He points out that Shakespeare also abbreviated many words, played with the rules of language, and made up several thousand words, and he is not considered an abuser of language. Not only can you move, persuade and encourage others to think and act differently, your speaking skills also help you stand out among your co-workers. Similar debates have been going on for many years regarding whether French, English, or both should be the official language in Quebec, Canada, and which language(s)French, Dutch, or Flemishshould be used in what contexts in Belgium (Martin & Nakayama, 2010). The utterances of judges and juries set precedents for reasonable interpretations that will then help decide future cases. Is it OK if we skip our regular night out this week?. Discuss the power of language to express our identities, affect our credibility, control others, and perform actions. Crystal, D., How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2005), 277. 
Bringing up these topics in a lighthearted way can give us indirect information about another persons beliefs, attitudes, and values. However, many of these movements are politically and ideologically motivated and actually seek to marginalize and/or expel immigrantstypically immigrants who are also people of color. Just as we learned here, new words can create a lot of buzz and become a part of common usage very quickly. Some critics say textese is destroying language by pillaging punctuation and savaging our sentences (Humphrys, 2007). We also use humor to disclose information about ourselves that we might not feel comfortable revealing in a more straightforward way. Symbols, both words and images, were a very important part of Hitlers rise to power in the 1930s and 40s in Europe. Expressing feelings can be uncomfortable for those listening. Jury members are expected to express thoughts based on reported observations to help reach a conclusion about someones guilt or innocence. But you still have to support your ideas and explain the conclusions you make to be seen as competent. Directives are utterances that try to get another person to do something. The productivity and limitlessness of language we discussed earlier leads some people to spend an inordinate amount of time discovering things about words. =nG+ YIulKd[d 3Mrhnp^v]~TU\In[Il$"9uu?>;j9A{[3OO;+
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Keep this in mind to avoid arousing false expectations on the part of the other person (Hayakawa & Hayakawa, 1990). Try to identify one potential positive and negative influence that textese has had on our verbal communication. You need severaloral communication skillsfor career advancement. Promises are often paired with directives in order to persuade people to comply, and those promises, whether implied or stated, should be kept in order to be an ethical communicator. Getting integrated: A key function of verbal communication is expressing our identities. Of course, there are individual differences within a language community, but the power of shared language to unite people has led to universal language movements that advocate for one global language. A juror might express the following thought: The neighbor who saw the car leaving the night of the crime seemed credible. Inversion is a form of word play that produces slang words like sick, wicked, and bad that refer to the opposite of their typical meaning. Although teachers and parents seem convinced that this type of communicating will eventually turn our language into emoticons and abbreviations, some scholars arent. Youll learn about both oral and nonverbal communication with important frameworks like the Rule of Three and Aristotles Appeals of logic, credibility and emotion. When we express observations, we report on the sensory information we are taking or have taken in. Harappa Educations Speaking Effectively course is carefully designed to teach you how to improve your communication skills. Formal conversations are crisp, direct and condensed. Communicating emotions using I language may also facilitate emotion sharing by not making our conversational partner feel at fault or defensive. We have borrowed many words, like chic from French, karaoke from Japanese, and caravan from Arabic. Skilled Interpersonal Interaction: Research, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 166.
If you translated that into In my humble opinion, you are great, then you are fluent in textese. We then use verbal communication to remind others how we feel about them and to check in with themengaging in relationship maintenance through language use. English is a good case in point, as most of its vocabulary is borrowed and doesnt reflect the languages Germanic origins. Strong oral communication is one of the best skills you can have in the workplace. In terms of age, young children are typically freer to express positive and negative emotions in public. Politicians and many others in leadership positions need to be able to use language to put people at ease, relate to others, and still appear confident and competent. Verbal communication characterized by empathy, understanding, respect, and honesty creates open climates that lead to more collaboration and more information exchange. Things like facial expressions and tone of voice offer much insight into emotions that may not be expressed verbally. Slang is a great example of the dynamic nature of language.
