Working-class Speakers Research Articles

“I guess I have to just put my dick on the table”: Rough Trade, Tenure, and Black Sexualities as Self-defense

Willoughby-Herard crafts original bawdy fables and fashions crude proverbs to analyze Black LGBTQ+ experiences in academia as a ground for theory that navigates the promise and peril of telling. The essay takes seriously Evelynn Hammonds’s advice that Black sexual and gender others recall their journeys as a mode of defense, analysis, meaning making. Using vulgar tales to throw shade, while wrestling within and beyond the limits of trauma porn and spectacle, makes for a hard-won cultural legacy and remittance that points to possibilities for survival and being. Recalling bitter experiences in academia exposes social relations anchored by collective violence. Following Alicia Levy-Seedat, vulgarity, deployed by working-class speakers of Jamaican Patwah (patois), cuts through patronizing conditions. Willoughby-Herard’s notion of “writerly extravagance” enables telling while feeding on the rough laughter and crass pleasure of readers and hearers to create something like survival, or at least having the last laugh.

Investigating (in)coherence in Tyneside English(es): sociophonetic variation spectrums of face, goat, price and mouth in the DECTE corpus

The present study investigates the co-occurrence of face, goat, price and mouth vocalic variants in the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS, Strang, 1968). The analysis is based on the original fine-grained transcriptions of the TLS sociolinguistic interviews across a sample of 44 predominantly working-class speakers (men/women, older, middle-aged and teenagers). Multiple Factorial Analysis and cluster analysis were combined to identify sub-groupings in the variety based on the entirety of the transcriptions (consonants, stressed and reduced vowels), and to investigate coherence across these vocalic variants. The results point towards major gender and class effects with four clusters of speakers characterised by varying degrees of accentedness. Overall, lower-status women and slightly higher-status women distinguish themselves through distinct variant choices. Differences amongst men of either status can best be measured through the extent to which they use the traditional variants.

“I can't see myself ever living any[w]ere else”: Variation in (HW) in Edinburgh English

AbstractSociolinguistic research across Scotland in recent decades has documented an erosion of the phonemic contrast between /ʍ/ (as in which) and /w/ (as in witch). Based on acoustic phonetic analysis of 1,400 <wh> realizations produced by eighteen Edinburgh women born between 1938 and 1993, I argue that in the context of Edinburgh this is best understood as a complex sociolinguistic variable (HW) encompassing (at least) six fricated and fricationless variants. Realizations vary in type and relative duration of frication, voicing, and glide quality. Bayesian statistical analysis suggests that choice and realization of variants is conditioned by speaker's social class, style, and phonetic context. Unlike some prior work, I do not find evidence of ongoing (apparent-time) change or an effect of contact with Southern British English. Fricated variants are most prevalent in formal speech styles and in the speech of middle-class women, while working-class speakers favor fricationless variants.

Picard: a mal aimé among regional languages?

ABSTRACTAlthough often seen as a medieval rival to French, Picard has received far less official recognition and support than more celebrated regional languages such as Breton or Occitan. A shared history and high degree of linguistic similarity with the national language appear to have engendered a perception that it is simply ‘bad French’, but for supporters such Eloy (1997) Picard remains potentiellement une vraie langue, worthy and in need of status enhancement initiatives enjoyed by other regional languages. Promotion of language status for Picard, however, is found to be fraught with practical difficulties, not least of which are a lack of territorial unity and major cultural differences between the north and south of the picardophone area. Equally importantly, the discourse of languagehood fosters notions of linguistic purity which ignore the extensive mixing of local, supralocal and national elements that has always been evident in Picard writing and speech. This in turn engenders linguistic insecurity, notably among urban working-class speakers, whose speech can all too easily be caricatured as both ‘bad French’ and ‘bad patois’, with obvious consequences for intergenerational transmission. The well-intentioned promotion of Picard as a regional language may therefore, perversely, be detrimental to the very varieties it serves.

Solidarity, stance, and class identities

AbstractScholars have explained working-class speakers’ continued use of stigmatised vernaculars as a response to their relative powerlessness in relation to the standard language market. Research has shown how, in the face of this powerlessness, working-class communities turn to group solidarity, and use of the vernacular is seen as part of this more general orientation. As a result, two competing social values—status and solidarity—have featured prominently in discussions around language and class. I expand these discussions using data from a linguistic ethnographic study of children's language in Teesside, England. I argue that meanings related to status and solidarity operate at multiple levels and cannot be taken for granted, and demonstrate that vernacular forms thatlackstatus within the dominant sociolinguistic economy may be used toassertstatus within local interactional use. I further advance discussion of the ways local vernaculars might be intimately linked to classed subjectivities. (Social class, variation, solidarity, status, stance, indexicality, identity, interaction, ethnography)*

Intersectionality and the social meanings of variation: Class, ethnicity, and social practice

