Language often evolves faster than we can keep track of it, but what makes a word worth adding to the dictionary? For language sciences assistant professor Kelly Wright, the answer starts with how people actually use language. An experimental sociolinguist and lexicographer, Wright studies how words travel between communities and pick up new meanings. She also documents emerging language and has helped bring words like menty b, GYAT, and rawdog into the dictionary.
What interests you about studying words and the way people use language?
I’m really interested in words, which is sort of uncommon for linguists. Linguists are more interested in sounds or linguistic structure. But as somebody who works for the dictionary, I’m really interested in each word, the story it tells, and who, when, and how someone uses it. That’s really what I work on, how people make meaning.
Does the dictionary make a word legitimate, or does everyday use?
It depends on the dictionary. The dictionary I write for is called "Among the New Words",and it is published in the journal American Speech. It’s a little different because we have more control over the types of words we document. We’re still trying to document things that aren’t already well covered in other dictionaries.
For larger dictionaries, like Merriam-Webster, there are a lot of criteria. They don’t want to include things that are just a flash in the pan. They’re trying to determine whether a word is truly part of the language and whether people have been consistently using it and looking it up over time.
What do you wish more people understood about the way they speak?
Your voice is valid. It should be celebrated. I think a lot of people go through life feeling like they have to sound some type of way and change a lot of what they say. Experimental evidence shows most people aren’t paying that close attention. You should feel freer to be you.
What happens when people feel pressured to speak a certain way?
Some people simply don’t have the ability to produce standard language varieties because they have a different first language or a disability. There’s a level of, “I can’t get those sounds out of my mouth.” Then there’s another other level of, “I don’t sound like that. It’s not who I am. That’s not how I talk. If I talk like that, it’s a performance.”
In my expert witness work, I often see situations where people have incompatible expectations about language. One person is trying to communicate as clearly as possible while someone else is judging how they sound.
It can have serious consequences. Sometimes those expectations are incompatible, and it costs people their freedom.
Do you have a favorite word or language trend right now?
There’s some cool stuff going on with a group of words that I really like, phrases like “she ate” or “left no crumbs.” I love gustatory imagery. It’s an interesting slice of the semantic pie that we don’t play in as much.
Over the last 15 years, those expressions have continued to evolve. They get refreshed and picked up by different communities and then branch off into related ideas about “cooking,” “serving,” “giving,” and more.
What’s especially interesting is how words and phrases move between communities. One community starts using a term, it gets picked up by another, and then the original community continues using it in a new way. Sometimes people are building on the meaning, joking with it, or even poking fun at the people who don’t quite get it. It continues to turn, and it’s so cool.
Has the internet changed the way we experience language?
People ask that a lot, but the internet hasn’t changed language that much. It has just made it more visible. The phenomena we observe online are the same phenomena that have always been happening. They just happen faster and on a larger scale.
Maybe a phrase was being used in Australia 40 years ago, but now a show, a song, or a person, can introduce it to millions of people at once.
We get to see what people were already doing on their own, and I love that.
