language + social groups Flashcards
(14 cards)
milroy: what is a social network?
a social structure made of individuals who are linked by one or more specific connection e.g friendship, working relationship
milroy: open and closed networks
- open network: an individual whose contacts tend not to know each other
- closed network: an individual whose contacts all know each other
eckert - language and age
found people’s language was often affected by important life events. she therefore said we can’t assume all people of a certain age range speak the same. she defined age in 3 ways:
- chronological age
- biological age
- social age
eckert’s jocks and burnouts (goes against the idea that language is influenced by social class)
eckert came up with the idea of the role of social practice.
a social practice is what we share when we engage in an activity together.
eckert observed friendship groups in a school in Detroit.
she established two different groups: the jocks (engaged in and enjoyed school) and the burnouts (not involved with school and engaging in rebellious behaviour).
she found burnouts used non standard English while jocks used standard English. she found that people speak more like their friends - whose who shared social practices - than those belonging to the same demographic catagory e.g social class
eckert’s jocks and burnouts: how can we criticise this study?
due to it only being taken place in a school in Detroit, it lacks cross cultural validity meaning we can’t generalise her findings to every student in other places
cheshire (social groups doesn’t cause polarised language)
she categorised young girls in Reading into middle and working class by their attitudes to minor crime, those who tolerated minor crime were working class and those who disapproved were middle class. she found that working class girls used more of the non standard ‘come’ whilst middle class girls used the most non standard ‘what’. this suggests that there is not such a clear cut different between social group and slang use and that there is more variation in young people’s language. it seems both social groups appreciated the opportunity to use stand when interacting with their peers and that social group doesn’t cause polarised language use
cheshire’s study: criticism
there is a lack of cross cultural validity because it was only done in Reading so we can’t generalise the findings to all students in other areas
labov’s social stratification study
he studied the use of the postvocalic ‘r’ found in words like “fourth floor”. he went to 3 different department stores in New York, all of different classes (Salls - upper, Macy’s - middle, Klein - lower). he found that people who had a socioeconomic status pronounced the ‘r’ more frequently (higher class) and middle class workers tries to sound more prestigious (hypercorrection)
labov social stratification study: criticism
we can’t generalise the study because it was only done in New York, which is considered socially prestigious anyway, so the study lacks cross cultural validity
trudgill - g dropping
he investigated pronunciation of ‘-ing’ endings in words like ‘fishing’ and ‘singing’. he found that people from lower down the scale of class were more likely to drop the ‘g’ - ‘fishin’ and ‘singin’ (g-dropping). overall, he found non standard grammar was more popular with the working class
petyt - h dropping and criticism of the study
he examined the dropping of ‘h’ sounds across the social classes. he found the lower working class speakers dropped 93% of ‘h’ sounds while the upper class only dropped it 12%. however, we can’t generalise due to only being tested in Yorkshire
why do people use slang? (trudgill and eckert)
trudgill: to show belonging to a group
eckert: to establish a connection to youth culture and set themselves off from the older generation
Thomas Sheridan
he was a prescriptivist. he believes that RP is more superior and should be promoted. he sees a ‘proper’ accent as “proof that a person has kept good company”. Sheridans ideas gave rise to elocution as a professional way to speak
swales - discourse community
proposed the idea of a ‘discourse community’ in which members of a group share a discourse with specific language that they use to communicate e.g gamers use language such as ‘bot’ to describe a computer controlled character. not everyone outside of this discourse community would understand this lexis and swales suggested that a certain level of knowledge is needed to participate in the communication; if we don’t belong to the social group we may feel alienated by their language
