Why does the shtyle spread? Street prestige boosts the diffusion of urban vernacular features

Abstract

In this article, we investigate social meaning as a determinant of linguistic diffusion by confronting laboratory and corpus data of Citétaal, a multi-ethnolect that has spread across Flanders. In a speaker evaluation experiment, we found that Citétaal was upgraded on ‘streetwise dynamism’, even by respondents unfamiliar with its migrant origin. From this, we conclude that it is Citétaal's third-order indexicality, pruned of ethnic associations, which carries the diffusion. To determine the relative importance of streetwise cool vis-à-vis other predictors, we studied the diffusion across Twitter of the principal Citétaal shibboleth (/s/ palatalisation). As a production proxy for streetwise cool, we included expressive compensation strategies such as lengthening (verrry), which turned out to be among the main predictors of the Citétaal form. We argue that social meaning is a major change determinant, and that Twitter is the optimum source to track both a diffusion and the factors, including social meaning, which drive it. (Rapid linguistic diffusion, social meaning, streetwise prestige, speaker evaluation experiment, corpus linguistics, Twitter)*

Why do we say them when we know it should be they? Twitter as a resource for investigating nonstandard syntactic variation in The Netherlands

“…In addition to the contrast profiling benefit of subject-hun, Grondelaers et al (2022) propose a social meaning explanation for its diffusion, in line with a growing number of studies that demonstrate that accelerating features are linked with associations of streetwise cool and urban toughness (see Foulkes & Docherty, 1999;Grondelaers & Marzo, 2023;Sneller & Roberts, 2018;Stuart-Smith et al, 2013).…”

“…In addition to the contrast profiling benefit of subject- hun , Grondelaers et al (2022) propose a social meaning explanation for its diffusion, in line with a growing number of studies that demonstrate that accelerating features are linked with associations of streetwise cool and urban toughness (see Foulkes & Docherty, 1999; Grondelaers & Marzo, 2023; Sneller & Roberts, 2018; Stuart-Smith et al, 2013). Respondents were asked to associate spoken stimuli with two sets of pictures, either representations of traditional prestige associated with standard usage (e.g., an antique Chesterfield couch or a symphonic concert venue), or representations of urban cool associated with nonstandard usage (such as a flashy sushi restaurant or an internet company in a recycled factory hall).…”

“…Following up on the crucial issue of coding for stylized casualness, Grondelaers and Marzo (2023) argued that Twitter's expressive compensation strategies can be used to operationalize young, cool, and nonposh self-profiling. They first carried out a speaker evaluation experiment into the dynamic prestige boosts of an ethnolectal diffusion in Flanders.…”

“…We also coded our tweets for expressive compensation strategies such as intensifying adverbs ( super in [7]-[8], fucking in [9]), lengthening such as okeee and rollschaatsennn in (5), interjections ( oehh in [11]), and CMC-additions such as emojis (as in [10]). Following Grondelaers and Marzo (2023), we regard these strategies as resources tweeters can apply to “tweak” their personality, and to stylize themselves in terms of qualities (young, cool, dramatic, ironic, etc.) that readers can pick up as dimensions of a dynamically prestigious personality that is prone to hun -use.…”

Using social media to infer the diffusion of an urban contact dialect: A case study of Multicultural London English

“…To date, however, most of this work has focussed on describing the use of these varieties based on recordings of a limited number of speakers from individual speech communities. As such, researchers have not been able to examine the diffusion of these varieties across multiple regions nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread (though see Grondelaers & Marzo, 2023). Although there is some reason to assume that ‘urban varieties jump from major urban centre to major urban centre’ (Meyerhoff, 2022: 153), this conclusion has not been confirmed by empirical data.…”