Shadowing Practice: How Gen Z and TikTok are changing the way we speak - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Hello, I'm Lucy Hawkins.
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Hello, I'm Lucy Hawkins.
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From the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story.
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For many thousands of years, language has been changing.
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Here in the UK, the gradual departure from what became known as the Queen's English is a trend which has often been characterised as a threat to cultural identity.
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But with the advent of social media, the pace of change may be running away from us.
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Phrases like, it's giving, riz, no cap.
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These are all terms which we attribute to internet culture and specifically to younger, millennial and Gen Z demographics.
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Today we're considering how the mass migration to living our lives online is having an impact on the spoken word in the real world.
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It's even made its mark on the Oxford English Dictionary.
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Well, with me here in the studio today is former BBC journalist, author and linguist Sophia Smith-Gaylor and Neil Edgler, who is from BBC Learning English.
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Sophia, Neil, lovely to have you with us on the pod.
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Hi.
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Hi.
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Hello, Lissi.
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Neil, last night I sat with my teenage kids, as I now know you did as well, and said, I'm discussing language tomorrow.
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Things have changed.
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I'm hearing these words from you all the time.
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Can we talk about it?
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they were straight away like mum don't do it don't use the words don't embarrass yourself you will never come back from this at all
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you know like this is just steer clear play it straight what did you say to your teenage kids pretty much exactly
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the same conversation i've become aware of this whole range of vocabulary used by this generation that seems completely and utterly
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exclusive and they find it funny when i try and use those expressions i mean you're such a boomer If you basically start using these words, you're tainted and it's a no-go.
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And Sophia, you don't have kids, but I mean, you're so aware of how language is changing.
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And you're even writing a book at the moment about linguicide.
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What actually is linguicide?
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So linguicide is the phenomenon of a language disappearing and perhaps even dying or becoming extinct.
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And this is happening around the world at an alarming rate.
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So a language disappearing because it's been criminalised.
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war, genocide, other obvious examples.
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But linguicide equally can be more covert.
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So linguists also described a language becoming associated with shame and speakers being so ashamed of speaking that language they begin to speak another.
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And tell us about your job, Neil.
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You're creating content to help people learn English.
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We make videos and podcasts and web pages to help learners of English around the world at whatever level they are to teach them English but also to help them to enjoy themselves in English.
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Well language is obviously the social tool that we all use to communicate but as we've already discussed it's so different depending on the generation that's talking and we alter our language depending on who we're talking to.
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When it comes to our kids and what we're seeing particularly with the younger generations Neil, what sort of words are you seeing emerge at the moment?
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Now we're going to mention some of the words that we're not supposed to mention.
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Okay, I'm going to let you do it.
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So I think of all of the things I've heard recently, the most fascinating is this word skibbity.
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That was the first one that came up at Mind in the Table as well.
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Can you use it in a sentence?
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Well, I don't think I can effectively.
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I can try and I get laughed at.
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But it's very, very fluid grammatically.
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So, for example, I have heard the expression the skibbity risler.
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Rizzla is connected to this word rizz, which we may come on to talk about as well.
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But skibbity seems to be able to be thrown in almost anywhere.
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And nobody, including my kids, can tell me what it really means.
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And I think that's part of the whole sort of exclusivity of each generation's use of language.
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To the point about exclusivity and saying, Mum, please don't say this word.
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We should think of language speaking also as identity making.
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So if you are in a subgroup and you use particular phrases to signify I am part of this group, the minute you start hearing these phrases adopted outside of the group, it's not the in-group language anymore.
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So it stops being the in-group language of teenagers, for example, because mum's using it.
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And then they'll just start using another one.
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But Sophia, what Neil and I are finding challenging is this is changing so quickly all the time.
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Neil's already mentioned RIS.
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I remember doing quite a kind of academic interview around the word RIS when it was the Oxford word of the year.
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The Oxford word of the year has been revealed and this year it's RIS.
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Now if you've no idea what that means, don't worry, you might just be over 30.
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I'm lucky I've got teenagers, I know this one.
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The kids are not using RIS anymore.
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They might use it in a slightly patronising ironic way but Neil's now saying they're using Rizler.
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What's Rizler?
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A Rizler is a person who has Riz.
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Duh!
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See?
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I'm getting myself into all sorts of trouble here and all sorts of traps but it is so it's evolving so quickly.
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It's evolving really quickly and if you think about in the past how languages developed and changed a language will always change because our needs as people change and different and new things happen.
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And in the past, you may have lived in a remote village and the only language contact or contact you had with any kind of linguistic innovation would have been some trader rolling into town and then moving forward or perhaps you would move.
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Today, if you're consuming mass media in social media, you're actually seeing a very diverse array of different voices from around the world.
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I can be speaking to my nephews at home in New Zealand.
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a world away, it seems to me, and yet they're using the same words as my teenage kids here in London.
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That wasn't the case when we were younger.
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No, it wasn't, and that's part of this homogenisation that social media brings, that the kids are using the same slang globally.
