English language age and social group

Reading study by cheshire

  • Cheshire looked at groups of children aged 11-14 and how they spoke in Reading

  • Wanted to see how often they used certain local language features like ‘was’

  • Some nonstandard features were used all the time and others appeared less often especially in classroom compared to playground.

  • This showed style-shifting as people can change the way they speak depending on the situation or who they’re talking to

What is the criticism?

  • Group of children is quite small and came from similar social backgrounds

Cheshire 2006

  • Both adults and children’s language changes as they go through major life events that affect their social lives and attitudes.

  • She called this age grading, meaning a pattern of language change that repeats in every generation as people get older

Bigham (2012)

  • Bigham built on the idea of cheshire and talked about ‘emerging adults’ People aged 18 and over who are going through key life changes.

  • He found that their accents often don’t match where they’re from geographically, but instead reflect their personality and identity

Trends in teenage talk - Strenstrom, Andersen and Hasund (2002)

  • They studied how 14-16 year olds in London Schools spoke.

  • Like Cheshire, they focused on non-standard language features for example multiple negation (‘like’ ‘aint’ ‘nothing)

  • They also looked at what they called ‘slanguage’ meaning the kind of slang and informal speech common among teachers.

  • Slang has many different functions and that teenagers often use non standard language on purpose

  • Teenagers are usually aware that their way of speaking has low prestige but they still use it as part of their identity and social group

Eckert - Teenage Talk

(2003)- She argued that teenagers lead other age groups in linguistic change due to the various changes in their lives which young people tend to experience. She argues, 'language also serves a crucial stylistic function, as a visible yet inexplicit means for constructing social meaning.

1989

  • She studied teenage language and behaviour in a Detroit high school.

  • She identified two different social groups: the Jocks were those who participated in a lot of school activities, respected authority and adhered to social norms, while the Burnouts resisted school culture, exhibited rebellious behaviour and tended to participate in non-school activity

  • In particular, communities of practice, influenced the students' behaviour, attitude and language.

  • There was a difference in vowel variation of the sound /uh/ where Eckert argued the Burnouts pronounced this to reflect their greater exposure to urban speech.

  • The Burnouts were perceived as swearing frequently and being inarticulate, while the Jocks were perceived as emulating their parents' speech.

Moore- Bolton Study

  • 29 girls at a Bolton school, aged between 12-13 at the beginning of the study and 14-15 years at its completion.

  • She categorised the girls into the following communities of practice: Townie (those who perceived themselves as most connected with the working-class local area, Popular (those with an anti-school attitude and who were moderately rebellious), Geek (those who participated in school activities and were conformist) and Eden Village (those aligned with the more desirable home area who oriented towards school values).

  • She explored the use of 'was' and 'were', with 'were' being the nonstandard feature, such as in, 'It were worth it' and 'Who were saying it?' The Townies used more nonstandard forms, while the Populars and Geeks used fewer.

  • Moore also looked at the backgrounds of the girls and discovered that social group membership was a far more important factor in language use than other factors such as class.

Ives- Teenage language

  • Interviewed 63-17 year olds in West Yorkshire, asking them to share any words they remembered from their childhood.

  • Many of the words the participants shared were associated with games, such as 'tig'.

  • While you might assume that this is because primary school is often associated with games, Ives surmised that the teenagers associated positive memories with these experiences, which is why they could remember these words.

  • He also concluded that teenager-specific language is frequently comprised of:

    Slang

    Colloquial or nonstandard word choices and forms

    Taboo words and phrases

    Dialect words

  • That teenagers use language to create and support a sense of social group identity and membership, and nonstandard forms of language provide more freedom of expression

De Klerk and Zimmerman- Teenage slang

  • Vivian de Klerk argued that the use of slang by teenagers shows a shared linguistic code, shared knowledge and interests - in other words to reinforce group membership' and 'a sense of belonging is important to the average 'insecure' teenager'.