AbstractThis article examines how the social meanings of phonetic variation in a British adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationship between ethnicity, social class, and social practice. I focus on the realisation of thehappyvowel in Sheffield English, which is reported to be a lax variant [ε̈] amongst working-class speakers but is undergoing change towards a tense variant [i] amongst middle-class speakers. I analyse the acoustic realisation of this vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondary school and find that the variable's community-wide associations of social class are projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation, which I suggest is a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographic evidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of thehappyvowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles, which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuring local social practices. (Intersectionality, indexicality, social meaning, identity, ethnicity, social class)*

On the Effects of Social Class on Language Use: A Fresh Look at Bernstein's Theory

Basil Bernstein (1971) introduced the notion of the Restricted and the Elaborated code, claiming that working-class speakers have access only to the former but middle-class members to both. In an attempt to test this theory in the Iranian context and to investigate the effect of social class on the quality of students language use, we examined the use of six grammatical categories including noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition and conjunction by 20 working-class and 20 middle-class elementary students. The results of Chi-square operations at p<.05 corroborated Bernstein’s theory and showed that working- class students were different from middle-class ones in their language use. Being consistent with Bernstein’s theory, the results obtained for the use of personal pronouns indicated that middle-class students were more person-oriented and working-class ones more position-oriented. Findings, thus, call for teachers' deliberate attention to learners’ sociocultural variation to enhance mutual understanding and pragmatic success.

Bunched /r/ promotes vowel merger to schwar: An ultrasound tongue imaging study of Scottish sociophonetic variation

For a century, phoneticians have noted a vowel merger in middle-class Scottish English, in the neutralisation of prerhotic checked vowels /ɪ/, /ʌ/, /ɛ/ to a central vowel, e.g. fir, fur, fern [fəɹ], [fəɹ] [fəɹn], or [fɚ], [fɚ], [fɚn]. Working-class speakers often neutralise two of these checked vowels to a low back [ʌ] vowel, fir, fur, both pronounced as [fʌɹ] or as [fʌʕ]. The middle-class merger is often assumed to be an adaptation towards the UK’s socially prestigious R.P. phonological system in which there is a long-standing three-way non-rhotic merger, to [ɜː]. However, we suggest a system-internal cause, that coarticulation with the postvocalic /r/ may play a role in the contemporary Scottish vowel merger. Indeed, strongly rhotic middle-class Scottish speakers have recently been found to produce postvocalic approximant /r/ using a markedly different tongue configuration from working-class Scottish speakers, who also tend to derhoticise /r/. We present the results of an ultrasound tongue imaging investigation into the differing coarticulatory effects of bunched and tongue-front raised /r/ variants on preceding vowels. We compare tongue shapes from two static points during rhotic syllable rimes. Phonetically, it appears that the bunched /r/ used by middle-class speakers exerts a stronger global coarticulatory force over preceding vowel tongue configurations than tongue-front raised /r/ does. This also results in a monophthongal rhotic target for what historically had been three distinct checked vowels. Phonologically, our view is that middle-class speakers of Scottish English have reduced the V+/r/ sequence to one segment; either a rhoticised vowel /ɚ/ or a syllabic rhotic /r/.

The cognitive coherence of sociolects: How do speakers handle multiple sociolinguistic variables?

Sociolinguistic variables have social evaluations and are used at different rates by different speakers. Variants become indexical of social traits and social identities, and are taken as defining ‘sociolects’ associated with identifiable groups: e.g., ‘working class speech’, ‘African-American English’. But since every speech community has many sociolinguistic variables, do the multiple variables cohere in forming sociolects? Thus if each variable has a variant considered ‘working class’, do working class speakers use all such variants simultaneously? Lectal coherence would imply that variables are correlated; if they are not, the cognitive and social reality of the ‘sociolect’ is problematic.This paper investigates intercorrelations among two phonological and two syntactic sociolinguistic variables in 20 speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. The results show considerable cross-variable correlation, but much of it may be explained by structural or grammatical coherence. There is some evidence of socially-motivated coherence, involving gender as well as status differentiation. Female speakers show stronger correlation among variables than males, while non-standard phonology seems to be indexical of male identity. The conclusion is that some sociolectal cohesion does exist, but it may be weaker and more multidimensional, than is commonly assumed. Future work on lects should problematize their coherence.

Extremely interesting, very interesting, or only quite interesting? Adverbs and social class

An earlier study, based on interviews with a socially stratified sample showed a difference in the use of adverbs, with the middle–class speakers using derived adverbs in –ly more than twice as frequently as the working–class speakers. An examination of interactions in peer–group same–sex dyads shows a similar socially stratified pattern in both adults and adolescents. There are similar differences in the use of some other adverbs and certain adjectives. The consistency of the results suggests that there is a stable difference in speech styles between the two social classes and that this difference reflects a different attitude on the part of the speakers to their audience.

