Anglistics Study Programme Sociolinguistics Week 5 Anglistics Study

Anglistics Study Programme Sociolinguistics Week 5 Anglistics Study Programme www. singidunum. ac. rs/admission

Anglistics Study Programme • Gerard Van Herk’ “What is Sociolinguistics” • Chapter 4: Social Status • What does language variation tell us about distinctions within communities? • Distinctions can include class, ethnicity, age, gender, and others, as well as the interactions between them.

Anglistics Study Programme • Some say sociolinguistics started with a study by Fischer in 1958 of schoolchildren in New England-found that g-dropping wasn’t random, as linguists had assumed previously. [saying jumpin’ vs jumping] • Though there are no categorical rules for when this happened, there were clear probabilistic constraints-dropping the g was more likely to happen in specific contexts.

Anglistics Study Programme • Fischer’s findings were that linguistic constraints were less common with formal verbs, compared with informal words (criticizing vs. running). He found that boys were more likely than girls to drop the g, that working class students also dropped the g more often than middle class students, and that everybody (particularly middle class students) dropped the g more often during formal conversations.

Anglistics Study Programme • This is the basic idea that has been expanded on since by sociolinguists-most societies are divided into groups with different status. • Some linguistic functions are variable-this means that they can be expressed in two or more ways (these are called variants). • Now, sometimes these linguistic variations appear to have no social meaning whatsoeveryou can say Give her the potato OR Give the potato to her.

Anglistics Study Programme • Often, however, one of the variants becomes associated with higher-status groups, thus acquiring prestige (or, what’s more probable, is that the other becomes associated with lower -status groups and acquires stigma) • We find that higher-status people use prestige form more often, as well as when people are in formal situations or paying more attention to their speech. The g-dropping is stigmatized.

Anglistics Study Programme • How does one determine status? This concept can be traced back to Karl Marx, that a western, industrialized society is composed of different classes. He identified the capitaliststhose who owned the means of production-and the proletariat-who worked for said capitalists. • However, class differences most of us are familiar with come from the basic distictions that social scientists work from, in which class includes lifestyle and life chances.

Anglistics Study Programme • Sociolinguists often determine the membership of a speaker’s class through a complex scorecard-this includes type of home, neighborhood, income, and occupational prestige. • We are not robots, however, we aren’t doomed to speak a certain way because of the class we were born into. There is a more complex view of the relationship between class and speech.

Anglistics Study Programme • Labov introduced the idea of borrowed prestige-speakers’ setting and the role they are playing can affect their use of language features that are associated with a particular class. The study found that employees of fancier stores used fewer stigmatized forms than employees at less fancy stores. This held water even though all the employees had basically the same class background and worked for the same low pay.

Anglistics Study Programme • The Canadian sociolinguist Jack Chambers actually suggests that people often try to talk like who they want to be, and that we might want to look into identifying people by their aspirations, as opposed to their current status.

Anglistics Study Programme • There was an exception: the crossover effect with the second-highest group. When this group was speaking more formally, they used prestige variants even more often than the group above them, that is, the people whom they were presumably trying to emulate. • This means that they showed social hypercorrection, overdoing what they saw as the linguistic requirements of the situation. Think of some examples of social hypercorrection: the way white rappers dress.

Anglistics Study Programme • This crossover effect among the 2 nd highest class has shown up in studies from many different communities, and is often attributed to linguistic insecurity among a social group attempting to move up the class ladder. • A useful alternative explanation exists for at least some of these types of effects-perhaps we should assign speakers to social categories on the basis of where they fit into the linguistic market-for example, some jobs require more standard English, despite not necessarily being the highestpaying (examples: schoolteachers, executive secretaries, some fancier stores).

Anglistics Study Programme • When we use terms such as linguistic insecurity and hypercorrection we assume that speakers are fairly conscious of how the things that they say are used against them in terms of determining their social status. However, it seems that different linguistic features involve different amounts of awareness and control (example, a NYC mother and daughter were convinced they always pronounced their R’s, and were sad to hear that they did drop them when they listened to themselves on tape).