All of the Words of the Year 1990 to Present, American Dialect Society, accessed June 7, 2012. Expressions of anger can be especially difficult to manage because they represent a threat to the face and self-esteem of others. Since then, hundreds of auxiliary languages have been recorded but none have achieved widespread international usage or been officially recognized as an international language (Crystal, 2005).
But thats exactly what the common slang meaning of the word was at the time the song Yankee Doodle was written. Saying I need you to stop suffocating me! really expresses a thought-feeling mixture more than a need. Palindromes, as noted, are words that read the same from left to right and from right to left. And he did. People were labeled and reduced to certain characteristics rather than seen as complete humans, which facilitated the Nazis oppression, violence, and killing (Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, 2012). Neologisms are newly coined or used words. Yankee Doodle isnt saying the feather he sticks in his cap is a small, curved pasta shell; he is saying its cool or stylish. The more specific we can be when we are verbally communicating our emotions, the less ambiguous our emotions will be for the person decoding our message.
Lastly, the optimism of an internationally shared language eventually gives way to realism. Its the most secure form of communication for critical issues and important information, It helps to resolve conflicts with face-to-face communication, Its a more transparent form of communication as it lets you gauge how others react to your words. Linguists and native speakers of endangered languages have also rallied around so-called dying languages to preserve them. Rather than verbal communication being directed at one person as a means of control, the way we talk creates overall climates of communication that may control many. Newly coined words are those that were just brought into linguistic existence. Language also provides endless opportunities for fun because of its limitless, sometimes nonsensical, and always changing nature. Lets look at differenttypes of oral communication: Imagine you meet the CEO of your organization in the elevator. In the perception process, this is similar to the interpretation step. Newly used words make their way into languages in several ways, including borrowing and changing structure. Speeches are important in businesses like event management or community outreach. First, there would have to be a massive effort put into a period of simultaneous learningotherwise it is difficult to motivate people to learn a language that is not necessary for their daily lives and that no one else speaks. Humor functions to liven up conversations, break the ice, and increase group cohesion. We may create a one-of-a-kind sentence combining words in new ways and never know it. For example, instead of saying, Youre making me crazy! you could say, Im starting to feel really anxious because we cant make a decision about this. Conversely, you language can lead people to become defensive and feel attacked, which could be divisive and result in feelings of interpersonal separation. Weve already learned about identity needs and impression management and how we all use verbal communication strategically to create a desired impression. What effects, if any, do you think textese has had on your non-text-message communication? Martin, J. N. and Thomas K. Nakayama, Intercultural Communication in Contexts, 5th ed. We also create new words by adding something, subtracting something, or blending them together. At the interpersonal level, unsupportive messages can make others respond defensively, which can lead to feelings of separation and actual separation or dissolution of a relationship. We first start to develop an understanding of humor as children when we realize that the words we use for objects are really arbitrary and can be manipulated. We can withhold verbal communication or use it in a critical, aggressive, or hurtful way as a form of negative reinforcement. Existing words also change in their use and meaning. Since we almost always know our needs more than others do, its important for us to be able to convey those needs to others. Some humor scholars believe that this early word playfor example, calling a horse a turtle and a turtle a horseleads us to appreciate language-based humor like puns and riddles (Foot & McCreaddie, 2006). Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, Lesson 4: 19391942, Persecution and Segregation, accessed June 9, 2012, http://www.holocausteducationctr.org/index.php?submenu=testimony&src=gendocs&ref=DownloadCurriculum&category =testimony. There are differentexamples of oral communicationin a business setting. Arming yourself witheffective oral communicationskills will boost your confidence, prepare you for challenging tasks like meeting and impressing clients. Serious attempts to create a common language, sometimes referred to as a lingua franca or auxiliary language, began in the 1600s as world exploration brought increased trade and Latin was no longer effective as the language of international business. Not expressing needs can lead to feelings of abandonment, frustration, or resentment. People use encoding to decide how and when to use humor, and people use decoding to make sense of humorous communication. We may also still use pen and paper