple-checked their youth language styling and I still can’t find agreed usage: is the film called Adulthood or AdULTHOOD; is galdem/gyaldem/gyal dem a nuance thing? How many ‘r’s and ‘p’s in brrupp? D’you get me, blud or blad?

Resourcelessness

Browser beware: Urban Dictionary takes you to definitions you didn’t think could exist while Oxford English Dictionary is as useful as consulting your grandmother. Wiktionary contributors may supply you with interesting but unhelpful tangents which you then have to chase up on the British Library’s website, whose advanced search options are set up for people who have the time to go to an actual library. Thankfully, we have the estimable Jonathan Green who is hundo p the authority on rude/youth words. His website, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, is a regularly updated trove of expressions with timelines and etymologies that go back centuries.

There is some guidance for editors of the future; they will benefit from OED’s appeal, which should provide an authoritative spellcheck of ‘distinctive words that shape the language’. If you are interested in how new words are added to the dictionary, this article explains.

For now and the foreseeable future, we are left with the chicken-and-eggness of New Hart’s Rules’ advice on lexical variants (youth language per se is not included in 21.7, but …): ‘it is essential to have specific guidance in the form of a dictionary and a style document to ensure consistency’. That, as the young people probably no longer say, is peak.

Glossary

bagsy    a verb, often used by children, to declare a right to something before somebody else makes the same claim
bants    short for ‘banter’
blad/blud    from ‘blood’, a noun used to address a male – often a friend
braap/brrupp/brup    an exclamation to show agreement or approval by imitating the sound of gunfire
dropping    making something available (to buy, watch or listen to), usually on the internet
faynights    an exclamation called out during a game to assert exclusion from the rules, or protection from disqualification
finsta    a ‘fake’ Instagram account, where people often upload more private posts
galdem/gyaldem/gyal dem    girls
homie/homey    from ‘homeboy’ – a good friend
hundo p     hundred per cent, in complete agreement
innit    an elision of ‘isn’t it’, an often meaningless rhetorical marker
mandem    men, or people in general
peak    bad luck, unfortunate
peng    attractive (used for people), nice (used for things)
rinsta    a ‘real’ (public) Instagram account
safe    good or cool, also signifies agreement
sick    cool, awfully good
sinsta    a secondary Instagram account, see also finsta
wagwan    a greeting, an elision of ‘what’s going on?’
wappnin’    a greeting, an elision of ‘what’s happening?’
wicked    attractive, excellent, wonderful
wotcha/wotcher    a greeting, an elision of ‘what cheer’
yo    a greeting, agreement (yes) and a way of addressing somebody

Riffat Yusuf is a West London-based proofreader and copyeditor, and a content editor for a small structural engineering company. She has been editing since 2018, and before that she taught ESOL for 10 years and brought up her family. In the dim and distant past she was employed in journalism, radio and television. In the future, she’d like to work on ELT resources.

‘A Finer Point’ was a regular column in the SfEP’s magazine for members, Editing Matters. The column has moved onto the blog until its new home on the CIEP website is ready.

Members can browse the Editing Matters back catalogue through the Members’ Area.

Photo credits: silhouttes by Papaioannou Kostas; selfie by Djamal Akhmad Fahmi, both on Unsplash

Proofread and posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Inclusion and diversity

‘Pedantry is not a good look’: the radical message of English Grammar Day

2 Replies

By Julia Sandford-Cooke

So, when I told another SfEP member that I was going to English Grammar Day at the British Library, he was like, ‘I hope it doesn’t just involve complaining about Americanisms and overworked shop assistants writing “Out off order” signs’. Well, I was kind of expecting it would be just that – but, you know, it actually turned out to be kind of a subversive celebration of language change. And, yes, it also acknowledged the numerous linguistic tics I’ve already used in this opening paragraph. I suspect that prescriptively inclined delegates went home despairing of the deteriorating state of the English language. But, if they did, they weren’t paying attention.

Editors tend to be descriptive, not prescriptive, in their approach

For me, the day raised the issue of how we, as editors, can balance the prescriptive and descriptive elements of language use. It’s all very well for academics to shrug their shoulders and agree that things change, but where do we stand when our job is to ensure that text in the public domain is correct?

Or is that our job? Perhaps we should regard our work more as facilitating communication. Most modern editors would probably agree that it is. SfEP members formed a good proportion of the audience and I didn’t hear any of them grinding their teeth (except when it was suggested that nobody would miss the possessive apostrophe). In fact, most of us nodded at Rob Drummond’s graph indicating that pedantry decreases as language knowledge increases.