Anglistics Study Programme • Each of us has dozens of linguistic features that mark our speech (which is why sociolinguists tend to be hired to provide information about the voices used in phoning bomb threats). Some of these features are salient (meaning noticeable) and recognized within the community as having a particular social meaning. So if these features are very noticeable and often discussed, they may be stereotypes. .

Anglistics Study Programme • If they’re barely noticed but the speakers control how often they use them in different styles they are called sociolinguistic markers. Other features are “below the radar” but can be shown using large-scale studies to be associated with particular social characteristicsthese features are called sociolinguistic indicators. A speech community’s norms affect both markers and indicators

Anglistics Study Programme • Now we suggested that nobody needs to actively mark their region unless or until they have contact with people from other regions. Likewise, perhaps people’s social class membership has to be uncertain for them to use variable language to mark it. We have to assume that social mobility plays a big role in how class and language influence each other. In societies where mobility is more difficult, the linguistic boundaries are also more rigid. We use the term caste to describe a social group like this-it’s very hard, if not impossible, to move out of. Think: India.

Anglistics Study Programme • The British class system in the distant past also adhered to something like a caste system, with extremely limited social mobility. The somewhat more fluid situation Marx described in the 1840’s was a fairly recent development associated with industrialization. Increasing social mobility during that time period increased the importance of language as a way of identifying somebody’s class -we wouldn’t want people who inherited wealth to be associated with those who had only recently earned their money, haha. How lucky to have nonstandard speech features ensure that this wouldn’t happen.

Anglistics Study Programme • Consequence of this was that an entire industry was born around people teaching non-standard speakers how to linguistically pass for members of the social elite. Ever more elaborate prescriptive rules were introducedhere’s where we get math rules like ‘two negatives make a positive’ to avoid saying I don’t want nothing-until the 17 th century, this was actually fine.

Anglistics Study Programme • The result is a middle class showing social hypercorrection-until the late 1800’s where we get ain’t and g-droppin’ used by the working classes and the nobility, but rarely by those in between. • British social mobility increased throughout the 20 th century and overt commentary on class differences in speech remained strong.

Anglistics Study Programme • Examples of words associated with upper class (U) and non-upper class (non-U): • Graveyard (U) vs. cemetary (non-U) • Rich (U) vs. wealthy (non-U) • Napkin (U) vs. serviette (non-U) • Notice that the no-U words involve more indirection and euphemism-they’re actually more ‘polite’ than the relatively direct language of U.

Anglistics Study Programme • Prestige or standard varieties of a language generally start off as the variety associated with a particular social or regional group, without necessarily being seen as linguistically ‘better. ’ As that group rises in power or status, its language acquires a glow of respectability or correctness. Ex. London when it became the permanent capital, the dialect of Oxford. Cambridge-London became the language of court documents and university lectures.

Anglistics Study Programme • This was reinforced with the development of court bureaucracy, and with the introduction of the first printing press, when the London variety was chosen to standardize spelling-until the status distinction kicked in, it was normal that even nobility spoke with distinct regional accents-and people also spelled things the way that they said them.

Anglistics Study Programme • Yet social mobility doesn’t lead to just hypercorrection or social anxiety. It also means that if a group’s place in the society changes, the prestige attached to features of said language can change. Ex: in Hungary after the communist takeover, the children of laborers received govt. subsidies to stay in schoolresulting in previously highly stigmatized working-class speech features to become more and more acceptable.

Anglistics Study Programme • Over the past hundred years (and dictionaries!) written English has become standardizedliterally-there’s a particular codified way to spell most words and punctuate most sentences. • But whose accent wins out? • How much can we use contractions, etc. ? • It is impossible to define this objectively-we can agree that some forms (like ain’t) are probably not part of the standard (at least anymore).

Anglistics Study Programme • Today’s standard is a bit easier to pin down on social grounds-the language of the upper socio -economic classes and educated people, of literature or printed documents, the variety taught in schools and used by TV broadcasters.

Anglistics Study Programme • In North American English this is the accent of the American Midwest and of central and western Canada • In Britain it is the language of the south. • It is the standard of high-status people. • By this definition though, we lose any idea of “correctness” (which is implied by another meaning of ‘standard’-as in ‘living up to my standards’)

Anglistics Study Programme • What we are left with is a sociolect-that is, a subset of language used by a particular social group or class. What is interesting to many sociolinguists is the idea of a standard-the widely held belief that some ways of speaking are not just different, but actually inherently correct. Thus, the standard gets much of its power from being seen as socially and linguistically unmarked (meaning, not weird).

