Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism, 2023
In many societies, special privilege is accorded to standard accents, owing to perceptions that t... more In many societies, special privilege is accorded to standard accents, owing to perceptions that they possess superior clarity, are closer to the language’s written form, or denote greater intelligence than non-standard varieties. The Accent Bias in Britain (ABB) project sought to investigate the extent to which unconscious accent bias might influence the judgements of recruiters in the legal sector. The results reveal persistent bias against certain non-standard varieties of British English in professional contexts. We discuss the ramifications of these findings for our current understanding of prescriptivism and its effect on social mobility.
Accent is one of the most recognisable signals of social background in the UK today. It can cue a... more Accent is one of the most recognisable signals of social background in the UK today. It can cue a listener to a speaker’s ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, region, culture, or social class. For traits that are not visible, such as socio-economic status, accent is often the primary signal.
Research in the United States has shown that bias against certain accents can lead to unequal access to employment, housing, and education. Despite the long history of accent-based social judgement in British society, equivalent research on its impact on life outcomes for different social groups in the UK is very limited. What impact does a person’s accent have on their social mobility? What role do institutions at different life junctures—including schools, universities and employers—play in such barriers to mobility?
In this report, we review the problem of accent and social mobility, including recent work that has examined attitudes to accents among employers, recruiters, and the general public. We then extend the focus to personal experiences of accent anxiety, sense of belonging, and implications for social mobility at different life stages. We examine effects of social class, region, and ethnicity, but also how intersections among these amplify barriers to mobility.
Our specific focus is the effects of accent bias on anxiety, sense of belonging, and experiences of bias for different social groups at four key life junctures: university applicants (largely age 17-18), university students (largely age 18-21), young professionals (largely age 21-24), and senior managers (largely age 35+). At each juncture we present two types of data: a quantitative UK-wide picture and qualitative commentary on these experiences gathered from each life stage through more detailed questionnaires. We show that accent anxiety and bias affects every life stage, but that university is a time of particularly heightened accent anxiety, as young adults approach the moment of entering a chosen career.
In the previous chapter, you were introduced to the basic principles underlying quantitative rese... more In the previous chapter, you were introduced to the basic principles underlying quantitative research methods. You learned, for example, that quantitative tests employ deductive reasoning to examine predetermined hypotheses, and that these tests are subject to certain constraints, such as reliability and validity. In this chapter, we build upon this theoretical base, and discuss some of the concrete issues involved in the quantitative analysis of language. We begin in the first section (section 1) with an extended discussion of how to construct hypotheses for quantitative investigation. We also examine the basic concepts required for testing these hypotheses. We then turn, in sections 2 and 3, to a detailed exposition of two of the most common statistical tests used in linguistics, chi-square tests and t-tests. You will learn what these tests are, how to use them and what they can (and cannot) tell you. Finally, in section 4, we look at how to go about interpreting quantitative results, and discuss some of the ways in which quantitative and qualitative methods can be brought together in linguistic research.
Routledge Handbook of Experimental Sociolinguistics, 2023
Sociolinguistics is dedicated to understanding the relationship between language and the social w... more Sociolinguistics is dedicated to understanding the relationship between language and the social world. The contemporary field of sociolinguistics coalesced in the 1960s, largely in reaction to the emergence of Chomsky’s generativist approach (Chomsky, 1965) and its insistence on the separation between competence (an individual’s knowledge of a language) and performance (the observable patterns of language use). For Chomsky (1965, p. 3), only competence was important to the development of linguistic theory, with actual performance seen as “grammatically irrelevant.” Scholars such as John Gumperz, Dell Hymes and William Labov took issue with Chomsky’s position, arguing that it offered an impoverished view of language that artificially separated analyses of a language’s grammatical “correctness” from the rules governing its everyday use (Hymes, 1966). Instead, they argued for the need to treat language as both a cognitive and a social phenomenon, where the object of study is not only what utterances count as “well-formed” but also how those well-formed utterances are used. Gumperz, Hymes and Labov approached this task differently. For Gumperz, the focus was on how individuals use language strategically in interaction to achieve specific social and interactional goals (by, for example, switching to a different code when giving an order or making a request; see Gumperz, 1982). Hymes (1974) focused on language as part of a broader cultural ecology, considering the ways that language contributes to the more general social life of a community. Labov remained closest to Chomsky’s goal of developing a theory of language itself as a system, though with the understanding that doing so required two innovations. The first is that language is heterogeneous (Weinreich et al., 1968): competence does not entail homogeneity. Instead, there are “alternate ways of saying the ‘same thing’ ” (Labov, 1972). Second, this heterogeneity is ordered. Its appearance is not haphazard or “free”. Rather, variability in language is systematically distributed across social divisions, such that certain ways of speaking (“variants”) are associated with some social groups or situations, and other ways with others. For Labov, the goal of (socio)linguistics is, therefore, to map these associations between variable linguistic behaviour and social structure. To do so, Labov and colleagues (Labov, 1965; Weinreich et al., 1968) identified a number of key “problems” that a field of sociolinguistics needs to address. Two of these are relevant to the discussion in this chapter. The first is the embedding problem, or the need to determine the degree of correlation that exists between the use of a linguistic variant and a given set of social and/or situational factors (e.g., gender, ethnicity, social class, formality). The second is the evaluation problem, or the need to establish the subjective correlates (i.e., attitudinal judgements) of specific variants. Identifying a variant’s social embedding allows us to predict when a variant will (or will not) be used while knowing how it is evaluated gives us insight into why those usage patterns exist. From very early on, research in this tradition has relied on experimental methods to provide insight into embedding and evaluation, ultimately helping us to better understand the social meanings of language, or the “set of inferences that can be drawn on the basis of how language is used in a specific interaction” (Hall-Lew et al., 2021). In this chapter, I provide an overview of the main experimental approaches that have been adopted, summarizing both historical perspectives and current directions in the field. By the end of the chapter, readers will have a general understanding of the primary experimental paradigms that have been used in sociolinguistic research and an idea of how experimental methods can be used to address key questions of sociolinguistic theory.
