sociolects

Question 1

what is a social group?

Answer 1

the idea that society is not a collection of isolates individuals

Question 2

what was Howard Giles’ Accomodation Theory?

Answer 2

Convergence – change one’s language to be like others

Divergence – change one’s language to be different from others

Question 3

what was Lesley Milroy’s study?

Answer 3

According to Milroy, a social network is a “web of ties”:

*relationships between people and contact patterns

*strengths of ties between people

*nature of connections – their density and their multiplexity

Milroy studied three inner-city working class Northern Ireland communities – found that language variations could be explained due to the residents’ social networks.

High Network Density: working together, living close to family members and friends, socialising together – accents were reinforced and stayed strong

*Low Network Density: more isolated people – not getting out much (unemployed, looking after children at home) – weaker accents. Where men were “isolated” (one community had high male unemployment), their accents were weaker than the women’s who had higher-density scores through working together in local factories

For speakers in these social networks, strong ties within communities were associated with their identity.

*Maintaining a strong accent was a way of demonstrating and affirming this sense of themselves.

Milroy’s study showed this was true for men and women – nothing gender-based about accent strength.

Question 4

what factors influence social class?

Answer 4

Household income

whether you own or rent

savings

kinds of people you mix with and know socially

cultural activities you engage in

Question 5

what is dialect?

Answer 5

a style of language within a geographical region

Question 6

what is an ethnolect?

Answer 6

a style of language thought to be associated with a particular ethnic group

Question 7

what is a familect?

Answer 7

a style of language used within a family

Question 8

what is a genderlect?

Answer 8

a style of language thought to be distinctive of either men or women

Question 9

what is a sociolect?

Answer 9

a style of language used within a particular social group

Question 10

what is overt prestige?

Answer 10

status that is publicly acknowledged

Question 11

what is covert prestige?

Answer 11

status gained from a group, not the general public

Question 12

what was Penelope Eckert’s study?

Answer 12

2000

The Jocks and the Burnouts

among high-school students in the Detroit, Michigan, area of the USA.

Jocks – group that participated in school life enthusiastically.

Burnouts – actively rebellious and refused to take part in school activities.

Question 13

findings of Penelope Eckert’s study?

Answer 13

People tended to speak more like those with whom they shared social practices and values

*Burnouts used the exaggerated pronunciations associated with the urban accent of their Detroit neighbourhood (covert prestige)

*Jocks were more concerned with speaking in a socially prestigious way (overt prestige), reflecting their more middle-class backgrounds

The Jocks were critical of the Burnouts for their “ungrammatical” language, frequent swearing and for not being articulate

*The Burnouts thought that the Jocks talked like their parents.

Question 14

what was Jennifer Cheshire’s theory?

Answer 14

*Found that the “toughest” girls and boys conformed to the group use of non-standard grammatical forms, such as ain’t.

Question 15

what was Harriet Powney’s theory?

Answer 15

idea of familect – shared language and meanings with one’s family, such as pet names

Question 16

Basil Bernstein’s theory?

Answer 16

1971

Restricted Code – Basil Bernstein claimed that working-class speakers used this context-based, less formal way of speaking

Elaborated Code – Bernstein said this one was for the middle class.

Sadly, his work created a deficit model – that working-class language was deficient – later challenged by William Labov (see accent and dialect work).

Question 17

what was Lave and Wenger’s theory?

Answer 17

Community of Practice: A group of people who share understandings, perspectives and forms of language use as a result of meeting regularly over time.

1) mutual engagement – regular interactions based around

2) a joint negotiated enterprise and with group members using

3) a shared repertoire.

Question 18

what are pragmatic rules?

Answer 18

the unspoken rules that operate in interactions between people who share a common understanding

Question 19

what was Gary Ives’ study?

Answer 19

Do people speak differently because of their age?

Gary Ives survey in West Yorkshire secondary school – 100% of teens (63 surveyed) said yes.

In the same survey, he asked them to remember words they used when younger that they no longer used. They remembered some (kissy-catch, tig, kerby – semantic field of games) but had trouble doing so. Does that mean their vocabulary hadn’t changed much?

Question 20

What was Anna-Brita Stenström’s theory?