I’ve put it on twitter several times before, but for those to whom this is new (check me, using ‘whom’😁), this is the full version of that pedantry graph… pic.twitter.com/R4rxeriOsn

— Rob Drummond (@RobDrummond) July 8, 2019

When people criticise the language of others, it’s almost always about more than language

Take Zwicky’s bias warnings, quoted by David Denison:

The recency illusion – a belief that things you notice recently are recent.
The frequency illusion – once you’ve noticed something, you see it everywhere but that doesn’t mean it happens all the time.

We all have our tics and bugbears. I hate constructions like ‘We were sat on the bench’ and ‘Come with’ (it’s ‘come with ME’, dammit!) and would correct these in written text without a second thought. On the other hand, I am aware that all my conversations are peppered with the oft-despised ‘like’. As Rob Drummond said in his talk, ‘standard’ English is an arbitrary accident of history, reflecting the balance of power and personal choices that may, or may not, have gained wider traction. The speech of those who decry ‘like’ or the exclamatory ‘so’ almost certainly features other discourse markers that nobody seems to mind – ‘kind of’, ‘well’, ‘you know’, ‘I mean’, ‘actually’. Your ‘overuse’ of linguistic tics may be someone else’s normal. They’re not necessarily devoid of meaning, either – it was pointed out that certain academics’ use of ‘as it were’ could imply that the speaker feels that ordinary words are not adequate to express the brilliance of their insight!

There is evidently a difference between what people say and what people think they said, and, frankly white, middle-aged, middle-class men – those with the power – receive less linguistic criticism than other groups in society. Everyone has preferences but when these become judgements and prejudices, these preferences are problematic. The use of ‘he’ as a singular generic pronoun has, thankfully, fallen out of favour but the lack of an alternative term raises new issues. Charlotte Brewer analysed actor James Woods’ recent tweet complaining about the singular ‘they’, taken by many to be transphobic. Dictionaries tend to avoid the matter, as well as failing to reflect new definitions of other gendered words – ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, for example. Do dictionaries record or sanction use – or neither? A woman may have a wife, whether or not the dictionary says it’s possible.

Non-standard may become standard but, even if it doesn’t, non-standard does not mean sub-standard. In fact, it often does a better job of communicating than standard forms. A good example is the sophistication and eloquence of much grime music and rap. Check out The Hip-hop Shakespeare Company for more evidence.

To misquote Taylor Swift: ‘Hey, kids! Grammar is fun!’

Grammar is often taught in primary schools by those who are not confident in describing the technical details. To be honest, many editors make a good living without knowing what a modal verb is, or caring about the difference between ‘which is better?’ and ‘which is best?’. Does it matter? Probably not, if the aim is to pass Key Stage SATs or to make a passage of text easier to understand. But English Grammar Day showed that grammar is about much more than whether fronted adverbials improve a piece of prose.

Editors normally work with the written word. Most users of English differentiate between writing and speaking modes, but younger people often blend the two. Electronic forms of communication (texting, for example) may reflect spoken language written down, but we don’t yet have the terminology to grammatically assess it.

There is always an element of choice in how we use language. Non-standard grammar can both reflect, and play a role in, the performance and expression of our identities. Code-switching is not a problem for most speakers if they first recognise the need and then choose to do so. Contrary to rumour, there is apparently no evidence that GCSE and A-Level examiners have come across text-speak – clearly, young people know how to meet the standards appropriate to the situation. The theme of our 2017 SfEP conference was ‘context is key’ – nobody is saying that students shouldn’t use standard grammar in formal essays, but they don’t need to use it in everyday writing and speech, as long as their audience understands them.

Which brings us back to how editors could address these issues. There’s one short answer. Rob Drummond added a coda to his graph that, ‘You can become a pedantic anti-pedant and that’s unattractive as well.’ Our job, as those with the language knowledge, is to educate pedants. And, sometimes, our job is to recognise that we are those same pedants.

With thanks to the day’s speakers, who provided the springboard for my thoughts in this blog post and to whom I apologise for any inadvertent plagiarism: Charlotte Brewer, Jon Hutchinson, David Denison, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Barbara Bleiman, Rob Drummond and John Mullan.

And with apologies to my proofreader for the first few sentences.

Julia Sandford-Cooke of WordFire Communications has 20 years’ experience of publishing and marketing. She has written and edited numerous textbooks, specialising in vocational education, media studies, construction, health and safety, and travel. Check out her micro book reviews on Ju’s Reviews. Don’t ask her to explain what a modal verb is.

You can brush up your grammar with the SfEP’s online course.