Research in sociolinguistics (and sociophonetics) has long relied on appeals to “identity” as a m... more Research in sociolinguistics (and sociophonetics) has long relied on appeals to “identity” as a means of accounting for patterns of variation in language use (for reviews of this work, see Le Page 1997; Tabouret-Keller 1997; Llamas & Watt 2010; Levon forthcoming). At its core, an appeal to “identity” as an explanatory factor is based on the assertion that linguistic differences are not (or not only) determined by physiological differences among speakers or by automatic routines established during early language socialization. Instead, identity-based approaches treat linguistic variation as a fundamentally social phenomenon, related to an individual’s positioning in society and/or their understanding and interpretation of that positioning. Yet even within this more socially oriented body of work, “identity” remains a contentious term and academic disagreements about the utility of “identity” as an analytical concept are longstanding. Cameron & Kulick (2003), for example, famously argued that there exists an overemphasis on the use of language as a way to claim membership in an identity category in language, gender, and sexuality scholarship to the exclusion of other ways in which language and gender/sexuality may interact (including, for example, as a means for rejecting category affiliation or via a more indirect, higher-order indexical relation between language and a given social label). In response to Cameron & Kulick’s argument, Bucholtz & Hall (2004) countered that a nuanced examination of how people dynamically and relationally enact category membership is central to this line of enquiry (see also Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Cameron & Kulick 2005). Similarly, Trudgill (2008) proposed that “identity concerns” play no role in the formation of new dialects in language contact situations and that long-term automatic accommodation between speakers can account for the developmental patterns observed in the literature. This position that was explicitly rebutted by Coupland (2008) and Holmes & Kerswill (2008), among others, who, while acknowledging the problem with “simplistic purposive accounts of identity as motive” (Coupland 2008:268), nevertheless argued that accommodation is never wholly automatic, that accommodation occurs when people—not language varieties—come into contact, and that interpersonal and intersubjective factors always play a role (see also Labov 2012). Within phonetics, proposals like Ohala’s (1983, 1994) Frequency Code and Gussenhoven’s (2004) Effort and Production Codes seek to account for patterns of sociophonetic variation via recourse to universal biological rules that are independent of social or identity-linked factors. In contrast, scholars such as Eckert (2017) have argued that, universal meaning potentials notwithstanding, agency and identity are crucial for sound symbolic meaning to be realized in interaction, such that we cannot divorce our analyses of sound symbolism from the specific social contexts in which it occurs. Part of the reason why there is so much disagreement about the role of identity in linguistic variation is because the term “identity” is often used to refer to a number of very different things. This is due in large part to the fact that “identity” is what Giddens (1987) calls a “double hermeneutic,” a concept that is used both as a technical term of analysis in scholarly work and as a popular term for organizing experience in wider society. According to Giddens, scholarly and popular understanding of such concepts influence one another, with popular conceptualizations conscripted into scholarly work and vice versa. While not necessarily a problem in and of itself, the danger of this kind of mutual influence is a proliferation of meanings of a given term, resulting in a lack of scholarly precision and a potential degradation in the perceived merit of academic enquiry. With respect to the term “identity,” Brubaker & Cooper (2000:1) summarize the issue succinctly by stating “if identity is everywhere, identity is nowhere.” In other words, if “identity” can mean different things to different people in different contexts (e.g., an overt category membership, an in-the- moment interpersonal relation, a deeply held sense of self), what sort of analytical purchase does the term have for scholars? It is not our intention to provide a definitive answer to this question in the current chapter. Instead, our goal is to provide an overview of the different ways in which the issue of identity has been approached in sociophonetics. We begin in the next section with a brief introduction to Brubaker & Cooper’s system for classifying different treatments of identity in social research into three broad categories: identity as category positioning (by self or other), identity as the expression of commonality or groupness, and identity as situated subjectivity. We use this system not as a prescriptive taxonomy, but as a way to organize our review of sociophonetic research on identity, demonstrating how examinations of variation in both speech perception and production have contributed to each of these areas. Through this review, we hope to demonstrate the relevance of identity-linked questions to sociophonetic investigation and to outline some of the different ways in which the topic can be approached.
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2024
In this article, we explore how people in conflict-affected societies use language to navigate th... more In this article, we explore how people in conflict-affected societies use language to navigate the affective constraints that political conflicts impose. Specifically, we consider the role of multilingualism in enabling sexual and romantic intimacy between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in Israel/Palestine. Our data are drawn from a close examination of the speech of Fadi Daeem, one of the protagonists in the 2015 documentary Oriented. Building on studies of (in)securitization and everyday bordering, we show how the ongoing armed conflict between Israel and Palestine serves to instantiate a regime of affective checkpoints, a space in which sexual and romantic relations between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are discursively blocked. We describe how Fadi and his friends use strategic instances of code-switching between Arabic, Hebrew, and English to navigate this ideologically fraught terrain. Our primary goal is to demonstrate how multilingualism can be employed as a resource for managing affect and desire in a conflict-ridden context like Israel/Palestine. In doing so, we further highlight how the intimate domain of romantic desire is inevitably situated within a broader matrix of power and constraint.
This article examines how the “arbitrary content of culture” (Bourdieu 1977) comes to be inscribe... more This article examines how the “arbitrary content of culture” (Bourdieu 1977) comes to be inscribed onto patterns of sociolinguistic variation. Specifically, we consider the role of iconicity in this process. Studies of iconicity and variation to date have tended to focus on the iconic properties of the speech signal itself (e.g., an association between higher-frequency sounds and smallness). We bring these ideas about sound symbolism into dialogue with research on embodied behavioral codes, which link particular forms of bodily comportment and their associated qualia with specific social categories and positions. We suggest that certain claims about sound symbolic meanings may be better interpreted as derived effects of socially meaningful bodily hexis. Our arguments are illustrated through a consideration of two variables, both of which have received widespread attention in the literature on variation in English: the backing and lowering of the short front vowels and the fronting/backing of /s/. We discuss how treating these variables from the perspective of socially inculcated bodies can provide a unified account of their observed sociolinguistic patterning and help to shed light on how variables accrue social meaning more generally.
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, 2018
This chapter discusses the relationship between language and sexual politics. It focuses on the w... more This chapter discusses the relationship between language and sexual politics. It focuses on the ways language is used to police membership in different gendered and sexual groups, to construct self and others along gendered and sexual lines, and to negotiate belonging in different communities and institutions. The first half of the chapter summarizes prominent research in this area. Topics covered include struggles over labeling practices, discursive constructions of sexual authenticities, and the role of language and sexuality in the creation and reproduction of national ideologies. The second half turns to a detailed case study of language and sexual politics among lesbians in Israel. The chapter describes how the women in question use particular linguistic practices to construct distinct sexual selves, and, in the process, challenge prevailing Israeli sexual norms. The discussion also highlights future directions for language and sexuality research, focusing on the importance of an adequate theory of power.
Keywords: sexual politics, labeling, authenticity, belonging, gender morphology, Israel
Advancing socio-grammatical variation and change, 2021
One of the principal goals of sociolinguistic cognition research is to develop an ecologically va... more One of the principal goals of sociolinguistic cognition research is to develop an ecologically valid model of sociolinguistic perception that provides an integrated view of the different factors (social, linguistic and cognitive) that influence how listeners ascribe social meaning to variation. To date, the lion’s share of empirical studies has focussed on the perception and evaluation of phonetic variables while very little research has considered listener reactions to morphosyntactic features. Moreover, socio-cognitive research has only started to investigate the dynamic and contingent nature of sociolinguistic perception in real-time. This is due in particular to the challenges associated with tracking what hearers notice and how they interpret the socio-indexical information they encounter in everyday talk. In this chapter, we report on a project that addresses both of these issues by exploring subjective evaluations of morphosyntax and phonology in real-time.
