Social Group Flashcards
Anti-languages
Anti-languages Key Terms
(4)
- Cryptolect – secretive language used by a subculture.
- Dyadic Communication – communication between two people.
- Occupational Register – a set of jargon used and understood by a particular social group. E.g terms gamers use / nurses use.
- Received Pronunciation – the accent seen as ‘correct’ and ‘prestigious’ used by the queen and used when teaching English as a language.
Anti-languages
Thieves’ Cant
(16th century)
- An anti-language used by thieves in the 16th century.
- Anti-languages are often established to allow communication to take place freely, and to affirm an identity.
Anti-languages
Cockney rhyming slang
(early 19th century)
An anti-language associated with London.
* Thought to have developed from street sellers and petty criminals (thieves cant).
* Examples include – “apples and pairs” (stairs), “adam and eve” (believe), “trouble and strife” (wife).
Anti-languages
David Crystal on Cockney rhyming slang
Suggests that the Nation’s current obsession with celebrity culture has led to additions to Cockney Rhyming slang, keeping it relevant.
* E.g “Pete Tong” (wrong), “Brad Pitt” (fit), “Wallace and Gromit” (vomit)
Anti-languages
Halliday
(4)
- Coined the term ‘anti-language’, to fit an anti-society.
- Often have same grammar, different lexis – relexicalization.
- Features of anti-languages include borrowing words from other languages, creating unconventional compounds, and utilising new suffixes for existing words.
- Anti-language is fundamental to the existence of the ‘second life’ and only functions effectively when the ‘layperson’ cannot understand.
Age
Eckert – age
There are three forms of age
* Chronological – how long someone has been alive.
* Social – how someone interacts socially, for example, like marriage and the birth of a first child.
* Biological – physical maturity.
- Teenspeak distances teenagers from adults.
Age
Gary Ivers
(2014)
Looked at code switching in two different schools.
School A
* 95% were from Pakistan.
* Switched between Punjabi and English for different reasons.
* “Everyone speaks like this” / “its natural”.
* Expletives in Punjabi is funnier, power as others don’t know what they are saying, establish area and identity.
School B
* More culturally diverse.
* Lots of lexical influence from different countries, with a large influence of Black American speech.
* Replacing of standard English, shift from nouns to verbs.
* “bruv” / “hype” / “chatting rubbish”.
Age
Christopher V Odato
(2013)
- Looked at the use of ‘like’ within children’s speech.
- From as young as four, children were using ‘like’.
- Stage 1 – children using ‘like’ infrequently and in few syntactic positions. E.g beginning of clause
- Stage 2 – by the age of 5 (girls) / 7 (boys), the use within sentences increased.
- Stage 3 – frequently used in sentences and increasing variety in position.
- This could be linked to how children learn to speak and mimic others.
Age
Labov - Martha’s Vineyard
Younger inhabitants converged to the vowel pronunciation of the older members when tourists arrived to distance themselves.
Age
Stenstrom
Teenspeak contains slang, expletives, contractions, name calling, insult battles.
Social Class
Trudghill
(1974)
- Studied the social differentiation of English in Norway – 50 adults, 10 children.
- Lower class
- use glottal stops in the place of ‘t’ (“a lo’ of“)
- Omit ‘s’ in third person singular tense (he walk instead of he walks)
- Men are more likely to use non-standard English than women.
Social Class
Bernstein – social class
(3)
- Believes there are two different ‘codes’ which are ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ code.
- Restricted is context-bound, and non-standard and was spoken by lower classes.
- Elaborated is more standard and developed, spoken by middle class children.
Social Class
Petyt
(1985)
- Investigated the frequency of H-dropping in a word initial position among speakers in Bradford. (Give it to ‘im)
- Working class said 28% of Hs.
- Middle class said 93% of Hs.
Social Class
Labov – New York stores study
(5)
- Studies three different types.
- Asked employees to say “fourth floor”, studying the pronunciation of the rhotic /r/
- Concluded that women of all social classes were more likely to use perceived correct pronunciation.
- Attempting to gain respect - overt prestige.
- The employees with higher socioeconomic status pronounced the ‘rhotic /r/’ more frequently then those in a lower status.
Region
Region Key terms
(6)
- Accent - how you say something
- Dialect - the words you use
- Matched guise - an experiment where one speaker speaks in a range of different accents in order for people to pass judgement about accents.
- Received pronunciation - an accent which is typically posh, associated with the Queen and the BBC. Only 2% of the UK speak it.
- Glottal stop - missing the ‘t’ in words.
- TH-fronting - missing the ‘th’ in words and replacing it with ‘f’