when sending someone a thank-you note, a birthday card, or a sympathy card. Affixing usually alters the original meaning but doesnt completely change it. Various combinations of colored stars, triangles, letters, and other symbols were sewn onto the clothing or uniforms of people persecuted by the Nazis in order to classify them. Comedians make a living by making language fun, but humor is contextual and not always easy to pull off. In this section, we will learn about the five functions of language, which show us that language is expressive, language is powerful, language is fun, language is dynamic, and language is relational. For example, when people say, I feel like youre too strict with your attendance policy, they arent really expressing a feeling; they are expressing a judgment about the other person (a thought). When I asked a class what the top college slang word should be for 2011, they suggested deuces, which is used when leaving as an alternative to good-bye and stems from another verbal/nonverbal leaving symbolholding up two fingers for peace as if to say, peace out.. In the United States, Cajun French in Louisiana, French Canadian in Maine, and Pennsylvania Dutch are examples of language communities that are in danger of losing the language that has united them, in some cases for hundreds of years (Dorian, 1986). This manipulation creates a distortion or incongruous moment in the reality that we had previously known. They are mostly without an agenda. In such cases, we can see that verbal communication can also divide people. Keyboard, newspaper, and giftcard are all compound words that were formed when new things were created or conceived. Overall do you think textese and other forms of computer-mediated communication have affected our communication? There is also a lack of immediate feedback. And last, we can form new words by blending old ones together. Although American English is in no danger of dying soon, there have been multiple attempts to make English the official language of the United States.
Esperanto, which means hopeful, is the most well-known and widely used auxiliary language that was intended to serve as a common international language. In the opening to this chapter, I recounted how an undergraduate class in semantics solidified my love of language. The digital age has given rise to some interesting changes in word usage. People are usually comfortable with the language they use to describe their own identities but may have issues with the labels others place on them. Now, you have 30 seconds to introduce yourself before they get out on the next floor. It can also mean that two people are now bound in a relationship recognized by the government and/or a religious community. Huang, L., Technology: Textese May Be the Death of English, Newsweek, August 2011, 8. Based on what you are doing and how you are feeling at this moment, write one of each of the four types of expressionsan observation, a thought, a feeling, and a need. Ex-husband and kitchenette are relatively recent examples of such changes (Crystal, 2005). The fun and frivolity of language becomes clear as teachers get half-hearted laughs from students when they make puns, Jay Leno has a whole bit where he shows the hilarious mistakes people unintentionally make when they employ language, and people vie to construct the longest palindromic sentence (a sentence that as the same letters backward and forward). Of course, promises can be broken, and there can be consequences, but other verbal communication is granted official power that can guarantee action. Dorian, N. C., Abrupt Transmission Failure in Obsolescing Languages: How Sudden the Tip to the Dominant Language in Communities and Families? Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1986): 72. The word named the most likely to succeed was cloud as a result of Apple unveiling its new online space for file storage and retrieval. When I first started teaching this course in the early 2000s, Cal Poly Pomona had been compiling a list of the top twenty college slang words of the year for a few years. Communication in the Real World: An Introduction to Communication Studies. Expressing feelings is often the most difficult form of verbal expression. Moving from the interpersonal to the sociocultural level, we can see that speaking the same language can bring people together. These are just two examples of humorous and contradictory features of the English languagethe book Crazy English by Richard Lederer explores dozens more. Control is a word that has negative connotations, but our use of it here can be positive, neutral, or negative. Research has shown that only about 10 percent of the slang terms that emerge over a fifteen-year period survive. Verbal communication helps us inform, persuade, and entertain others, which as we will learn later are the three general purposes of public speaking. (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 1995), 3436. Google went from being a proper noun referring to the company to a more general verb that refers to searching for something on the Internet (perhaps not even using the Google search engine). Language helps us express observations (reports on sensory information), thoughts (conclusions and judgments based on observations or ideas), feelings, and needs. Humphrys, J., I h8 txt msgs: How Texting Is Wrecking Our Language, Daily Mail, September 24, 2007, accessed