While the loss of regional distinctiveness across the southeastern UK is well studied and largely... more While the loss of regional distinctiveness across the southeastern UK is well studied and largely undisputed, there is less consensus about class-based divisions. This paper investigates this question through an updated analysis of the variety emblematic of Britain's upper class: Received Pronunciation (RP). While previous studies have suggested levelling in RP to a broader standard southeastern norm, our findings indicate that the most recent advances in the variety show it (re)differentiating itself from other varieties in the region. Investigating both individual vowel movements and broader system-wide properties, we argue that the changes observed in RP today result from speakers adopting a particular articulatory setting (lax voice), which has subsequent ramifications on vowel realizations. We suggest that speakers make strategic use of this articulatory setting as a way of embodying an elite persona in the British context, an interpretation that resonates with the social distributions of similar changes in other varieties.
Keywords: RP, British English, articulatory setting, embodiment, distinction
Routledge Handbook of Variationist Sociolinguistics, 2024
It is uncontroversial that there exist different ways of speaking, that language is characterized... more It is uncontroversial that there exist different ways of speaking, that language is characterized by orderly patterns of variability. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which these patterns take on social meaning. I begin from the assertion that the assignment of social meaning is always an ideological process. While patterns of linguistic difference may already exist in a given language or context, those patterns only start to become meaningful when they help to establish contrasts between relevant social groups and situations. I provide an overview of the different semiotic steps involved in making particular variables socially meaningful, including how particular variants become linked to given social categories or characteristics (indexicality), how, once established, such indexical links are naturalized and come to be seen as signals of a group's underlying character (rhematization), and, finally, how all of this works to consolidate a field of contrasts between different social types, each associated with their own characteristic way of speaking (enregisterment). I illustrate each of these steps with brief examples from variationist research from the 1960s to the present-day. I also describe how the social meanings of variation evolve over time, and briefly discuss this point in relation to ongoing work examining the social values of different articulatory settings in the UK.
Keywords: variation, social meaning, indexicality, enregisterment, ideology, differentiation
This chapter provides an overview of the ways that attitudes to different varieties of British En... more This chapter provides an overview of the ways that attitudes to different varieties of British English may affect individuals’ ability to obtain employment and professional advancement. The chapter begins by offering a review of theories from social psychology and related fields of impression formation and discusses the role that linguistic variation plays in person perception and evaluation. Next, a brief review of prior work on language attitudes and stereotypes in employment contexts in the UK is provided. The chapter then goes on to summarise the results of three experiments conducted as part of the Accent Bias in Britain project, examining the effect of regional accent differences on judgments of professional among the general public, among expert professional listeners, and using real-time techniques. A final experiment considers the effect that anti-bias interventions have on respondent evaluations. The chapter closes with a summary of current findings and suggestions for future research.
Borders define norms of belonging, regulating who is to be considered a legitimate members of a g... more Borders define norms of belonging, regulating who is to be considered a legitimate members of a given socio-political space. In addition to their myriad physical manifestations, borders are also internalized by individuals, structuring the ways in which people understand the world around them and their position within it. This chapter consider how internalized borders are navigated in interaction. Integrating the tools of sociolinguistic analysis with theories of dialogical selfhood developed in psychology, the chapter discusses how subjective conflicts are broached and negotiated through talk, leading to a multidimensional presentation of self that seeks to manage subjective conflict. Arguments are based on a case study of a gay man in Greece and the strategies he deploys to minimize a perceived incompatibility between gayness and dominant discourses of Greek nationalism. The ultimate aim of the chapter is to illustrate the importance of theorizing selfhood within sociolinguistic research and the crucial role played by internalized borders in discursive enactments of self.
Like all communities, nations are defined as much by who is normatively licensed to be a member o... more Like all communities, nations are defined as much by who is normatively licensed to be a member of the national community as by who is excluded. Everyday bordering practices play a crucial role in this regard, continually (re)adjudicating who is allowed in and who is to be kept out of the national community. While much work on bordering has focused on the way external boundaries are enacted, in this chapter we consider how bordering also organises the internal structure of (imagined) national communities and, consequently, how individuals navigate these internal boundaries in everyday interaction. To do so, we examine how talk-in-interaction can function as a commodity situation (Appadurai 1986), a contextually bound moment in which particular ways of being are commodified and take on value in a symbolic market. We illustrate our arguments through an analysis of how a gay couple in Athens, Dimitris and Fotis, narrate their understanding of a normative conflict between gayness and Greekness. We demonstrate how, during an interview, the men work to resolve this conflict via the interactional construction and commodification of a specific person-type, the "bear". Ultimately, our goal is to demonstrate the benefit to be had by examining the commodification of identity as process, not product, and one that is negotiated in the micro-dynamics of situated interaction.
Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism, 2023
In many societies, special privilege is accorded to standard accents, owing to perceptions that t... more In many societies, special privilege is accorded to standard accents, owing to perceptions that they possess superior clarity, are closer to the language’s written form, or denote greater intelligence than non-standard varieties. The Accent Bias in Britain (ABB) project sought to investigate the extent to which unconscious accent bias might influence the judgements of recruiters in the legal sector. The results reveal persistent bias against certain non-standard varieties of British English in professional contexts. We discuss the ramifications of these findings for our current understanding of prescriptivism and its effect on social mobility.
Accent is one of the most recognisable signals of social background in the UK today. It can cue a... more Accent is one of the most recognisable signals of social background in the UK today. It can cue a listener to a speaker’s ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, region, culture, or social class. For traits that are not visible, such as socio-economic status, accent is often the primary signal.
Research in the United States has shown that bias against certain accents can lead to unequal access to employment, housing, and education. Despite the long history of accent-based social judgement in British society, equivalent research on its impact on life outcomes for different social groups in the UK is very limited. What impact does a person’s accent have on their social mobility? What role do institutions at different life junctures—including schools, universities and employers—play in such barriers to mobility?
In this report, we review the problem of accent and social mobility, including recent work that has examined attitudes to accents among employers, recruiters, and the general public. We then extend the focus to personal experiences of accent anxiety, sense of belonging, and implications for social mobility at different life stages. We examine effects of social class, region, and ethnicity, but also how intersections among these amplify barriers to mobility.
Our specific focus is the effects of accent bias on anxiety, sense of belonging, and experiences of bias for different social groups at four key life junctures: university applicants (largely age 17-18), university students (largely age 18-21), young professionals (largely age 21-24), and senior managers (largely age 35+). At each juncture we present two types of data: a quantitative UK-wide picture and qualitative commentary on these experiences gathered from each life stage through more detailed questionnaires. We show that accent anxiety and bias affects every life stage, but that university is a time of particularly heightened accent anxiety, as young adults approach the moment of entering a chosen career.
