#mle

[nightycaiman]

BOBA SKINK MOMENT

he made his water dirty im sorry friend pings for this awesome skinkmoment

@birbisanon @suchacreativeusrname @bread-in-persimmon-season

[earhartsease]

just suddenly imagining a prehistoric version of mlp called My Little Eohippus so the fans are called hippies

[kephas-rolling]

I was reading on Multicultural London English, and focused on some phonetic features and discovered that the backing of /k/ to [q] - pronounced like Arabic ق in قَلَمَ /qa.la.ma/ "to cut, to clip - was a frequent realisation before a selected set of vowels.

[q] occurs before /ʌ, ɑ, ɒ, ɔː/, that is low and mid-low back vowels in word-initial position. Roundness doesn't seem to play role in the backing of /k/. I don't think this is a coincidence because in MLE, high vowels seem starkly fronted /ʊ/ => [ʉ], /uː/ => /ʏː/ while low back vowels are backing even more, as illustrated in the graphs below, comparing a senior and a teenager:

The authors (Cheshire, Fox, Kerswill & Torgersen 2008:16) mention that there is a strong generational divide; the uvular realisation was completely absent from elderly speakers' speech.

There is a gender divide as well, female speakers were less likely to use [q] than male speakers and also a strong ethnic factor. The authors' research with teenagers from Hackney and Havering boroughs. The backed version [q] was less frequently used in the speech of Anglo kids, meaning with a ‘white London’ background; that is, their families have relatively local roots (‘Anglo’).

The results show that [q] is "the average frequency amongst the Anglo speakers is 70.2% and amongst the non-Anglos 65.0%, a difference which is not significantly different."

There is one more important factor accounting for the frequency of [q], and that's friendship networks. Indeed, as Cheshire et al explain:

"Although ethnicity does not show up as a significant factor, there is a main effect of friendship network (p<0.01) and this is due to Anglo speakers with an Anglo network being less likely to use the back variants (p<0.05). The Anglo speakers with a non-Anglo network were not significantly different from the non-Anglo speakers".

This correlation plays a strong role in linguistic innovation. The authors mention that speakers from ethnically diverse environment were the most innovative ones. Speakers who 80% of their friends of a different ethnicity display the most prominent use of [q]. "There are significant effects of friendship network for K-backing (Anglo speakers with an Anglo network have less use of the most".

I just love that the friendship network factor was integrated in relation to the diversity of informants' friend to better frame the frequency of a phoneme.

Source:

Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect change: Linguistic innovation in London, by Jenny Cheshire, Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill & Eivind Torgersen (2008)

[riverphoenixsgothwife]

goth or emo kris lemche flipping off the camera in a 2000s horror movie is something that can be so personal

[princess-lointaine]

hair pins styled as opera gloves, made from eco-friendly cellulose acetate. by mle.

[lebanesetoaster]

If you ever think to yourself, I should listen to that one (old) Melissa Etheridge song. No your shouldn’t. That’s the devil talking. It’s not relevant to the situation at hand. This music is written somewhere deep in my bones and now is NOT the time for that drama.

[modelpluswarsaw]

Paulina Wyka for MLE Collection Campaign captured by Dorota Porębska 

[lefuette]

Incorrect ntwewy quotes by me #1

Fret: Is this a good idea?

Minamimoto: Is assuming a normal distribution a good idea when you could easily do an ML estimation?

Fret: ...yes? Is the answer yes this time?