Millie's Language Blog

What is the PURPOSE of the blog? Debate? Offering comment or opinion? Persuasion? Reflecting on a personal experience? Etc.   The purpose of this article is to create humour for the reader, using sarcasm and witty comments to, in a way, mock the general public for going along with strange trends such as selfie sticks and ridiculous weight loss tools. Who is the AUDIENCE for the blog? What effect does the blog intend to have on the audience/receiver?   The target audience for this blog is most likely to be young people, particularly millennials in their early to mid-twenties who may follow the trends or maybe enjoy mocking people their age who do. What is the TONE of the blog? Relaxed and conversational? Formal and sophisticated? Descriptive or reflective? Etc.   This article has quite a sarcastic and witty tone, using particular language devices to poke fun and mock people who take part in these trends.   Lexis and semantics – find exampl...

How does Text B use language to create meanings and representations? Within this twitter feed of Solihull Police, there are many uses of language to create meanings and representations. For example, the account uses friendly and welcoming greetings such as 'Good afternoon' to open up a dialogue and conversation with the reader. It welcomes the reader before establishing what they are tweeting about, implying that the account user is taking the reader of their twitter feed into consideration, wanting them to engage with the account. In another tweet, the account uses the emoticon ':-)' to establish a friendly and accessible tone, so that their followers would be more likely to be more active on the twitter feed. In the same tweet, the user sets a challenge for their followers to engage with, establishing a connection with them. By using the hash tag '#FridayThe13th', it keeps the account in the light and allows people without knowledge of the account ...

How does Text A use language to create meanings and representations?     Within this extract from a page on MyHub, there are many different language choices used to create meanings and representations. For example, colloquial terms such as 'cops' are intentionally used to engage the target audience, which in this case are teenagers who may be interested in the police force profession, and are purposely converging to dialect used by teenagers. The writer of this forum is intentionally doing this to establish a relationship with not only teenagers interested in the police force, but also youth who are stereotyped as rebels or criminals that may not be trusting of police. They may the attempting to change the way that this community of youth views this level of authority.   The register of this forum has been purposely chosen to be an interview. This discourse structure makes the content of the interview seem more personal and easier to relate to. It is sim...

Opinion Article - Teenspeak Is it really true that teenagers are incapable of communicating with their peers? Recent studies have suggested that the new era of 'teenspeak', which has developed through modern technology, has tainted the way that this generation and future generations to come will communicate.    Howard Giles' Accommodation Theory suggests that we adjust the way we speak to one another to 'accommodate' the person we are addressing to. This is something that everyone does in society, including teenagers. With this in mind, we can appreciate the idea that teenagers know their limits when it comes to who they are speaking to. Dialect from teenagers is much different from the way they speak and act around their friends and more profession and authoritative figures. The stigma around the way that teenagers are manipulating this unique form of communicating into their writing and speaking to anyone who isn't within their social circle just i...

Essay Plan - Accents and Dialect Question: Evaluate the idea that some accents and dialects are viewed more favourably than others Introduction: - discuss the question, write a summary of what content will be in the essay Paragraph 1: - discuss how people, especially children, will adapt their accents to fit a more 'prestigious' and RP (Received Pronunciation) accent  - Michael Rosen's podcast 'Accents Will Happen' talks about how children with thick Northern accents are likely to want to adapt their accents outside of the family dialect to fit in with more 'normal sounding' dialect. - Children prefer to listen to local dialect rather than family dialect Paragraph 2: - Talk about convergence and divergence - discuss why people with thick accents convergence to match the person they are speaking to - could it be because the RP accent is more favoured? Paragraph 3: - Howard Giles 'matched-guise technique' - in...

Regional Variations: Changing London Dialects Task One: Task Two: Multicultural London English/ Multicultural Urban British Language 1. What does Nikesh Shukla believe has happened to Cockney rhyming slang? Cockneys now span a larger area than they did before, moving to places such as Essex and the home countries. 2. What does he believe has replaced rhyming slang? A multicultural language 3. What reasons does he give for this? The main reason is that people from different races and cultural backgrounds are mixing together to create a wide multicultural language. 4. What are the origins of MLE? People from Asian communities (South, South-East) African communities, Caribbean, Europe and South America Task 3: Paul Kerswill 1. What are the main linguistic elements of MLE? MLE users will replace certain letters in words. The letters 'th' are usually replaced by an 'f' or 'v', as in 'fink' or 'muvver' 2. What has it develop...