Sociolinguistics Flashcards
Variables
one idea, many ways of expressing it
Variant
different ways of expressing a variable
Allophony as a sociolinguistic variable?
is not a sociolinguistic variable as allophony is not interchangeable - you do not have the option to say one thing over the other
Orderly heterogeneity
speakers have many choices on how they assemble their speech (heterogeneity)
these choices form predictable patterns (orderly)
examples of variables
regional words for a bread roll: bap, un, barn….
g dropping - running, runnin’
transcription of variable
(…)
transcription of variants
[…]
speech communities
people in frequent interaction who share a linguistic repertoire and have shared norms and evaluations of that repertoire
can cross continents:
USA: zee
UK, NZ, SA, AUS: zed
components of a repertoire
can be lexical, phonological, pragmatic, vowel distribution, syntactic…
superposed language
language associated with formal speechmaking, scientific discussion, a specialised function
the choice of superposed variants may be guided by:
technical requirements
social barriers
typically these are late learned, outside the critical period
community of practice
people who get together to engage in a shared activity (and talk about the shared practice they have in common)
enregistered language
when notable features of the way language is spoken is in a given place become crystallised in the public imagination, we say it has become enregistered:
- Cockney (London)
- Pittsburghese (Pittsburgh)
Uniformitarian Principle
knowledge about the past that helps us explain the present
Real Time
replicating a previous study in the same environment as the initial study
Apparent Time
compare generations of speakers in the same moment
Change from above
involves an incoming norm (usually from outside)
people know it is happening
tends to be used stylistically
tend to be led by the higher socio-economic class
tends to be led by women
Change from below
speakers are unaware of it
tends to be less stylistically active
tends to be led by ‘interior’ socio-economic classes
tends to be led by women
age grading
age differences are a stable property of the speech community
- adolescents tend to use more non-standard forms
often involves stable variation, or change that is not progressing between generations
crossover effect
when one class takes over another in a linguistic phenomena, thus going against the pattern in place
gendered language
caretakers more likely to use the more prestigious form when talking to girls than boys across all ages
gendered identity and presentation adheres to held notions of gendered speech (women having a fronter [s], men have a backer [s])
gender paradox
women use the more standard/prestigious form
they lead change from both above and below
- because it is not the same women leading both changes
Eckert’s Study
study of teens in Detroit split into important social groupings:
- Jocks (middle class, suburban, university bound, hierarchal)
- Burnouts (locally based, urban, workplace bound)
recorded language changes and had the following findings:
- for older, more established changes: girls lead
- for newer, more recent changes: change led by social grouping, not gender
styleshifting/intraspeaker variation
when speakers change the way they speak depending on the context or topic
attention paid to speech (Labov)
when you do not pay attention to your speech, you are more likely to use your most natural vernacular.
when you do, you are more likely to use more formal, superposed elements
Audience design (Bell)
proposed that speakers shift their speech to match to their imagined audience
audience roles:
- addressee (ratified and being directly addressed)
- auditor (ratified but not directly addressed)
- overhearer (neither ratified nor being directly addressed but speaker is aware of their presence)
- eavesdropper (speaker not aware of them)
speaker design
when speakers choose different variants to present a certain identity to the world
‘acts of identity’ treats use of linguistic variants as a kind of speech act
speech acts
performative (by saying it, you are doing it) promising swearing pronouncing declaring
indexicality
when a linguistic variant is associated with a certain place, or group of speakers, that variant can ‘index’ the meanings associated with that place
-ing
= formality, educatedness, effortfulness
-in’
= casualness, friendliness
Study by Smith, Durham and Fortune
recorded caretakers and young children in Buckie, Scotland
- children exposed to two variants
(HOOSE) - [u:] - [ʌʊ]
associated ‘hoose’ with play and ‘house’ with discipline
reification
assuming a form of speech is more or less than another
Study by Purnel, Idsari and Baugh
carried out an experiment in the Californian Bay Area where a tridialectal speaker requested house viewings in 5 different locales in:
Standard American English
African American English
Chicano English
findings showed that the population breakdown for each locale roughly corresponded with which guises were granted permission to view the properties
(for example, in the predominantly white Woodside, appointments made in Standard American English were more likely to be accepted)
Credibility
case of Trayvon Martin
- witness Rachel Jeantel was on the phone to Trayvon Martin at the time of the shooting, but because jury members struggled to understand AAE, her testimony played no role in their decision which took the side of the cop.
Associations of Vocal Fry
associated with both powerful, authoritative British men as a good thing, and Californian women as a sign of uneducatedness or stupidity.
- derived from attitudes about the speakers, not the variant itself
