29 November 2011 Aaron J. Dinkin 25 [email protected]

Lecture 22: Language attitudes and perceptual

People’s perceptions of and attitudes about language has consequences for social interaction:

Purnell, Idsardi & Baugh (1999) studied and housing : using AAVE or Latino English phonological features on the phone with prospective landlords was much less sucessful at getting appointments in predominantly white areas than standard white features.

Percentages of calls leading to successful appointments in different Bay Area communities. Communities are sorted by percentage of white population increasing left to right.

Matched-guise experimental technique: change one feature of the stimulus and see if that changes the response.

Labov (1966)’s matched-guise study of rhoticity in New York: Sentences with multiple tokens of (r), like: He darted out about four feet before a car and got hit hard We didn’t have the heart to play ball or cards all morning …fully rhotic in one guise, but with one non-rhotic token in the other. Respondents labeled the partially-rhotic guise 3–4 points lower than the fully- rhotic guise on a 7-point “occupational suitability” scale.

Thus New Yorkers are very sensitive to even mild instances of non-rhoticity, and judge speakers harshly on it.

Results of matched-guise rhoticity study by socioeconomic class of responder, showing difference in occupational suitability judgments between two guises

Perception of covert prestige:

Amanda, a speaker from South Philadelphia, reports how she used the non-Philadelphia /æ/ in laughing during her freshman year of college— And I was telling my mom the story. I was like, “Yeah, I was [læfIn] really hard at that.” My mom was like, “Did you just say [læfIn]?” And I was like, “Yeah, I did.” She was like, “Never fucking say that again.”

Avoiding a distinctive feature of the Philadelphia is seen as “a betrayal of Amanda’s South Philadelphia roots” (Wagner 2008).

Listeners are sensitive to features of dialect variation: Plichta & Preston (2005): subjects hear 7 degrees of /ay/-monophthongization, and match them with nine cities between Michigan and Alabama; north-south assignment of samples correlated closely with monophthongization.

In Plichta & Preston (2005), the male speaker was also judged as more Southern than the speaker. Why? Look at other attitudes connected with Southern .

Composite of 147 hand-drawn maps from Michigan respondents (Preston 1996)

In map-drawing tasks, the South is the most commonly identified specific region of North —people know there’s a Southern accent. Southern dialect is often stigmatized on maps: “worst English in America”, e.g.

What happens if you ask speakers for explicit language attitude judgments? Qualities often group into a competence (standard, educated, “good language”) axis and a solidarity (friendly, casual, pleasant) axis. These correspond roughly to overt prestige and covert prestige.

Michigan respondents’ ratings for “correctness” (preston 2002): Michigan rated most correct, South least correct

Alabama respondents’ ratings for “pleasantness” (Preston 2002): Alabama most pleasant, Northern locations (including Michigan) least

Inference: correctness (i.e., overt prestige) is what Michiganders value in their own accent, but pleasantness (i.e., covert prestige) is what Alabamans values in theirs.

Indiana is traditionally northernmost extent of southern features, or most Southern-like area of the Midland; note Michiganders rate Indiana as much less correct than Ohio or Illinois. Indiana seemingly linguistically insecure about Southern status, rates no difference between itself and Michigan for correctness:

Southern Indiana respondents’ ratings for “correctness” (Preston 1996).

Why was the male speaker judged more Southern in Plichta & Preston (2005)? Southern accents are stigmatized & have covert prestige—features more associated with male than female speech. So “male” and “Southern” share language attitude features and are associated with each other.