Lecture 1

Lecture 1 -- Summary Outline

Language and Society: What Your Speech Says about You

By Valerie Fridland

What Does Your Speech Say about You?

The social categorizing we do when hearing someone speak is one of

the most fundamental properties of human language, but we often

spend much more time worrying about subject/verb agreement and

parts of speech. We typically don’t realize the vast social work that language

does for us or the valuable social capital it provides. In this lecture, we

will bring this aspect of language to the forefront. As we’ll see, language

variation is a crucial aspect of our physiological and conceptual system.

We’ll also learn how this variation comes to be collectively meaningful and,

often, socially powerful.

I. Language as a Social Resource

A.  Have you ever started a conversation with someone and decided

that you didn’t want to get to know that person better because of

how he or she sounded? You can thank your socialized speech

habits for that perception.

B. We tend not to realize how much information we get from other

people without even knowing them Even just overhearing speech,

without personally talking to the speaker, we make assumptions

about his or her age, gender, financial status, and more. On the basis

of a few overheard sentences, we decide whether this is a person we

are interested in getting to know better.

C. This associative skill often serves us well. It allows us to recognize

other people with whom we may have something in common

or those we want to avoid. It probably saves us from many

uncomfortable first dates or ill-suited friendships, yet it’s also

a powerful tool we wield without giving much thought to how

we have come to possess it or how we use it for both inclusion

and exclusion.

D. Speech is fundamentally part of what allows us to live a collective

experience. Talk helps us to negotiate the social world and the actors

in it, not just in what we say but in how we say it. It is through the

shared meanings established by being members of a community

that we come to understand and operate in the world as complex

social beings. Speech offers a shortcut to determining who is like us

and who isn’t, who shares our background and who doesn’t. At the

same time, it can also shape our expectations and beliefs without

our awareness of its sway.

E. Although we all have access to language, we don’t all have the

same access to language. Language opens doors and closes them.

It establishes relationships and severs them. It represents us, and

it can isolate or embrace us, depending on our linguistic matches

with others.

1.  Those who have learned how to manipulate language as a

resource are rarely even aware of the influential role of speech

in forging their daily interactions.

2.  For those of us with access to standard forms and institutional

prestige, this influence is typically a good thing. But for those

whose dialects are not the preferred varieties-whose match

with institutional preferences is not exact-the social import

we place on speech can be a punishing one.

3. Still, even when not afforded prestige, our speech does

important social work for us; it may mark us as cool, hip,

urban, ethnic, or young. Standard or not, our speech is part of

the toolkit we use to fashion our identities.

F. This course is about demystifying our use of language as a social

resource. We will look at many facets of the relationship between

language and our society. First, we will explore the encoding of

social interactions with cognitive aspects of language. We will also

learn about variability in the system of language. For most of the

course, we will move beyond this more abstract understanding of

language to examine how it is situated in our everyday lives. We

will come to understand how it is that our speech reveals so much

about us.

II. Speech as Shorthand for Identification

A. As we all know, how you speak tells listeners much more about you

than just the semantic message your speech contains. For example,

language serves a significant in-group/out-group function, helping

us to identify others who share memberships in the same groups

that we do.

B. Think about the type of judgments you make based on the way

someone else talks. Would you, for example, feel confident learning

to surf from an instructor who has an English accent? Would a

“surfer dude,” no matter how intelligent, be accepted as a college

English instructor?

C. Our impressions of people are strongly shaped by the speech they

use. The relationship we form with others (however brief) is most

likely influenced by their speech. Of course, some speakers’ dialects

are more revealing than others, but we all reveal many secrets with

the way we talk-even those of us who don’t believe we have an

accent or speak a dialect.

III. Language Variation

A. Linguists look at language in a much more fine-grained way than

nonlinguists do. Though most nonlinguists probably consider

language variation to consist of differences in word choice or

global differences between languages, in fact, the greatest variation

in language is much more subtle and extensive.

