 Ie ddod am y trofodaeth fel gweithio. Felly gweithio arall y meddwl am y gynhyrch. Ie ddweud amser. Mae'n mynd i ddweud o gweithio. Rydym chi ddweud yr oedd cyfnodol, yn ddwy ar y ddweud. Mae'n ddweud o'n ddweud o gweithio arall. Mae'n ddweud ar Barbara Beaumont, Brann Robinson, ac Peter Skeen, felly mae'n ddweud arall, mae'n ddweud. Daeth yn ddelwyd. Rwy'n cael ei fod yn ymryd ac yn yw'r cyfnod mewn ymddangos, ac yn cael yr ysgrifennu, mae gennym ni bod yn gallu gweithio'n gweithio'r gweithio. Roeddwn yn gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Ond rhaid i'n meddwl i'n rhan o'r ffordd o'r rhan o'r gweithio'n gweithio, a'r cyfnod i'n gwneud o'r gweithio. Roeddwn i gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Y cwmaint eich hwyl yn ymweithio i'r gweithio, y gallwn i'n gwneud o weithio ar gyfer y cyfnodod ac yn y ffwrdd cyd-dod y gallwn i'r cyfrifiadau, dwi'n gwybod am ymarfer, dwi'n gwybod am yw'r cyfrifiadau. Felly, roeddwn i wych yn ymddangosol, dwi'n gweithio ar gyfer y baffwmwynt. Yn ymddi'r cwestiynau, yn eich cyfrifiadau? Felly, ychydig i'n mynd i'r cwestiynau, dwi'n gweithio ar gyfer y cyfrifiadau. ac mae'n ddim yn gallu bod nhw'n gwneud. Mae'r gwahaniaethau, o ffordd, y llwyddo llwyddo i fod y gallu gwahaniaethau. A oedd drwsgol y gallu gwahaniaethau, ac y gwahaniaethau y gallu gwahaniaethau yw y gynllun gyda'i gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. ac nid oes, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Yn ni wedi bod y rhaid, y ffordd y cyfnodd y gallu gyda'i gwahaniaethau. Roeddwn ni'n gweithio'n gweithio. Dy THAT is theoretical or pure I love that This is Noem Chomsky Probably the most famous theoretical linguist ever in the history of the world He is standing in front of a blackboard on which he's written lots of boxes and numbers and arrows and lines and what looks like algebra Ond rhan fyddw Xbyloedd. That is theoretical linguistics. And I don't want to disrespect it, but I don't do that because I don't really like it. And it's full of things like that as well, which I did see for the first time while I was an undergraduate and quickly put down. This is to do with the structure of human languages and this particular puzzle is some kind of explanation for cyfle, ypingonell�� iawn dyw'r g öl aryu cyma iawn agor. I'm sure it's interesting, but it it doesn't interest me. Here's something else that Chomsky's quite ... and theoretical linguists are quite like doing. This is something called optimality theory, which is a linguistic model proposing that observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting constraints and it models grammars as systems sydd gennym iaith gweithio eu bydd, a pa i gyd, y gydig iaeth gwaith y Cymru. Rhywun ned ei bod yn cyrranu gorfod yn ymgyrch. Mae'n rhaid o'n gydig iaith y gwahanol. Felly mae'n gorfod hynny ti'n gydig iaith. Mae yn gydig iaith gweithio'r eraill i fynd uithio ddimoglau. Mae eich cyfnod yn ymgyrch. Ymdill. In one slide is this... Oh, no it's not. Sorry, that's coming up. I had to put this in before I did my one slide. There is a bridge between the two actually. This is phraise tree structure. That's Chomsky sleeping under a tree possibly waiting for an apple to fall in his head. Llywodraeth gweinidol, Lywodraeth Gweinidol, yn y gallan ynddyn ni'n wneud o'r ffordd cyflogol i gael ffawr ar gyfer Llywodraeth Llwyddiadol. Felly mae'n gweinidol Yn amlwg dyma'r ei ddedwyll ac yn oed yn ffawr, yn dda i'w korwp fe fwy fydd yn cael ei deilio. Mae'r umdal o'r ffordd yn ffordd ond mae'n ddedw i gael ffordd. Fyddyn ni'n dydyn ni'n gweinidol yr ysgol, yn yr ysgol ond mae'n ddeu yn sercau. And this one in because because of John, I found this on the internet. John that's for you. And this is a sentence broken down into its constituent parts. Its constituent little phrases which are embedded inside each other. An applied linguist isn't terribly interested in that because it's a made-up sentence. But might be interested in a variant on that which would be John has lost his marbles. Ond myfyrwch sydd wedi cythaspros fydd gweithio eich cyfwyr am hollol gweithio, ond mae'r fwmgynod gyffredinol dweud y ffyrwch eich cyffredinol yn ei ddysgol iawn. Felly, mae'r rhai byddiadau yn unigod. Felly yn weithio ffyrwch, rwy'n ddefnyddig. Pwysig i'r rhaglen. Rwy'n edrych yn ychydig i'n cofnod i gael eich gwysoedd â'i gynhyrch. Na ydy'r rhaid y gallwn gweld. Rwy'n dim eu chynghwys. That's a applied linguistics, because what's missing from theoretical linguistic and I don't wish to disrubect them I really don't. I'm not clever enough to do any of that, but what's missing are people. Where you have people, you have language. If you have people who know language something very bizarre is going on, something horrible has probably happened. Where there are people, there is language, they're speaking it, they're listening to it, they're reading it, they're writing it, they're dealing with it. ac y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth am gyll y ffordd, i gyfarwch y ffordd. Rhyw gydag i'r gael ei dweud i gafin i ffwrdd y cyflym ychydig. I sy'n gallu gyfarwch. Rhyw gydag i'r Llywodraeth Corpus. Rhyw gydag i'r Llywodraeth Corpus eich analysu o lyfr ei lleolion o llangwyd produce by people not thought up like colourless green ideas, so it's what people produce enormous samples and we are talking millions of examples of speech or writing can be put to a computer analysis that will pick out patterns which an individual human brain would not be able to see. I've got up here an example of something you may never have saw before but you do know if you're speaking English It's that the word recommend collocates with strongly, and sometimes with highly, but mostly with strongly. So if you ever use strongly with the word recommend and you do, it's because it's what everybody else is doing. Here's another one. I was going to ask you, I've given away. I was going to ask you what you thought was collocated with accessible. Mae'r ddwych yn ddwych, a ddiwodol eich llaw o'r ddwych, ond mae'r ddwych yn ddweud o'r