Tenser, said the Tensor

Using the Same Examples

I've been working on linguistic typology recently (beyond my thesis, I mean).  One of the things that a good cross-linguistic survey ought to do is select as random a sample of languages as possible.  However, selecting languages is very hard to do without biasing the sample—for example, in practice you're often limited to written sources, which restricts you to descriptive grammars written in a language you can read and that your library has a copy of.  On top of that, a linguist sometimes has to ignore all the little tidbits of information he or she has picked up over the years about various languages in order to avoid inadvertently choosing the same languages every other linguist would use.

Allow me to illustrate what I mean with a short quiz.  For each question, your answer should be the first example that pops into your head.  I predict that, although our answers won't agree every time, with much greater than chance frequency, you'll pick the same language I did.  My answer follows each question on the same line in the background color—select the line to see it.

[Update: If you're reading this post through an aggregator, the formatting has likely been stripped off, making my answers visible.  Try clicking through to the actual blog to take the quiz.]

1. Name a non-Indo-European language.  Basque
2. Name an Australian language.  Dyirbal
3. Name a group of non-mutually intelligible languages that are often called "dialects".  Chinese
4. Name a group of several mutually intelligible dialects that are often called "languages".  Scandinavian
5. Name a head-initial language.  English
6. Name a head-final language.  Japanese
7. Name a language with free word order (scrambling).  Classical Latin
8. Name an isolating language.  Mandarin Chinese
9. Name a language that permits null subjects.  Spanish or Italian
10. Name a language with basic word order SVO.  English
11. Name a language with basic word order SOV.  Japanese
12. Name a language with basic word order VSO.  Irish
13. Name a language with many noun cases.  Finnish
14. Name a language with many forms for each verb.  Turkish
15. Name a language with many noun classes (genders).  Swahili
16. Name a language with noun classifiers (counters).  Mandarin Chinese
17. Name a language with productive reduplication.  Tagalog
18. Name an ergative-absolutive language.  Georgian
19. Name a language with dual number.  Classical Greek
20. Name a language with complex consonant clusters.  Berber or Polish
21. Name a language with tones.  Mandarin Chinese
22. Name a language with vowel harmony.  Turkish
23. Name a language with a small phoneme inventory.  Hawaiian

See what I mean?  I stayed away from questions where there's only one or two good answers (e.g. "Name a language that contains grammtical structures that are beyond the power of context free grammars"), but I'll bet we chose the same language more than once.  If we have the same answers for such wide-ranging phenomena as these, that means linguistics as a field has, by a sort of unspoken agreement, agreed upon a set of standard examples.  Now, there's probably more than one common answer for some of these questions—number 1 was just a stab in the dark, although I bet Basque is the answer more than once per (Nlanguages – NIndo-European) respondents—but there's often a very small group of languages that turns up in discussions of a particular phenomenon over and over.

This is, I suppose, inevitable, and not entirely negative.  It's handy if everyone in the field shares a common working set of examples so we can easily have discussions about various interesting phenomena.  However, if we're really interested in exploring the full range of possible human languages, playing in the same small sandbox of well-known languages (and occasionally adding a new example when somebody strays off the beaten path) simply won't cut it as a method of searching the human language space.

I can think of a solution, but it's hard: learn more "exotic" languages, specialize in language families beyond the familiar (I think we've got Indo-European covered at this point), and fer chrissake stop using English as a source of examples.  Did I say "hard"?  Maybe I should have said "unrealistic"—I have to admit that I'm not ready to abandon the use of examples from my native language—but a real effort to stay away from the standard example languages can only lead us to a broader perspective and a better basis for cross-linguistic generalizations.

[Now playing: "Los Angeles" by X]

[Update: In the comments, Heidi Harley mentions a similar list she's been collecting: examples upon which well-known bits of linguistic theory are based.]

Reel Wheel

This morning a reader (oh, all right, it was Terminal Student) sent me a link to this segment on NPR's Weekend Edition about an audio archive of British regional accents.  It includes recordings of two speakers with really interesting accents.  Give a listen—can you follow what they're saying?

NPR host Sheilah Kast seemed to need a translation of what they're saying, but I didn't find them to be too hard to follow after the first few words, although I had to pay close attention.  All those years of memorizing Monty Python are finally paying off, I guess.  Is it my imagination, or does the old woman talking about baking bread say [wæɹm wæθɹ̩] (with a theta) for "warm water"?  I'd never heard that dialect feature before.

The collection these recordings are drawn from contains 681 items, including longer recordings of the two speakers in the broadcast, so you can listen to the voices of disappearing varieties of English for hours on end.  I suppose I'm used to a huge country connected by TV, radio, telephones, and continuous mass migrations, but I'm always surprised by the sheer variety of accents that exist in the UK.  England and America may be two countries separated by a common language, but from where I'm sitting it's a wonder people from adjacent counties in England can understand each other at all.

[Now playing: "Somebody Told Me" by The Killers]