Answer 20

2014

characteristics of teen language:

Irregular turn-taking

Overlaps

Indistinct articulation

Word shortenings

Verbal duelings

Slang

Taboo

Language mixing – using language from other cultures

Question 21

what is lavendar language?

Answer 21

the language of the lgbtq community

Question 22

what did William Leap do?

Answer 22

held the first Lavendar Language and Linguistics conference in 1993 for a small group of colleagues working in linguistic anthropology with an interest in language and sexuality

since then it has become an annual evenet

called lavender instead of queer linguistics bc of long-term association of ‘lavender’ with gays

lavender = synonym for homosexual in Gershan Leyman’s 1941 glossary of American Slang

1990s, William Heap published articles on language of gays and lesbians called ‘Lavender Linguistics’

‘Lavender’ seen as a neutral term which wouldn’t exclude research areas, neither was it explicitly political and would be welcoming to all those interested in language and sexuality

Question 23

what did Arnold Zwicky find?

Answer 23

homosexual vs gay - he says some prefer one to the other as a referencing term. Also refers to article by Jeffery Schmalz in 1992 which states many people prefer the term ‘queer’

lesbian or dyke - he argued that dyke has been reclaimed as it was a pejorative term

gay (adj) vs gay (noun). he suggests many dislike the use of the noun form

queer (adj), he argued many young people preferred it to gay, older people less enthusiastic

he targeted folk belief that u can identify a non-straight person from language

common misconceptions = homosexuality was an identification with opposite sex eg lesbians think and act like men, gay men think and act like women. from this it was wrongly thought that gay men would imitate female speech etc

Question 24

conclusions of zwicky?

Answer 24

considering that there would be different speech was erroneous because it made the assumption that people had rigid patterns of how they identified themselves

ppl had different ‘communities of practice’ (eckert + mcconnell-ginet, 1992), it is ‘foolish’ to assume there is a single gay/straight community)

zwicky’s research is quite dated and does not include trans, nonbinary and other groups

zwicky did not allow for difference between gender identity and sexual orientation

Question 25

what is an anti language?

Answer 25

term coined by michael halliday in 1976

extreme version of social dialects arise among subcultures and groups that occupy marginalised/ precarious position in society, especially when outside the law

created by a process of relexicalization (substitution of new words for old)

Question 26

what is thieves cant?

Answer 26

secret known to criminals, hustlers and vagabonds

thought to have begun around 1530 but probably existed before then

compilations and dictionaries of cant written as an aid to warn people what ne’er-do-wells were plotting, eg Richard Head’s Canting Academy

thought to originate from Romany, but there are different Celtic and Gaelic cants as well as evidence from Norman French

Question 27

what is Cockney Rhyming Slang?

Answer 27

a particular cant used in London, eg mince pies for eyes and dog and bone for phone

Question 28

what did Julia Coleman do?

Answer 28

identified the difference between jargon, cant and slang:

jargon = the professional language allowing for precise discussion of topics
related to the given vocation

cant = language used to obfuscate meaning completely from those not in the ‘in
group’

slang = an ephemeral term used by any ‘in group’ to distinguish them from other
groups

Question 29

what is prison language?

Answer 29

A study in 2009 looked at the language spoken in prisons.

It was found that the language spoken by prisoners and officials in the prisons
(prison wardens, etc.) includes jargon, cant, and Slang

Question 30

what is ethnicity?

Answer 30

community, might include religions, beliefs or language, your family relations

Question 31

what is nationality?

Answer 31

what nation you belong to, legal concept

Question 32

how has language changed in the UK under the influence of different ethnicities?

Answer 32

caribbean people arrived in the UK from late 1940s onwards.

variety of english used by 2nd and 3rd gen speakers became known as London Jamaican

by 60s and 70s, mix of peoples meant that people of different ethnic backgrounds come into contact with eachother’s varieties of english

people began crossing between varieties– a white speaker might use more traditional London English with white peer group, and shift to a lexis more influenced by Jamaican English with black friends

white and asian young people without black peer group began to use non-standard Creole-influenced speech at this time too

Question 33

what was ben rampton’s theory?

Answer 33

Language Crossing – ‘Creole was widely seen as cool, tough
and good to use. It was associated with assertiveness, verbal resourcefulness,
competence in heterosexual relationships, and opposition to authority.’ (2010)

Question 34

what did Roger Hewitt and Mark Sebba do?

