Nonstandard Situations and Nonstandard Language in Aviation Discourse: Which Slang Gets the Very Last Word?

Abstract

Deborah Tannen and Charlotte Linde have shown that in the discourse analysis of aircraft voice cockpit recorder transcriptions, gender, rank, authority, and politeness provide ways to understand obstacles to and assistance for successful communication. A further look at such speech acts, asking whether both technical language and slang are used and are functional, reveals an uncertainty about which is more concise and clear. Despite the distrust of slang and official attempts to assert or enforce a purely technical lexicon, pilots and air traffic controllers, under pressure in highly dangerous situations, alternate between the two sorts of utterance. Slang provides not only shorthand, concise expressions as compared to technical language, but it also communicates feeling. Nevertheless, it depends on a common acquaintance with the slang lexicon among members of the speech community involved in the incident. Whether aviation slang is an "endangered language" may be a question that can only be answered by further analysis, given the increasing pressure to develop and use unambiguous and clear technical jargon.