terry cards

Examined three generations of Punjabi Londoners

  • Have social meanings conveyed by community accent features changed over time?

  • Do we see systematic links between ethnic and other social meanings?

  • Are these interactions idiosyncratic at the individual level

Phase 1: migration of visible minority of asians and racial conflict. Far-right, anti-immigration rallies, riots, hate crimes

Phase 2: second gen being exposed to this and more multicultural schools

Racial identities are indexed with gender, class, and historical context

Ethnic speech features: broadly limited to accent or grammatical features that are derived from indian language influence (or perceived derivation)

  • Using how an individual shifts their language with situations (wave 3)  by collecting recordings in daily life

Found major differences in ethnolinguistic variation but more related to gender and time than just ethnicity

Network Diversity Index: how diverse each individual’s personal social network was (how many unrelated groups the person interacted with on a regular basis) → gendered reversal in network diversity

  • Women are employed outside the community

  • Men are socialized within the the community 


Lecture Notes:

  • Analogy with languages/speeches and races

  1. Language is one aspect of human variation

I. populations that are set apart geographically nad socially, traits that are heritable (passed down)

  1. So we can look at this other aspect of human variation

  • Language's role in racial groupings

  1. Functionally when people are grouping into races they use various criteria that is standardized (there is no singular biological criteria they are basing_

  2. This is why we look at wave three (language variation as part of its function for group formation)

  3. This gets caught in the language that we perform

  • We looked at how languages role in racial groupings

  1. Language subordination: language is connected to all these different notions of groups so we use language as a proxy…language discrimination/subordination as a proxy for the more essentialized notions of race

I. Mechanism:

Ii. Model for how that gets implemented by institutions that allow us to pick up on how peir spoke..hierarchical notion

  1. Ch 7. Case study with children’s stories in the big bad wolf… how particular language associated with particular people get spoon fed

  2. Labov’s language v. vernacular v. a style that one had to learn which let him make that connection to race and class and how we construct our ideas around race


Changing dialects of Punjabi in London by Sharma

  • Revisiting conventional versus indexical meaning

How do ideas about race affect our use/experience of language?

  • Jocks and burnouts this idea of coconstruction of language groups is important…seen in the third wave

  1. Those categories that people were examining (Indian middle class girls use this language (fixed easily identifiable groups that are self-defined) is 1st wave. Going back to piers Roth article, people’s different conceptions of race and in the first wave you cut out what the speaker thinks

How do our experiences with language affect our ideas about race?

Interested about how people read race into ideas of language, class, gender and how they then perform

  • Speech (sounds)

  • Linguistics (style)

Language is more than sound and all the parts of language are given racial weight

  • Syntax: the rule for organizing words into sentences 

  1. operating in systems and internal rules that you follow…how do you organize words into sentences

  2. Chompsky: colorless green ideas sleep furiously…as someone that speaks standard english that is a well structured sentence that has no objective meaning

  • Put what table on…not well formed but communicated meaning well

  1. You should have different systems that interact but they should let you make different judgements 

  • Semantics: the meaning of words and sentences

  1. The literal meaning of words and the pieces of them (pre-, suffix, etc)

  • Pragmatics: the meaning  derived from context beyond words

  1. The weather…we all talk about it, we all experience it, we all call it weather

  2. Medorologistics: the experts talk about pressure systems and calc 3

  3. The average joe doesn’t think about more indepth

  4. Meaning, outside of specialists, what words means…we think much faster than we can speak…if you want to convey meaning you don’t but everything into words

  • We extract meaning in other ways

  • How's the food? People are leaving…There is not a single word that says the food is bad but that meaning is conveyed

  • Phonology: the organization of speech sounds in a language

When we talk about giving these parts of language racial significance we are talking about giving them a social meaning

  • Social meaning identifies the constellations of traits that linguistics 

Beltrama 2020

Semantic Meaning V. Social Meaning

Semantic -

  • Conventional

  • Presupposes intentionality 

  1. Morpheme: smallest piece of sound (i walked(t)) but not (t)able

Social Meaning

  • Indexical

  1. You say that (t) like someone from other there that thinks like that

  2. We can index anything and any piece of language

  • Only requires legibility: i don't have to intend anything i just have to notice something or think that i notice something

  1. Units spread across the grammar

  • Social meaning is spread across the entire grammar but that doesn’t mean it is evenly spread

  • Many argue that phonological units and patterns are better carriers or social mean than either words or their syntactic arrangements

  • Pragmatic meaning is something that blurs the lins


You’re driving home and you stop at the read light because the red light means stop → as a group of people we’ve decided on a convention

  • We see smoke coming out of a house so we think fire → observation leads to judgements

  • Its counterintuitive → we think that social things are made on conventions and choices but no 

Sociophonetics (although this social meaning is across the entire grammar people argue that phonological units tell us things better)

  • A lot of people get syntax, semantics, and phonological units early

  • (p)aper v. sto(p) → we put these two sounds in the same category even though they are different

  • There are words in hindi that differ completely if you use the different p sound

  • Babies are very attentive to the different speech sounds of people…if something interested them they suck harder…once they are 10 months old they stop perceiving the distinctions

  • That's why its so hard for people to lose their accents (its about what they perceive and hear)

Indexing

  • The kinds of information that each of these systems are carrying and how they are indexed

  • Index a particular morphine to give it some social meaning…if we change it we might also change the conventional meaning (propositional meaning)

  • Ed indexing is harder than (t) or (p) because they don’t have a purpore persay

How stable are social meanings?

  • Things that have one type of social meaning now can be different later

  • The groups might have different social meanings

  • Associating the way you say this with x group and so i'm associating a characteristic with x group (stacking indexing)

How unique are social meanings?

  • Lanague difference to construct and perform social differences in jock and burnouts.

  1. How they pronounce their vowels…they pronounce this x way is jock

  2. Burnouts (anti-establishment, outside of the school system): they borrowed how the intercity kids at another school spoke. They said thats tuff…the way the black intercity kids spoke…they associated that group with anti-establishment

  3. Indexing is a way to put social meanings together

  4. How we use our experiences to put indexes together

Today’s reading

Typical Asian form:

Typical British form:

  • Different ways of pronouncing the /t/

We might produce different sounds by where we produce our tongues

Butter…a glottal stop (a brief pause/stop)

Sharma is talking about “styles” here not dialects or varieties

  • They are able to see many styles in london



Gen 1 - does not orientate to British prestige associations for either forms in terms of class

Gen 2 (immigrant populations) - start seeing shift

Gen 3 - siginifgant correlations with formality for  both variables (what started as an ethnic meaning takes on a more class based meaning)

  • The younger speakers still have ethnic forms they use to differeiante ethinically

  • We get this reindexing

  • We associate types of music with different types of people


UNC Indian international students

  • The delphi accent might seem like lower class/out of place/dumb to the average student

  • Is different to how an indian-american student sees the international accent. It distinuishes people