🪅• Language & Ethnicity: Studies Flashcards
List All 4(?) Key Themes That Each Study Relates To
N/A
Enregisterment of MLE
Who were the linguist(s) responsible for this study?
(+ Date of Study)
Ilbury
2023
Enregisterment of MLE
What was the focus/ methodology for this study?
- Analysed 373 tiktok videos that were tagged #roadman across the years 2021,22 & 23
- They transcribed to 23,700 words
- Majoirty of videos were humorous parodies of the roadman persona based on well-known stereoypes
- OBSERVED: Attire, behaviour, personality traits & linguistic features
- Linguistic ethnographical method to draw on wider contextual knowledge by enganging in conversations on relevant discourses online
- Digital ethnographical method, the conclusions were drawn with the observations/ opinions of the relevant online communities in order to produce informed conclusion/ response
Enregisterment of MLE
What were the key findings for this study?
***** Roadman always shown as a male
* Characteristics included: like grime music, tougness, overt masculinity, wearing streetware and heterosexuality
* Parodies commonly presented roadman as involved in some criminal activity
* LEXIS = most had connotations of violence/ crime e.g. ‘shank’ = knife (IN MLE)
* PHONOLOGICAL = th-stopping, dh-stopping, goose fronting etc.. (ALL IN MLE)
* SYNTAX = pronoun man as first person singular pronoun (IN MLE)
* DISCOURSE = tag questions e.g. innit (IN MLE)
FINDINGS SHOWED THAT MLE LINGUISTIC FEATURES ARE ENREGISTERED WITH THE ROADMAN SOCIAL PERSONA AND THAT DEPICTIONS OF ROADMEN ACT ON NEGATIVE STEREOTYPES OF YOUNG BLACK MEN
Enregisterment of MLE
What core theme(s) does this study relate to?
N/A
Attitudes Towards MLE
Who were the linguist(s) responsible for this study?
(+ Date of Study)
Kircher & Fox
2019 & 2021
Attitudes Towards MLE
What was the focus/ methodology for this study?
- Attitudes towards MLE & its speakers
- 800 Londoners aged 18-86, gathered info on age, gender, ethnicity & if they spoke themselves MLE
- Digital ethnographical approach - online survey to collect opinions
- Measured opinions on MLE & speakers via responses to several questions (rating on a scale from 1-5) that measured either:
- Social status (education, intelligence, ambition)
- Social attractiveness(sociability, friendliness & speakers own identity as a Londoner)
- Also had opportunity to write a response in their own words, 735 did
Attitudes Towards MLE
What were the key findings for this study?
- MLE not viewed positively, received an average rating of 2.2 & was viewed unfavourably in both Social status and Social attractiveness
- Attitudes were more postitive from:
- Those who spoke MLE
- Those who spoke a language other than english
-
Those with higher levels of education (inferring solution = educating?)
WRITTEN RESPONSE DATA –> - Those who spoke MLE = less negative but expressed concern that their dialect my inhibit progression, showed fear of disadvantages especially in employability (🟣)
- Those who didn’t speak MLE = described MLE as ‘broken language’, ‘language decay’, ‘secret language’ * ‘fake language’; they were extremely negative views/ connotations and very prescriptivist judgements
FINDINGS SHOW THAT MLE IS VIEWED VERY NEGATIVELY, ESPECIALLY BY NON-SPEAKERS
(🟣Link to Accent Bias Britain w/ employment statistic)
Attitudes Towards MLE
What core theme(s) does this study relate to?
N/A
Th-Stopping in Manchester
Who were the linguist(s) responsible for this study?
(+ Date of Study)
Drummond
2018
Th-Stopping in Manchester
What was the focus/ methodology for this study?
- 25 participants aged 14-16 years old, all attending PRUS (Pupil Referral Units) in Manchester
- Linguistic ethnographical approach in order to understand all contexts behind the participants conversations for optimum record of language
- Collected recordings of speech from pupils in a range of contexts, group settings w/ a researcher & individually
- 70 hours of audio, 413,000 words in fieldnotes
Th-Stopping in Manchester
What were the key findings for this study?
