Enregisterment, Commodification, and Historical Context: “Geordie” Versus “Sheffieldish”

Beal, Joan C.

doi:10.1215/00031283-2009-012

Cited by 101 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…This state of affairs is partially due to the nature of the producers and consumers of folk-linguistic artifacts (see e.g., Beal 2009). In the case of Pittsburgh, small-scale vendors sell shirts to individuals, who have a relatively limited audience when wearing their shirts (as constrained by the limited number of individuals who can be interacted with, the limited number of settings in which a T-shirt may be appropriately worn, etc.…”

Section: California Enregistermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched-Guise Investigation of the California Vowel Shift

Villarreal

2018

Journal of English Linguistics

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Research on social meaning, which links language variation to the wider social world, often bases claims about the social meanings of linguistic forms on production (i.e., speakers' situational use of meaningful forms). In the case of the California Vowel Shift (CVS), an ongoing restructuring of the vowel system of California English that takes place below the level of conscious awareness, previous production research has suggested that the CVS carries social meanings of carefreeness, femininity, and privilege. Left unclear in these production-based claims is whether listeners actually pick up on and recognize the social meanings that speakers apparently utilize the CVS to transmit. In this research, a dialect recognition task with matched guises (California-shifted vs. conservative) forms the basis for exploring Californian listeners' reactions to the CVS, and how these reactions are mediated by perceptions of dialect geography.In short, this research focuses on listeners' reactions to the CVS in order to address a more fundamental question: How do listeners and speakers together participate in the construction of social meaning?Stimuli for the main study task were drawn from excerpts of sociolinguistic interviews with 12 lifelong California English speakers from three regions of the state: the San Francisco Bay Area, Lower Central Valley, and Southern California. Guises were created from interview excerpts by modifying the F2 of each TRAP and GOOSE token via source-filter resynthesis methods.Californian guises featured backed TRAP and fronted GOOSE; conservative guises featured fronted TRAP and backed GOOSE. Ninety-seven Californians participated in a perceptual task in which they attempted to identify speakers' regional origin and rated speakers on affective scales.iii The results indicated that Californians recognize the CVS as Californian, as California-shifted guises were less likely to be identified as from outside California (but more likely to be identified as from Southern California). Listeners rated California-shifted guises higher on the scales Californian, sounds like a Valley girl, and confident, indicating a core of social meanings indexed by the CVS. Among listeners from the San Francisco Bay Area, the CVS indexes masculinity, but among Southern California listeners, the CVS indexes femininity. Listeners from across California also rated speakers who they believed to be from the same region as them higher on Californian, familiar, and sounds like me.This research demonstrates that the social meanings of linguistic forms do not reside only in speakers' situational use of these forms, as listeners did not associate the CVS with carefreeness, femininity, or privilege, the social meanings of the CVS suggested by previous studies of California English production; instead, I propose an account of the indexical field that links perception and production by placing the core social meanings of the CVS uncovered by this research (Californian identity, sounding like a Valley girl, and confidence) a...

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Section: California Enregistermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched-Guise Investigation of the California Vowel Shift

Villarreal

2018

Journal of English Linguistics

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“…Johnstone et al (2006) have additionally pointed out the solidarity-building function that Pittsburghese can serve, in unifying people from the same place. In a somewhat related manner, both Remlinger (2009) and Beal (2009) have discussed the ways in which discursive and metadiscursive practices surrounding enregistered forms can serve to maintain differences between insiders and outsiders within a region. In Copper County, Michigan (Remlinger, 2009) and in Newcastle and Sheffield, England (Beal, 2009), a select number of enregistered forms function as shibboleths, serving to immediately mark speakers as outsiders when they (inevitably) fail to pronounce the words correctly according to local norms.…”

Section: Indexicality and Enregistermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, the cultural values that are attached to what it means to be from the region are embodied in iconic local figures, such as the ''Yooper'' (from 'Upper Peninsula') in Michigan, the steelworker and housewife in Sheffield, and the miner in Newcastle. These characters often appear alongside enregistered dialect forms, ''reinforcing the link between linguistic forms and iconic local identities'' (Beal, 2009).…”

Section: Indexicality and Enregistermentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enregisterment of Pittsburghese and the local African American community

Eberhardt

2012

Language & Communication

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“…Beal (2009) shows how current scholarly discourse about dialect leveling echoes the discourse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when " the enclosure of common land, the mechanization of agriculture, and the Industrial Revolution [ … ] caused people to move from the countryside into rapidly expanding industrial towns and cities " (p. 139). Beal points out that many of the English dialects now considered endangered were themselves the result of leveling processes sparked by geographical mobility.…”

Section: Dialect Awarenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indexing the Local

Johnstone¹

2010

The Handbook of Language and Globalization

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Handbook of Language and Globalization 9,593 words including references Globalization divides as much as it unites; it divides as it unites --the causes of division being identical with those which promote the uniformity of the globe.Alongside the emerging planetary dimensions of business, finance, trade and information flow, a 'localizing', space-fixing process is set in motion. (Bauman 1998, 2) Attention to linguistic variation worldwide is evidenced in efforts to document or revive dying languages; in political struggles over language and dialect rights, national languages, and language in education; and in the commodification of languages and varieties in film, on TV, radio and the internet, in folk dictionaries and on other tourist artifacts. New attention to regional variation has been part of this trend. As Newcastle (England) speech levels to a regional standard in the wake of outmigration (Watt 2002), people start to refer to the Newcastle football club as The Toon, spelling the local pronunciation of town (Beal 1999). As island-dwellers in the eastern U.S. encounter more and more outsiders and their dialects die, they cling to one or two local forms (Schilling-Estes 1998. This is not the first time regional linguistic variation has become salient in political and popular culture. But it seems paradoxical that regional variation should be so noticeable in the early 21 st century, in the context of the and language awareness. To illustrate this, I draw on work I and my colleagues have done in Pittsburgh, PA, a de-industrializing city in the northeaster U.S. (Johnstone, Bhasin and Wittkofski 2002, Johnstone and Baumgardt 2004, Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006). I use the concept of indexical order (Silverstein 2003) to model how social and economic change over the course of the latter half of the 20 th century has made local speech forms hearable, first as "markers" (Labov 1972, 178-80) of correctness, care, and the like, and later as examples of "Pittsburghese," an (imagined) dialect associated with local identity. Regional dialects in contactPeter Trudgill's (1986) Dialects in Contact set off a wave of work leading to a more and more nuanced understanding of "dialect leveling," or the ways in which dialects can lose aspects of their distinctiveness when their speakers come into contact with speakers of other dialects. According to Trudgill's influential model, contact among speakers who use different linguistic forms might be expected to lead to linguistic accommodation (Giles, Taylor and Bourhis 1973) by speakers needing to express solidarity or avoid miscommunication with others. Over the long run, this process might be expected to lead to the "leveling" of varieties-the reduction, that is, in the number of differences between them. In the U.S. as in Europe, industrialization beginning in the 18 th century led people to move from the countryside to the cities. Subsequent developments included the

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Enregisterment, Commodification, and Historical Context: “Geordie” Versus “Sheffieldish”

Cited by 101 publications

References 6 publications

The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched-Guise Investigation of the California Vowel Shift

The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched-Guise Investigation of the California Vowel Shift

Enregisterment of Pittsburghese and the local African American community

Indexing the Local

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