- Received Pronunciation (RP) is the most socially prestigious accent, as it is often associated with wealth and a high social status.
- RP is associated with competence and authority. In surveys, it tends to receive high ratings for such qualities as intelligence and self-confidence. However it is interesting to note that speakers of RP emerge from surveys less favorably than speakers with a regional accent in terms of their personal attractiveness. They score less well for qualities such as sincerity, and humor.
The Howard Giles Capital Punishment Experiment suggested that people find regional accents more persuasive than those speaking RP. Giles presented five groups of students with an identical set of arguments against capital punishment. Whilst one group read their argument via printed text, the remaining groups listened to oral presentations, all with different accents. One group heard an RP speaker, another a Somerset speaker, another a South Wales speaker and the last group a Birmingham speaker. He (Giles) then assessed the persuasiveness of the accents by comparing the students’ views on capital punishment before AND after the presentations were held. It emerged that those hearing regional speakers were more likely to have changed their minds than those who read the printed text or heard the oral presentation by an RP speaker.
Age is also said to have a large part to play in a persons sense of personal identity as of relates to language variety. The most notable difference is probably between the speech of teenagers and the speech of older members of the same community. Teenagers have a very wide lexicon of slang words that is frequently changing. This serves to strengthen their identity as a separate social group from that of adults.
When talking about someone’s ‘personal identity/background’ in relation to language variety, not only must we take into account the notion of regional dialects, but we also must think about the individual’s idiolect. Whilst a dialect is the language used any number of people, an idiolect is the language use of an individual, and it remains exclusive to them. As it is impossible for any two people to use language in a precisely identical manner, it is also impossible for any two individuals to share the same idiolect.
As we mentioned, a person’s sense of personal identity is not the only factor linked to language variation. We also must look at a person’s sense of social identity. One of the most fundamental aspects of this is the idea of Sociolects. In the same way that people are likely to be able to pinpoint someone’s geographical background as a result of their dialect, many people also make assumptions about individual’s social class by judging them by their use of language. Whilst the concept of a sociolect is quite simple, the amounts that are present in modern-society are very vast. A sociolect is a variety of language associated with a particular social group. There are many of these groups and I intend to look into some of the main ones, firstly those based on socio-economic status. There can be no doubting the well-documented relationship between language and social class as it has been the subject of many investigations over the years and there is a lot of evidence to back up the idea that members of different social classes use language in different ways. In Britain especially, there is a higher incidence of regional features in the speech of people from lower social classes. Alternatively, speakers from higher social classes are more likely to use ‘Standard English’ forms and their speech will tend to be closer to Received Pronunciation. For example: Trudgill’s Norwich research (1983) discovered that those respondents lower down the social scale were more likely to drop the ‘g’ sound in their pronunciation in words like ‘fishing’ and ‘singing’ (which would result in ‘fishin’ and ‘singin’) whilst those higher up the social scale were more likely to include the sound in their pronunciation. He also discovered that throughout all classes, the pronunciation increased according to the formality of a particular situation. This confirmed the notion that people are conscious of their speech; and that they tend to adopt more socially ‘prestigious’ features when the context warrants. He (Trudgill) also considered grammatical features in his research, including the use of verbs without an ‘s’ending. For example: saying ‘she go’ rather than ‘she goes’ As before, he found out that this non-standard feature was heard much more among the working-class speakers.
Gender is also an aspect of an individual’s sense of social identity that links to language variation. This refers to the idea that men and women differ in the way they use language. Linguistic research suggests that women tend to use more prestige forms of language. For Example: Their vocabulary and grammar are closer to Standard English and their accents closer to Received Pronunciation. Research into conversational behavior suggests that women are more co-operative and more likely to offer encouragement, whilst men tend to be more competitive and assertive in their speech. Jenny Cheshire’s 1982 research in Reading found that many of the linguistic traits adopted by adolescents are similar to those displayed by adult men. She and other researchers found that:
- Men are more likely to drop the ‘h’ sound at the beginning of words such as ‘house’ and ‘hat’
- There is more use of ‘ain’t’ among men than among women. Alternatively, ‘isn’t’ features more predominantly in female speech than in male.
- Men are more likely to use ‘seen’ and ‘done’ as past tense forms. For example ‘I seem him yesterday’ and ‘we done it last week’
- Men are more likely to use double negatives. For example ‘I don’t know nothing about it.
There is an argument that a possible for reason for these is that women are more status-conscious than men. As we alluded to earlier, speech can be taken by others an indicator of social class and it is perhaps for this reason that women make more effort to conform to Standard English in order to demonstrate their status and respectability to others.
There is also the approach based around society’s expectations of women. This centers on the notion that society expects ‘better’ behavior from women than from men and that women are often expected to act in a ‘ladylike’ way – including speaking in an ‘appropriate’ manner. You could also relate this to the argument that women are expected to play the dominant role in child-rearing, which would include providing the children with ‘correct’ speech for them to imitate.
Finally we must take into account a person’s cultural background in relation to language variety. As not all speakers of the English Language will have been ‘born and bred’ in Britain, their own different varieties of speaking (known as Pidgins and Creoles) become used.
A pidgin combines two or more languages enabling members of different speech communities to communicate with one another. Pidgins when circumstances force different languages together. What commonly happens is that the dominant of the two (or however many) languages – usually decided by the amount of social power they each have – becomes adapted and simplified. The use of the pidgin is usually confined to a limited range of situations.
Because pidgins are restricted in their use, they are usually characterized by limited vocabulary and grammatical structures.
One of the most studied examples of pidgin is the ‘Tok Pisin’ (Talk Pidgin). It is spoken in Papua New Guinea and developed from varieties of English spoken in the Pacific region in the 19th century. The English derivation of much of the Tok Pisin vocabulary is very apparent. For example: ‘I’ and ‘me’ comes from the Tok Pisin ‘Mi’ and the English for ‘mouth’ comes from the Tok Pisin ‘Maus’. When a Pidgin becomes more extensively used and becomes the first language of new generations, we say it is undergoing creolization (Becoming a Creole.)
Many of the world’s pidgins and creoles are a legacy of old colonial power and derive from English, French, Portuguese or Dutch. More recent examples include those spoken in Germany among Turkish migrant workers. Roughly around 25% of the recognized creoles are English-based, but most Creole languages are spoken by descendants of African slaves. These include the Caribbean creoles derived from English. Jamaican Creole, for example has many grammatical features that distinguish it from Standard English. For example:
- Multiple negatives.
- No verb endings to indicate past tense; instead, the base form of the verb is used (‘he go last week’)
- Omission of auxiliary verbs (‘me not = ‘I am not’)
‘British Black English’ is an example of the growing interest among linguists in their (pidgins and creoles) importance as an expression of personal and national identity. British Black English is a term used for several different varieties of Creole English spoken in Britain. These Creole’s rather like regional accents and dialects are an important symbol or group identity and solidarity. They are closely associated with black youth culture and have produced a large amount of Creole literature including poetry and reggae lyrics.
To conclude, the ways in which language variation is connected with people’s sense of personal, social, and cultural identity are vast in their amount. A person’s sense of personal identity relates to language variation when we consider the individuals dialect, idiolect and other areas such as gender age. An individual’s social identity relates to language variation when we consider sociolects and the notion of social class. The possible use of Pidgins and Creoles are the main areas of a person’s cultural identity when it comes to language variation.
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