Class Ethos and Politeness

This article lends quantitative support to the notion that politeness is variable across social strata, and provides linguistic evidence for the notion of a "social class ethos.' This difference is shown to be encoded in ordinary usage, within the genre of direction giving. Interpretation of the natural language data collected is based here on Brown and Levinson's "politeness theory" (1978, 1987). The data give evidence that middle-class speakers are more likely to make use of the more elaborated negative politeness strategy, with suggestions being issued in an indirect way. Workingclass speakers tend to choose the "bald-on record" strategy, suggesting directions in the form of direct bald imperatives. Variable speaker perceptions of social distance across the two classes give the results found in the data.

Word-final consonant devoicing in a variety of working-class French – a case of language contact?

AbstractThe article examines the variable distribution of word-final consonant devoicing (=WFCD) among working-class speakers in the Roubaix district, with respect to phonological conditioning and speaker characteristics. WFCD is shown to affect coronals, labials and velars in that order, and to be favoured by pre-pausal position. Among speakers over forty-five WFCD is primarily associated with female speakers, and to a lesser degree with male speakers under thirty. This sociolinguistically unusual distribution of a strongly vernacular variant may plausibly be attributed to language/dialect contact consequent on the immigration of Flemish-speaking textile workers. Such language contact would have tended to reinforce an already existing characteristic of Picard patois rather than introducing a totally new feature as the brief review of other Picard varie-ties would suggest.

An intonational change in progress in Australian English

ABSTRACTMany speakers of current Australian English often use a high-rising intonation in statements. This usage, which has been termed Australian Questioning Intonation (AQI), has a nonpropositional, interactive meaning (checking for listener comprehension) and interacts with the turn-taking mechanism of conversation. A quantitative study of the use of AQI in Sydney reveals that it has the social distribution characteristic of a language change in progress: higher rates of usage among working-class speakers, teenagers, and women. Real time data confirm this, showing that the form was almost nonexistent in this speech community two decades earlier. The social motivations of this innovation are examined in terms of local identity and the entry of new ethnic groups into the community, and possible linguistic sources are discussed. The utility of quantitative methods in studying meaningful linguistic variables is demonstrated. (Australian English, language change in progress, intonation, sociolinguistic variation, social class, social motivation)

Labov, Larry and Charles

The linguistic debate to have had the most marked impact upon educational discussion has undoubtedly been the one over 'linguistic deficit (or deprivation)'. The impact has been of both a theoretical and practical kind. If some children speak a language that is 'deficient', this must surely go some way towards explaining why those children have 'underachieved' in school. And, if so, then 'linguistic deficit' must prima facie, be something that teachers, as a matter of conscious policy, must try to eradicate if underachievement is to be ended. The thesis of 'linguistic deprivation' is indelibly associated with the name of Basil Bernstein, who argued in a series of articles that working-class and middle-class children speak according to two different codes-a 'restricted' and 'elaborated' one respectively; and that the former code, for a number of reasons, places its users under a disadvantage in the school system [1]. Bernstein frequently inserted passages disclaiming any value-judgements on the two codes, and insisting that we should not speak of one as 'superior' or 'inferior' to the other. But such disclaimers did little to weaken the apparent thrust of his writings. For one thing, middle-class speakers, in his own view, can employ both codes; so that there is no way of talking of which they are deprived in the way that working-class speakers, confined to the 'restricted' code, are. Second, Bernstein's descriptions of some of the features of the 'restricted' code make it difficult to see how these features could avoid negative judgement. A crucial feature, for example, is the way its speakers are tied, in what they say, to the actual context in which discussion is proceeding; something that is surely a disadvantage when, as we often do, we want to talk about things not present in context. At any rate, the reaction to Bernstein's work-and to similar ideas mooted in the USA and Germany-was that teachers and educational administrators should actively intervene in altering and improving the speech of working-class, or black, or dialect speakers, so that they would be better able to exploit their educational opportunities. The reaction to this thesis, when it came, was strong and impassioned. The name indelibly associated with this reaction is that of the American socio-linguist, William Labov. In his famous article, 'The logic of non-standard English' [2], he argued that the evidence for the 'deficit' thesis was thoroughly suspicious, and that both empirical and conceptual confusions infected its proponents' talk of grammaticality, rules of language, and the like. But most important, judged by its effects, was Labov's near-reversal of the usual judgements made on the merits or demerits of 'standard' and 'non-standard' speech. The 'elaborated' code, he argued, is mainly characterised by its 'verbosity', While NNE (Non-Standard Negro English) is distinguished by its clarity and conciseness, besides being free from any of the 'illogicality' attributed to it by some writers. It would be reasonable, I think, to regard Labov's position as the new orthodoxy on this issue. Many of the quotations 177

Social Patterns of Turn-taking: Nonverbal Regulators

Comparison of middle- and working-class speakers finds a significant difference in the type, number, and rate of nonverbal behaviors used in regulating conversation.