Deborah Cameron on immigration and the English language

Here is a link I found thanks to the LingEducator page on Facebook. Deborah Cameron, author of my all-time favourite Verbal Hygiene (1995), takes a stance on British politicians' ideas concerning immigrants living in the UK and their alleged unwillingness to learn English or teach it to their offspring. I can't say I agree with it wholeheartedly, hearing as I do UK-based Poles who absolutely murder English, but it's definitely an interesting read.
http://www.berfrois.com/2012/12/deborah-cameron-a-word-of-the-queens/

In case you haven't read Verbal Hygiene yet (and you must if you're a linguist), here's a link: http://books.google.pl/books?id=69jW-IyasdoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=verbal+hygiene&hl=pl&sa=X&ei=SpPkUOmiLIiphAfl0YCwBQ&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Peter Patrick's sociolinguistics handouts

Today I discovered a handful of handouts on sociolinguistics by Peter L. Patrick of the University of Essex. The document whose URL is below contains links to several other handouts by Patrick and others.
http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lg/lg474/CoreIdeasSociolx.pdf

'Things ain't what they used to be': Handke again

Kwiryna Handke's Socjologia języka (Sociology of Language) (Warsaw, 2008) turned out to be a book partly on sociolinguistics and partly on sociology of language, as the title indicates. It's also concerned with stylistics, etymology and correctness (that's right, not grammaticality and not standard usage). Almost all of the book deals with Polish so that reading it makes sense only to students of Polish and other people who are fluent in the language. I'm sorry to say that unless I misunderstood the author she believes in the following:

1. Polish can be beautiful and correct or ugly and incorrect.
2. In the past Poles cared about correctness, while these days nobody does.
3. In the past nobody used slang or swear words, while these days everyone does. Poles swear all the frigging time!
4. It is okay to prove points 2 and 3 by comparing letters written by writers over a hundred years ago and things heard in the street in recent years. It's like comparing 19th-century portraits painted by professionals to someone's doodles made with a pen to prove that art is dead.
5. It is okay to write about 21st-century Polish and all of a sudden quote a poem written in the Romantic period as if it really represented the real spoken or written Polish of today.
6. In the past women taught their children to use correct Polish, whereas these days, since no one cares anyway, they don't even know what correct Polish is. This is connected with a total lack of patriotism, apparently.
7. It was okay to borrow heavily from a variety of languages in the past, while now it's not okay to borrow words or structures from English.
8. Language change in the past was cool but now it's language decay.
9. Last but not least Standard Polish is in fact literary or cultured Polish.

Much as I respect and appreciate Handke's scholarship, as a thirty-year-old I can't help feeling accused of being too stupid to speak my language 'properly' and therefore stabbing it with a knife every time I use 'cool' or fail to decline someone's surname in the only 'correct' way till my mother tongue bleeds to death. It's just a pity the author provides no statistics because I'd like to see actual numbers proving that my language is deteriorating. Maybe then I'd launch a Polish language saving campaign myself.

Stephen Fryguist

I forgot to mention where the title of my blog comes from. Stephen Fry, known in my country for his rather silly words on Polish antisemitism said in 2009 as well as the fact that he's married to a man, happens to be one of my favourite actors and model users of English. Despite my dislike of unnecessary and dogmatic prescriptivism, the fact that I'm not a native speaker of the language allows me to admire and at times emulate his accent, vocabulary and style. I never fail to recommend listening to him to my students.
'Don't Mind Your Language', presented on his blog as a podcast and a written text, is a wonderful piece of Fryesque rhetoric concerning language pundits ('Sod them to Hades!') and 'hard' linguistics, namely Stephen Pinker, Guy Deutscher and Ferdinand de Saussure. Last year at a conference in Toruń I gave a speech comparing Fry's views presented in the essay to David Crystal's books for the general reader and I'll notify you as soon as it's published.
If you haven't heard/read the essay yet, please do. If you teach advanced English or Introduction to Linguistics, don't hesitate to download the podcast and present it to your students.

http://www.stephenfry.com/2008/11/04/dont-mind-your-language%E2%80%A6/

Texting and the 'threat' to English

In this very entertaining episode of a BBC show my all-time favourite Professor David Crystal explains why mobile phone texting is not bad for the English language. I have yet to read his book on 'txtng'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7WSzxQ0nX4