LANGUAGE AND AI
Evolving English: Globalisation and AI
You probably shouldn’t dismiss content as AI-written just because it uses certain words
The American linguist William Labov spent a tiny piece of the 1960s asking New Yorkers where things were. He didn’t really care; he just wanted to hear them say words with the possibility of rhotic pronunciation. That’s when the “r” in a word like “butter” is pronounced, something familiar to most American accents today.
In the 1960s, however, New York experienced a linguistic shift. Where non-rhoticity — meaning many “r” sounds are silent — had once been a mark of higher social status, rhoticity emerged as the city’s new sign of class.
Labov demonstrated this by visiting three department stores and asking the staff questions to elicit the answer “fourth floor”. Sure enough, the staff at upmarket Saks pronounced the “r” sounds more often than the staff at middle-income Macy’s, and the staff at budget-friendly S. Klein barely pronounced them at all.
Languages change over time and distance, particularly languages like English, which are famously unregulated. There is no equivalent of the Académie Française to tell English speakers what is right or wrong. Instead, we all muddle through, globally and across…
