Bonjour, Monsieur Barton!

Not being a fan of football, I'd never felt compelled to write about it in relation to language – until now. This is because today we learn of Liverpool-born footballer Joey Barton, currently on a 12-month stint in Marseille, has seemingly adopted a French accent in his own speech and, by extension, the speech patterns of native French people when they speak English. C'est incroyable, ne c'est pas? Well, when you listen to the clip of him speaking, it's not incredible at all; it's perfectly understandable. And that's the point!

The practice of modifying your speech when conversing with others who do not have the same first language as you is known as speech accommodation. It would be very easy to infer that Barton is now deliberately ridiculing his French hosts through his speech. I disagree.

Let's look at the evidence: Joey Barton naturally has a very strong Liverpool accent. Though I have studied French but have never lived there, it seems logical to me that if a Scouse footballer moves to Marseille in southern France, initially at least, he'll encounter a few problems communicating and fitting in. So since his arrival in September, if he's not yet managed to let his feet do the talking, and has yet to learn French; he will have consciously and subconsciously modified his own speech to make himself understood. 

Here are just a few features I noticed during the first 30 seconds of an extract from his interview:

"Yesterday I make one tackle, all everybody speak about is this tackle [...]"

Typical of the Liverpool accent, the words make, speak and tackle are all pronounced with the /x/ phoneme (as in the Scottish word loch) rather than with the hard /k/ phoneme. Some later instances of speak are pronounced with a hard /k/, however.

"that"

Again, the initial consonant sound of that is almost a /d/, rather than a /ð/, as lampooned in the rhetorical question "They do do that though, don't they, though?", where all consonant sounds at the beginnings of all words in that sentence are pronounced in exactly the same way for comic effect (by comedian Harry Enfield and previously, in the film Yellow Submarine).

"I'm a little bit bored from the English media."

Here the /t/ phoneme in little is pronounced; whereas Barton would normally omit this sound and replace it with a glottal stop /ʔ/, which is exactly what happens in the following word bit. No French person speaking English would ever use a glottal stop in this way, so we can speculate that Barton is subconsciously copying (not ridiculing) his French colleagues before reverting to his native speech style the closer he gets to the words English media!

But just as no French person would use glottal stops in their English; a native English speaker would instinctively know about subject-predicate agreement (see "all everybody speak about" in the first sentence above). Similarly, in the second sentence, an English native speaker would use the preposition with or by but never from with the word bored. Based on these initial features, I'd say that Barton is not out to ridicule the French. He has merely assimilated their speech style through his contact with them. That being the case, the English media should – just for once – leave the guy alone.

A word in your year

With apologies for the slight hiatus, I return with news of the UK Word of the Year for 2012 – as chosen by the Oxford English Dictionary (usually Susie Dent and her colleagues). Now, the first thing to notice about this year's winner, omnishambles, as well as all the others that were in the running – Eurogeddon, Mobot, green-on-blue, Games makers, medal or podium (used as verbs) and second screening – is that the name of the award itself is telling. In most cases, these words will mean precisely nothing outside of a specifically UK context.

Omnishambles in particular appears to have emerged victorious despite its incredibly limited usage. Coined in the script of the British TV satire The Thick Of It, the word is defined as:  

'a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, and is characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations'.

Don't you just love the way the OED doggedly sticks to its -iz spellings, by the way? Anyway, as a British-made show (the US remake was abandoned), users of the word must surely be confined to fans of that show. The term was also used in the UK House of Commons in April 2012 in criticism of the budget, and in a further portmanteau coinage Romneyshambles – betraying one UK perspective on the US presidential election and its now defeated candidate. But in my view, these instances confirm the term's status as a niche word; much more ephemeral than the 12 months that the Word of the Year tag implies.

We should avoid attaching too much significance to what is, by the OED's own admission, a rather subjective epithet. Other neologisms will gradually gain currency and enter the dictionary on account of their widespread usage. The Word of the Year is chosen by a group of lexicographers sat around a table. As such, you could be forgiven for thinking that their choice is an attempt to impose their own interpretation of the zeitgeist on the rest of us. From the point of view of the term's intended meaning, the choice is also a strange one. Was 2012 really so bad?

If so, then surely Eurogeddon should be at the top of the pile, as uncertainty in the UK and Europe continues the longer the EU crisis persists. Choosing a word used to define anything at the extremes of human expression also means that word will quickly become moribund. If a greater catastrophe occurs next week, then we quickly have to find a new term to signify this latest nadir. Omnishambles will no longer be up to the job. This is exactly what happens with slang and youth language – where existing terms quickly lose their function as identity markers or intensity markers and are superseded by new terms. Just think of all the mild profanities that are now commonplace but would, at the very least, have earned you a clip round the ear in decades gone by!