13 Chapter 13: Sociolinguistics: Language and Social Status

By the end of this chapter you should be able to:

• Describe the concept of prestige or standard varieties of language, and list some prestige varieties you are familiar with
• Discuss the relationship between language and social difference, especially as it relates to gender, race and ethnicity, and class

Why do some Canadian English speakers say eh at the end of their sentences while others opt for right? In American English, why do some people say you, others y’all, some you guys, or even youse or yinz? In what contexts is one person more likely to say one of those or the other? What kinds of information about someone can we glean if we hear them say eh? Or right? Or even innit?  Have these patterns changed over time?  These are sociolinguistic questions. Sociolinguistics is a methodological and analytical approach to understanding the relationship between language and the broader social and cultural context of use.  We call it sociolinguistics because both linguistic (e.g., grammatical, structural, articulatory) and social factors are equally important; sociolinguistics, unlike many formal approaches to language, does not focus on an idealized grammar (sometimes called ‘competence’) but rather analyzes language in use (sometimes called ‘performance’). In this chapter we will see how sociolinguistics has analyzed the interplay between language variation and the social meaning of language, such that language both reflects social differences (in gender, race and ethnicity, class, and more) and also helps to produce and reinforce those differences.

Languages Versus Dialects and Language Variation

The number of languages spoken around the world is somewhat difficult to pin down, but we usually see a figure between 6,000 and 7,000. Why are they so hard to count? The term language is commonly used to refer to the idealized “standard” of a variety of speech with a name, such as English, Turkish, Swedish, Swahili, or Urdu. One language is usually considered to be incomprehensible to speakers of another one. The word dialect is often applied to a subordinate variety of a language and the common assumption is that we can understand someone who speaks another dialect of our own language.

These terms are not really very useful to describe actual language variation, however. For example, many of the hundreds of “dialects” spoken in China are very different from each other and are not mutually comprehensible to speakers of other Chinese “dialects.” The Chinese government promotes the idea that all of them are simply variants of the “Chinese language” because it helps to promote national solidarity and loyalty among Chinese people to their country and reduce regional factionalism. In contrast, the languages of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway are considered separate languages, but actually if a Swede, a Dane, and a Norwegian were to have a conversation together, each could use their own language and understand most of what the others say. Does this make them dialects or languages? The Serbian and Croatian languages are considered by their speakers to be separate languages due to distinct political and religious cultural identities. They even employ different writing systems to emphasize difference, but they are essentially the same and easily understandable to each other.

So in the words of linguist John McWhorter (2001), actually “dialects is all there is.” What he means by this is that a continuum of language variation is geographically distributed across populations in much the same way that human physical variation is, with the degree of difference between any two varieties increasing across increasing distances. This is the case even across national boundaries. Catalan, the language of northeastern Spain, is closer to the languages of southern France, Provençal and Occitan, than any of the three is to its associated national language, Spanish or French. One language variety blends with the next geographically like the colors of the rainbow. However, the historical influence of colonizing states has affected that natural distribution. Thus, there is no natural “language” with variations called “dialects.” Usually one variety of a language is considered the “standard,” but this choice is based on the social and political prestige of the group that speaks that variety; it has no inherent superiority over the other variants called its “dialects.” The way people speak is an indicator of who they are, where they come from, and what social groups they identify with, as well as what particular situation they find themselves in, and what they want to accomplish with a specific interaction.

What Is a “Standard” Variety of a Language?

The standard dialect of any language (also known as the “prestige dialect”) is simply one of many variants that has been given special status in the community because it is spoken by the people who have the greatest amount of prestige, power, and (usually) wealth. In the case of English, its development has been in part the result of the invention of the printing press in the sixteenth-century and the subsequent increase in printed versions of the language. This then stimulated more than a hundred years of deliberate efforts by grammarians to standardize spelling and grammatical rules. Their decisions invariably favored the dialect spoken by the aristocracy.

Non-standard varieties of a language, also known as vernacular dialects, are usually distinguished from the standard by their inclusion of stigmatized grammatical forms.  For English, such stigmatized forms in vernacular dialects include multiple negatives, the use of the verb form ain’t (which was originally the normal contraction of am not, as in “I ain’t,” comparable to “you aren’t,” or “she isn’t”); pronunciation of words like ‘this’ and ‘that’ as ‘dis’ and ‘dat’; pronunciation of final –ing as “–in;” as well as any other feature that grammarians have decreed as “improper” English. However, we should remember that from the perspective of anthropology, there is no such thing as “improper” language.