B. Certainly, choosing between different vocabulary words (such as

pop versus soda) can change the sense of a comment and tell us

something about the speaker. But vocabulary (larical items) is only

one small part of what linguists study. More important is variation

that is both systematic and embedded within our language system

C. This variation typically refers to unnoticed featmes, such as which

vowels you use (for example, British “f’ahther" or American

“father”), whether or not you glottalize sounds (“bottle” or “bo?l”),

or when you delete consonants that appear in a cluster at the end ofa

word. These kinds of variations are typically less overtly recognized

by nonlinguists, but whether you’re conscious of them or not, they

are indicative of your social place and social relationships.

D. For example, a large number of research studies have examined

the in/ing variation (as in “walkin” versus “walking”) in Englishes

worldwide, finding much the same patterns of use.

1. All these studies show that some people systematically use the

in variant at a higher rate, and this frequency of use is, in large

part, based on age, gender, and situational context. Studies

suggest that younger speakers tend to use the in form more

often than older speakers, and men use it more than women.

Research has also found that people tend to identify speakers

who use the in variant as Southern.

2. In just a simple shift between two forms of the same ending,

speakers communicate a great deal of information: their

understanding of the formality of the situation or of their

relationship to the listener; age; gender and at least in terms of

the listeners’ perception, regional background.

E. For this alternation to be socially meaningful, we must all

understand and follow the same rule for variation; otherwise, the

variation would be so haphazard and irregular that it would be

impossible for it to be understood as meaning anything by other

members of the speech community. In other words, it is because

we have all learned the same rule for when and how to vary verbal

ing as a marker of formality that we can use and understand

it effectively.

F. As we will see, many facets of language are available for such

manipulation, often without our conscious awareness of what

we’re doing. We learn linguistic rules early in life as a product of

our interactional experiences. They become so habitualized that

we follow them without even being aware that we are doing so.

However, this habitualization can vary greatly, depending on who

you are and the social world you inhabit.

G. Much of our language socialization depends on our location, age,

class, gender, ethnicity, and experience within institutions. For

example, women are judged more negatively than men for using

certain linguistic patterns, such as profanity. In other words, we

don’t all have the same norms available to us.

1. We don’t simply pick and choose among linguistic variants but

must acquire them as part of our native linguistic systems.

2. Otherwise, these variants don’t seem natural when we use

them, nor do they signal the same meaning as they do for the

rest of our speech community.

III. The Social Utility of Linguistic Variation

A. Consider two sentences that essentially say the same thing: (1) That

picture is, like, so cool, and (2) That picture is very lovely. The

semantic meaning of the two sentences is roughly equivalent, but

we would draw different conclusions about the speakers.

B. Moreover, based on the impressions we form as conversation

unfolds, we may shift the way we engage in further conversation

to identify ourselves as more or less similar to a speaker. In other

words, we may converge, shifting our speech to match the style of

speech we receive, or we may diverge, shifting our speech to be

less like the other person’s style. We use such strategies every day

when we linguistically engage people in a variety of contexts.

C. To see how this works, form a mental picture of the type of speaker

you would hypothesize for each of the sentences mentioned above.

You probably assumed that the speaker of the first sentence was

both young and female and the speaker of the second sentence was

older and also female.

1.  It seems strange that we can make such extensive

characterizations based simply on two variations of the same

sentence, yet most people probably would not have a difficult

time with this exercise. In fact, most of us likely do this sort of

unconscious analysis whenever we encounter speech.

2. The fact that we have stereotypes based on the way people

speak is not always empirically sound, as we will see in a

later lecture. For example, most people assume that those who

use like (a youth solidarity marker) and so (an intensifier) are

mainly females, but research shows that these uses are also

found among young men.

3. In short, language provides a window into the social world. As

we will see, however, the glass is often slanted by our place in

the world and our earlier experiences.

D. It is only through careful examination of how language is used that

we can begin to understand language as social capital, with both

costs and benefits that we rarely consider. Our identity is strongly

tied to the speech we use and our perceptions of the speech we

hear. In a very real sense, then, exploring the connections between

language and society leads us to greater self-awareness.