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When I was at school, the words that we would use to describe a really bright person or a less bright person might be different from the words used by someone who was brought up in a different part of the same country.
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Neil, is it just video-based social media or is there influence here around text sites and microblogging and things as well?
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Absolutely, yes.
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And a lot of the new vocabulary that we've seen emerging over the last few years comes from blogging and from online communities communicating through text.
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People are walking around and saying LOL and FOMO and YOLO to each other.
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That's an interesting development.
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And we're saying LOL, we're not saying LOL, we're not saying FOMO.
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We've adopted them into the sort of existing lexical structure that we have so that they sound like normal words.
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And that didn't take long.
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Didn't take long at all, no.
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And with some of these words, the skibbity, the riz, rizler, no cat, where do they come from?
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Is it from different cultural groups?
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Is it from different sectors of society?
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Where are they actually emerging from?
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A lot of the words are being innovated within in groups and then they get introduced to the mainstream.
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We're seeing a lot of vocabulary coming from Black and Latino LGBT culture in the US.
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We're seeing loads of expressions coming from that, like it's giving, slay, all come from those spaces.
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We're also seeing language emerging from what actually were incel subculture words from even the 2000s.
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Some of these expressions don't even come from the 2010s.
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They're a little older than we think.
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When it comes to social media and language change, we think a term is new, but in reality, it's likely been in circulation for some time before a sort of more influential person perhaps uses the term.
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And then we see the words leave these peripheries and leave these subgroups.
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They become mainstream.
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And it's these words that then become more widely adopted.
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And Neil, do you think it's also like with our kids, and I'm trying to think back to when I was young as well, it's a bit of an act of rebellion.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Yes.
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I think the interesting thing about the language change we're seeing at the moment is just the pace in comparison to pre-internet discourse.
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You know, the words are there all around the world immediately.
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Some get picked up, some don't.
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And that happened before but it was just much slower.
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I mean, I think we need to cast our mind back before 1989 and the world wide web.
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What was happening with language before then?
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Well, I remember when I was at school.
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Back in the day!
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The reinvention of the word wicked, meaning great or cool or whatever.
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I think I am just, by about a year, too old to use that and feel comfortable using it, even though it's been in circulation for about 30 years now.
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So these words have always come about and reinvented this, what they call, semantic shift, where a word has an original meaning and then suddenly has a new meaning.
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And it's all tied up with the exclusivity and stuff.
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But it's the pace with which it happens these days, which is really astounding.
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Sophia, you speak many languages.
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A couple.
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Okay.
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Italian?
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Arabic?
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Yeah.
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I studied Spanish and Arabic at university and my family speaks Italian.
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I grew up hearing it but not speaking it.
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So what about these other languages in the world?
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Is it the same?
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I mean, are they experiencing the same kind of changes in these words that we are seeing in English?
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Oh certainly, all languages are experiencing the phenomena we've described such as linguistic innovation, adopting new words.
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The obvious difference that we may observe in other languages is the influence of English and the fact that English as a language it holds prestige in so many global domains.
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And there are moves right around the world to try and protect language.
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I I mean, I spend some time in French speaking Canada and there's real moves to stop the creep of English into French that's spoken there.
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Giorgio Maloney, the leader in Italy right now, very protective of the Italian language.
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Countries have different attitudes towards how much they try and control linguistic change, which defies control.
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languages are even speaking to linguicide that I'm writing about the idea that a language can die must must therefore mean a language can live
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so as living things they're really difficult to control and if you say if you say to people you can't use this word that we're now
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hearing lots of people say you must use the French version it's kind of coming a little bit too late because the French version didn't immediately dominate or resonate with speakers so it can actually be quite
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challenging you're trying to reverse time almost and in something like that Neil I wonder if words as well and phrases that we use
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can sometimes just be fashionable I mean I'm not talking about riz only lasting 18 months or whatever but other words and
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phrases that grab hold and a trendy but then kind of die away again almost like fashion or clothing or music yeah I think that's right.
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You can look at expressions which are used by many people over a short period of time that then kind of vanish.
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So we have BBC Learning English, a podcast called The English We Speak.
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We look at idiomatic expressions that are sort of trending at the time.
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A couple of years ago we were talking about blended working, blended working, working at home and in the office.
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I haven't heard that one for a while.
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People don't use it anymore.
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We all say hybrid working now.
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So yes, there is a fashion for these words.
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They come and go.
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And Sophia, you've not just been looking at how our vocabulary has changed, but it's the way we say things as well.
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And this notion of up talk, particularly sort of rising at the end of a sentence.
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I'm from New Zealand.
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I mean, we all speak like that at home and in the Antipodes.
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I also wondered if it's not just social media that's influencing the way that we speak.
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it's maybe years of everyone watching neighbors.
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We have always used uptalk.