Proofread by Joanne Heath, Entry-Level Member.
Posted by Abi Saffrey, SfEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the SfEP.

I am a Polish editor of English

30 Replies

By Kasia Trojanowska

When I was invited to write about the challenges and rewards of being a non-native speaker editor of English, it felt like the cat was being let out of the bag after a very long time. I am a non-native English speaker and an editor, but I never think of myself as such – to me, I’m simply an English editor. And now, finally, someone has noticed my big, fat secret.

Abi’s (this blog’s coordinator’s) invitation opened up something I hadn’t until then been ready to acknowledge. I imagine that seeing my name people must wonder where I’m from, how good my English actually is and what’s my claim to editorial competence (I also like to imagine they have better things to do). In today’s interconnected world, I could’ve been born in the UK to Polish parents – a lot of immigrant children carry non-English names. But I learned English in another country and came here in my 20s, and when I speak, the first thing you’ll notice will be my unfamiliar accent. Working as an editor, I’m basically asking to be judged on my language at every turn. Shouldn’t an editor be someone whose English, both written and spoken, is impeccable?

By virtue of my background, I’m facing two kinds of challenges already – my name and how I sound. Until that email from Abi, I would deal with them through avoidance. First, I’d be stumped if you found any mention of my background on my public profiles. I’d decided long ago that this would be my weak spot and didn’t want to draw attention to it in case this made anyone doubt my skills. And second, I would simply avoid speaking with clients, at all cost. Unfortunately for me, there are some people who just don’t get the message – and don’t do email. I now thank them.

To a certain extent, the challenges I’ve experienced as an editor of English are internal and come from the idea of what an editor should embody, which to me, and many others, is language knowledge and competence nearing the heights of perfection. As a profession, I think we are quite unique in holding ourselves, often publicly, to such incredibly high linguistic standards that it must come at a price. One of the consequences is that this makes some of us anxious communicators – and the challenge is multiplied for someone who has learned English as an adult. What I’d like us to remember though is that language is a system and therefore can be studied and learned. So can editorial craft. I studied English literature and linguistics for 5 years at university and have worked as an editor of English for nearly 12 years; that gives me close to 17 years of experience as an English-language professional. And I’m still learning – I take editing courses, I read industry books, scour the internet for current language trends, go to conferences – everything we all do as editorial professionals. I find professional development and education to be the best remedy for the lurking ‘English-language editor’ impostor syndrome that rears its head in moments of self-doubt.

Professional development at the 2018 CIEP Conference

The rewards are perhaps the same for me as for everyone else who loves their job. Contact with authors is immensely rewarding; one of my authors calls my editing her work ‘magic’ – it doesn’t get better than this! I engage with incredibly dedicated, knowledgeable and inspirational people who care about how they write, I read books and papers on topics I wouldn’t have come across otherwise, I learn and grow thanks to what I do for a living, and, to use that worn out cliché, I love reading. A challenge now is picking up a book for pure enjoyment, our common complaint I suppose.

I keep going back to that email from Abi, because it’s shifted something for me, prompting a change in how I think about myself and present myself to the world. That same evening, I edited my website bio to say I wasn’t born in the UK and I didn’t graduate from a UK university. Perhaps that’s another step in overcoming my biggest challenge – my own prejudice against myself as a competent, expert, non-native English-language editor.

*As a disclaimer I’d like to add that I have never experienced anything but kindness, encouragement and trust from my colleagues of various nationalities, not least the native speakers of English.

Kasia Trojanowska, APM (CIEP), MA (hons) English Lit, is an academic and non-fiction English-language copy-editor, proofreader and text designer. She was born and educated in Poland and came to the UK for no specific reason in 2007. Shortly after arriving in London, Kasia found her editorial calling and a first job as an assistant scientific editor. She works both with authors who are English native speakers and those for whom English isn’t their first language, and simply loves her job.

Kasia says: I hope it comes across from my blog that ‘non-native English speaker’ is to me an empowering term – it’s part of who I am and I’m proud of my linguistic heritage.

The CIEP’s own view on the use of these labels is available here: ‘”Non-native” and “native”: Why the CIEP is no longer using those terms’.

September 2021

Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Plain English: ‘Be short, be simple, be human’

What is plain English?

Plain English is about communicating with people in writing as clearly as possible.

George Orwell and Ernest Gowers, writing in the 1940s, were among the first to encourage writers to use plain English: ‘Be short, be simple, be human,’ wrote Gowers in his guide Plain Words. There’s no one accepted definition today, but the International Plain Language Federation sums it up nicely:

A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure and design are so clear that the intended audience can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information. [our emphasis]

It’s about putting the reader’s needs first, even above the writer’s preferences, when it comes to deciding how to word and organise a text. This doesn’t ignore the writer’s priorities – quite the opposite! What’s your main aim as a writer, if not to communicate clearly with your readers?

