Presentation Title

Author

What is the prettiest language?

Bits and Pieces

Q slide

Let’s go back to dialects of American English. How correct do you think the speech of people in New Jersey is? 1 = correct, 4 = not correct

Let’s go back to dialects of American English. How pleasant do you think the speech of people in New Jersey is? 1 = pleasant, 4 = not pleasant

Recall

• All language helps us do stuff in the world
• Sociolinguistics is the study of the interaction of language and social factors
• There are many explanations for dialects
  • Settlement, migration, geography
  • Identity!
• Dialects exist because they help people do stuff
  • Not good, not bad
  • Just rules that are different!

Today’s question

We’re asking about the prettiest language – which one?

Q slide

What is the prettiest language?

What people see/hear as beautiful (or ugly) is subjective – it’s an opinion!

How do you know?

People reveal their ideas in many ways…

What do people base their ideas on?

Q slide

Think about a language you think of as beautiful. What characteristic do you think made you pick it?

Language attitudes

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfkAv5w5r3E&t=578s

Q slide

True or false (based on the video): Language attitudes trigger stereotypical perceptions. [true]

Perceptual Dialectology

• Perceptual Dialectology (also known as “folk linguistics”) is the study of how nonlinguists classify different dialects, as well as their beliefs about and attitudes toward different dialects and their speakers
  • It deals with where nonlinguists believe variation comes from, where nonlinguists believe variation exists, and why nonlinguists believe variation happens
• In many traditional dialectology studies, there is a lack of inclusion of nonlinguists’ attitudes and beliefs about linguistic varieties and variation
  • Perceptual dialectology fills this gap
  • Contrasts with perspective that only production data counts as “real” data

What are language ideologies?

• Language ideologies are a set of beliefs, feelings, ideas, or thoughts about languages as they are used in everyday, social settings
  • Linguists and anthropologists study these in order to understand certain worldviews held by the cultures they are investigating
  • Part of a larger social/cultural system; engrained, broad, socio-cultural schemas
  • Connections between language use and reactions to language use
  • Two-way street!

• All varieties of all languages display variation
• Variation may be tied to various factors:
  • identity – variation may relate to social groups (i.e., age, region, ethnicity, gender, etc.)
  • context – variation may relate to the context in which language is used (i.e., register)
  • genre – variation may relate to spoken or written genres (i.e., joke, sermon, argument, etc.)
• Variation happens in all domains of a language variety
  • Words, sounds, sentence structure, etc.
  • Conscious and unconscious…

We already know…

“When we choose among variants available to us…we use those language signals that will mark us as belonging to specific social groupings, and distance us from others.”

(Lippi-Green, p. 40)

Language as social action

Belonging

Acknowledging that you have a certain accent/dialect means you acknowledge that you belong to some group of people who have that accent/dialect (and don’t belong to another…)

It’s all about identity and belonging…

But what we know about language ideologies is that they often lead to/conjure up stereotypes…

Stereotypes!

• Stereotypes are (over)generalizations made about a particular group of people
  • True for one = true for all!
  • Positive vs. negative? Explicit vs. implicit?
• Why do we do it?
  • Useful in making quick decisions – see several police cars at a donut shop, choose not to go to that donut shop
  • Remember, humans seek patterns
• Problems?
  • Encourages prejudice

• The point is this
  • Ideas about “correct” forms of language are primarily social (rather than linguistic) and are largely based upon stereotypes about the social groups that speak particular varieties
  • The idea of what is “correct” varies from country to country, culture to culture (compare “proper” British and American English)
  • The same linguistic process may be “correct” in one society and “incorrect” in another (e.g., Word-final /r/ in varieties of English, multiple negation)
  • The variety that is considered “correct” is almost universally the variety of the social group with the most political and economic power in a given society

Social Meaning

What’s next?

Come to lecture Monday for the start of our next module – Language in the world , with our first one on “How do kids learn to talk?”

Read “Nine ideas” in Canvas

Observation Notes #3 due Friday, October 11 by 11:59pm (not late, no AI)

Quiz 6 Friday!

Check out Data Collection assignments!