February 25, 2025
Few voices in film are as distinctive and cherished as Werner Herzog’s. That applies to voice in both literal and figurative senses, but my focus here is on the singular instrument with which he narrates many of his documentaries.
In case you’re not familiar with Herzog’s speaking style, or would like to listen to it right now, here’s a short clip of him talking about chickens:
He returns to the subject of hypnosis in his 2022 memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All,* before segueing into the characteristics and effects of his voice:
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16 Comments | 
books, film, language, speech, writers | Tagged: accents, autobiography, Bavarian, books, dialect, documentaries, film, filmmaking, German, language, memoir, mimicry, phonetics, slurs, speech, translation, Werner Herzog, writers | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
May 21, 2023
I was recently approached by the Irish Independent newspaper for comment on the influence of American English and pop culture on Irish English speech.
The resulting article, by journalist Tanya Sweeney, focuses on the words people use to address their mother: mam, mum, mom, ma, and so on. It says the rise of mom in Ireland joins ‘other Americanisms that have now slipped into the lexicographical stream’.
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19 Comments | dialect, Hiberno-English, Ireland, journalism, language, phonetics, speech, words | Tagged: American English, Americanisms, dialect, Hiberno-English, Ireland, Irish English, Irish Independent, Irish language, journalism, language, language change, language contact, mam, mom, phonetics, speech, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
May 3, 2023
With a film adaptation out, and Airborne Toxic Events occurring in reality, it seemed a good time to revisit White Noise, Don DeLillo’s great seriocomic novel of the mid-1980s. Its protagonist, Jack Gladney, is a professor of Hitler Studies preoccupied by an upcoming conference, because he doesn’t speak German.
Gladney begins taking private German lessons, recounting the experience in his wry, anxious voice. Spoiler note: little of what follows has any real bearing on the plot, and it’s not a particularly plot-driven book, but you may prefer to back out if you haven’t read White Noise and might soon.
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8 Comments | books, humour, language, literature, speech | Tagged: American literature, books, Don DeLillo, German, humour, Jack Gladney, language, language learning, literature, pronunciation, speech, White Noise, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
February 27, 2023
Sometimes what I read tells me what to write about. Other times the hints come from what I watch. This time it’s both. First I read a line in Richard Pryor’s autobiography Pryor Convictions with this mighty stack of intensifying negatives:
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47 Comments | dialect, grammar, language, language history, linguistics, pragmatics, speech, syntax, usage, writing | Tagged: 000000, 1, 2, ambiguity, descriptivism, dialect, double negatives, ffffff, grammar, language, language history, language myths, linguistics, misnegation, multiple negation, negation, negative concord, Otto Jespersen, politics of language, pragmatics, prescriptivism, Richard Pryor, sociolinguistics, speech, standardized English, syntax, usage, usage myths, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
November 24, 2021
Early in the pandemic, I used Zoom and other video-chat platforms like never before. For me it was mostly social, not work-related: a way to see and stay in touch with family and friends when I wasn’t meeting them in person. I soon noticed ways the technology compromised communication.
Take back-channelling. This is when we say things like mm, yeah, and whoa to convey, minimally, that we’re listening, that we agree, that the speaker should continue their conversational turn, and so on. Back-channelling didn’t work well in some apps, because the timing was slightly out of sync or because the sounds briefly dominated the audio, interfering with the speaker instead of supporting them.
Such problems are not new, but they are newly prevalent. How to tackle them depends on the context: the technology, the conversation type, the people involved, and so on. One thing I did was reduce my back-channelling noises; in their place I nodded more often and more visibly and used more facial expressions.
I also made visual reaction cards based on popular emoji:
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8 Comments | emoji, humour, language, linguistics, personal, pragmatics, speech | Tagged: back-channelling, conversation, crafts, digital culture, drawing, emoji, gesture, humour, internet, internet culture, language, linguistics, lockdown, pandemic, personal, pragmatics, speech, technology, video chat, Zoom | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
September 7, 2021
It’s a truism that language is integral to identity. So when our relationship with it changes, complications quickly accrue: Do we become someone different in another tongue? Is that all down to culture and context, or is there something inherent in a language that affects who we feel ourselves to be? And what happens when we start our lives speaking one language but then switch to another?
These are among the questions explored, with heart and rigour, in Julie Sedivy’s new book, Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self (available October 2021 from Harvard University Press, who sent me a copy). Sedivy was born in the former Czechoslovakia and spoke only Czech until the age of two. At that point her family left the country, then the continent, and her linguistic environment was transformed.
As a child in Canada, Sedivy was suddenly surrounded by English, heard it animate her new friends and role models, and felt compelled to adopt it. English ‘elbowed its predecessors aside’ and became the family language: ‘What could my parents do? They were outnumbered. Czech began its slow retreat from our daily life’. The consequences were not yet apparent to her; ‘the price of assimilation was invisible’.
Years later, after losing her father, Sedivy came to realize ‘how much I also mourned the silencing of Czech in my life’. Her Czech heritage had come to feel like a ‘vestigial organ’. She had lost access to the ‘stories and songs that articulate the values and norms you’ve absorbed without knowing they live in your cells’. She wrote Memory Speaks as part of an effort to ameliorate and understand that loss, exploring
why a language can wither in a person’s mind once it has taken root, what this decline looks like, and how the waning of language can take on a magnitude that spreads beyond personal pain to collective crisis.
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10 Comments | book reviews, books, language, linguistics, literature, science, speech, translation | Tagged: bilingual, book review, books, emigration, Julie Sedivy, language, language acquisition, language death, language learning, language loss, linguistics, literature, memoir, Memory Speaks, multilingualism, psycholinguistics, reading, science, translation | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
June 9, 2021
Lately I watched The Wire for the first time since it screened in 2002–08. It holds up really well, thanks to its wealth of characters, superb writing, and enduring political relevance. Afterwards, I read Jonathan Abrams’s acclaimed All the Pieces Matter (No Exit Press, 2018), an oral history composed of carefully interwoven interviews with the show’s cast, crew, and creators.
The Wire is set in Baltimore and is suffused with Baltimore culture, including its language. Two principal characters, Stringer Bell and Jimmy McNulty, are played by British actors, Idris Elba and Dominic West, who had to adjust their accents to be authentic in their roles. This led to some difficulty, as Abrams’s book reveals.
Co-creator Ed Burns said that West spent a lot of time going over the accent with David Simon: ‘“Now, say it like po-lice.” “Police.” “No, po-lice.”’ Others helped out as well. Peter Gerety, a veteran of stage and screen who played Judge Daniel Phelan, said West asked him for guidance:
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8 Comments | books, film, language, speech, stories | Tagged: accents, acting, actors, Andre Royo, Baltimore, books, crime fiction, David Simon, dialect, Dominic West, Ed Burns, HBO, Idris Elba, Jonathan Abrams, language, Peter Gerety, pop culture, speech, television, The Wire, TV | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
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