University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 12-15-2014 Southern Language, Ideology, and Identity in a High School Sorority Sara Lide University of South Carolina - Columbia Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Lide, S.(2014). Southern Language, Ideology, and Identity in a High School Sorority. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3034 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Southern Language, Ideology, and Identity in a High School Sorority by Sara Lide Bachelor of Arts Rice University, 2006 Master of Arts Lancaster University, 2007 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2014 Accepted by: Elaine Chun, Major Professor Tracey Weldon, Committee Member Jennifer Reynolds, Committee Member Christine Mallinson, Committee Member Lacy Ford, Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies © Copyright by Sara Lide, 2014 All Rights Reserved. ii Acknowledgements I cannot possibly acknowledge everyone who has helped me through this long process, and I could certainly not do so adequately. Instead, I offer these few words of gratitude. I am thankful for my committee, Jennifer Reynolds, Tracey Weldon, Christine Mallinson, and especially my advisor, Elaine Chun, and for their guidance, advice, and encouragement along the way. My weekly meetings with Julia McKinney and Sandra Keller helped me in so many ways: thank you for the intellectual and moral support that extended far outside the bounds of those meetings. To the sociolinguistics community at USC, and especially to Paul Reed, our many discussions were invaluable. For financial support, I thank the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Foundation and the Linguistics Program. And thank you to Ms. Jones, and the YLSM community especially, for welcoming me and allowing me to share this part of your lives. I am grateful for the support of many others, including Birdie and Lis, who were there long before this all began, and Ralph, who saw me through the end. And most importantly, for all of your love, I thank my family: Mary and Lanneau, Thomas, Elizabeth, Pato, and Alma Louise. iii Abstract This dissertation explores the language practices of high school sorority members in a mid-sized city in the U.S. South. Specifically, it describes how economically privileged, white, female youth in the Young Ladies’ Society of Midway (YLSM) used Southern language to position themselves and others in relation to widely and locally circulating ideologies of language, region, gender, and class. Drawing on sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological methods, this study addresses the issues of how Southern language practices and language ideologies relate and how indexical meanings and social identities emerge through linguistic interaction. As a study that examines the language of a group of Southern girls, this dissertation contributes to linguists’ understanding of what Southern language is. I argue that Southern language is best understood not as a set of linguistic features used by people in the South but as an emergent construct that is informed by and serves various ideological purposes. First, by drawing on ethnographic insights and interactional analysis, I illustrate how YLSM members defined the language practices of working- class others as “accented” and “ignorant” compared with the “polite” and “charming” language practices of upper-class, or preppy, Southerners like themselves. In doing so, these speakers reproduced the widely circulating stigma of Southern language, specifically with respect to phonological forms, yet they also erased linguistic stigma for themselves by calling attention instead to the positive functions of preppy Southern language. Second, I show how Southern language practices were not merely indexical of iv regional identity but rather were indexical of social types defined along multiple intersecting dimensions of identity. Specifically, when they invoked images of redneck and preppy Southerners to describe their male friends, YLSM members constructed Southern language forms as indexing region, gender, and class at once. Third, I use both interactional and sociophonetic analyses to demonstrate how two speakers used glide- weakened /ai/ and fronted /u/, often considered hallmarks of Southern language, to reflect their different orientations to Southern identity. The regional indexical meanings of these vowels emerged through their strategic use in interactions, for example, in stylized moments, where their use reproduced both positive and negative types of Southern identity and Southern speech. This dissertation illustrates the complexity of the social meanings of language practices: social meanings are partially shaped by regionally and widely circulating ideologies, yet they are also partially emergent within the course of interactions themselves. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv List of Tables ................................................................................................................... viii List of Figures .................................................................................................................... ix List of Examples ................................................................................................................ xi Chapter 1. Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 1.1. Organization of the dissertation ........................................................................ 5 Chapter 2. Literature Review........................................................................................ 8 2.1. Southern language and culture .......................................................................... 8 2.2. Youth subcultures and language ..................................................................... 19 2.3. An indexical approach to language and identity ............................................. 23 Chapter 3. Field Site and Methods ............................................................................. 31 3.1. The field site: The Young Ladies’ Society of Midway................................... 32 3.2. Methods of data collection .............................................................................. 48 3.3. Methods of data analysis ................................................................................. 55 Chapter 4. The Ideological Distinction Between Form and Function ........................ 60 4.1. Social meanings of Southern language practices ............................................ 62 4.2. Acting Southern: Preppy Southern charm ...................................................... 65 4.3. Sounding Southern: Unrefined Southern accents ........................................... 72 4.4. Saying “Yall”: Sounding and acting Southern................................................ 82 4.5. Discussion ....................................................................................................... 88 vi Chapter 5. Sounding Like a Southern Boy: The Intersection of Region, Language, Gender, and Class...................................................................................... 90 5.1. Stereotypes of white Southerners.................................................................... 91 5.2. Stereotypes in interaction ................................................................................ 94 5.3. Redneck or preppy: Local ideologies of Southern masculinity ...................... 98 5.4. Redefining redneck Southern masculinity ...................................................... 99 5.5. Defining preppy Southern masculinity ......................................................... 106 5.6. Discussion ..................................................................................................... 112 Chapter 6. Indexing Southern Identity with /ai/ and /u/ ........................................... 114 6.1. Claire and Julie: Different types of Southern girls ....................................... 115 6.2. Glide-Weakened /ai/ ..................................................................................... 118 6.3. Fronted /u/ ..................................................................................................... 133 6.4. Discussion ..................................................................................................... 146 Chapter 7. Conclusion .............................................................................................. 148 7.1. How is Southern identity defined? ................................................................ 148 7.2. What counts as a Southern linguistic feature? .............................................. 152 7.3. Contributions and limitations ........................................................................ 156 References ......................................................................................................................