 Hello to everyone, here is another Questions of the Month video, this time the one where I will deal with the questions that were asked by our YouTube channel community in June 2013. And again I will present everything using the active board behind me, whose content can be downloaded from the e-lecture library on the Virtual Linguistics Campus. Here is the first problem taken from the phonetics video basic segments of speech. How about the other vowels? Because here we only have the primary and secondary vowels. Well, this first question, as far as I understand it, relates to a more elaborate treatment of vowels. Well, I thought to have given that. In the first of our two videos, basic segments of speech vowels one, I hope to have outlined and demonstrated the system of cardinal vowels. And in a second e-lecture, basic segment of speech vowels two, I expanded this approach by including the central vowels as well as types of vowels such as diphthongs, nasalized vowels and so on. And I also related some language specific vowels, for example from French or German to the system of cardinal vowels. Well, and if you want more language specific information about vowels, you have to consult my phonology e-lectures about the sound system of RP, North American English, German and so on. So I think to have solved that problem. Here is the next one. It concerns the video, the evolution of language. When I created this e-lecture, which in the meantime has had several thousand views, I could not imagine that this was would result in a vivid debate. I do not want to take up the debate here. The debate about human evolution versus human creation. All I want to say here is that we would like to maintain as professional and academic as possible and therefore ask you to avoid inappropriate language. So as I said in another questions of the month video, inappropriate and disrespectful comments may be ignored and in some extreme cases we have to delete them. The next question concerns the status of received pronunciation. Is it a social dialect or not? To answer this question, let us take some time and say something about the term dialect in general. A dialect is defined as a variety of a language that differs from the standard in terms of phonology, grammar and lexis. So these aspects are different. According to this definition, for example, Geordie, the variety spoken in the area around Newcastle in England, can be defined as a dialect of English and the same applies to Southern States American English, which would then be a dialect of North American English. If we now focus on the phonology of a variety, received pronunciation is the phonological standard of the English spoken in England. And again, we can define phonological variants of it. For example, Estuary English. Estuary English mainly differs from received pronunciation in terms of phonology. Hence it can be defined as a phonological dialect or if you prefer an alternative, slightly outdated term as an accent of received pronunciation. Thus far we have defined the varieties of a language purely on the basis of linguistic parameters. But what about other parameters? For example, we can define dialects on the basis of the region where they are used and look at some linguistic variables such as the use of particular alophones of particular phonemes, the choice of specific words or phrases and associate them with particular regions. According to such a regional variation, we get a continuum where RP, received pronunciation over here would be classified as a variety without any region, whereas SCAUSE, the variety spoken around Liverpool, Geordie, the Newcastle variety or Estuary English, the variety of the southeast of England, would be regional dialects. Another parameter is the social one. This time, the variety or social dialect is associated with parameters such as social prestige or acceptance and according to this parameter, RP is the dialect with the highest degree of acceptance. If we now combine the regional and the social parameter and relate them to the situation in England, we can see that upper class phonological dialects exhibit no regional variation and that working class varieties display a good deal of regional variation. So received pronunciation is at the same time the standard phonological dialect of the English spoken in England and the variety with the highest social prestige. So it is, if you wish, a social dialect. Regionally, however, it is neutral. There is no particular region that can be associated with received pronunciation. Well, that was an e-lecture in its own right, wasn't it? Perhaps I'd better take up this topic again in a separate e-lecture. Anyway, my complex answer may now help to solve the next problem relatively quickly. It concerns the status of Canadian English. Is it a dialect of English or not? Well, if we now take the parameters we've just discussed, we can clearly say it is a regional dialect confined to Canada and it is socially neutral. Phonologically it can be defined as a dialect of North American English marked mainly by these features. The low back merger, for example, which merges the vowels in collar and collar to something like collar, Canadian raising, which raises the diphthong in words such as house to house and the Canadian shift, which lengthens and backends the short a in maniac to maniac. And of course there are some minor features. So much for the linguistic problems. Let us now turn to some general questions and problems. You know, there was a competition in Germany to get financial support for