ddweud. Felly, mae'r ddwych yn bob ddwych. Felly, ynddo'r ddwych yn ffonetu ac ffonologi, mae'n edrych i'r ddwych yn y Ffóngau hyn, mae'n meddwl i'r ddweud, a roedd yn bwysig yn ffawr i'r ddwych o'r ffonimau sy'n eu rhai ffawr i'r ddwych o'r ffynol o'r argyfwad yw'r ddwych. Rwy'n gwybod fe oedd ychydig yn wneud y gallwn gweithio'r llawr, ac rwy'n meddwl ymddangos. Ac rwy'n meddwl yw'r mecanicau ar y rôl yw'r llawr, ac rwy'n meddwl yw'r ysbytion yng nghymru. Yn ymddangos ymddangos ymgyrch yw'r llawr o'r llawr, lle mae'r llawr o'r llawr o'r llawr o'r llawr gael, o bobl hwn. Mae eich sgwyl yn argynno'r sgwyl. mae'n ardychel sy'n gweithio'r boel sydd yng ngheilio. Yn 700 o baf yw yw'r boel sydd yn gweithio'r cyfrôn. A gael i'r cyfrannu, mae'n cael ei rhywbeth. Rwy'n gwybod i'n rwyb i ni ddechrau yng ngyrdd. Felly, y cyfrannu 5 yw yn ei chyrdd wedi'u cyfrannu i'r cyfrannu hwyntaf yn gweithio'u cyfrannu. Mae hyn yn ei wneud i gael eich cyfrannu cyfrannu. iawn i gynch. Cymrydau cymaint o'r problemau hynny. Cymrydau cymrydau, nid yw'r cyfrindig, mae'r cyfrindig yma, gallwn cymrydau, mae'r cyfrindig, felly mae'r cyfrindig wedi'u cyfrindig, ac mae'r cyfrindig yn y papro Niwginni Hyllans ar y twbad 30 o 40 y gyrdyn nhw yw'r cyfrindig dwi'n cyfrindig yw'r cyfrindig yw rhan yw'r cyfrindig a'r cyfrindig yn ei wneud gydag yma many thousands of years possibly, and whose language was therefore unrelated and very, it's called, I forgot what it's called now, Michael will tell me, a language which has no relatives, never mind, forget that, and people will go in wanting to describe it, wanting to describe how that language solves the problems that all human languages do, how to relate thought to speech. Are the people look at the relationships between families? These are all of the Indo-European family of languages, looking at how they are related to each other in terms of prepositions and word order. Even more broadly, it's possible other applied linguists have done a huge amount of research and established that there are four main language families in the world. You've got the blue one, the Indo-European. The green one in Africa is the Bantu language family, the red one, the Polynesian family, and there's an Utho Aztecan family in North and Central America. And so looking at how languages are typologically similar or dissimilar gives you a lot of information about human migrations possibly of very, very many thousands of years ago. It might even lead you into this branch of applied linguistics. I think this is the best Christmas card I've ever seen. I do think they're walking through snow. It's very loving. They're not human. They're early hominids. Is he saying anything to her? It looks like he is. There's a lot of speculation here. Did these early forms of humans have language? It's largely speculative and it's perhaps a tiny bit pointless, but it's nevertheless quite interesting. Something more useful is forensic linguistics. Every single person has an ideolec, that is to say their language is peculiar to themselves in, for example, their favourite phrasings, the choice of syntactic structures, things they don't say, expressions they don't use, and this gives us the possibility of this kind of investigation. Julie Turner went missing in 2005 and later texted her family, telling them she was fine, but her family were suspicious and so were the police. They turned over her texts, both the ones from before she went missing and the ones after she went missing, and a forensic linguist compared the two and found they were very different. In fact, they were very similar to the ideolect of some chap who's name I can't remember, who the police suspected of being involved in her disappearance and indeed that was proved and he is now serving life in prison. Now, I think if we had one of those working for us at St Mary's, we'd have in the REF just about the best case study you could possibly have. I've put someone in jail, that's the impact, that's the impact of my research, or possibly I've saved someone from the electric chair by proving that he couldn't have written that confession because it wasn't his ideolect. More trivially, did he write his plays or was it loads of different people contributing to his plays? Forensic Linguistics has methods to sort of fer it out, how much of Henry VIII did Shakespeare write, etc. I'm going to skip over the next slide because it takes time. Historical linguistics takes the diachronic view. What was language like in the day of Shakespeare? Chaucer, the Beowulf poet. How did Latin change gradually into French over the course of a thousand years or so? So it's Chaucer, middle English and a thousand years ago English looked like that if it was written down. That was their favourite font at the time and it sounded like this and if you know Luke chapter 2 verse 7 as I'm sure you do and it is quite seasonal, this says And he know me chilclathon be wand, and he know on bin a laid, for them the he nafton room on Cumannahus. There's probably one word there, well there's two, there's the word and that's quite easy and there's the word room and then the rest of it's a bit mysterious but I might come back to that. The point is that's what historical linguists do. Coming up to the present day, social linguistics is the study not just of accents and dialect but of group variation across class, ethnicity, gender, geographical regions, the relationship of language to power which is a really important area. Power is exercised in and opposed through language. Language is highly political, it's not just some bizarre hobby that linguists have, it's highly political and it can get you into trouble big time. On the left Jordan Blackshore age 20 created an event called Smash Down Northwich Town. Unfortunately he did that in August when the rest of the country was going up in flames and he was arrested. On the right Perry Sutclith Keenan age 22 caused a wave panic in Warrington by posting a link to on his Facebook to a page called The Warrington Riots. Nothing happened in Northwich, nothing happened in