Language & Society 2019

Enregisterment – active productive iconization of linguistic forms, marketing of such

“Norf London”

“projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto some other level”. 

- a process leading to change in the language (e.g. phonological changes). It involves the projection of an opposition onto some other level.

• Construction of oppositions (e.g. nation-state building in former Yugoslavia: each part after the splitting changed their language to create distance)
• Creation and reproduction of ideologies more generally

“Ideology, simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders some persons or activities invisible. (…) Facts that are inconsistent with the ideological scheme either go unnoticed or get explained away.”

- Catalan as a dialect of Spanish; Valencian as a dialect of Catalan

- Dialects not having grammars

- “There are no true/real gypsies/Maori” etc

• language beliefs are actively used for purposes of nation-building or the building of other groups
• Building of other groups tied together by language
• ’homogenism’ and nation-building (one nation, one language)
• Association (e.g. of Classical Arabic w/ Islam)
• Pronunciation of BATH vowel (Northern E.)

Many believe that certain languages exist in a standard form which affects the way we think about language:

• Negative views about varieties not meeting those standards
• Sense of protection of Standard English (against decay) 

-> this is a non specialist divide also!

• Fractal recursivity and erasure come into play to present the uniform state as ‘common sense’ 
• post-hoc rationalisations to account for structural rules (e.g. the dialect has gaps, is illogical, doesn’t follow the patterns of Latin and Greek, etc)
• Because it is common sense, people can be punished for going against it – accent discrimination is not illegal in many countries, even though it is often a proxy for racial or class discrimination.

• Language is not a possession of native speakers, but is defined externally in grammar books and dictionaries and a specific literary canon defined by the political elite
• People externalise authority e.g. claims that they can be ‘wrong’ or speak the language incorrectly; e.g. Scrabble.
• The view that there is a treasured set of texts which best depict the language at its finest, to be revered and studied by all (e.g. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and now romantic poetry)

• Time depth is considered to credit a language with legitimacy, so the longer you can trace back your language, the better
• ‘Legitimate’ languages are not mixed or new (cf borrowings; urban dialects)
• ‘Legitimate’ languages are distinct and help define the nation state
• Heritage has to be protected from corruption and decay – complaint tradition

Milroy excludes prestige:

• ‘Standard variety’ is often equated with the ‘highest prestige variety’ rather than with the variety which is characterised by the highest levels of uniformity (since this is the only linguistic characteristic of a standard variety).
• But this is not a necessary connection: cf plugs and designer suits.
• Varieties acquire prestige when their speakers have prestige. But scholars have suggested that a particular variant is standard because it is used by a particular elite, high prestige group.

-> Fractal recursivity: Standard = uniform

the elite are prestigious and so characteristics of them gain prestige too

language of elite = prestigious = standard.

-> Prestige is not a necessity of standardness, but fractal recursivity makes us think so

• The standard becomes a central reference point, with other grammars being seen as surface derivatives 
• it is common to label processes as if they have begun from a written standard perspective (e.g. copula deletion, t/d deletion; /t/ glottalization; /0/ fronting).
• The standard or ‘prestige’ or ‘careful style variant' is considered the baseline, and other forms ‘diverge’ from it

- the unstandardized language universe

- Walls around language use in Western world

• No understanding or belief in the concept of different languages:
• Grace: ‘Each individual conceives of the immediate linguistic reality in terms of pools of linguistic resources’ – a fashionable view in sociolinguistics today.
• Mühlhäusler: No conception of what their language is, no sense of belonging to a linguistic community

Some proposed linguistic changes in the dialectological literature assume a standard starting point.

• The history of /au/ in Southern England and New Zealand Englishes
• Lack of retroflex consonants in Taiwanese Mandarin

• “spontaneous speaker of pure vernacular...our direct access to language untainted by the interference of reflection of social agency” (Eckert 2003: 392).
• “Locally located and oriented, the Authentic Speaker produces linguistic output that emerges naturally in and from that location” (Eckert 2003: 392).
• Eckert argues that both linguists and non-linguists succumb to this privileging of the ‘authentic’.

→ traditional dialectology

       → variationist sociolinguistics

• Firmly place-based
• Socially untainted (Only strong networked, tight-knit communities studied)
• Male
• Traditional / Unchanging (only stable communities studied, with ‘normal’ sociolinguistic transmission; cities affected by significant demographic upheaval avoided)
• Unconscious speech (the fetishisation of the vernacular and the methodological hunt for the ‘least observed speech’)
• Non-mobile (mobile individuals are excluded from even urban dialectological studies; optimal, static recording conditions prioritised over capturing human interaction ‘on the move’)

the vernacular

• Patterns are most regular in spontaneous speech
• Conscious monitoring of speech, or performance of speech, interferes with the regularity of the vernacular.

“Traditional dialectology” was carried out in rural areas among NORMs (Chambers and Trudgill 1998).

