Q: How do you track a Bostonian in the woods?

A: Follow the r-droppings.

There are so many lovely jokes about r-dropping in Boston English, but most of them don't lend themselves well to text. Or to replication by those who are not native speakers of the illustrious dialect.

I didn't grow up in Boston, but New Hampshire (especially Southern NH) is close enough where r-dropping is concerned. I'm pretty good about putting those pesky rhotics back in coda position, especially since neither of my parents dropped them, but sometimes they just don't want to be there.

This mostly happens with place names, like Worcester and Portsmouth (interesting fact: Concord NH and Concord MA are pronounced distinctively, both with initial stress but the former has a syllabic r in the second syllable while the latter has a lax high front vowel), and mostly when I'm tired. But there is one lexical item -- the title of a children's television program -- that I have an extremely difficult time pronouncing r-fully: Dora the Explorer.

Apparently the desire to sound well-educated is completely undone by the awesome power of nice rhyming trochees.

Another language spoken in Malawi

Benjamin Zimmer over at the Language Log has written about Madonna's new adoption. I'm terrible at keeping track of celebrities (or at the very least I stopped keeping track of Madonna after everything she did post-Evita proved to be a terrible disappointment) but I'm vaguely familiar with the foreign baby adoption trend that's currently circulating. Apparently Madonna's new one is from Malawi; the country's national language is Chichewa, which has been receiving some media attention as a result of the adoption.

This is fantastic. I want to encourage the media to pay attention to minority languages, or at least I would if I had any influence over them whatsoever.

But I also want to take the opportunity to mention another language spoken in Malawi: chiTumbuka. I did some fieldwork on Tumbuka a while back (and can still produce a few sentences about cooking vegetables) and discovered that it's really quite interesting. Among other things, there's good evidence for rightward wh-movement (look for a decidedly mediocre paper in the proceedings of ACAL 36 - if you don't feel like waiting, you can download it from my website).

That's really all I had to say. When I saw Malawi mentioned on Language Log my ears pricked up for mention of Tumbuka, and didn't see any, so I wanted to mention it myself.