  • In 2009, Klaus Zimmerman cited the common influences on youth language (he was looking specifically at Hispanic culture), which include:

  • How adults grant status to the category of youth'

    The influence of the media

    The use of new technological forms of communication

    Music

    Street art, including graffiti

Strenstrom - Teenage talk

  • Explored linguistic usage of Spanish and English teenagers in her 2014 work Teenage talk She found:

  • Use of fillers

    Tags to signal agreement

    Slang

    Taboo language and swearing

    Irregular turn taking

    Word shortenings

    Teasing/ name calling

    Verbal duelling (e.g. interruptions; speaking louder)

Martinez - The language of British teenagers

He found various linguistic features characteristic of British adolescents such as:

Reduction and simplification of the verbal system, e.g.'She hate the course'

Higher use of negatives than adults, e.g. 'You got a book, ain't you?' and 'never called for me yesterday'

Quotatives (a device to mark quoted speech), e.g. l goes, don't you dare' and I was like, 'oh my god"

Vague language, e.g. 'There's a thingy on it'

Nonstandard tags, e.g. 'He's gone home, innit'

Taboo and swear language as intensifiers, e.g. 'She had the f***ing funniest voice'

Berland- use of tags

  • He found that teenagers used a range of tag questions but these were linked to class:

  • Working class individuals tended to use 'innit', while more middle class teenagers used 'yeah’.

  • 'Okay' tended to be used to a greater extent by the male participants, while 'innit', 'right' and 'yeah' were used relatively equally by both genders.

Odato- usage of ‘like’

  • Observed children playing together in America, identified three stages of ‘like’ as a discourse marker

  • Stage 1 - Used infrequently and mainly in front of a determiner phrase (a phrase beginning with 'a' or 'the') or at the beginning of a clause

  • Stage 2 - Used more frequently, and in different positions, though still most commonly before a determiner phrase

  • Stage 3 - Used far more frequently and in a greater number of positions, such as before a prepositional phrase

  • Odato also found that girls used 'like' in a more varied fashion than boys at a younger age and moved between the stages more quickly. He observed that children seemed to be copying its usage from an older speech generation.

Fajardo - Creative linguistic processes in teenage slang

  • In his 2018 article, he notes the creativity which occurs in the various processes used by teenagers to 'create' language, such as: Clipping, e.g. 'Instagram' to 'Insta'

    • Ellipsis, e.g. 'Best friend' to 'Bestie'

  • Acronymy, e.g. 'Best friend forever' to 'BFF'

  • He concludes that teenage slang users are motivated by a natural sense of togetherness and belonging' in their language use.x

Labov- Martha’s Vineyard Study

  • Labov concluded that the local population wished to dissociate themselves from the summer visitors, and did this by using the more centralised pronunciation.

  • The younger age group who also used this form in an exaggerated way should have used more standard forms due to their exposure to different styles of speaking on the mainland.

  • Interestingly, Renee Blake and Meredith Josey conducted a follow up study in 2003, where they found that the /a/ centralisation decreased, presumably due to a social restructuring on the island over the past forty years.

Bernstein- Restricted and Elaborated code

In 1964, the linguist Basil Bernstein explored linguistic variation in relation to social group. He developed this study into the 1970s and 80s.

Bernstein observed children’s speech patterns and posed the following questions:

• What kinds of social relations generate what kinds of speech systems?

• What kinds of principles or planning procedures control the speech systems?

• What kinds of relationships in the environment do these planning procedures both give access to and stabilise?

From these questions, he discussed the restricted code and elaborated code is used in formal settings and characterised by a wider vocabulary and more complex grammar, while restricted code is used in more informal situations and by closer knit groups.

• Bernstein concluded that the codes are generated by social relationships rather than being based on intelligence or pure ability. So, you may use the restricted code with your close friends when you are alone with that social group, but if that social group moves into a situation which requires the elaborated code (e.g. when you attend a class in school with your friend.

• In Berstein’s earlier studies, he implied that middle class children use the elaborated code and working class children were only able to use the restricted code. He later modified thisto say that both classes of children could understand the code when it was spoken to them and that working class children might sometimes use the elaborated code.

• Unfortunately, because Bernstein study primarily associated the restricted code with working class speakers, it can be perceived as a deficit model of language. A deficit model implies that nonstandard language is less prestigious or weaker than the standard variety.

• In Language and Class in 1972, Harold Rosen argued that Bernstein’s earlier studies did not focus on the lived experience of working class people, and how there are so many cultural and social differences between each community.

• In the same year, William Labov argued that Bernstein’s study lacked evidence and criticised him for linking language and class so broadly.

• However, Gabrielle Ivinson recently (2017) argued that instead of viewing the codes as part of a deficit model, we should use them as part of a difference model to explore why some young people struggle to access elements of schooling even today.

John Swales - Discourse community

In 1990, John Swales put forward the idea of a discourse community in ‘Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings’.

• A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of discourses, values and assumptions, and use communication to achieve shared goals.