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I mean, it's most characteristic, I think, for asking questions.
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I just did it there.
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Asking questions, that would be uptalk with this rising intonation at the end of the phrase.
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When it comes to social media and using uptalk, something that I've written about in the past is how asking, is there a TikTok voice or accent?
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Is there a way that I speak that I adopt when I'm making a TikTok video?
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The idea is that when we make video content, we use a lot of rising intonation, possibly to relate to our audience.
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It's more engaging.
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It's more engaging.
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Another theory is that I'm keeping you listening.
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The rising intonation suggests there's more to come.
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You're hooking people.
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Hooking people in.
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When it comes to social media video, if I can complete a video retaining someone's attention, it's more likely to perform better on the algorithm.
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So actually what's possibly happening is creators are furthering linguistic innovation based on algorithmic direction, which is fascinating.
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Neil, speaking of intonation, what about the change to pronunciation?
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Are we seeing some British words change and they're now said in a much more American way?
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There used to be a much greater distinction between the way Americans would say or pronounce a word and the way that British people would.
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And now that's more fluid and we're not able to say with such certainty that that's American English and that's British English.
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So let's have an example of the word which I say as schedule.
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Younger members of BBC Learning English say schedule and schedule is what we used to say was the American pronunciation.
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What about grammar then, Neil?
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Are we seeing those changes?
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And they must surely be slower.
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Grammar really does change slowly.
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You can look at, for example, you could pick up a copy of Frankenstein, which was written 200 years ago, and absolutely understand it completely.
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There's nothing in the grammatical structures which will confuse you.
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But something that has happened and has happened more quickly recently because probably of social media is something known as verbing, which is turning nouns into verbs.
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And the most obvious one is Google, to Google or to friend.
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We are podcasting.
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And so that is actually a grammatical change which we have seen accelerate recently.
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Sophia, is language change picking up momentum?
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Is it getting faster?
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As media will change, linguistic innovation will change.
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So it's already so hyper fast and powerful in the current vertical video climate that we're in and the amount of language we are exposed to.
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It's hard to imagine how that can get even sort of more hyperactive, but I'm quite confident it will.
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And Neil, in terms of your job, do you love all these changes to the language or are you slightly horrified sometimes.
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I'm not horrified in the slightest and I know lots of people are and they think that it's wrong and that mistakes are being made but language is dynamic.
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No one here is sitting talking like Chaucer.
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You know language changes and I think it's exciting and we need to embrace it and at BBC Learning English we try to describe language as it is rather than prescribe the way it ought to be.
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What about the future of language?
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If we could look ahead Sophia what do think's going to happen in the next 20, 30 years?
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I think a lot of the future is predictable in that when I am in my 40s, 50s, 60s,
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I'm probably going to start thinking why are my kids or the kids around me saying all these bizarre words that I've sort of never heard of.
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And what do you think, Neil, do you think the other thing that might happen is that we'll see some language sadly die out some languages because of the prevalence of English, the prevalence of what people are consuming online is going to really influence what's spoken in the home.
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Yeah, unfortunately that is a reality.
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I mean, languages are dying all the time.
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And one of the features of language in the social media age is homogenisation.
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Linguicide is such an urgent and pressing issue because it's believed by the end of the century that we are in, half of the world's languages will disappear.
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I have a positive story to tell from New Zealand about that, about how much more Māori is spoken in New Zealand than when I was young.
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And when we talk about how quickly things change, when I go back home, I can't believe how much more Māori is just spoken in everyday life among people just casually.
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It's not a big thing at all.
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They are an example to the world.
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They are used all the time in language revitalisation work as examples of how a language that appears to be dying, becoming extinct, whatever phrase you prefer, can revitalise and acquire new speakers.
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I can't have any conversation about anything that looks at the future anymore without mentioning AI.
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Oh yeah.
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Is there an influence there as well?
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Is that going to change language?
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Interestingly AI is being used again if we look at linguicide and endangered languages.
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I've done reporting looking at how AI is helping people revive their languages or create resources very quickly that are able to support speakers who want to reclaim or revitalise a language.
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But again, we're seeing examples where perhaps the AI tools being made, especially out of endangered languages, where accuracy is so important because there aren't lots of sources necessary for them.
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And the AI hallucinating, making up words or expressions or grammars for these languages as we described as being of low resource, like there's not loads of training data to train an AI.
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I would say AI isn't all bad.
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It brings lots of very useful tools for communities, but it kind of has to be observed and watched.
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And if it's misbehaving, it has to be told off.
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Well, it's been wicked to have you both on the podcast.
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Sophia, thank you.
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Thank you.
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Neil, good to see you.
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Thanks.
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Thank you.
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If you want more episodes of The Global Story, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts.
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We do one big story in depth every day.
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And don't forget to subscribe.
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Thanks for watching.
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Goodbye.
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Context & Background