What is it for?

You can use plain English to:

make information accessible to people who aren’t specialists in your area (whether that’s about health, money, research, government policy or something else)
share essential information (on safety or the law)
give people the chance to have a say on things that affect them, or to use services they’re entitled to
build a reputation for putting customers first
build a good relationship with readers
save time and money (on clarifying misunderstandings, reprinting documents).

So you can use it for ethical and economic reasons. By making letters, reports, policies, articles and application forms easier for people they affect to read and understand, you’re making a difference to those people. You’re also making savings for your organisation, and helping to achieve its marketing aims.

What can using plain English do for me?

Writing in plain English can help your organisation:

make the text more effective (informing, selling to or empowering the reader, or appealing to more readers)
market itself (by strengthening your reputation, building trust and loyalty, and attracting customers, staff and suppliers)
achieve its business aims (eg increasing profit by saving time and money)
fulfil its purpose (providing a public service, raising awareness of an important issue).

How can an editor help?

Editors offering plain English services can help by making text clearer and easier to read. Many of them can suggest ways to improve its structure and layout too.

According to the Oxford Guide to Plain English, the average UK adult has a reading age of just 13. They’re also busy – they don’t have time to read insurance policies for pleasure. So in a plain English edit, an editor aims to make the writing as easy as possible for the average person to read.

To do this, editors follow established guidelines, such as those in the Oxford Guide. ‘Translating’ a piece of writing into plain English isn’t a mechanical exercise, though – a trained editor considers the reader’s level of knowledge and what will be clearest for them.

Some editors can also help by:

giving training about using plain English
completely re-writing a document, or writing a plain English summary
designing templates and style guides that follow plain English principles.

What else can I do?

Keep the reader in mind when you’re planning, writing and designing the text – think about what will be clearest and most logical for them.
Make sure you’ve included all the information the reader needs – don’t assume they know as much about your subject as you do.
Learn about the principles of plain English (by doing training and using resources, such as those available from the National Adult Literacy Agency in Ireland).
Test the text on real readers to see if they understand it quickly and easily.
Get feedback from readers on documents you’ve already published and make improvements.

If you write in simple, direct language, readers are more likely to respect and value what you have to say. And this will make as much of a difference to you, and your priorities, as it will to your readers.

Where can I find out more?

The CIEP now offers a course on this topic. It is called Plain English for Editors.

Laura Ripper began her career in 2004 at Plain English Campaign, where she translated all sorts of documents into plain language. In 2008 she moved to a wider editorial and communications role, which included raising awareness of the UK’s switch to digital TV. Laura set up her proofreading and editing business in 2012 to concentrate on the aspects of her job that she loves best. She still specialises in plain English, and has found these skills useful for every type of document – from journal articles to board game rules. She is an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP. When she isn’t at her desk, Laura loves walking in the hills. She has two feline assistants.

Luke Finley set up Luke Finley Editorial in 2013 and is an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP. He briefly worked in publishing in the 1990s, but most of his working life has been spent in the voluntary and public sectors, in social policy development and implementation. His experience of local government gave him a keen interest in plain English and trying (sometimes in vain) to persuade people to communicate more clearly. Luke will edit or proofread anything from academic books to charities’ annual reports to travel agents’ websites, but mostly works on social policy and politics texts.

Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

CIEP blog

The blog of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading

Tag Archives: English

Grab your thongs and the esky, we’re off to the (Australian English) beach!

UK- or US-focused?

Australian words

More subtle differences

Style guides and dictionaries

Antipodean English?

Wise owls: Dialects in England

Louise Bolotin*

Hazel Bird

Melanie Thompson

Sue Littleford

Of Indian Englishes, eating heads and doing the needful

A Finer Point: The sic of ‘sick’

If ever there was a boomer

MUBE it

Word up

Standard bearing

Word count

Write, right, rite

But how did it all go #?

But still …

Resourcelessness

Glossary

Inclusion and diversity

‘Pedantry is not a good look’: the radical message of English Grammar Day

Editors tend to be descriptive, not prescriptive, in their approach

When people criticise the language of others, it’s almost always about more than language

To misquote Taylor Swift: ‘Hey, kids! Grammar is fun!’

I am a Polish editor of English

Plain English: ‘Be short, be simple, be human’

What is plain English?

What is it for?

What can using plain English do for me?

How can an editor help?

What else can I do?

Where can I find out more?