• Swales presents these characteristics:

  1. has a broadly agreed set of common public goals;

  2. has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members;

  3. uses its participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback

  4. utilizes and possesses one or more genres (different modes of communication) in the communicative furtherance of its aims

  5. In addition to owning genres, it has acquire some specific lexis (e.g jargon)

  6. has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant

    content and discoursal expertise (people with different levels of

    knowledge, e.g. a person who has been at a school for longer than someone else)

Language and ethinicity : R drummond (2012)

Context: Polish people living in Manchester

Drummond intended to discover the extent to which they acquired features of the Mancunian accent

Study:Looked at the pronunciation of –ing words (feeling, living)

Findings:

Predictable variants such as –in but he also found people using –ink

So what?

It is Polish-influenced pronunciation and was only used by those people who intended to return to Poland in the future rather than stay in England.

He summarised that this was more or less consciously a way of signalling allegiance to Poland and performing their ethnic identity.

Language and ethnicity : D Sharma (2011)

Sharma studied Punjabi-speaking Indians in West London and asked them to record themselves in day-to-day life.

She then analysed specific features that had a ‘British’ or ‘Indian’ variant and the context in which they occurred.

Findings

/t/ - The Indian variant sees the tip of the tongue curl upward in further back on the roof of the mouth than the British variant.

Vowels in words such as ‘place’ and ‘cake’ pronounced as a monophthong rather than a diphthong.

Vowels in words such as ‘go’ ‘boat’ and ‘know’ pronounced as monophthong rather than a diphthong.

Sharma found that younger speakers did not adjust their speech very much – possibly because of the social environment in which they have grown up.

Middle-aged, older speakers varied their style much more. The case study discusses Anwar, a 41-year old male who went from 100% Indian when talking to a sri-lankan maid to almost 100% British when talking to a Cockney mechanic.

Language and ethnicity: G ives (2014)

In 2014 Gary Ives commissioned two case studies in London and Bradford because he wanted to investigate new dialects. School A, was the Bradford Study and this is what we shall focus on:

It was a micro study – he spoke to eight teenage boys about the way they spoke and the language they used. They attended a school where 95% of the students were from Pakistani backgrounds – the majority from Mirpuri which is very rural.

Ives found that, quite clearly, the boys used a mix of Punjabi and English when communicating with each.

“It’s all about our area”

“Other people don’t understand what you are saying … we use a different language so they don’t know … that isn’t between a white person and a Pakistani person but from Pakistani to Pakistani … there’s different types from different areas”

“We might speak English to mum and dad but with our friends we add in Punjabi”

The boys identified themselves as ‘British Asian’ – they refereed to those who had recently come over from Pakistan as ‘freshies’. The boys admitted that although they did not look down on ‘freshies’ they did not feel as connected to them because of their accent.

There was a distinction based on post code. They referred to some of their language choices as ‘street’ or ‘BD8’ and how ‘BD22’ language would be ‘different’ and ‘posh’.

One boy talked about how his language had a lot to do with ‘the music industry, like rap and hip hop’ – he said that peer slang unified social groups. He also stated that Punjabi could be used for swear words ‘but only with certain people’ – and that it was like ‘a secret language’ – this also played a role in group dynamics and a sense of belonging

Language and ethnicity: MLE

Multicultural London English (abbreviated MLE) is a sociolect of English that emerged in the late 20th century.

It is spoken authentically by working-class, mainly young, people in London (although there is evidence to suggest that certain features are spreading further afield).

Linguists say Multicultural London English (MLE) and is used increasingly in southern England and is replacing Cockney and other dialects. Apparently multicultural Englishes with similar characteristics are emerging in other large UK cities. It combines elements from Cockney, Jamaican and other Caribbean Englishes, and from South Asian varieties of English. It is known as Jafaican (pseudo-Jamaican) by some, but researchers from Lancaster University believe that it is not white kids trying to sound like black kids, but rather young people who are exposed to different varieties of English as they grow up and who incorporate different influences into their speech.

Phonological features:

Some phonetic characteristics of MLE include a shift of some vowels towards the back of the mouth: the pronunciation of /h/, which isn’t pronounced in Cockney

th fronting (/θ/ becomes /f/).

Lexical features:

Vocabulary: ‘bare’ ( a lot/very) ‘beef’ (disagreement) ‘choong’ (attractive)

‘innit’ as a tag question and ‘this is me’ as a quotative ‘I went over to his place, and this is me: ‘what you doin’?’ (In Scouse you say ‘and I was like … and she was like…)