June 7, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-483511/I-h8-txt-msgs-How-texting-wrecking-language.html?printingPage=true. Imagine how powerful the words We the jury find the defendant seem to the defendant awaiting his or her verdict. Whether its criticism, teasing, or language differences, verbal communication can also lead to feelings of separation. What utterances make up our daily verbal communication? Eyewitness testimony is a good example of communicating observations. The first few exchanges with a potential romantic partner or friend help us size the other person up and figure out if we want to pursue a relationship or not. Slang refers to new or adapted words that are specific to a group, context, and/or time period; regarded as less formal; and representative of peoples creative play with language. Things can go wrong in both of those processes. Some countries also broadcast radio programs in Esperanto. If youre in need of emotional support or want validation of an emotional message you just sent, waiting for a response could end up negatively affecting your emotional state. Oral communicationis communicating with spoken words.
Next, we will discuss how language expresses our identities, affects our credibility, serves as a means of control, and performs actions. Many works of literature and important manuscripts like the Bible and the Quran have been translated into Esperanto, and many original works of literature and academic articles have been written in the language. Examples of oral communicationare conversations with friends, family or colleagues, presentations and speeches. Some language is actually more like an action than a packet of information. Language is powerful in that it expresses our identities through labels used by and on us, affects our credibility based on how we support our ideas, serves as a means of control, and performs actions when spoken by certain people in certain contexts. Your oral communication skills can boost morale, encourage improved performance and promote teamwork. This is your elevator pitch. You have to get your point across in a few words because everyone has only limited time to spare. He also cites research that found, using experimental data, that children who texted more scored higher on reading and vocabulary tests. Source: Adapted from Matthew McKay, Martha Davis, and Patrick Fanning, Messages: Communication Skills Book, 2nd ed. Witnesses are not supposed to make judgments or offer conclusions; they only communicate factual knowledge as they experienced it. The sentences handed down by judges following a verdict are also performative because those words impose fines, penalties, or even death. Humor is a complicated social phenomenon that is largely based on the relationship between language and meaning. We also use verbal communication to describe things, people, and ideas. Perhaps because of the confusion that this caused, the meaning of gay has contracted again, as the earlier meaning is now considered archaic, meaning it is no longer in common usage. The American Dialect Society names an overall Word of the Year each year and selects winners in several more specific categories. We take various observations and evaluate and interpret them to assign them meaning (a conclusion). Verbal communication can be used to reward and punish. Public speaking is an important skill to develop if you want to command a room full of people. The United States isnt the only country that has debated the merits of officially recognizing only certain languages. English has been called the vacuum cleaner of languages (Crystal, 2005).Weekend is a popular English word based on the number of languages that have borrowed it. Would you mind if I went home by myself? would likely make the expression more effective.
Even those with good empathetic listening skills can be positively or negatively affected by others emotions. Even though some people embrace reclaimed words, they still carry their negative connotations and are not openly accepted by everyone. You can talk about your day, what youre going to eat for lunch or discuss weekend plans. Abram, D., Spell of the Sensuous (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1997), 89. Judges words perform actions ranging from holding someone in contempt of court to sentencing someone to death. Of course, the content of what is said is important, but research shows that romantic partners who communicate frequently with each other and with mutual friends and family members experience less stress and uncertainty in their relationship and are more likely to stay together (McCornack, 2007). These are conversations that you have with your team members or friends and family. In any case, borrowing is the primary means through which languages expand. Its impossible to be supportive in our communication all the time, but consistently unsupportive messages can hurt others self-esteem, escalate conflict, and lead to defensiveness. When a person is surrounded by people who do not speak his or her native language, it can be very comforting to run into another person who speaks the same language. McCornack, S., Reflect and Relate: An Introduction to Interpersonal Communication (Boston, MA: Bedford/St Martins, 2007), 237. Esperanto was invented by a Polish eye doctor at the end of the 1800s and today has between one and two million fluent speakers worldwide.
