Social groups Flashcards
Define Penelope Eckert’s Jocks and burnouts theory.
Eckert studied negation - also referred to as negative concord. She studied the Jocks and the Burnouts in a high school in Detroit.
The burnouts used negative Concorde 42% of the time.
Jocks used it 13%.
Burnouts reguarlly switched from standard to non-standard forms. They did not lack knowledge but wanted to appear like they do.
Jock girls were the most consistent language users
Due to societal pressures for them to appear perfect.
Define intra-speaker variation and interspecific variation.
intra- variation within the speaker themselves
inter - variation within different speakers.
What did the sociolinguists Joanna Thomborrow say and when?
2009
‘One of the most fundamental ways we have of establishing our identity, and shaping other peoples views of who we are, is through the use of our language.
define sociolect
A form of language or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, an age group or other social group.
define convergence and divergence
Convergence - trying to fit into social groups - matching the language to those around you
divergence - changing your language to stand out
define overt and covert prestige
overt - when people put on an accent that is widely recognised as being the culturally dominant Group . e.g RP
Mary Bucholtz ‘geek study’
She studied the connection between language and identity.
Studied a group girls which embraced the geek identity.
They distanced themselves from their peers.
Prided themselves on their social intelligence and their freedom.
prided themslelves on catching teachers errors.
Used the fronting of back adverbials far less frequenctly.
in order to diverge from their cool peirs
They also used the release of the ‘t’ between vowels and used a more British English pronunciation to come across as articulate and intelligent.
Consciously used conservative and prestigious features of lexis.
What was Gary Ives study and when?
Survey on a secondary school in West Yorkshire.
63 teens aged 16-17 were interviewed.
100% of them said that people spoke differently at different ages.
many found it difficult to remember words from when they were younger.
Many teenage lexicons are linked by informal register/taboo and dialect.
teens believed they used slang specific to their age to distance them from the older gen.
many older children no longer found it ‘cool’ to use informal variants of language in online communication, suggesting they had grown out of it.
2014
What was Vivian deklerks theory
Believes that young people seek to establish new identities through the use of linguistics.
States that the patterns of speech previosuly modelled on the speech of adults such as their parents or teachers ‘are slowly eroded by the patterns of speech by their peer group’.
They need to establish themselves as different from their parents and other young people distinguishing themselves as members of distinctive social groups.
Experts three types of ages
chronological - number of years since birth
biological - physical maturity
social age - linked to life events.