In the previous chapter, you were introduced to the basic principles underlying quantitative rese... more In the previous chapter, you were introduced to the basic principles underlying quantitative research methods. You learned, for example, that quantitative tests employ deductive reasoning to examine predetermined hypotheses, and that these tests are subject to certain constraints, such as reliability and validity. In this chapter, we build upon this theoretical base, and discuss some of the concrete issues involved in the quantitative analysis of language. We begin in the first section (section 1) with an extended discussion of how to construct hypotheses for quantitative investigation. We also examine the basic concepts required for testing these hypotheses. We then turn, in sections 2 and 3, to a detailed exposition of two of the most common statistical tests used in linguistics, chi-square tests and t-tests. You will learn what these tests are, how to use them and what they can (and cannot) tell you. Finally, in section 4, we look at how to go about interpreting quantitative results, and discuss some of the ways in which quantitative and qualitative methods can be brought together in linguistic research.
Routledge Handbook of Experimental Sociolinguistics, 2023
Sociolinguistics is dedicated to understanding the relationship between language and the social w... more Sociolinguistics is dedicated to understanding the relationship between language and the social world. The contemporary field of sociolinguistics coalesced in the 1960s, largely in reaction to the emergence of Chomsky’s generativist approach (Chomsky, 1965) and its insistence on the separation between competence (an individual’s knowledge of a language) and performance (the observable patterns of language use). For Chomsky (1965, p. 3), only competence was important to the development of linguistic theory, with actual performance seen as “grammatically irrelevant.” Scholars such as John Gumperz, Dell Hymes and William Labov took issue with Chomsky’s position, arguing that it offered an impoverished view of language that artificially separated analyses of a language’s grammatical “correctness” from the rules governing its everyday use (Hymes, 1966). Instead, they argued for the need to treat language as both a cognitive and a social phenomenon, where the object of study is not only what utterances count as “well-formed” but also how those well-formed utterances are used. Gumperz, Hymes and Labov approached this task differently. For Gumperz, the focus was on how individuals use language strategically in interaction to achieve specific social and interactional goals (by, for example, switching to a different code when giving an order or making a request; see Gumperz, 1982). Hymes (1974) focused on language as part of a broader cultural ecology, considering the ways that language contributes to the more general social life of a community. Labov remained closest to Chomsky’s goal of developing a theory of language itself as a system, though with the understanding that doing so required two innovations. The first is that language is heterogeneous (Weinreich et al., 1968): competence does not entail homogeneity. Instead, there are “alternate ways of saying the ‘same thing’ ” (Labov, 1972). Second, this heterogeneity is ordered. Its appearance is not haphazard or “free”. Rather, variability in language is systematically distributed across social divisions, such that certain ways of speaking (“variants”) are associated with some social groups or situations, and other ways with others. For Labov, the goal of (socio)linguistics is, therefore, to map these associations between variable linguistic behaviour and social structure. To do so, Labov and colleagues (Labov, 1965; Weinreich et al., 1968) identified a number of key “problems” that a field of sociolinguistics needs to address. Two of these are relevant to the discussion in this chapter. The first is the embedding problem, or the need to determine the degree of correlation that exists between the use of a linguistic variant and a given set of social and/or situational factors (e.g., gender, ethnicity, social class, formality). The second is the evaluation problem, or the need to establish the subjective correlates (i.e., attitudinal judgements) of specific variants. Identifying a variant’s social embedding allows us to predict when a variant will (or will not) be used while knowing how it is evaluated gives us insight into why those usage patterns exist. From very early on, research in this tradition has relied on experimental methods to provide insight into embedding and evaluation, ultimately helping us to better understand the social meanings of language, or the “set of inferences that can be drawn on the basis of how language is used in a specific interaction” (Hall-Lew et al., 2021). In this chapter, I provide an overview of the main experimental approaches that have been adopted, summarizing both historical perspectives and current directions in the field. By the end of the chapter, readers will have a general understanding of the primary experimental paradigms that have been used in sociolinguistic research and an idea of how experimental methods can be used to address key questions of sociolinguistic theory.
Research in sociolinguistics (and sociophonetics) has long relied on appeals to “identity” as a m... more Research in sociolinguistics (and sociophonetics) has long relied on appeals to “identity” as a means of accounting for patterns of variation in language use (for reviews of this work, see Le Page 1997; Tabouret-Keller 1997; Llamas & Watt 2010; Levon forthcoming). At its core, an appeal to “identity” as an explanatory factor is based on the assertion that linguistic differences are not (or not only) determined by physiological differences among speakers or by automatic routines established during early language socialization. Instead, identity-based approaches treat linguistic variation as a fundamentally social phenomenon, related to an individual’s positioning in society and/or their understanding and interpretation of that positioning. Yet even within this more socially oriented body of work, “identity” remains a contentious term and academic disagreements about the utility of “identity” as an analytical concept are longstanding. Cameron & Kulick (2003), for example, famously argued that there exists an overemphasis on the use of language as a way to claim membership in an identity category in language, gender, and sexuality scholarship to the exclusion of other ways in which language and gender/sexuality may interact (including, for example, as a means for rejecting category affiliation or via a more indirect, higher-order indexical relation between language and a given social label). In response to Cameron & Kulick’s argument, Bucholtz & Hall (2004) countered that a nuanced examination of how people dynamically and relationally enact category membership is central to this line of enquiry (see also Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Cameron & Kulick 2005). Similarly, Trudgill (2008) proposed that “identity concerns” play no role in the formation of new dialects in language contact situations and that long-term automatic accommodation between speakers can account for the developmental patterns observed in the literature. This position that was explicitly rebutted by Coupland (2008) and Holmes & Kerswill (2008), among others, who, while acknowledging the problem with “simplistic purposive accounts of identity as motive” (Coupland 2008:268), nevertheless argued that accommodation is never wholly automatic, that accommodation occurs when people—not language varieties—come into contact, and that interpersonal and intersubjective factors always play a role (see also Labov 2012). Within phonetics, proposals like Ohala’s (1983, 1994) Frequency Code and Gussenhoven’s (2004) Effort and Production Codes seek to account for patterns of sociophonetic variation via recourse to universal biological rules that are independent of social or identity-linked factors. In contrast, scholars such as Eckert (2017) have argued that, universal meaning potentials notwithstanding, agency and identity are crucial for sound symbolic meaning to be realized in interaction, such that we cannot divorce our analyses of sound symbolism from the specific social contexts in which it occurs. Part of the reason why there is so much disagreement about the role of identity in linguistic variation is because the term “identity” is often used to refer to a number of very different things. This is due in large part to the fact that “identity” is what Giddens (1987) calls a “double hermeneutic,” a concept that is used both as a technical term of analysis in scholarly work and as a popular term for organizing experience in wider society. According to Giddens, scholarly and popular understanding of such concepts influence one another, with popular conceptualizations conscripted into scholarly work and vice versa. While not necessarily a problem in and of itself, the danger of this kind of mutual influence is a proliferation of meanings of a given term, resulting in a lack of scholarly precision and a potential degradation in the perceived merit of academic enquiry. With respect to the term “identity,” Brubaker & Cooper (2000:1) summarize the issue succinctly by stating “if identity is everywhere, identity is nowhere.” In other words, if “identity” can mean different things to different people in different contexts (e.g., an overt category membership, an in-the- moment interpersonal relation, a deeply held sense of self), what sort of analytical purchase does the term have for scholars? It is not our intention to provide a definitive answer to this question in the current chapter. Instead, our goal is to provide an overview of the different ways in which the issue of identity has been approached in sociophonetics. We begin in the next section with a brief introduction to Brubaker & Cooper’s system for classifying different treatments of identity in social research into three broad categories: identity as category positioning (by self or other), identity as the expression of commonality or groupness, and identity as situated subjectivity. We use this system not as a prescriptive taxonomy, but as a way to organize our review of sociophonetic research on identity, demonstrating how examinations of variation in both speech perception and production have contributed to each of these areas. Through this review, we hope to demonstrate the relevance of identity-linked questions to sociophonetic investigation and to outline some of the different ways in which the topic can be approached.