Warrington, it was very peaceful and quiet, it wasn't a single writer including them but they both got four years in jail for that linguistic act. He needs no introduction. Last week when some of us were out there on the picket line defending our pensions he said frankly I'd have them all shot, I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families. I mean how dare they go on strike when they have these gilt edge pensions that are going to be guaranteed while the rest of us have to work for a living. Well that was apparently a joke, that was a crime, that was a joke. What does language mean and who gets to say what it means? Who gets to say that was a joke and so he's fine, he's kept his job. Who gets to say what that link on a Facebook meant and why they are in prison? Obviously it's a political act and there are applied linguists on that case. Social linguistics is very interesting in the exercise of power through language. When is a joker crime and when is it just a bit of fun? Right engage your brain before you say anything is probably something which Jeremy Clarkson ought to have on a shirt somewhere. Neurolinguistics is the study of the anatomy of the brain in relation to language language use and modern research toys like magnetic resonance imaging and positron electron tomography to name but two can give you images of brain activity when a person is reading or speaking or writing or listening to language as opposed to not doing any of those things. It can also give you a view into a damaged brain, a brain which has been damaged through trauma of some kind and so that the person cannot produce or understand language and all that is extremely interesting. Developmental psycholinguistics is a sort of subset of that. It looks at children's ability to learn language, there they are, which is phenomenal. They can do it like they'll never be able to do it again in the rest of their lives and that's a fantastic puzzle for us. This is a little group of four-year-olds. They cannot make themselves a sandwich. They certainly can't tie their shoes or be allowed to go out down the corner shop and buy a newspaper. They can't do any of those things but they can speak and they can speak a lot and they can speak grammatically. They have a big vocabulary. In fact they're only two years away from having pretty much finished language acquisition. How is that possible? It's a study that developmental psycholinguistics really likes to ask. I'm not in that. I'm in this. This is my field, second language acquisition and it looks at how humans develop knowledge of a language after childhood and the unhappy truth that this is almost always not nearly as well as they could before their childhood ended. The sorts of questions that second language acquisition is asking is why how? What's it got to do with motivation, age, personality, quality of instruction, cognitive ability or innate endowments? More of that later perhaps. I've just brought that in this is your score in English language test plotted against your age at which you started and it looks like you've just jumped off a cliff and bounced onto some concrete underneath. There's a catastrophic decline that sets in according to that particular one when you're seven and it's by the time you're twelve it's picked up speed and hasn't reached its terminal velocity even at that age. Well almost us. This is nothing to do with linguistics but it claims it is. I thought I'd put it in. They're not almost us. They are absolutely millions of years away and the studies which try to show that they are almost us are frankly risible because the only thing they ever show is that apes will do anything at all including pretending to use human language for peanuts or a piece of fruit or a chocolate biscuit. That's something which babies don't. The problem with babies and humans is this one you don't have to reward them to get them to talk you have to reward them to get them to shut up. You never have to encourage your child to say anything by offering it a peanut or a chocolate biscuit unless you are training them in pragmatic dimensions of language politeness like saying please thank you thank you for having me and things like that. So I just wanted to pause here. Go slightly off course and there are rules that we all absorb as we grow up about when to be quiet when you're allowed to speak I'm just basically going to point out the fact that you all know the moment you can't say anything because it's my go and sort of putting your hand up and asking your question now is not appropriate you can ask them at the end but you can't do it now and if you want to talk to each other you can have to do it quietly so that I don't look at you like that but what would happen if your phone rang and I'm not asking that because I want you now to turn your phone off it's not because of a trick like that it's that what seems to happen in the modern world is with this technology when your phone rings the phone becomes the most important thing of all linguistically and in case answered it butts in the phone butts in all the time and it breaks all of the rules you shouldn't butt in you should politely inquire if you can stop speaking to somebody and attend to something else but everybody seems to think your phone rings that's the most important linguistics thing now answer that phone so I'm not asking you to turn your phone off I'm just saying I think I need that t-shirt when I am in a tutorial right I should maybe get one of those pragmatics covers the study of the non compositional nature of language in other words that meaning is frequently not recoverable from the sum of its parts language is figurative I think I've got a slide about that yes here you are it's figurative meanings are implied rather than stated broadly and there will always be um problems for extraterrestrial beings who don't know that uh an extraterrestrial being who replies to the question he's just been asked there with a why yes thank you I would like a knuckle sandwich hasn't understood language at all and he's about