- th-fronting was the most common feature, used 86% of time by students
- th-stopping less common, only used 5% of time w/ 17 students not using at all
- Pupils more likely to use non-standard features when in** infromal setting**
- No specific ethnicity used th-stopping more, supporting MLE = multiethnolect
- Zooming into insances, during a conversation about criminal behaviour, the lexical item ‘theif’ was pronounced with th-stopping + another instance a student actually self-corrected thing –> ‘ting’ in a conversation about grime music
- Showing students are consiously using features, they are displaying a performance identity of street culture to appear cool
DRUMMOND’ BELIEVES THAT TH-STOPPING HAS AQUIRED A SOCIAL MEANING OF TOUGHNESS DUE TO USE IN GRIME + FINDINGS INFER THAT TH-STOPPING IS NOT LINKED TO ETHNICITY, BUT INSTEAD USED TO RELFECT A STANCE OF TOUGHNESS & PERFORM AN IDENITIY
Evidence Agianst Ethnicity Determining Language
Th-Stopping in Manchester
What core theme(s) does this study relate to?
N/A
Sassy Queens
Who were the linguist(s) responsible for this study?
(+ Date of Study)
Ilbury
2020
Sassy Queens
What was the focus/ methodology for this study?
- Examined the language of 10 Gay, White, British men age 18-25
- Analysed 15,800 tweets, no more than 3000 per individual, over the duration of 1 year
- Orthographical approach: analysing the words/ spelling used within the tweets and looked out for non-standard (AAVE) spellings
- If he found as such, it would determine if the spellings/ men were directly replicating/ imitating AAVE, via comparing their spellings to that of the AAVE lexicon, therefore perhaps delving into regions of cultural appropriation
Sassy Queens
What were the key findings for this study?
- Only 309 out of the 15,800 (1.9%) of the tweets contained at least one AAVE feature, with only 29 containing more than one
This infers that when the men were using the AAVE features, they were not religiously replicating them - Ilbury found that black women are often stereotyped in online meida e.g. mems as angry, fierce & sassy e.g. = ‘aint got time for that’ meme
- Being fierce and sassy are features that are desired/ celebrated/ appreciated by the gay community
AS A RESULT OF THIS AND THE FINDINGS, ILBURY CONCLUDED THAT THE 10 MEN IN THE STUDY WOULD HAVE USED AAVE LINGUISTIC FEATURES IN ORDER TO PERFOM AN IDENTITY AND PRESENT THEMSELVES ARE FIERCE AND SASSY, THUS REFLECTING THEIR IDENTITIES AS HOMOSEXUAL MEN
The men were uneducated on the etymology/ history of the lexis, they were simply using it to perfom/ present a gay identity
Sassy Queens
What core theme(s) does this study relate to?
N/A
Punjabi Indian English
Who were the linguist(s) responsible for this study?
(+ Date of Study)
Sharma & Sankaran
2011
Punjabi Indian English
What was the focus/ methodology for this study?
- Looked at Punjabi community in Southall, London
- Over the last 60 years, South Asians shifted from being a minoirty group to a majoirty which now makee 60% of the local population
Foucsed on the pronounciation of /t/ as it has a local (London), South Asian & Standard pronounciation:
* Standard: fully pronounced standard /t/
* Local: glottalized /t/
* South Asian: retroflexive /t/
They analysed 3 groups of south asians, totalling 42 individuals:
Punjabi Indian English
What were the key findings for this study?
(EXTRA) Example speakers, both from Group #3:
Anand (Young man, 20) → Sounded very cockney/ MLE → Boys commonly establish a street status, so Anand would have grown up w/ local working class boys, would have wanted to appear tough hence cockney/ MLE accent
Namrita (Young woman, 28) → Sounded very RP → Merging to more standard language in order to be more successful in ore open social networks, therefore using an RP accent due to high percived prestige
Although, for women in particular, they used more Punjabi features when speaking English at home. By comparing with Namrita, it was inferred that women seem to have much sharper compartmentalisation across their repertoires → Links with females having more pressure in society and therefore also the findings of Trudghill’s Study (Women over-reporting the use of standard more) & Kerswill’s Study (Women use standard pronouciations more than men)
(RESULTS) Results for the use of the pronounciation of the /t/ phoneme:
Results show that Punjabi features are becoming less common amoungst younger generations and local features are being used, reflective of how ethnicity does not govern language use
Punjabi Indian English
What core theme(s) does this study relate to?
N/A
Asian English
Who were the linguist(s) responsible for this study?
(+ Date of Study)
Ives
????
Asian English
What was the focus/ methodology for this study?
?
Asian English
What were the key findings for this study?
?
Asian English
What core theme(s) does this study relate to?
?
