Ethnicity, Age, occupation + social class Flashcards
(19 cards)
Occupation john swales - discourse community
occupational settings and people within them form a discourse community which he defines as groups that have shared goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals. Members of a discourse community; share goals, use specialist lexis or discourse and possess required knowledge and skills.
For example, in a hospital, the medical staff share a common goal (to help the patient), use specialist lexis (medical terminology) and have studied medicine at university
- “myocardial infarction” instead of “heart attack.”
koester - phatic talk
workers need to establish interpersonal relationships and have interactions that are not just about work-related procedures. Although some employers are represented as discouraging talk that isn’t strictly work related, Koester shows that being sociable and engaging in personal chat is an important aspect of effective working. As well as power then, solidarity - the ability to connect with one’s workmates - is an important dimension in workplace communication
- Casual greetings – “Morning! How was your weekend?”
- Small talk – “Did you watch the match last night?”
- Expressing solidarity – “I completely agree!”
paul drew and john heritage - institutional talk
workplace and professional talk differs from ordinary conversation in three ways; it focuses on specific goal and tasks, there are special lexical and linguistic structures for the workplace context and differences in power mean that interactions are often asymmetrical with restrictions on turn-taking, topic shifting etc. it is important to consider how language is used differently by someone who has less power in an institution compared to a manager who has more power. As the manager has higher status in that context, it is appropriate for them to use imperatives.
e.g. - “Let’s move on to the next agenda item.”
- “Can you provide an update on the project?”
- Courtroom Talk – Judges and lawyers use formal questioning and restricted turn-taking.
- “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
- “Objection, Your Honor!”
janet holmes
small talk serves a valuable bridging function, a means of transition to the main business of a workplace interaction. in interactions between workmates of unequal power it is generally the boss who either allows small talk or cuts it short. the superiors may not use or expect small talk, but it can be a way to reduce social distance.trivial topics like weather, current events, or personal anecdotes, particularly important in initiating conversations, often demonstrating politeness and consideration for the other person’s feelings
- Casual greetings – “Morning! How was your weekend?”
- Weather talk – “Lovely day today, isn’t it?”
- Shared experiences – “That meeting was long, huh?”
Age - jenny cheshire - life events theory
suggests biological age is not the main influence on a person’s language but rather an individual’s experiences of different life events that shapes their language. This occurs through what Bigham calls ‘emerging adulthood’ as this is stage where people leave education and go down own individual paths + careers e.g. 20 year old single female speaks different to 20 year old married female. Each individual has increasing differences in social experiences e.g. 18 ‘teentalk’ innit that is is recognisable but at 30s + 20s not recognisable
That’s cap, you didn’t do that!
- “I have three exams tomorrow—I’m cooked!”)
eckert - research on teen talk
during teen years chronological age plays significant role in our language use , as we have more shared experiences and a stronger group identity than other age groups do.
features of teen speak
- slang = chopped
- multiple negation = i didn’t never do that
- cultural mixing ‘wagwan’
but notevery teen speaks the same e.g. Jocks and Burnouts study
Odato research
the teenspeak feature ‘like’ is governed by complexities, which children must develop in order to use the code, and he identified 3 stages:
stage 1 - children use ‘like’ infrequently and in only a few syntactic positions, mainly as the beginning of a clause (‘like you won easily
stage 2 - children use ‘like’ more often and in a greater number of positions, girls tended to move to this stage age 5, whereas boys age 7
stage 3 - children now use it more frequently in other positions, such as before the prepositional phrase ‘ look at how yours landed like right on the target’
shows gender may influence usage
ignacio palacios martinez - use of negatives
argues that teenagers tend to be much more direct when they speak, whereas adults are more conscious of what they say and how they say it, for fear of coming across as too direct. typical negative words and phrases were mostly informal: ‘no way’, ‘nope’, ‘nah’, ‘dunno’, non-standard use of ‘never’ and multiple negation
unni berland - use of tags ‘innit’, ‘yeah’, and ‘right’
‘innit’ was more common among the working class teenagers while ‘yeah’ was used more by the middle class group. there was also evidence that ‘okay’ was used more by girls than boys, although both genders used ‘innit’, ‘right’ and ‘yeah’ in equal measures
Ethnicity paul kerswill - dialect levelling
dialect levelling happens when strong local dialects are watered down as people become more mobile, and have more contact with people outside their locality. the other strand is upward mobility (wanting to gain social status through ‘improving’ their speech. the Uk is a class-stratified society. local accents tend to be spoken by working class people, perhaps because they are not as geographically mobile. there is solidarity in tight knit working class communities, and thus sounding local has prestige value, and so strong accents and dialects are maintained.