to get beaten up so it's quite important and the problem with that invader from outer spaces he's been reading that man's book and not that man's book right the danger of um computers taking over the world it's not in a lot of science fiction that computers without speaking you know get re-intelligent no they won't we will always be able to beat them that language always because we know how to imply we know how to suggest without saying things on the surface we are much cleverer thank goodness I think that's hope I hope using that's quite a comfort in this day and age now all the above areas of flooding physics are something terribly important in common and this is the subject really of my talk tonight they are evidence-based I'm again I don't wish to disrespect this chap here it's not to say that Chomsky and generative linguistics is not interested in evidence because they are in fact they are so interested in evidence they spent the last 50 years looking for evidence for the existence of a universal human grammar which is at the heart of generative linguistics they haven't come up with anything substantial and I think that's a very entrenched position but I'm going to talk about that a bit later on but the fact is applied linguistics is an evidence-based discipline and we think we get a very raw deal if we were if from any other discipline that is evidence-based which is any other science at all I mean you can think of astronomy epidemiology particle physics you know brain surgery or whatever that in itself should be good enough when you tell somebody what do you do oh I'm an oncologist I'm a particle physicist I'm an astronomer that should be good enough people will be willing to concede that they don't know anything about your subject and so that you probably are expert and they will bow to your greater wisdom you will not say something like yeah well I know you think that nothing can move faster than a speed of light but I don't think so and so I'm just not going to listen to anything you have to say and applied linguists doesn't get that kind of concession at all language is so much part of our daily lives and I think people think it must be obvious to everybody how it works that their own experience counts for a great deal even in the face of evidence they don't want to give up their opinion they don't want to give up their assertions they don't want to give up what they think is obviously common sense now what I'm going to do now I hope with this technology is show you something which is not a proof of my title but an emblem for it right so not a proof I want you to hold on to that it's not a proof but it's quite good fun and it is emblematic and it requires you to listen I've deliberately chosen this link to be in Japanese so that you won't be distracted by what these people are saying but you should be able to understand what they're doing right now Japanese for I don't believe it is like that that's what happened there um so I hope you followed that what they were listening to was exactly the same loop of sound it was always bah bah bah bah but when they were looking at the man's mouth it was a film of him saying another sound he was actually saying dah or ga you can't really tell but I thought it was a dah and even when they're told that what they're listening to is a bah their brain will tell them that what they're looking at is much more convincing and it is actually not that sound so you don't I'll just I'll just go on with this here I've played the rest of it well you have to bear in mind is when you can't see the person's mouth you will hear the sound as bah when you can see the person's mouth you will hear it as dah even though I've told you and it's true there isn't any difference it's always the same sound that's what happened I have not been able to convince myself that that sound doesn't change unless you shut your eyes and then you hear that it doesn't change the information of your eyes is too hard for you to override the McGurk effect the McGurk effect into YouTube there's loads of them there's loads of them so what's going on here is although you might understand that I am telling you the truth that is always the same sound and even though you may understand that because when you shut your eyes you know it's always the same sound you can't believe it you can't believe it there's no one that is a man who's been researching this effect for 15 years still can't believe it he's still not able to override but this is an emblem for my talk and also an excuse to look at something which is quite amusing no matter how good our evidence is that things in language are the way they are no matter how much evidence we muster to explain aspects of language to people if we get in the way of their long held beliefs they don't believe you they can't believe you it's extremely difficult to persuade the majority of people that evidence for matters linguistic is much more powerful than anecdote it's much more powerful than opinion it's much more powerful than the horrible idea of common sense common sense is a stupid guide to reality common sense tells you the sun moves across the sky during the course of the day and of course it doesn't but common sense will tell you yes it does I saw it you know I'm not moving I know I'm not moving so let me bring up here next some things that might challenge what you've always thought there are no primitive languages you might have thought oh yes there are there are sophisticated languages are written what if I tell you there are none what if I tell you that everyone speaks grammatically everyone you might not believe that because you are always told by your teachers at school that there were people that didn't speak grammatically and there were very bad people that needed to be eradicated what if I tell you that English is not a global language because if it's innate linguistic superiority no it's not it's not because it's top language what if I told you to calm down because English is not going down the toilet it's not in decline which you might