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2024
In this article, we explore how people in conflict-affected societies use language to navigate th... more In this article, we explore how people in conflict-affected societies use language to navigate the affective constraints that political conflicts impose. Specifically, we consider the role of multilingualism in enabling sexual and romantic intimacy between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in Israel/Palestine. Our data are drawn from a close examination of the speech of Fadi Daeem, one of the protagonists in the 2015 documentary Oriented. Building on studies of (in)securitization and everyday bordering, we show how the ongoing armed conflict between Israel and Palestine serves to instantiate a regime of affective checkpoints, a space in which sexual and romantic relations between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are discursively blocked. We describe how Fadi and his friends use strategic instances of code-switching between Arabic, Hebrew, and English to navigate this ideologically fraught terrain. Our primary goal is to demonstrate how multilingualism can be employed as a resource for managing affect and desire in a conflict-ridden context like Israel/Palestine. In doing so, we further highlight how the intimate domain of romantic desire is inevitably situated within a broader matrix of power and constraint.
This article examines how the “arbitrary content of culture” (Bourdieu 1977) comes to be inscribe... more This article examines how the “arbitrary content of culture” (Bourdieu 1977) comes to be inscribed onto patterns of sociolinguistic variation. Specifically, we consider the role of iconicity in this process. Studies of iconicity and variation to date have tended to focus on the iconic properties of the speech signal itself (e.g., an association between higher-frequency sounds and smallness). We bring these ideas about sound symbolism into dialogue with research on embodied behavioral codes, which link particular forms of bodily comportment and their associated qualia with specific social categories and positions. We suggest that certain claims about sound symbolic meanings may be better interpreted as derived effects of socially meaningful bodily hexis. Our arguments are illustrated through a consideration of two variables, both of which have received widespread attention in the literature on variation in English: the backing and lowering of the short front vowels and the fronting/backing of /s/. We discuss how treating these variables from the perspective of socially inculcated bodies can provide a unified account of their observed sociolinguistic patterning and help to shed light on how variables accrue social meaning more generally.
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, 2018
This chapter discusses the relationship between language and sexual politics. It focuses on the w... more This chapter discusses the relationship between language and sexual politics. It focuses on the ways language is used to police membership in different gendered and sexual groups, to construct self and others along gendered and sexual lines, and to negotiate belonging in different communities and institutions. The first half of the chapter summarizes prominent research in this area. Topics covered include struggles over labeling practices, discursive constructions of sexual authenticities, and the role of language and sexuality in the creation and reproduction of national ideologies. The second half turns to a detailed case study of language and sexual politics among lesbians in Israel. The chapter describes how the women in question use particular linguistic practices to construct distinct sexual selves, and, in the process, challenge prevailing Israeli sexual norms. The discussion also highlights future directions for language and sexuality research, focusing on the importance of an adequate theory of power.
Keywords: sexual politics, labeling, authenticity, belonging, gender morphology, Israel
Advancing socio-grammatical variation and change, 2021
One of the principal goals of sociolinguistic cognition research is to develop an ecologically va... more One of the principal goals of sociolinguistic cognition research is to develop an ecologically valid model of sociolinguistic perception that provides an integrated view of the different factors (social, linguistic and cognitive) that influence how listeners ascribe social meaning to variation. To date, the lion’s share of empirical studies has focussed on the perception and evaluation of phonetic variables while very little research has considered listener reactions to morphosyntactic features. Moreover, socio-cognitive research has only started to investigate the dynamic and contingent nature of sociolinguistic perception in real-time. This is due in particular to the challenges associated with tracking what hearers notice and how they interpret the socio-indexical information they encounter in everyday talk. In this chapter, we report on a project that addresses both of these issues by exploring subjective evaluations of morphosyntax and phonology in real-time.
While the loss of regional distinctiveness across the southeastern UK is well studied and largely... more While the loss of regional distinctiveness across the southeastern UK is well studied and largely undisputed, there is less consensus about class-based divisions. This paper investigates this question through an updated analysis of the variety emblematic of Britain's upper class: Received Pronunciation (RP). While previous studies have suggested levelling in RP to a broader standard southeastern norm, our findings indicate that the most recent advances in the variety show it (re)differentiating itself from other varieties in the region. Investigating both individual vowel movements and broader system-wide properties, we argue that the changes observed in RP today result from speakers adopting a particular articulatory setting (lax voice), which has subsequent ramifications on vowel realizations. We suggest that speakers make strategic use of this articulatory setting as a way of embodying an elite persona in the British context, an interpretation that resonates with the social distributions of similar changes in other varieties.
Keywords: RP, British English, articulatory setting, embodiment, distinction
Routledge Handbook of Variationist Sociolinguistics, 2024
It is uncontroversial that there exist different ways of speaking, that language is characterized... more It is uncontroversial that there exist different ways of speaking, that language is characterized by orderly patterns of variability. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which these patterns take on social meaning. I begin from the assertion that the assignment of social meaning is always an ideological process. While patterns of linguistic difference may already exist in a given language or context, those patterns only start to become meaningful when they help to establish contrasts between relevant social groups and situations. I provide an overview of the different semiotic steps involved in making particular variables socially meaningful, including how particular variants become linked to given social categories or characteristics (indexicality), how, once established, such indexical links are naturalized and come to be seen as signals of a group's underlying character (rhematization), and, finally, how all of this works to consolidate a field of contrasts between different social types, each associated with their own characteristic way of speaking (enregisterment). I illustrate each of these steps with brief examples from variationist research from the 1960s to the present-day. I also describe how the social meanings of variation evolve over time, and briefly discuss this point in relation to ongoing work examining the social values of different articulatory settings in the UK.