The standard of any language is an artificial, idealized form of language, and usually is the same as the language of education. One must learn its rules in school because it is not anyone’s true first language. Everyone speaks a dialect, although some dialects are closer to the standard than others. Vernacular dialects that are regarded with the least prestige and respect in society are associated with the groups of people who have the least amount of social prestige. People with the highest levels of education have greater access to the standard, but even they usually revert to their first dialect in the context of an informal situation with friends and family. No language variety is inherently better or worse than any other one. It is due to social attitudes that people label some varieties as “better” or “proper,” and others as “incorrect” or “bad.”

It is important to note that almost everyone has access to a number of different language varieties or registers. They know that one variety is appropriate to use with some people in some situations, and others should be used with other people or in other situations. The use of several language varieties in conversation by one person is known as code-switching.

Language and Gender

Our gender is a social acquisition that comes about through socialization over our lifetime (and sometimes even prior to our start of life… I’m looking at you ‘gender reveal’ parties). Sex on the other hand is something that is assigned to us based on aspects of our (usually external) biology at birth. You’ve probably heard that “gender is the socially-constructed counterpart of biological sex” (Cheshire 2002: 427). That’s only half true though: binary sex is also a social construct (see Chapter 19). Although sex is colloquially spoken about as a biological binary, its anatomical, endocrinal, and chromosomal criteria all exist on continua; the two discrete categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ are split at a socially-constructed and fuzzy boundary. For cisgender people, their gender identity (i.e., as a man, as a woman, as masculine, as feminine) is (largely) consistent with the sex that they were assigned at birth (i.e., male, female). For transgender people, their gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth and often differs from the gender identity they were socialized into earlier in life. For nonbinary and genderqueer people, their gender identity does not (always) map to the spectra of masculinities and femininities. In cultures across the world, gender is not restricted to a binary (e.g., two-spirit people in some Indigenous communities in North America and hijras in India).

Understanding the distinction between gender and sex is important because past sociolinguistic research often collapsed the difference. As Eckert (1989: 246–7) observed over 30 years ago: “Although differences in patterns of [linguistic] variation between men and women are a function of gender and only indirectly a function of sex …, we have been examining the interaction between gender and variation by correlating variables with sex rather than gender differences.” Eckert’s main point here is that although sociolinguists frequently talk about two groups based on ‘sex differences’, the linguistic difference between men and women is not a biological fact but a social one: men do not use certain variants in a certain way because of their particular anatomy, hormones, and chromosomes, but because they have been socialized into using language ‘like a man’.

The complexity of gender helps to explain some well-observed gendered-patterns of variation. These patterns have been found over and over again in many studies (see Labov 2001).

First, women use more of the overtly prestigious variants of language. What is feminine about prestige language? For one, as we saw above, people in higher social classes use more standard variants, and wealth refinement is a central aspect of canonical femininity. Moreover, Deuchar (1989) suggests that standard language can protect “the face of a relatively powerless speaker without attacking that of the addressee”. In the context of patriarchal male dominance, standard speech functions, in some ways, as a survival strategy. At the same time, further expectations are put on women’s language. In one of the most influential papers on the sociocultural study of language and gender, Robin Lakoff defined the double bind: women are socialized not just to use standard language but powerless and tentative language… to talk ‘like a lady’. But, in Lakoff’s (1972: 48) words, “a girl is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.” Her tentative, powerless language will be seen as a reflection on her (in)ability to participate in serious discussion but if she resists and subverts this expectation, she runs the risk of being deemed unfeminine. There are real-world consequences of our beliefs about gendered language!

Second, women deviate from the standard (i.e., they innovate away from the current norm) more than men when no one is looking!  Labov (2001: 293) calls this the gender paradox: “women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not.” And here’s the solution to the gender paradox: ‘women’ (and ‘men’) are not a cohesive, homogenous group! It’s the subset of “non-conformist” women who are the leaders of changes from below. Frequently these “non-conformists” are young women, who often innovate with new ways of speaking that others of all genders eventually follow, even if those others usually critique the young women for it first. The complexity of gender again offers explanation. The gender paradox is true only in the aggregate: only when we collapse all men and all women together does the pattern emerge. But it is not categorically true: there are women who deviate more from the standard than some men, and vice versa.