think you might be older if you have to be at a certain age before you start believing that but some of you are there what if I told you that slang or texting there are doing nothing to the standard of the English language at all they're not and sorry Philip but what if I told you that your dog hasn't learned English applied linguistics it's got evidence for all of these things in spades stuns bucketfuls of it there is nothing to support the opposite opinion which is what you find in the ordinary world outside of applied linguistics and that kind of thing is met with huge hostility huge hostility we're accused of damaging the language of having some horrible laissez faire probably left wing attitudes that will mean the end of children speaking properly the death of language standards and we're seen just be dribbling and grunting rather than using language now I just want to run through this this guy may well come from a culture which has a stone age primitive technology but his language isn't primitive his language is as complex as any other human language and would take you a very long time to love it's not primitive he doesn't just have a few words you know and a few grunts and a few signs and she does actually speak grammatically and if I had a whiteboard I'd draw you the tree I mean yeah she doesn't speak a lot of sense she's in she's not even a girl so man dressed up there's an awful lot of nonsense but it's grammatical and I you know it is I'm sorry because if it weren't there would be no joke you wouldn't be able to understand a word she was saying but it is grammatical English is a global language not because it's the best language because thanks to historical accidents there was a British empire that was succeeded by an American empire and the language was English and it got taken all over the place and it makes the French ffume because you know they would have got in first if they had been able to and then we'd always be in French as a global language I don't think you can see this and I'm sorry I couldn't make it any bigger and I couldn't find anything better um this is a really interesting uh graph I mean you can't see them at the top it says 65 000 years ago people left Africa um and we don't know how long they'd stayed there before they left probably you know could be another 20 50 000 years that humans were in Africa before they broke out um but what this is saying is uh they left Africa some of them came into Europe by 5000 years ago 5000 BC there was a group of them in southern russia northern uh turkey speaking a language which we call proto-indoeuropean um by 1000 BC a group of them were sitting offshore uh to the british isles and then they invaded 500 AD they were here and we can start calling their language english and then of course the vikings invaded in the eighth and ninth centuries and then we had the norman conquest uh which helped to bring about uh the variety of english called middle english and then we have the renaisals and then we have Shakespeare English and basically then we have 2012 the dialect I'm speaking to you now um in order to think that english is in decline you've got to believe and this is a stupid position that for the last 95 000 years this language has been changing until it's delivered the one I'm speaking now and then any further changes are some kind of ghastly falling off of standards if you look at it diachronically like this we're just part of an inevitable movement of change it's neither good nor bad it's completely neutral now you can say that over and over and over and over again and you can explain it and you'll still get people saying no but it's being ruined it's being ruined by things like this this is a real bogey uh a lot of people but you know abbreviations are part of our language heritage and we see them we know them we're not afraid of them we don't think they're bad but they are all doing the same job of making writing faster and if you are chipping writing on a stone tablet that's really good and if you are trying to write on a piece of incredibly expensive vellum that's also very good and if you're trying to do and oops sorry a message in a little tiny text box like that it's the only way to go if you can read this what's the problem is a perfectly well-formed english sentence which has been tapped out by somebody who does know english and can spell it because if you can't you can't work out that can't work it out you don't know how to spell so calm down dear and here is one for Philip especially what we say to dogs and what they hear the dog knows your cross it knows your pointing at it your voice is raised it does know your cross and it doesn't know why and it's not going to be able to think to itself well i'd better stay out of the garbage in the future because obviously i'm going to be in major trouble however the resistance i just need to say this the resistance to things like this is so deep it's so pervasive that Deborah Cameron in her book verbal hygiene has said it's just hopeless everybody give up we are never going to win the argument here with the human race because there's some deep seated psychological inability to accept that the way we speak isn't the only way that speech can be done that we're afraid of it changing because it's undermining something which is extremely important to us and therefore we should all give up now i'm going to say in my talk tonight i don't want to give up i don't want to throw in the town and say yeah well we know that texting isn't ruining english but nobody is going to believe us i want to say we know it's not ruining english and people should start believing us even though and Deborah Cameron makes this point as well we get accused of saying well the problem with applied linguistics is you just don't like rules you just think anything is all right and i want to say here tonight there's nobody who likes a grammar rule more than an applied linguist we love them they're our bread and butter we're interested in them to such an extent that we do research projects into them to see