Keywords: variation, social meaning, indexicality, enregisterment, ideology, differentiation
This chapter provides an overview of the ways that attitudes to different varieties of British En... more This chapter provides an overview of the ways that attitudes to different varieties of British English may affect individuals’ ability to obtain employment and professional advancement. The chapter begins by offering a review of theories from social psychology and related fields of impression formation and discusses the role that linguistic variation plays in person perception and evaluation. Next, a brief review of prior work on language attitudes and stereotypes in employment contexts in the UK is provided. The chapter then goes on to summarise the results of three experiments conducted as part of the Accent Bias in Britain project, examining the effect of regional accent differences on judgments of professional among the general public, among expert professional listeners, and using real-time techniques. A final experiment considers the effect that anti-bias interventions have on respondent evaluations. The chapter closes with a summary of current findings and suggestions for future research.
Borders define norms of belonging, regulating who is to be considered a legitimate members of a g... more Borders define norms of belonging, regulating who is to be considered a legitimate members of a given socio-political space. In addition to their myriad physical manifestations, borders are also internalized by individuals, structuring the ways in which people understand the world around them and their position within it. This chapter consider how internalized borders are navigated in interaction. Integrating the tools of sociolinguistic analysis with theories of dialogical selfhood developed in psychology, the chapter discusses how subjective conflicts are broached and negotiated through talk, leading to a multidimensional presentation of self that seeks to manage subjective conflict. Arguments are based on a case study of a gay man in Greece and the strategies he deploys to minimize a perceived incompatibility between gayness and dominant discourses of Greek nationalism. The ultimate aim of the chapter is to illustrate the importance of theorizing selfhood within sociolinguistic research and the crucial role played by internalized borders in discursive enactments of self.
Like all communities, nations are defined as much by who is normatively licensed to be a member o... more Like all communities, nations are defined as much by who is normatively licensed to be a member of the national community as by who is excluded. Everyday bordering practices play a crucial role in this regard, continually (re)adjudicating who is allowed in and who is to be kept out of the national community. While much work on bordering has focused on the way external boundaries are enacted, in this chapter we consider how bordering also organises the internal structure of (imagined) national communities and, consequently, how individuals navigate these internal boundaries in everyday interaction. To do so, we examine how talk-in-interaction can function as a commodity situation (Appadurai 1986), a contextually bound moment in which particular ways of being are commodified and take on value in a symbolic market. We illustrate our arguments through an analysis of how a gay couple in Athens, Dimitris and Fotis, narrate their understanding of a normative conflict between gayness and Greekness. We demonstrate how, during an interview, the men work to resolve this conflict via the interactional construction and commodification of a specific person-type, the "bear". Ultimately, our goal is to demonstrate the benefit to be had by examining the commodification of identity as process, not product, and one that is negotiated in the micro-dynamics of situated interaction.
As in many linguistics subfields, studies of prosody have mainly focused on majority languages an... more As in many linguistics subfields, studies of prosody have mainly focused on majority languages and dialects and on speakers who hold power in social structures. The goal of this Special Issue is to diversify prosody research in terms of the languages and dialects being investigated, as well as the social structures that influence prosodic variation. The Special Issue brings together prosody researchers and researchers exploring sociological variation in prosody, with a focus on the prosody of marginalized dialects and on prosodic differences based on gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. The papers in this volume don’t just advance our understanding of critical issues in sociolinguistics, but they also challenge some of the received wisdom in the exploration of sociolinguistic influences on prosody. Not only does this collection highlight the value of this work to informing theories of prosodic variation and change, but the collected papers also provide examples of methodological innovations in the field that will be valuable for all prosody researchers.
Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is... more Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is not explicitly protected by the Equality Act 2010, accent can become a proxy for other forms of discrimination at key junctures for social mobility such as recruiting to elite professions. The Accent Bias and Fair Access in Britain project (www.accentbiasbritain.org) aims to assess prevailing attitudes to accents in Britain and to assess the extent to which accent-based prejudice affects elite professions. In this article we focus specifically on methodological innovations in this project, rather than detailed results. We describe our approach to four challenges in the study of accent bias: how to assess whether accent preferences actively interfere with the perception of expertise in candidates’ utterances; how to more precisely identify sources of bias in individuals; new technologies for real-time rating to establish whether specific ‘shibboleths’ trigger shifts in evaluation; and how to assess the efficacy of interventions for combating implicit bias. We suggest integrating best practices from the fields of linguistics, social psychology, and management studies to develop sound interdisciplinary methods for the study of language, discrimination, and social mobility.
Keywords: Accent discrimination, legal profession, research methods, anti-bias interventions
We investigated whether expression of social meaning operationalized as individual gender identit... more We investigated whether expression of social meaning operationalized as individual gender identitity and politeness moderated pitch range in the two languages of female and male Japanese-English sequential bilinguals. The bilinguals were resident in either London (UK) or Tokyo (Japan) and read sentences to imagined addressees who varied in formality and sex. Results indicated significant differences in the pitch range of the two languages of the bilinguals, and this was confirmed for female and male bilinguals in London and Tokyo, with the language differences being more extreme in the London bilinguals than in the Tokyo bilinguals. Interestingly, self-attribution of masculine gender traits patterned with within-language variation in the English pitch level of the female bilinguals, whereas self-attribution of feminine gender traits patterned with within-language variation in the English pitch level of the male bilinguals. In addition, female and male bilinguals significantly varied...
This special issue was born out of a conversation initiated at a panel organized by two of us at ... more This special issue was born out of a conversation initiated at a panel organized by two of us at the ninth biannual meeting of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), held at City University of Hong Kong in May 2016. The principal goal of the panel was to stimulate an academic discussion on the role of normativity and antinormativity in language, gender, and sexuality research in response to a series of critical interventions in cultural studies regarding some of the tenets underpinning queer theory (see Wiegman 2012; Penney 2014; Wiegman & Wilson 2015). It was our belief that sociolinguistics—with its focus on situated interpretations of social practice—has much to contribute, both theoretically and empirically, to these debates within cultural studies. This special issue is an initial attempt at articulating what such a contribution would be.
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Research in the United States has shown that bias against certain accents can lead to unequal access to employment, housing, and education. Despite the long history of accent-based social judgement in British society, equivalent research on its impact on life outcomes for different social groups in the UK is very limited. What impact does a person’s accent have on their social mobility? What role do institutions at different life junctures—including schools, universities and employers—play in such barriers to mobility?
In this report, we review the problem of accent and social mobility, including recent work that has examined attitudes to accents among employers, recruiters, and the general public. We then extend the focus to personal experiences of accent anxiety, sense of belonging, and implications for social mobility at different life stages. We examine effects of social class, region, and ethnicity, but also how intersections among these amplify barriers to mobility.
Our specific focus is the effects of accent bias on anxiety, sense of belonging, and experiences of bias for different social groups at four key life junctures: university applicants (largely age 17-18), university students (largely age 18-21), young professionals (largely age 21-24), and senior managers (largely age 35+). At each juncture we present two types of data: a quantitative UK-wide picture and qualitative commentary on these experiences gathered from each life stage through more detailed questionnaires. We show that accent anxiety and bias affects every life stage, but that university is a time of particularly heightened accent anxiety, as young adults approach the moment of entering a chosen career.
Gumperz, Hymes and Labov approached this task differently. For Gumperz, the focus was on how individuals use language strategically in interaction to achieve specific social and interactional goals (by, for example, switching to a different code when giving an order or making a request; see Gumperz, 1982). Hymes (1974) focused on language as part of a broader cultural ecology, considering the ways that language contributes to the more general social life of a community. Labov remained closest to Chomsky’s goal of developing a theory of language itself as a system, though with the understanding that doing so required two innovations. The first is that language is heterogeneous (Weinreich et al., 1968): competence does not entail homogeneity. Instead, there are “alternate ways of saying the ‘same thing’ ” (Labov, 1972). Second, this heterogeneity is ordered. Its appearance is not haphazard or “free”. Rather, variability in language is systematically distributed across social divisions, such that certain ways of speaking (“variants”) are associated with some social groups or situations, and other ways with others. For Labov, the goal of (socio)linguistics is, therefore, to map these associations between variable linguistic behaviour and social structure.
To do so, Labov and colleagues (Labov, 1965; Weinreich et al., 1968) identified a number of key “problems” that a field of sociolinguistics needs to address. Two of these are relevant to the discussion in this chapter. The first is the embedding problem, or the need to determine the degree of correlation that exists between the use of a linguistic variant and a given set of social and/or situational factors (e.g., gender, ethnicity, social class, formality). The second is the evaluation problem, or the need to establish the subjective correlates (i.e., attitudinal judgements) of specific variants. Identifying a variant’s social embedding allows us to predict when a variant will (or will not) be used while knowing how it is evaluated gives us insight into why those usage patterns exist. From very early on, research in this tradition has relied on experimental methods to provide insight into embedding and evaluation, ultimately helping us to better understand the social meanings of language, or the “set of inferences that can be drawn on the basis of how language is used in a specific interaction” (Hall-Lew et al., 2021). In this chapter, I provide an overview of the main experimental approaches that have been adopted, summarizing both historical perspectives and current directions in the field. By the end of the chapter, readers will have a general understanding of the primary experimental paradigms that have been used in sociolinguistic research and an idea of how experimental methods can be used to address key questions of sociolinguistic theory.
Yet even within this more socially oriented body of work, “identity” remains a contentious term and academic disagreements about the utility of “identity” as an analytical concept are longstanding. Cameron & Kulick (2003), for example, famously argued that there exists an overemphasis on the use of language as a way to claim membership in an identity category in language, gender, and sexuality scholarship to the exclusion of other ways in which language and gender/sexuality may interact (including, for example, as a means for rejecting category affiliation or via a more indirect, higher-order indexical relation between language and a given social label). In response to Cameron & Kulick’s argument, Bucholtz & Hall (2004) countered that a nuanced examination of how people dynamically and relationally enact category membership is central to
this line of enquiry (see also Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Cameron & Kulick 2005). Similarly, Trudgill (2008) proposed that “identity concerns” play no role in the formation of new dialects in language contact situations and that long-term automatic accommodation between speakers can account for the developmental patterns observed in the literature. This position that was explicitly rebutted by Coupland (2008) and Holmes & Kerswill (2008), among others, who, while acknowledging the problem with “simplistic purposive accounts of identity as motive” (Coupland 2008:268), nevertheless argued that accommodation is never wholly automatic, that accommodation occurs when people—not language varieties—come into contact, and that interpersonal and intersubjective factors always play a role (see also Labov 2012). Within phonetics, proposals like Ohala’s (1983, 1994) Frequency Code and Gussenhoven’s (2004) Effort and Production Codes seek to account for patterns of sociophonetic variation via recourse to universal biological rules that are independent of social or identity-linked factors. In contrast, scholars such as Eckert (2017) have argued that, universal meaning potentials notwithstanding, agency and identity are crucial for sound symbolic meaning to be realized in interaction, such that we cannot divorce our analyses of sound symbolism from the specific social contexts in which it occurs.
Part of the reason why there is so much disagreement about the role of identity in linguistic variation is because the term “identity” is often used to refer to a number of very different things. This is due in large part to the fact that “identity” is what Giddens (1987) calls a “double hermeneutic,” a concept that is used both as a technical term of analysis in scholarly work and as a popular term for organizing experience in wider society. According to Giddens, scholarly and popular understanding of such concepts influence one another, with popular conceptualizations conscripted into scholarly work and vice versa. While not necessarily a problem in and of itself, the danger of this kind of mutual influence is a proliferation of meanings of a given term, resulting in a lack of scholarly precision and a potential degradation in the perceived merit of academic enquiry. With respect to the term “identity,” Brubaker & Cooper (2000:1) summarize the issue succinctly by stating “if identity is everywhere, identity is nowhere.” In other words, if “identity” can mean different things to different people in different contexts (e.g., an overt category membership, an in-the- moment interpersonal relation, a deeply held sense of self), what sort of analytical purchase does the term have for scholars?
It is not our intention to provide a definitive answer to this question in the current chapter. Instead, our goal is to provide an overview of the different ways in which the issue of identity has been approached in sociophonetics. We begin in the next section with a brief introduction to Brubaker & Cooper’s system for classifying different treatments of identity in social research into three broad categories: identity as category positioning (by self or other), identity as the expression of commonality or groupness, and identity as situated subjectivity. We use this system not as a prescriptive taxonomy, but as a way to organize our review of sociophonetic research on identity, demonstrating how examinations of variation in both speech perception and production have contributed to each of these areas. Through this review, we hope to demonstrate the relevance of identity-linked questions to sociophonetic investigation and to outline some of the different ways in which the topic can be approached.
KEYWORDS: (in)securitization; checkpoints; queer; desire; code-switching; Israel/Palestine
Keywords: sexual politics, labeling, authenticity, belonging, gender morphology, Israel
Keywords: RP, British English, articulatory setting, embodiment, distinction
Keywords: variation, social meaning, indexicality, enregisterment, ideology, differentiation
Research in the United States has shown that bias against certain accents can lead to unequal access to employment, housing, and education. Despite the long history of accent-based social judgement in British society, equivalent research on its impact on life outcomes for different social groups in the UK is very limited. What impact does a person’s accent have on their social mobility? What role do institutions at different life junctures—including schools, universities and employers—play in such barriers to mobility?
