Slang - Key Concepts - An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

Key Concepts

Exploration 3.2: Slang

Look at the deinitions for ‘slang’ provided on Urban Dictionary, an online dictionary providing deinitions posted by users. (Ignore those that have nothing to do with language use; this word can also be used to mean sex, drug dealing, and the past tense of sling by some speakers.) What are the ideologies about slang that appear in this forum? To what extent are they about language (and, often, language decay) and to what extent are they about the groups of people associated with the use of slang?

76 Languages and Communities Perceptual dialectology

he study of non-linguists’ ideas about the regions, features, and values of dialects has come to be called perceptual dialectology (Preston 1989, 1999, 2002a, 2002b, Niedzielski and Preston 1999, Long and Preston 2003). he methodology employed by Preston in his work involved giving people maps of the United States and asking them irst to draw dialect regions, and then to label the dialects and describe them in terms of both correctness and pleasantness. What emerges from such work is an understanding of the attitudes people have about the ways of speaking associated with particular regions. It also reveals stereotypes concerning people who live in these regions. Among various interesting indings in these studies we see that speakers may not rate their own dialect highly, and that many dialects (including the speakers’ own), are sometimes rated highly for pleasantness but as lacking in correctness, or vice versa. For instance, the indings in Preston (1999) show that respondents from Michigan consistently rated their own dialect as correct, and perpetuated the stereotype of Southerners as speaking incorrect English. However, the Michiganders oten rated southern speech as pleasant and friendly (oten more friendly than their own region).

One of the interesting indings in some recent research in perceptual dialectology is that regional diferences are oten intertwined with ideas about other social groups. For instance, Bucholtz et al. (2007) found in a study done among University of California – Santa Barbara students about perceptions of language in the state of California, that although the southern California / northern California divide was prominent for most of the respondents, and stereotypes about the English spoken in these regions abounded, oten other factors emerged as signiicant as well. Speak- ers of Spanish (mostly referred to as ‘Mexicans’) were oten associated with Los Angeles and San Diego, and speakers of Chinese with the Bay Area. here were also certain areas associated with speakers of AAVE (the Bay Area, and Compton, a largely African American suburb of Los Angeles), but this was less frequent than the references to speakers of Spanish. An interesting inding was that the most common social label was ‘hicks,’ or other synonymous terms such as ‘hillbillies’ or

‘rednecks;’ the authors note that earlier studies have not shown this category to be associated with California by non-Californians.

Research by Alfaraz (2002) also shows the importance of other social factors intertwined with region in the evaluation of speakers of diferent social groups. his study, carried out in Miami, asked respondents to rate the pleasantness and correctness of various Latin American varieties of Spanish, a variety referred to as Penin- sular Spanish, and two varieties of Cuban Spanish, representing the Spanish spoken before and ater the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Alfaraz found that association of a particular variety of Spanish with speakers who were of low socio-economic class or were Black correlated with less positive evaluations of the variety. he pre- revolution Cuban Spanish, that is, the variety spoken by these respondents, was evaluated the most positively.

Studies in perceptual dialectology show us that people have far more nuanced beliefs about dialects than simply that they are either ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Further, most people have a more sophisticated understanding of social groups, incorporating information about region, social class, race/ethnicity, and many other levels of identity.

Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we have grappled with how to deine the social groups whose language we wish to describe and study in sociolinguistic research, noting that some of the same diiculties in deining what a language is surface in deining what a speech community might be. here is a tendency to look beyond the ways that people speak to deine what makes them a community, and to focus on the presence of shared norms. Alternative ways of deining groups, for example, as a community of practice or a social network, are also presented as less abstract means of deter- mining a social group for the purpose of research; both depend on linguistic interaction for their deinitions. We also revisit the concept of identities, focusing this time on how identities are linked to social group membership.

Exercises

1. Make a short (15–30 minutes) audio recording of a community of practice you participate in (be sure you have the permission of everyone in the group before you record!). his could be your roommates or family members you live with, some friends you oten eat lunch with, a group of co-workers, members of a knitting group, your rugby teammates, and so on; the only criteria is that this must be a group that meets and interacts regularly. Listen to the recording and answer the following questions:

• How can you describe the joint endeavor of this group? Do there seem to be common goals of the interaction?

• In what ways are the varieties spoken by the individuals in the group diferent – that is, do they come from diferent areas or social groups and have linguistic features that are associated with diferent varieties? Is there ever explicit mention made of speech diferences?

• In what ways do you see the shared norms of the group – are there particular lexical items or nicknames that are used in this group? Inside jokes? Topics of conversation that recur? In short, try to ascertain what features of the conversation indicate that this is a group that interacts frequently and not a group of strangers.

2. Find a map of the country you live in which has major state or province boundaries but no labels for these regions, and ask ten people to draw dialect

78 Languages and Communities

boundaries on the map, name the dialects, and rate them on scales of 1–10 in terms of correctness and pleasantness. Be sure to record relevant information about each of these research participants – for instance, age, sex category identiication, nationality, race/ethnicity, socio-economic class identiication, occu- pation, location of residence, region of origin. Answer the following questions about your data:

• Are similar dialect regions identiied by all or most of the research participants? Provide an overview of these regions.

• Are there accepted names for diferent dialects? If so, can you explain how this has come to be the case – are they discussed in popular media, or in school? If not, how can you explain the absence of terms for regional dialects?