whether particular grammatical rules are still current or never current or are ceasing to be current or whether you know they've been acquired by a learner or not acquired by a learner we're not in the business of lambasting people for not using rules that never existed except in the minds of pedants now i'm going to bring up next something that could go on for a very very long time so i've just picked my favorite targets a few notes about them here the hall of shame is led off by she thinks the only thing that can rescue english is the teaching of latin i'm all for the teaching of latin it's not going to do anything about english it is actually and a different language simon heffa has written an utterly ignorant and completely stupid blustering book called strictly english insisting on a return to rules of grammar which he thinks existed in the past when they didn't and haven't or haven't done since the 17th century his complete buffoon uh oh dear i'm being recorded no he's not allegedly uh he strongly insists on things like the plural of cappuccino is cappuccini and of course it's not unless you're speaking italian when it is but that's not what he means uh he's also very keen on people starting to say even though it be not raining i shall go for a walk you know what a nutter uh i'm afraid his royal highness doesn't approve of new words it's all getting a bit of a mess he said new words must be stopped uh i would like to point out to his royal highness all words were new at some point and if i can take you back to the 11th century version of luke um if we translated that into modern english they pretty much many of them would be completely new i always like to tell him the word prince is a new word for some people it was a new word um around about the 12th century or so it replaced the english word athling so there he's too young for this but he sees language doom in texting and he's written about it on his blog uh perl bainbridge is unfortunately no longer with us but while she was alive she wished to kill off regional accents because she thought they were horribly ugly and she wanted compulsory elocution lessons in schools christopher hitchins doesn't like the use of as as a conjunction no he does he doesn't like like as a conjunction sorry he doesn't like things like it tastes good like a cigarette should his bad english it should be it tastes good as a cigarette should and and he says that if we can just turn the clock back and get people to properly use as and like and not improperly everybody will start speaking very much more sense of course of course that's not true you can speak complete rubbish grammatically and most people do basically it doesn't guarantee you're going to say anything sensible John Humphries a journalist famous for showing uh publicly how stupid he thinks everybody is he's written two books fully of his own pet hates about the way language is used today two he's written two of them this person is a retired reader in genetics and therefore completely qualified to run the queen's english society which is determined to stop english changing in ways that the queen's english society deems to be bad they are fighting to resurrect the subjunctive their pet hate is if i was you and there's an entire mass of stuff on their website about that Gerald Warner is a professional social critic and journalist and a smug polemysist uh he thinks we need an academy of english to save our beautiful language he thinks it's been left to fend for itself at a time when it is under unprecedented attack from all quarters and i would just like to say to him Gerald did you know that in the ninth and twelfth centuries english lost a huge amount of its verb morphology after the twelfth century lost a massive amount of its native vocabulary to french borrowings and then in the 14th century sorry the 16th and 17th centuries was inundated by a tidal wave of latin and greek nothing like that is happening now of course he'd approved of all those changes he's always oh they're good you know but the new ones are bad martin estinell is director of the academy of english a self-appointed panel of guardians who's a val dame is to set down the standards of what is proper english and try to make everybody obey uh i'd like to quote samuel johnson from the 18th century when such a proposal was first mooted the british would only care about the rules handed down by an academy in order to make sure that they disobeyed them at every opportunity well said that man he's quite right and finally someone who i think is quite funny uh except here he worries about rampant language change if innovation continues unchecked the language will fragment into thousands of mutually incomprehensible dialects well no it won't uh no sorry no it won't no it won't don't worry david it won't it's fine it hasn't it's had 20 it's had 95 000 years of not doing that so don't worry about it um and this i'd have to put her up she has conversations with that gorilla about that gorilla's early life in rainforests in west africa and how traumatic it was when she was captured and they're currently discussing what to do about the fact that the gorilla wants to have a baby but their boyfriend gorilla doesn't appear to be particularly interested in that you're a maniac right i'm just going to remember so here we go this is the question in a partly queer school i don't know does it matter yes i'm going to say it does really matter because left to themselves these language hall of shamers can do an awful lot of damage an awful lot of damage and i'm going to give you two examples of this so why i think that it's important to try to fight back borris johnson mayor of london commissioned a paper from the central centre of a policy studies here it's called you can't see that there it's called so why can't they read he didn't commission an applied linguist which he should have done he commissioned somebody who just doesn't have any training in linguistics it should have been a considered and measured survey of the evidence for the illiteracy rates