the development of a MOOC, a massive open online course. We took part with our proposal, teaching English as a foreign language, part one, pronunciation. And the support we received by our YouTube subscribers and viewers has been overwhelmingly positive. Several thousand clicks on the proposal video and a high degree of acceptance. But despite this international acceptance and your fantastic support, our proposal was not selected by the jury. So we decided to offer our massive open online courses via our platform, the Virtue Linguistics Campus, henceforth, which leads me to the next general question. When are you going to offer the MOOC, phonetics, phonology and transcription again? Well, from now on, we will turn most of our Virtue Linguistics Campus courses into massive open online courses and will thus create a permanent offer. We will start with the MOOC Linguistics 101 fundamentals, which is basically an overview of language and linguistics. Then we have our MOOC Linguistics 102 Speech Science, which is essentially an introduction to phonetics. And our third of this series, Linguistics 103, the nature of meaning, a MOOC about semantics and pragmatics. Further massive open online courses, for example on morphology and syntax, will follow soon. And by the way, registration for these three MOOCs has just started. Just check the registration office on the Virtue Linguistics Campus and take part. And in all these massive open online courses, you can get certificates. The standard certificate is the so-called statement of participation issued by the Virtue Linguistics Campus for regular and active participation. But there is a second option. If you want it, you have to invest more work and a very small amount of money. If this is the option of your choice, you will receive a qualified statement of accomplishment by Marburg University in conjunction with our Virtue Linguistics Campus. This certificate will include the precise grade. It will list the workload involved and it will contain a complete list of all the tasks you have successfully submitted. In order to be given such a certificate, we want you to participate regularly and we want you to do the worksheets, one for each eLearning unit and we want you to achieve an overall score of 60% of more. Well it's all up to you. Just join us in our massive open online courses. The next problem concerns our eLectures in general. Several community members wish that we produce further eLectures on specific topics of their choice. For example, some of you want an eLecture on Procedure or this user YC1180K wants an eLecture on syllabic consonants, X bar syntax is another one and someone wants an eLecture on collocation and idioms or here take this one Semantic Primes is a topic of Warbechmann's choice. Well first I feel honoured that you like our current eLectures and that you want me to do more. In fact I will. I will not rest until I feel that we have a sufficient amount of eLectures and screencasts to support the fields of linguistics and web technology for linguistics in a sufficient manner. So topics such as these and here are further topics, historical linguistics, stratificational grammar, other non-Chomskian grammars, philosophy of language and so on and so forth. So these will soon be available as eLectures. For all I can say, stay tuned and wait for your favourite topic to be turned into an eLecture soon. By the way, on the virtual linguistics campus many of these topics already exist as virtual sessions in a multimedia format. Just book the global access and you have access to all of them. Well and here is another bid for literature references this time in social linguistics. But as I mentioned in previous Questions of the Month videos our policy is quite straightforward. We do not list literature references in a video. You would have to pause, you would have to identify the references and then you would have to copy them and eventually get them. But on the virtual linguistics campus literature references are given in three ways. On the one hand we have specific references in the virtual sessions, then we have class related references via the bibliography link of a class and eventually we have the VLC library. Unlike in a video where once recorded the references are permanent on the virtual linguistics campus we can easily update the references when necessary. So become a member of the VLC and you have the references you need. Alright I hope to have solved some of your problems at least for some of you and for another month. As usual in our Questions of the Month videos let me finally thank all our subscribers and users especially those who have delivered comments and have their images in their YouTube channel. You see these wonderful images in here. I'm overwhelmed with comments like these which are especially motivating. I listed some of them here, perfect, awesome, amazing job. He just happened to be a scholar with the right pedigree for this task. And eventually in Spanish, excelente presentación gracias por subirla y compartirla, did I get the Spanish one right? Probably not, but anyway perhaps you could deliver comments in English exclusively so that everyone can read and understand them. One of the best comments is this one, a remark to which we can all subscribe, can't we? Linguistics is fun, okay, that's it for now. So see you again in the next Questions of the Month video or in any of our e-lectures. I will continue trying hard to produce top class linguistic videos and you are the ones who motivate me to do so. Thanks for your support.