Non-Mobile 

Old

Rural

Men

• Horvath’s (1985) work on Sydney;
• Fox’s (2007) work on Tower Hamlets, an area of the East End of London;
  (ei) - ‘face’, ‘make’, ‘Dave’

• Contrast with the idealism of Chomsky
• “real language is language produced in authentic contexts by authentic speakers” (Bucholtz, 2003)
• Underwrites nearly everything we do in sociolinguistics
• “the outcome of the linguistic practices of social actors and the metalinguistic practices of sociolinguists” (B, 2003)

• ‘the scholarly gaze must be cast back from modernity to a prior time’
• Valorization of the rural as an authentic source of traditional cultural knowledge
• Documenting ways of life ‘vanishing in the wake of modernity’
  (cf anthropology; cf cultural change as cultural loss)

The characteristics and behaviours of socially defined groups can be determined and explained by reference to cultural and or biological characteristics believed to be inherent to the group.

• Women talk a lot because, more than men, they are interested in social engagement.
• Young people can’t orally communicate properly anymore because they spend all their time on mobile phones, texting.

Essentialism can sometimes be useful and be used deliberately to further a particular cause.

• ‘a deliberate move to enable scholarly activity, to forge a political alliance through the creation of a common identity, or to otherwise provide a temporarily stable ground for further social action with a short term goal’ (B 2003)
• dominance and difference in language and gender studies, celebration of women’s linguistic abilities
• descriptions of AAVE

• Linguistic isolationism

• Linguistic mundaneness

• The linguist as obstacle to linguistic authenticity 

• The linguist as arbiter of authenticity

• ‘the most authentic language is removed from and unaffected by other influences
• thus the most authentic speaker belongs to a well-defined, static and relatively homogeneous social grouping that is closed to the outside’ (2003: 404)

• ‘authentic language = is unremarkable, commonplace, everyday / naturally occurring speech’ (2003: 405-6).
• Part of the emphasis on documenting ‘quotidian language’, but this is just a small subset of all language use.
• Variationist sociolinguistics: most vernacular speaker at his most casual and unselfconscious and hence most systematic
• Conversation analysis: conversation is the most authentic, the base from which other kinds of language use derive

• ‘Observer’s paradox’
• Ethnography, participant observation

• The linguist as arbiter of authenticity 
• It is the linguist who ultimately decides who is authentic and who isn’t. 

The process by which, through constantly negotiated social practices, speakers claim certain identities:

• Use of AAVE
• Use of British regional accents

• two different kinds of identity: assigned and chosen/crafted/self-influenced
• identity as the essentialized traits of people of certain kinds (e.g. ‘women’…)
• identity as ‘traits seen as only loosely tied to individuals and groups [which] can be donned and doffed as easily as one can change the cut of one’s jeans’ (Kiesling, 449)

Identity as an explanation for correlation in found data is dangerous, because speech traits don’t have to necessarily be an identity explanation! -> too easy

• “The social positioning of self and other” (B&H)
• “Identity is how individuals define, create or think of themselves in terms of their relationships with other individuals and groups” (K)
• ‘identity is a discursive construct that emerges in interaction’(B&H)
• ‘the development of theoretical approaches to identity remains at best a secondary concern, not a focused goal of the field’ (B&H)

Identity is best viewed as the emergent product rather than the pre-existing source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore as fundamentally a social and cultural phenomenon’ (B&H: 588)

• constituted through social action
• resources may derive from resources in earlier interactions
• easiest to recognize in cases where speakers’ language use does not conform with the category they are normally assigned to: ‘crossing’.

• Identity emerges in discourse through the temporary roles and orientations assumed by participants, such as evaluator, joke teller, or engaged listener’ (B&H 591)
• Eckert: Study on jocks & burnouts, identity as student
• To counter idea that ‘it is simply a collection of broad social categories’ (B&H 591)
• Identities encompass 

1. macro-level demographic categories
2. local ethnographically specific cultural positions
3. temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles’ (B&H 592)

• we as a speech community create meaningful links between linguist forms and social meanings

Indexicality processes:

• Overt mention of categories

Actually referring to social categories in talk (‘whitey’, ‘hijra’, ‘posh’, Londoner’, ‘grumpy old man’)

• Implicatures and presuppositions

- require additional inferential work for interpretation
- Use of implicatures by people not wishing to over-openly display their own identity
- Presuppositions by defence lawyers to present rape victims as active agents rather than passive victims

• Displays of orientations towards talk, ‘stances’

- Discourse in which speakers take a particular position or approach, in interaction with others, with respect to a particular topic or person: friendly, authoritative, angry, disinterested...

- Use of linguistic forms that are associated with specific personas or groups

• To counter the idea that identity is just about sameness and difference
• To reiterate that identities get their meaning in relation to other identity positions and not in isolation