Anglistics Study Programme • Can you spot which sentences are incorrect according to the prescriptive rules of Standard English? • Let’s share what we feel, even though according to many prescriptivists, all of the example sentences are considered wrong. • Some constructions-increasingly common-like Julie and myself-come from linguistic insecurity-we cop out when we know that both Julie and I and Julie and me are wrong in specific cases, so we cop out.

Anglistics Study Programme • Now, highly marked language can be socially marked as well, especially in less formal contexts. • Many second language learners find the pretty formal version of the language they’re learning in school is kind of inappropriate for casual conversation. This is similar to what happens to people on the autism spectrum-they may use too many form-type variants which makes their speech sound stilted or unnatural. • Even those who work in jobs with a high linguistic market value end up standing a bit too standard once we clock off work. • Returning home from university to your neighborhood you may be accused of sounding posh and be reminded to ‘keep it real. ’

Anglistics Study Programme • Interestingly, men tend to use more nonstandard local forms than women do. But when asked which form they used, men tended to overreport their use of the local form, while women underreported. • This suggests that TWO kinds of prestige exist: overt prestige-the kind associated with sounding ‘proper’-and covert prestige-a sort of hidden positive evaluation that speakers give to other (presumably non-standard) forms.

Anglistics Study Programme • We use covert prestige as the linguistic equivalent of street credibility-but only the women assign covert (hidden) prestige to local forms (they obviously valued them, used themthey just said that they didn’t). • In each community we study it’s more likely that the local language features have lower status and are most closely associated with workingclass speakers.

Anglistics Study Programme • As we move up the class scale, the forms that people use grow more similar to the forms used by people of similar status elsewhere-a lawyer in both New York and Los Angeles will have virtual identical grammatical structures, though slightly different accents. But security guards working in two different cities will sound much more different from one another.

Anglistics Study Programme • Let’s consider this: when people started sounding like Londoners, it wasn’t a working class Cockney accent they aimed for-linguistic prestige is directly associated with power. It is the connection of the language in question to the phenomena of power that determines the value of that language and that contributes to the standardization process. • In situations that involve access to power and education, it is the standard language that is expected (socially unmarked) – you rarely hear someone corrected for not using ‘ain’t’

Anglistics Study Programme • The links between status, language and education have long been of interest to sociolinguists-Basil Bernstein said in the early 1960’s that we could think of two kinds of English-a ‘restricted code’ (which all children use) and an ‘elaborated code’ which only some children get-and which better prepares them for the type of language and reasoning used in school.

Anglistics Study Programme • Thus, working class children tended not to acquire this elaborated code-which educators tended to interpret to mean that working class children had linguistic deficits that would limit their cognitive development-something linguists disagree with.

Anglistics Study Programme • Prestige, stigma, power, status-ideas that can translate across a range of sociolinguistic situations. • Class is more closely associated with somewhat mobile industrialized societies-particularly urban areas. • Sociolinguists need to pay attention to local concepts of social language when trying to figure out how it might relate to language use. Ex. A Guyanese village in which social distinction was made between the Estate class-people who cut and planted sugar, used deep (basilectal-meaning the most creole-like variety) Creole forms, and the Non-Estate class-which had more urban contacts and used linguistic features closer to standard English.

Anglistics Study Programme • Also: the Poor-a long tradition in English has existed between the Good Poor People (the ‘deserving poor’-deserving of help, not of being poor), and the Bad Poor People (who aren’t even trying). Volition is assigned to the poor people, legitimizing putting or keeping them down, when saying things like ‘that’s so ghetto’

Anglistics Study Programme • Many English-speaking societies have developed terms for urban working class people-chav, bogan, ned-defined in remarkably similar ways-youth, white men, adopting a hiop hop style, presumably involved in crime, drugs, production of multiple children-describing them or imitating them has a linguistic component, heavy use of local stigmatized non-standard features. This may affect attitudes towards said local vernacular varieties.