Language is an ever-evolving entity, influenced significantly by cultural shifts and technological advancements. In the recent discussion led by Lucy Hawkins on the BBC World Service, interesting insights were shared on how Generation Z and platforms like TikTok are reshaping spoken English. The dialogue featured noted linguists Sophia Smith-Gaylor and Neil Edgler, who examined the potential implications of this transformation on our communication methods. They highlighted the growing influence of internet culture and generational vernacular, which often eludes the grasp of older demographics. This scenario presents an excellent opportunity for English learners to engage with contemporary vocabulary and expressions used by younger speakers.

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

  • It's giving: A phrase used to express that something embodies a particular quality. For example, "This outfit is giving me summer vibes."
  • Riz: Referring to charisma or charm, particularly in a romantic context. One might say, "He has a lot of riz when he talks to her."
  • No cap: A term meaning no lie or truthfully. You could use it as "I’m telling you, no cap, she can sing."
  • Skibbity: A versatile and playful term that can fit into various contexts, though its specific meaning may vary. For example, “That party was a skibbity kind of fun!”
  • Woke: Being aware of and actively attentive to social issues. An example sentence would be, "That organization is very woke; they support numerous social movements."

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

To effectively integrate the slang and phrases discussed in the podcast into your speaking vocabulary, consider employing the shadowing technique. Here’s a simple guide to practice:

  1. Choose the Video: Start by finding the podcast episode where the phrases are spoken. You can learn English with YouTube or podcast platforms.
  2. Listen Actively: Play the video and focus on the pronunciation of the words and phrases. Notice the intonation and rhythm of the speakers.
  3. Repeat Aloud: After hearing a phrase, pause and try to repeat it as closely as possible. This is crucial for improving your English pronunciation.
  4. Record Your Voice: Use a voice recording app to capture your attempts. Playback your recordings to identify areas for improvement.
  5. Practice Regularly: Consistency is key. Dedicate a few minutes each day to shadow the phrases. Over time, incorporating this vocabulary into your daily conversations will become more natural.

By embracing the shadow speech concept and regularly engaging with contemporary dialogues, you can significantly enhance your ability to communicate like a native speaker, while also keeping up with the dynamic nature of modern English speech.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

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