There is one, pretty big, caveat here though: the vast majority of the studies where these patterns have been found represent languages embedded in Euro-American culture. Studies of language and gender are not as widespread cross culturally, but they have found that ideas about language and gender (for instance, what is expected of “women’s speech”) vary substantially across place and time. For instance, among the Malagasy of Madagascar women’s speech is thought to be more direct and confrontational than men’s speech.  Notably, those stereotypes help keep women out of political leadership, where consensus building is highly valued, there too.

Further, for decades the linguistic practices of transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse people were largely ignored. However, more recently, transgender and nonbinary linguists have begun to study language within their own communities and from a far more affirming perspective (Zimman 2020). Some of this work has shown how linguistic variation can be used as a means of constructing a nonbinary identity. Gratton (2016) looks at the the use of variable -ing by two Canadian English speaking nonbinary people in two different contexts: one, a safe queer space and the other, an unfamiliar, non-queer space. Gratton finds that in the safe, queer context both speakers use each of the two variants around 50% of the time. However, in the non-queer spaces where they express legitimate fear of being misgendered, the two speakers diverge sharply from each other. One speaker, in reacting to the threat of being misgendered as a woman, used a very high rate of the masculine-associated [ɪn] variant, while the other speaker, reacting to the threat of being misgendered as a man, used a very high rate of the feminine-associated [ɪŋ]. Gratton (2016: 56) argues that it’s not the case that these two speakers are attempting to align with cis-masculinity or cis-femininity respectively – they are both non-binary! – but rather, they “utilize resources that they associate with cis-normative masculinity [and femininity] … in order to distance [themselves] enough from cis-normative femininity [or masculinity respectively] that they [are] not misgendered as such.” In this way, both linguistic variation provides both speakers a means of “perform a non-binary identity” (Gratton 2016: 57).

Language, Race and Ethnicity

Linguisitic differences have been associated with racial and ethnic groups. Indeed, language and ethnicity are intricately linked and often co-constitutive. That is to say, each is often circularly defined; divisions between languages are often defined with reference to divisions between cohesive cultural groups that use those languages and ethnic groups are often defined with respect to the language that the group uses (e.g., think about how Swedish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible but understood as distinct languages, spoken by distinct ethnic groups). Around the world, people often live in close proximity to other members of their racial or ethnic group. This is true both in places where that ethnic group is Indigenous or in contexts of colonialism and diasporic migrations. The linguistic consequence of this is that, because we tend to use language in the same way as the people we interact with most, dialects of many languages have emerged that are associated with particular racial or ethnic groups. Of course, not all members of a given group will speak that dialect natively, nor will all native speakers of the dialect be members of the group.

A well-studied example of a group with a distinctive dialect is African-Americans. They have a unique history among minorities in the United States, with their centuries-long experience as captive enslaved people and subsequent decades under Jim Crow laws. Over that history, African Americans developed a way of speaking known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE). As with any language variety, AAVE is a complex, rule-driven, grammatically consistent way of speaking.  It just has rules that are different from those of so-called “Standard English.”

Still, because of its association with African Americans, AAVE has been subject to negative stereotypes. There is a persistent misconception that AAVE represents “broken English” and that those who speak it are unable or unwilling to learn “proper” English, though this is not true, as Walter Edwards discusses below. Some of these negative stereotypes are developed through portrayals of African Americans in media (see Martin 2022). Ultimately, while it is no longer “politically correct” to openly express racism, it is much less frowned upon to express negative attitudes about African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Typically, it is not the language itself that these attitudes are targeting; it is the people who speak it.  These negative beliefs about AAVE speakers have real consequences, as linguist John Baugh (2003) has shown. Baugh coined the term linguistic profiling to describe the discrimination people face based upon how they speak. Over several studies Baugh employed matched guise tests, responding to housing listings, job ads, and other service offers himself using different dialects and finding that he was much less likely to receive a positive response when speaking AAVE.

Not all African-Americans speak AAVE, and people other than African-Americans also speak it. Anyone who grows up in an area where their friends speak it may become a speaker of AAVE too, like the rapper Eminem, a white man who grew up in an African-American neighborhood in Detroit. Present-day AAVE is not homogeneous either; there are many regional and class varieties, though most varieties have several features in common. Because of the stereotypes about the dialect, the African-American community itself is divided about the acceptability of AAVE.