In this report, we review the problem of accent and social mobility, including recent work that has examined attitudes to accents among employers, recruiters, and the general public. We then extend the focus to personal experiences of accent anxiety, sense of belonging, and implications for social mobility at different life stages. We examine effects of social class, region, and ethnicity, but also how intersections among these amplify barriers to mobility.
Our specific focus is the effects of accent bias on anxiety, sense of belonging, and experiences of bias for different social groups at four key life junctures: university applicants (largely age 17-18), university students (largely age 18-21), young professionals (largely age 21-24), and senior managers (largely age 35+). At each juncture we present two types of data: a quantitative UK-wide picture and qualitative commentary on these experiences gathered from each life stage through more detailed questionnaires. We show that accent anxiety and bias affects every life stage, but that university is a time of particularly heightened accent anxiety, as young adults approach the moment of entering a chosen career.
Gumperz, Hymes and Labov approached this task differently. For Gumperz, the focus was on how individuals use language strategically in interaction to achieve specific social and interactional goals (by, for example, switching to a different code when giving an order or making a request; see Gumperz, 1982). Hymes (1974) focused on language as part of a broader cultural ecology, considering the ways that language contributes to the more general social life of a community. Labov remained closest to Chomsky’s goal of developing a theory of language itself as a system, though with the understanding that doing so required two innovations. The first is that language is heterogeneous (Weinreich et al., 1968): competence does not entail homogeneity. Instead, there are “alternate ways of saying the ‘same thing’ ” (Labov, 1972). Second, this heterogeneity is ordered. Its appearance is not haphazard or “free”. Rather, variability in language is systematically distributed across social divisions, such that certain ways of speaking (“variants”) are associated with some social groups or situations, and other ways with others. For Labov, the goal of (socio)linguistics is, therefore, to map these associations between variable linguistic behaviour and social structure.
To do so, Labov and colleagues (Labov, 1965; Weinreich et al., 1968) identified a number of key “problems” that a field of sociolinguistics needs to address. Two of these are relevant to the discussion in this chapter. The first is the embedding problem, or the need to determine the degree of correlation that exists between the use of a linguistic variant and a given set of social and/or situational factors (e.g., gender, ethnicity, social class, formality). The second is the evaluation problem, or the need to establish the subjective correlates (i.e., attitudinal judgements) of specific variants. Identifying a variant’s social embedding allows us to predict when a variant will (or will not) be used while knowing how it is evaluated gives us insight into why those usage patterns exist. From very early on, research in this tradition has relied on experimental methods to provide insight into embedding and evaluation, ultimately helping us to better understand the social meanings of language, or the “set of inferences that can be drawn on the basis of how language is used in a specific interaction” (Hall-Lew et al., 2021). In this chapter, I provide an overview of the main experimental approaches that have been adopted, summarizing both historical perspectives and current directions in the field. By the end of the chapter, readers will have a general understanding of the primary experimental paradigms that have been used in sociolinguistic research and an idea of how experimental methods can be used to address key questions of sociolinguistic theory.
Yet even within this more socially oriented body of work, “identity” remains a contentious term and academic disagreements about the utility of “identity” as an analytical concept are longstanding. Cameron & Kulick (2003), for example, famously argued that there exists an overemphasis on the use of language as a way to claim membership in an identity category in language, gender, and sexuality scholarship to the exclusion of other ways in which language and gender/sexuality may interact (including, for example, as a means for rejecting category affiliation or via a more indirect, higher-order indexical relation between language and a given social label). In response to Cameron & Kulick’s argument, Bucholtz & Hall (2004) countered that a nuanced examination of how people dynamically and relationally enact category membership is central to
this line of enquiry (see also Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Cameron & Kulick 2005). Similarly, Trudgill (2008) proposed that “identity concerns” play no role in the formation of new dialects in language contact situations and that long-term automatic accommodation between speakers can account for the developmental patterns observed in the literature. This position that was explicitly rebutted by Coupland (2008) and Holmes & Kerswill (2008), among others, who, while acknowledging the problem with “simplistic purposive accounts of identity as motive” (Coupland 2008:268), nevertheless argued that accommodation is never wholly automatic, that accommodation occurs when people—not language varieties—come into contact, and that interpersonal and intersubjective factors always play a role (see also Labov 2012). Within phonetics, proposals like Ohala’s (1983, 1994) Frequency Code and Gussenhoven’s (2004) Effort and Production Codes seek to account for patterns of sociophonetic variation via recourse to universal biological rules that are independent of social or identity-linked factors. In contrast, scholars such as Eckert (2017) have argued that, universal meaning potentials notwithstanding, agency and identity are crucial for sound symbolic meaning to be realized in interaction, such that we cannot divorce our analyses of sound symbolism from the specific social contexts in which it occurs.
Part of the reason why there is so much disagreement about the role of identity in linguistic variation is because the term “identity” is often used to refer to a number of very different things. This is due in large part to the fact that “identity” is what Giddens (1987) calls a “double hermeneutic,” a concept that is used both as a technical term of analysis in scholarly work and as a popular term for organizing experience in wider society. According to Giddens, scholarly and popular understanding of such concepts influence one another, with popular conceptualizations conscripted into scholarly work and vice versa. While not necessarily a problem in and of itself, the danger of this kind of mutual influence is a proliferation of meanings of a given term, resulting in a lack of scholarly precision and a potential degradation in the perceived merit of academic enquiry. With respect to the term “identity,” Brubaker & Cooper (2000:1) summarize the issue succinctly by stating “if identity is everywhere, identity is nowhere.” In other words, if “identity” can mean different things to different people in different contexts (e.g., an overt category membership, an in-the- moment interpersonal relation, a deeply held sense of self), what sort of analytical purchase does the term have for scholars?
It is not our intention to provide a definitive answer to this question in the current chapter. Instead, our goal is to provide an overview of the different ways in which the issue of identity has been approached in sociophonetics. We begin in the next section with a brief introduction to Brubaker & Cooper’s system for classifying different treatments of identity in social research into three broad categories: identity as category positioning (by self or other), identity as the expression of commonality or groupness, and identity as situated subjectivity. We use this system not as a prescriptive taxonomy, but as a way to organize our review of sociophonetic research on identity, demonstrating how examinations of variation in both speech perception and production have contributed to each of these areas. Through this review, we hope to demonstrate the relevance of identity-linked questions to sociophonetic investigation and to outline some of the different ways in which the topic can be approached.
KEYWORDS: (in)securitization; checkpoints; queer; desire; code-switching; Israel/Palestine
Keywords: sexual politics, labeling, authenticity, belonging, gender morphology, Israel
Keywords: RP, British English, articulatory setting, embodiment, distinction
Keywords: variation, social meaning, indexicality, enregisterment, ideology, differentiation
Keywords: Prosody, sociolinguistics, dialect, variation
Keywords: Accent discrimination, legal profession, research methods, anti-bias interventions