paul kerswill - multi ethnic varieties of english
kerswill et al recorded london sixth-formers, whose speech had afro-caribbean and indian subcontinent influences. a clear new vernacular is emerging in inner london, linking identities and forging shared identities - often around music like rap, bhangra and hip hop. this is because there is a high concentration of recent immigrants, and acquired language through role models - this is a new form of english, regardless of ethnic background. the sounds are similar whether your family comes from south america, caribbean, west africa or arabia.
mark sebba - london jamaican study
interviewed and recorded young, female, new generation speakers born with jamaican parentage (catford girls posse).found main choices of the young speakers were effectively between caribbean and creole forms, cockney forms that he summed up as ‘london english’ and standard/RP forms the speakers were able to incorporate all 3 forms of language and code switch appropriately with great sophistication
- Example: “Mi cyaan believe it, man—proper madness!” (Mixing Creole and London slang)
- “Bruv, that’s bare jokes!” (Cockney slang mixed with Creole influence)
- Example: “Him go school every day.” (Creole syntax instead of “He goes to school every day.”)
sue fox - multi-ethnic youth dialect study
interviewed the youth population of london from different cultural backgrounds. she suggested a variety of MEYD, which she has termed as MLE has strong characteristics drawn from the influences of several other languages, creole and cultural sources. it is most used amongst the adolescent in the wider city environment of london and is gaining with youths in Birmingham + Bristol
- Lexical Borrowing – Words from Jamaican Patois
- Blud” (friend, from Jamaican Creole)
- “Mandem” (group of friends, from Jamaican Creole)
- “Safe” (expression of approval, from Cockney)
- Pronunciation Features – Some speakers use glottal stops and th-fronting, replacing /th/ sounds with /f/ or /d/
bruv instead of brother and fing instead thing - She don’t like it.” (instead of “She doesn’t like it.”)
- “I was like, nah man! non standard verb form
- That’s mad, innit?” (instead of “That’s crazy, isn’t it?”)
discourse features innit unsed as tag question
rob drummond - multicultural urban british english
MLE can be found in manchester, thus raising the possibility of a multi-city urban youth variety of english in the UK. the influence of settled immigrant speakers is significant - notably west indian, west african and bangladeshi, but the speakers the dialect are drawn from white, black and asian communities alike
MLE features
DH - stopping = dem for them
TH - stopping = ting for things
man as pronoun
pragmatic markers = you get me, innit
thomason - substratum theory
focus how different languages influences impact English when contact is met through non - native speakers and regional dialects and also how english borrows words such as coffee brought in from Arabic through war, immigration contact between different englishes and dialects from across the world adds to the variety and richness available in british english, which can contribute to a speakers linguistic identity, enabling them to demonstrate membership of a particular social group and distance themselves from other social groups
Labov
argues social context shapes language use but not in a way that makes one dialect superior
people from wc communities have complex sophisticated ways of using lanuage and that AAVE is influenced by status and group idenitity not social class. non standard also governed by rules that are consistent and meaningful within context of their speech community
e.g. double negatives ‘he don’t know’ used for emphasis
Class Bernstein
looks at restricted and elaborated code and found they both have the same meaning and that there’s no better or worse code, However Bernstein contradicts himself and made a correlation between social classes and h=that wc can only use restricted code whereas mc alternate between both suggesting wc don’t have access to social mobility
restricted = short simple sentence ‘give me that’ knows what ‘that’ is no subject or full sentence structure
- Ellipsis (missing words) – “Going shop.”
elaborated = full sentence structure with more elaboration and explanation
“Could you please hand me the blue notebook on the table?”
- Clear explanations – “I am going to the shop to buy groceries for dinner.”
Coupland’s British sociolect features
several non - standard grammatical features found across the Uk. Coupland suggests that these features are linked to the speaker’s socio - economic background than their regional origins
features
- multiple negatives = never been no one
- unmarked plural forms = she is five year old now
- never as past tense negative = never saw you yesterday