• How are diferent regional dialects evaluated in terms of their correctness and pleasantness?

• How can you account for variation in your data? hat is, do particular traits of the research participants (e.g., where they are from) seem to inluence how they feel about particular dialects?

4

his chapter will address what happens when languages, or more accurately the speakers of multiple languages, come into contact. Multilingualism is common in societies across the world, despite the perception by many monolinguals that speaking only one language is the norm (see Fuller 2012, 2013 for discussion of what she calls ‘the ideology of normative monolingualism’). In many cases, groups of people who speak diferent languages live near each other; sometimes there are political boundaries that divide them and sometimes they identify as being part of the same nation or state, but in all such cases they have contact and must communicate. (An example of the former situation is the neighboring nations of France and Germany;

of the latter, the German and French-speaking regions of Switzerland.) In other cases, there is movement of speakers of one language into an area where another

Key Concepts

The pervasiveness of multilingualism Domains of language use

The inluence of language ideologies and language attitudes on language use

Multilingual discourse shapes interactions, relationships, and social identities

Languages in Contact:

Multilingual Societies and

Multilingual Discourse

language is spoken – this is the case for immigration, colonialization, and various scenarios of conquest.

In these latter scenarios, there is likely to be one language which has social domi- nance, and in this situation language shit may occur, that is, speakers shit to speaking the dominant language. In situations of immigration, commonly within three generations, members of the minority group shit to the dominant language.

In some scenarios, we have what is called language maintenance, that is, both languages continue to be spoken. Giles et al. (1977) proposed a framework within which to assess a language’s ethnolinguistic vitality, that is, how likely it is to be maintained. hey say that we must consider three things about any threatened language: (1) its status: economic, social, and historical; (2) its territorial distribu- tion and concentration together with its population demographics, for example, absolute numbers, birth rates, marriage patterns, and migrations in and out; and (3) its institutional support or lack thereof, both formally, as in the media, educa- tion, and government services, and less formally, as in the workplace and in religious, social, and cultural activities.

In the rest of this chapter, we will discuss language use in situations in which there is maintenance, that is, in multilingual communities. We will use the term multilingual to refer generally to situations in which there are speakers of more than one language.

Multilingualism as a Societal Phenomenon

In many parts of the world it is just a normal requirement of daily living that people speak several languages: perhaps one or more at home, another in the village, still another for purposes of trade, and yet another for contact with the outside world of wider social or political organization. hese various languages are oten acquired through simple exposure to the language, although one language or more in a speaker’s repertoire may be learned through schooling or in an instructional setting.

One example of a varied multilingual society is present-day India. Mohanty, an Indian sociolinguist, writes of his own linguistic repertoire:

I use Oriya in my home, English in my work place, Hindi for television viewing, Bengali to communicate with my domestic helper, a variety of Hindi-Punjabi-Urdu in market places in Delhi, Sanskrit for my prayer and religious activities, and some conversational Kui with the Konds for my research in their community. hese languages it in a mutually complementary and non-competing relationship in my life. (Mohanty 2006, 263)

It is unusual in urban Indian society for someone not to use a variety of codes in diferent contexts and with diferent interlocutors, and children learn at a young age not only to master several languages but also to master the art of knowing the appropriate language for each social context. Maintaining multiple languages over

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generations is less common in some other societies and oten much less valued.

Multilingualism has nonetheless become an expected and increasingly prestigious part of urban cultures across the world. Fuller (2012), in her work in a German- English bilingual classroom in the urban center of Berlin, Germany, notes that many of the children speak two languages at home, sometimes German and English but in some cases English and Spanish, or German and Russian, Hindi, or Setswana.

hey consider it advantageous to master more languages, oten claiming competence in languages to which they have had limited exposure. hey also provide positive reinforcement to their classmates as speakers of Serbian, Romanian, or Farsi. his is, of course, not the case everywhere. Fuller notes that the Mexican- American children in her research in rural southern Illinois, USA, who also spoke indigenous languages from Mexico were oten hesitant to admit this, and were sometimes teased for their association with these languages. he status of these languages in Mexico was low and there was not a general sense of the value of linguistic diversity in the rural US community in which they lived. hus while multilingualism can be found almost anywhere, it does not always have positive associations.

Competencies and convergence in multilingual societies Most people who are multilingual do not necessarily have exactly the same abilities in all the languages (or varieties) they speak; in fact, that kind of parity may be exceptional. As Sridhar (1996, 50) says,

Multilingualism involving balanced, native-like command of all the languages in the repertoire is rather uncommon. Typically, multilinguals have varying degrees of command of the diferent repertoires. he diferences in competence in the various languages might range from command of a few lexical items, formulaic expressions such as greetings, and rudimentary conversational skills all the way to excellent command of the grammar and vocabulary and specialized register and styles.

Sridhar further speciies that the level of competence in a code is, of course, developed based on the need of the speaker to use a language in a particular domain or for a particular activity. he models for multilingual discourse we will discuss below recognize such factors as topic, speakers, and setting on language choice. hey also recognize that context does not determine language choice, but merely inlu- ences it. Speakers draw on the social norms and meanings that are shared in a community, but are not controlled by them.

In such situations, that is, when speakers master multiple languages and use them all in conversation, there may be linguistic consequences. One possibility is the development of what we call contact languages, which will be discussed in the next chapter. In other cases, the consequence is difusion of certain features from one language to the other(s) as a result of the contact situation, particularly certain kinds

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