The winning words are usually new words or words that recently took on new meaning. Humor can also be used to express sexual interest or to cope with bad news or bad situations. For example, sanction can mean to allow and to prevent, and dust can mean to remove particles when used in reference to furniture or to add particles when used in reference to a cake.
Racecar is a commonly cited example, but a little time spent looking through Google results for palindromes exposes many more, ranging from Live not on evil to Doc, note I dissent. Aside from the endless structural possibilities, words change meaning, and new words are created daily. Some of our words convey meaning, some convey emotions, and some actually produce actions. Whereas our observations are based on sensory information (what we saw, what we read, what we heard), thoughts are connected to our beliefs (what we think is true/false), attitudes (what we like and dislike), and values (what we think is right/wrong or good/bad). Some people are generally not good at or comfortable with receiving and processing other peoples feelings. New slang words often represent what is edgy, current, or simply relevant to the daily lives of a group of people. In terms of context, many people express their Irish identity on St. Patricks Day, but they may not think much about it over the rest of the year. We can offer verbal communication in the form of positive reinforcement to praise someone. Although individual men vary in the degree to which they are emotionally expressive, there is still a prevailing social norm that encourages and even expects women to be more emotionally expressive than men. I could have continued on to say that I have come to think of myself as a word nerd. Words or phrases like that express who we are and contribute to the impressions that others make of us. Using informal language and breaking social norms weve discussed so far wouldnt enhance your credibility during a professional job interview, but it might with your friends at a tailgate party. Language is dynamic, meaning it is always changing through the addition of neologisms, new words or old words with new meaning, and the creation of slang. Second, as we have learned, people take pride in their linguistic identity and find pleasure in playing with the rules of language, creatively inventing new words and meanings that constantly change a language. Aside from the specific words that we use, the frequency of communication impacts relationships. Language differences alone do not present insurmountable barriers. For this, you need to leverage Harappas LEP and PAM Frameworks as well as the Four Ps of Pitch, Projection, Pace and Pauses. There are many examples of people who have taken a label that was imposed on them, one that usually has negative connotations, and intentionally used it in ways that counter previous meanings. When we express needs, we are communicating in an instrumental way to help us get things done. Weve already learned that language helps shape our social reality, so a common language leads to some similar perspectives. The same can happen with new slang terms. As we expand our emotional vocabulary, we are able to convey the intensity of the emotion were feeling whether it is mild, moderate, or intense. Norms for emotional expression also vary based on nationality and other cultural identities and characteristics such as age and gender. Even though weve learned that meaning is in people rather than words and that the rules that govern verbal communication, like rules of grammar, are arbitrary, these norms still mean something. Brown, G., Explaining, in The Handbook of Communication Skills, ed. The productivity and limitlessness of language creates the possibility for countless word games and humorous uses of language. Verbal communication helps us meet various needs through our ability to express ourselves. New words are also formed when clipping a word like examination, which creates a new word, exam, that retains the same meaning. Which one do you have the most difficulty avoiding (directing toward others)? Which of them do you think has the potential to separate people the most? The process of oral communication is more effective than an email or a text message. For example, a witness could say, I saw a white Mitsubishi Eclipse leaving my neighbors house at 10:30 pm. As we learned in Chapter 2 Communication and Perception on perception, observation and description occur in the first step of the perception-checking process. Crystal points out that in order to play with language, you must first have some understanding of the rules of language (Huang, 2011). This statement encapsulates many of the powerful features of language. Why? Most slang words also disappear quickly, and their alternative meaning fades into obscurity.