in london which is an important topic but instead of that is an ignorant rant in favour of her preferred methodology for the teaching of reading which is synthetic phonics that's what she thinks is the answer her reasons for this are extremely poorly argued the entire document is written by anecdote that's a ghastly situation for which there is no other evidence at all followed by another anecdote for the solution so here i'm just going to read you something which if it was a student paper would probably get something like a 31 something like that for me she says here unfortunately many teachers themselves victims of a poor state education have a weak grasp of spelling and syntax as an assertion you know for which we have no evidence a teaching assistant at a large london primary school here comes the anecdote tells me that she has on a number of occasions observed teachers writing or wrongly spelled words and grammatically incorrect sentences on the board i arrest my case she says you see it's shocking she doesn't say what a number of occasions means maybe it was once it doesn't even say what the grammatically incorrect sentence was maybe someone wrote something without a subjunctive or something like that what's the problem with schools this is what she says too much paperwork okay noisy classrooms talking in corridors disruptive and violent behaviour truancy child-centered learning not standing in line or curriculum loaded with stuff that's her word stuff like personal health and social education teachers can't write grammatically okay they can't spell the children sitting groups shocker they don't correct writing errors which is a moral failure and worst of all they do whole word recognition methodology she she quotes also very favorably well because this is the villain that's the big villain that's why it's in capital letters it's a whole word recognition methodology for teaching of reading no wonder they can't learn to read she quotes admiringly a study done in west Dunbartonshire in 1997 over 10 years into trying to improve reading and you can see why because it was the worst place in the entire country for literacy with only 28 percent of its children leaving primary school functioning literate i mean that's awful that's really terrible so they did a 10 year project and at the end of it their literacy rates were right up here and she says phonics it's synthetic phonics synthetic phonics that's why they did so well and the reason i would give this a 31 maybe not maybe a 28 possibly is that she's missing the obvious problem with the evidence here they didn't just do synthetic phonics they did lots of other stuff they did things like bringing the parents in so that the parents could see the importance of reading with their children they were in partnership with local libraries so that they had reading spaces they invested hugely in books they made the whole thing a community project and literacy rates went up so we don't know what did it we don't know whether it was synthetic phonics we don't know whether it was whole whether we don't know and to know and i'm not going to say that i will do this research but it could be done you could just have to isolate the methodology from all the other variables and you'd have whole word recognition you'd have synthetic phonics and you'd have another one which is doing a mixture of the two and you'd follow them for a long years if you could just control all the other things as well you might come up with an answer as to what's the best way to teach reading this is my prediction they all work but the combination at least varies the diet so maybe that's the best way to go and that is actually what a lot of schools do sadly that's not going to suit a department of education it's determined to blame left wing teachers for resisting synthetic phonics and causing a crisis in literacy that can only be cured by abandoning whole word recognition completely right now if there is an answer to this problem it needs to be honest open-minded applied linguists research it has to be done that way they have to be done by people with knowledge of the acquisition of reading and no investment in the answer you just want to find the answer and i i want to say also how horrible it was for St Mary's school of education who otherwise had a brilliant quality assurance rating of like five star five star five star except for one thing they didn't do enough synthetic phonics and they got marked out and that's just outrageous and it's damaging and it's wrong and they should have had an applied linguist not me but someone like me case two michael gove director or what is he called secretary of state for education and training and something else i don't know what his title is he thinks he's a big idea we should introduce second languages into primary schools from the age of five he said it's a slam dunk which i think is what it means it was it's an american expression i don't know why he's using that but it means it is it's obvious it's obvious don't have it in secondary school start at five now why didn't this person ask an applied linguist before opening his mouth why did he say that it's not good enough to descend upon primary schools and say right second languages in the curriculum year to begin now immediately and then to claim they're all going to be this is his you know everybody is going to be very much better at learning languages because we start earlier and more intelligent and he says it's literally the case literally the case not you know the normal way he uses this word is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter the neural networks in the brain strength and that are the result of language learning well having strong neural pathways doesn't mean you're going to be more intelligent it just means you're going to have stronger neural pathways the two things are not the same not the same earlier if he'd asked an applied linguist he would have got this answer earlier it's not necessarily better for classroom language teaching children age five will learn