Answer 34

Roger Hewitt (1986) and Mark Sebba (1993) identified ‘Black Cockney’ – a style
rather than a variety

Question 35

what did John Pitts do?

Answer 35

John Pitts (2012) noticed the language of some young black speakers was shifting.

He said they felt that mainstream society was ignoring and constraining them.

They wanted to sound less like Ian Wright and more like Bob Marley

Question 36

what is BBE?

Answer 36

Although there was language contact different ethnic groups from 1960s to 1990s,
one distinct variety emerged = British Black English (BBE).

Many British speakers with Caribbean heritage have this variety as part of their
repertoire of styles.

BBE varies from region to region across Britain with local variations spoken.

Question 37

what did Jenny Cheshire find (to do with MLE)?

Answer 37

Jenny Cheshire et al. (2008) identified new a form emerging, predominantly among
young people: Multicultural London English.

Has been identified outside of London – so now linguists describe it as Multicultural Urban British English.

Not quite a variety (doesn’t have a uniform set of features) but more than just slang
(although some elements are slang terms).

Question 38

examples of MLE? (some elements have moved into wider use)

Answer 38

Lexis: Bare (a lot/very) Beef (disagreement, conflict) Choong (attractive) ting (girlfriend or thing) endz (local area) on road (on the streets

Phonology: diphthong vowel sounds of words such as ‘face’ and ‘like’ /fes/ and /la:k/

Grammar: few syntactical differences. Use of ‘dem’ as plural marker as in ‘man dem’ for
‘men’, ‘man’ as a self-reference like a pronoun e.g.’man paid for my own ticket’.

Discourse features: ‘innit’ as tag question. ‘you get me’ as confirmation check. ‘this is me’
as a quotative, e.g.’this is me “What you doing?” and this is him “not much”.’

Question 39

what is MLE?

Answer 39

is a dialect of London English which has emerged since the early 1980s in parts of London where there has been a relatively high level of immigration

based on the traditional East End Cockney dialect, but it has a number of different sounds and grammatical contructions

Question 40

what did Ruth Kircher and Sue Fox (2019) do?

Answer 40

conducted an online survey among 800 Londoners to find out what sorts of attitudes they had towards MLE

on a five point scale (1 = very low), the ppl who answered the survey gave MLE an overall score of 2.2

Question 41

what did Armanda Cardoso and her colleagues do?

Answer 41

investigated how people respond to the MLE accent

the milder version of MLE was rated as highly as RP, whereas the stronger version was the most poorly rated accent

Question 42

what was polari

Answer 42

a coded form of language used by gay men, particularly in London

some words eg ‘camp’ and ‘butch’ still used today

paul baker discussed polari in an article. he said polari was often used in a rather sardonic, cutting way, by using feminising words referring to police like ‘lily law’ and ‘hilda handcuffs’.

polari was also used by men wishing to work out if their new acquiantance would be interested in him, by dropping a polari word in a conversation and seeing if it was picked up

Question 43

what did deborah cameron say about homosexual speech in 2003

Answer 43

homosexuals THOUGHT to speak like women, lesbians thought to speak like men

homosexual speech seen as gender deviant

Question 44

what was basil bernsteins study that evidenced his theory

Answer 44

he showed pictures to children and asked them to describe what was happening in them

the working class children used language that fitted with the fact that they shared the same physical space with the researcher, while the middle class children spoke as if the researcher was not there

Question 45

what was peter trudgill’s 1974 study of norwich speech

Answer 45

concluded that changing the voiced velar nasal to an alveolar (saying runnin’ instead of running) was more likely to feature in working class speech than middle class speech, although he also found differences between men’s and women’s use of the non-standard forms

Question 46

what did paul kerswill say about MLE

Answer 46

Multicultural London English (MLE) is said to occupy a continuum from a vernacular variety to a youth style.

Paul Kerswill highlighted the potential origins of the features of MLE:

for example how the differing vowels within words like ‘goat’ and ‘face’ may come from the Caribbean, Africa, India, or learner varieties.

Kerswill also noted that the ‘man’ pronoun, which is also a feature of MLE, has possible connections with Jamaican varieties, though the way it is used in London differs greatly from Jamaican creole, and is ‘home grown’.

On the other hand, the origins of other features of MLE, such as /k/-backing, were unknown to Kerswill.