A final language (and Christmas!) related posting for 2006:

The Telegraph newspaper is reporting on an acoustic analysis of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts to the Commonwealth since 1952 which shows that over the years, the Queen’s English has become less posh. The article begins: “As the common tongue continues its inexorable slide towards a new dark age of glottal stops and “innits”, news comes that even the Queen is drifting slowly down river towards Estuary English.”

Between 1952 and 2006, the royal vowel sounds have slowly shifted from the upper class Upper Received Pronunciation towards the more democratic Standard Received Pronunciation.

“In 1952 she would have been heard referring to ‘thet men in the bleck het’. Now it would be ‘that man in the black hat’. Similarly, she would have spoken of the citay and dutay, rather than citee and dutee, and hame rather than home In the 1950s she would have been lorst, but by the 1970s lost.”

The original research paper by Jonathan Harrington, published in the Journal of Phonetics Vol. 34, Issue 4, Oct. 2006, is called An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts.

UBC Library subscribes to the Journal of Phonetics online – read the full article here. You can also listen for yourself by viewing the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts in these short video clips from 1958, 1975, and 2006.

I’ve had a few questions from students in LING 311 (Studies in phonology) looking for books and articles. I’m posting some tips for those of you who are still looking for resources on the phonology of your language.

To find books, try a search in the library catalogue. A keyword search for “phonology and (yourlanguage)” will usually turn up some results. When you look at the catalogue record for a book that looks good, notice the hyperlinked subject headings:

You can click on those subject headings to find more on that same topic. You’ll notice in the screen shot above, one of the subject headings is Spanish language–Phonology. You can also use that same format to do a Subject Heading search in the catalogue. (Remember to replace “Spanish” with whatever language you are interested in! And don’t forget to select “subject Heading” as your search type – the default is keyword.)

To find articles on phonology, the best place to search for journal articles is the Linguistics and Lanugage Behavior Abstracts database, which indexes all the main phonology and linguistics journals. Try a search for your topic and then click on the UBC eLink icon to find a copy of the article (if UBC Library subscribes to that journal, of course!)