Of course, African American English is not the only racially or ethnically associated dialect, even among dialects of American English.  Linguists have also described a variety of Native American dialects of English, such as Lumbee English and Navajo English.  They have also studied Chicano English, spoken by many Mexican-Americans, and many other ethnically associated dialects. As with AAVE, studies have shown that speakers of these dialects are also often subject to discrimination.

Language and Class

In many places, language varieties are associated with social class — and there are elements of that with the ideas about African American Vernacular English from the last section too! In perhaps the best known study showing this, sociolinguist William Labov (1964) looked at the pronunciation of the sound /r/ in the speech of New Yorkers in different department stores. Many people from that area drop the /r/ sound in words like fourth and floor (fawth, floah), but this pronunciation is primarily associated with lower social classes and is not a feature of the approved “standard” for English, even in New York City. In three different contexts, an upscale store, a middle-class store, and a discount store, Labov asked customers what floor a certain item could be found on, already knowing it was the fourth floor. He then asked them to repeat their answer, as though he hadn’t heard it correctly. He compared the first with the second answers by the same person, and he compared the answers in the expensive store versus the cheaper store. He found that 1) the responders in the stores differed overall in their pronunciation of this sound, and 2) the same person may differ between situations of less and more self-consciousness (first versus second answer). That is, people in the upscale store tended to pronounce the /r/, and responders in both stores tended to “correct themselves” and produce the standard pronunciation more in their second answers in an effort to sound “higher class.” These results showed that the pronunciation or deletion of /r/ in New York correlated with both social status and context.

Of course, there is nothing inherently better or worse, or higher or lower class, in either pronunciation; it depends entirely on the social norms of the community. The same /r/ deletion that is stigmatized in New York City is the prestigious, standard form in England, used by the upper class and announcers for the BBC. The pronunciation of the /r/ sound in England is stigmatized because it is used by lower-status people in some industrial cities. But in each place, there are real world consequences for how you might be treated, what jobs you might be seen as a good fit for, and which social circles you’ll be invited into based upon how you speak.

Key Terms

Sociolinguistics

Language

Dialect

Standard Dialect

Vernacular Dialect

Register

Code-Switch

The Double Bind

African American Vernacular English

Linguistic Profiling

Study Questions

1. What are some examples of standard or prestige dialects that you are aware of? What gives them their prestige?
2. What are some of the real-effects of the association of particular patterns of speech with gender, race and ethnicity, or class?

References

Baugh, J. 2003. Linguistic Profiling. In S. Makoni, et al. (eds.), Black Lingusitics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas. London: Routledge.

Cheshire, J. 2002. Sex and Gender in Variationist Research. In J.K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, & N. Schilling-Estes (eds.)The handbook of language variation and change, pp. 423–443. London: Blackwell.

Deuchar, M. 1989. A pragmatic account of women’s use of standard speech. In J. Coats and D. Cameron (eds.), Women in Their Speech Communities. Longman.

Eckert, P. 1989. The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation. Language Variation and Change, 1(3): 245-267.

Gratton, C. 2016. Resisting the Gender Binary: The Use of (ING) in the Construction of Non-binary Transgender Identities. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: 22(2): Article 7.

Labov, W. 1964. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Labov, W. 2001. Principles of linguistic change Volume 2: Social factors. London: Blackwell.

Lakoff, R. 1973. Language and woman’s place. Language in Society 2(1): 45-79.

Martin, Z. 2022. African American English is Good English. In C. Friend (ed.), Good Ideas About Writing.

McWhorter, J. 2001. The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. New York: Times Books.

Sachs, J. , Lieberman P. & Erickson, D. 1973. Anatomical and cultural determinants of male and female speech. In R.W. Shuy and R.W. Fasold (eds.) Language Attitudes: Current Trends and Prospects. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Zimman, L. 2020. Transgender language, transgender moment: Toward a trans linguistics. In K. Hall and R. Barrett (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A Derivative Work From

Anderson, Catherine, et al. 2022. Essentials of Linguistics, 2nd Edition.

Edwards, Walter. 2022. Everyday African American Vernacular English is a dialect born from conflict and creativity. The Conversation.

Light, Linda. 2020. Language. In Nina Brown, et al. (eds.), Perspectives, an Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition.