King Abdul Aziz University Sociolinguistics/LANE 422
Department of European Languages and Literature Sections: AC + AD
19 April 2008 Prestige & Language Loyalty
References:
Stockwell, P. (2002). Sociolinguistics: A resource book for students. London: Routledge.
INTRODUCTION
The main social determinants of linguistic variation can be said to be:
- geography - class
- gender - race and ethnicity occupation
- age - ideology and politics
The last of these means that the opinions, attitudes and self-awareness of individuals and communities can affect linguistic usage.
Throughout history, people have altered their own language or forced others to change their language because of their own attitudes and beliefs.
There are many modifying factors in sociolinguistic usage including the following:
. Ideological beliefs (not only explicit political opinions but also everyday attitudes.)
. Self-consciousness changes the way people speak and write
. The formality of the context
. The pressure of standardisation, usually from elsewhere in society
. The language loyalty of individuals to their own local usage
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A Peter Stockwell Example:
According to a Finnish student, there was a community on the Sweden/Finland border whose language was neither ‘proper’ Finnish nor ‘proper’ Swedish.
This student claimed that Finns referred to these people as ‘half-linguals’.
Clearly this community is not without language, and it is more likely that they speak a particular non-standard dialect.
However, it is equally clear that this dialect is enormously stigmatised in the eyes of Finnish speakers like Peter’s student, to the extent that they do not even regard the dialect as a form of language at all.
Such opinions of language varieties have behavioural, educational and governmental policy consequences that can have real effects on forms of language.
The sociolinguist Roger Bell (1976, pp. 147-57, cited in Stockwell, 2002, p. 13) has suggested several criteria by which the prestige (or stigma) in which a code is held can be measured. These are:
. Standardisation: whether the variety has been approved by institutions, codified into a dictionary or grammar, or been used for prestigious texts (national newspapers, religious books);
. Vitality: whether there is a living community of speakers who use the code or whether the language is dead or dying
. Historicity: whether speakers have a sense of the longevity of their code
. Autonomy: whether speakers consider their code to be substantially different from others
. Reduction: whether speakers consider the code to be a sub-variety or a full code in its own right; whether it has a reduced set of social functions; for example, it might not have its own writing system or might have only a very reduced function (like a football chant accent);
. Mixture: whether speakers consider their language ‘pure’ or a mixture of other languages
. ‘Unofficial’ norms: whether speakers have a sense of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ varieties of the code, even if there is no ‘official’ codification in grammars and dictionaries.
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It is not always straightforward to measure these.
English is a 'mongrel' (a mixture) language of early Germanic, Norman French, Scandinavian languages, Classical Latin and Greek, and others, but instead of being stigmatised for this mixture it is viewed as a 'rich' language.
Similarly, institutional adoption has ensured the prestige of Classical Latin and Greek, in spite of not being the living vernacular of anyone.
It is common when a language community roughly corresponds with national boundaries for one dialect to be promoted above all others and attract prestige to the point at which it is regarded as the ‘standard’ form, even to the extent that it is seen as the ‘proper’ language and all other dialects 'bad' forms of the language.
There are always socio-political reasons why this happens.
Haugen (1966, cited in Stockwell, 2002, p. 14) has described four stages in the process of standardisation:
. Selection: of one dialect above others;
. Codification: largely through the education system;
. Elaboration: increase in functions and range of uses of the code;
. Acceptance: by the community at large of the code as the 'standard' form.
Some Characteristics of Standard English: (see Stockwell, 2002, pp. 14-15)
As sociolinguists, though our analysis must be as descriptive as possible, it is important that common attitudes and perceptions that might have sociolinguistic effects are taken into account.
Various degrees of awareness in common perception can be distinguished as follows:
. stereotypes the very obvious features that all speakers are aware of in their own usage
. markers obvious identifiable features that are easily measurable and that speakers are aware of only when explicitly discussing their own usage
. indicators measurable features that are useful for linguists because they are below the normal level of users’ awareness
People commonly attach all sorts of social evaluations to variations in usage like these.
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SECTION B: UNDERGRADUATE STUDY (Stockwell, 2002, pp. 38-41)
. The prestige dialect ‘Standard English’ is spoken by around 15% of the population of Britain
. The prestige accent ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP) is spoken by no more than 5% of the population
This means that:
. many people are speaking Standard English using a regional accent
. there is a different perception in status between the standardised and codified dialectal form and the accent that was once known as 'BBC English'.
Judith Jones’s Study
Judith Jones took a random sample of 64 television advertisements and analysed them along Hymes's (1974) dimensions of a communicative event:
Setting, Scene, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, and Genre. (see Stockwell, 2002, pp. 38-39)
Judith’s Findings:
. RP was generally used to advertise expensive products, electrical goods and financial services
. Regional accents were used for natural products, especially food
. 63 % of voices were male, against 37% female
. Women tended to have RP accents
. Men tended to have regional variation
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