language very easily if they're in an immersion setting if it's all day not half an hour on a thursday afternoon and another half an hour on a tuesday morning they're very good at picking up languages while they're doing something else but they're not very good at responding to a 30 minute class where language teaching is the object in fact they're hopeless at that kind of thing you can't start at five unless mr gove you were going to invest the billions of pounds necessary to change all of our schools into immersion settings for french or italian or spanish or whatever which presumably in this climate you're not going to be doing it's very hard for me to imagine what you could do with a class of five years and i'm very experienced language teacher i've never had a class of five-year-olds i don't know what i would do um you need specialist materials you need specialist training it's going to take a lot of money and there isn't any money on the table all you've said is well just make the school day longer that's all you've said um worse he's ignoring the fact that huge numbers of children are already bilingual when they come to school there are hundreds of home language spoken by children in london schools why don't we value that why do we say we want you to learn french it's very rare to see a school valuing the cultural language of their children the one they speak at home it's often seen this is a problem they speak that language at home this is a problem we have to get them extra english in school so here's where i would take issue with um debora cameron and maybe i'm just being incredibly optimistic and a bit mad but i think if we had more emphasis on language as a subject in school a subject of inquiry a subject of wonder a subject that's interesting so that we introduce children to the amazing nature of language variation from formal written english to informal local dialect not as informal local dialect bad written english good but as both good but different different in interesting ways what if we help them to appreciate their home languages as something which was actually really interesting the way your home language is structured the way english is structured and how different they are we might be able to head off the knee jerk attitude that so many of our fellow citizens have when it comes to viewing standard english as best and non standard english as sub standard english standard english the province of the smart the elite the correct and not of hopeless ordinary people with their comical local dialect if go could listen to the messages coming from apply linguistics saying you know you can teach an awful lot of this stuff in a primary school you might not have better policies but they would be less terrible less pointless and maybe we would in 15 years time have an audience of people who didn't think that language was going down the drain that dogs could speak english that english was the best language because we're the best people with top language no one's got such a lovely language as we've got etc etc and in addition i just want to say while we've got him listening to me one really good thing we could do for foreign language teaching in this country is take the exam away from it the washback effect of GCSEs is baleful in all subjects but it's particularly baleful in language basically what pupils do is they get trained to display knowledge in an exam and that's because the exam is the most important thing get a C get a B get an A I don't think they are learning a language in order to be able to use it they're learning a language in order to be able to stuff another GCSE on their certificate and that's a problem take the exam away maybe you wouldn't get as many people signing up for it but they'd be getting a different experience in the classroom this is where I finished where I started in case you think that applied linguists are rather smug at telling off other people for not listening to evidence I do want to say that some of us do sit in entrenched positions that are difficult to get out of and this is one this is one of them 50 years of looking for evidence for a universal grammar based on the argument that it isn't possible for a child to acquire knowledge of its first language from experience alone that it has to be a genetically endowed knowledge that gives human children the toolkit they need to break into whichever human language it is that they're exposed to it's a creationist position it can be no other way it's just too wonderful it has to be genetically endowed now I think that is coming to the end of its life it is an entrenched position you might have to wait until he's retired you might have to wait until he's not around anymore before it's possible to say out loud of course you know there's a lot of work in emergentism that will explain child language acquisition in a much more parsimonious and obvious way I'm ending by saying that some enterprising applied linguist called Deb Roy has done something which our committee would not have allowed him to do he filled his house with cameras and microphones from the moment his little boy was born and he has recorded every word said to that child and by that child for two years and he's got the most ghastly job of analysing all of that uh unbelievable but he will at the end of it have evidence which it seems to me will knock on the head forever the poverty of the stimulus idea and here I'm just speaking through the few of you who are my fellow apply linguist the poverty of the stimulus idea the children don't hear enough high quality language for them to be able to learn the rules of it well this is someone who said that's an empirical question and I'm going to get the data and he has the data and maybe in 20 years time he will have he will have analysed it and I hope so and um I'm ending apologising to Noam Chomsky for making him the aunt Sally here but I do think he's a wonderful wonderful theoretical linguist and his contribution to linguistics will live in memory forever but it's coming to an end as I am as well