AS English Language - #2: Language in social contexts

AS English Language

#2: Language in Social Contexts

Language and Gender

There seem to be a difference between how men and women use language, but no-one seems to be sure exactly what they are or why they occur.  Studies have shown that women tend to use accents from a higher social class than men:

Peter Trudgill (1983) studied men and women’s social accents and found that women’s pronunciation was closer to Received Pronunciation (RP), the accent that is usually seen as the most prestigious. Using Standard English and RP gives a person overt prestige – the prestige of being associated with a respectable, well-off section of society. 

Cheshire (1982) studied the speech of adolescent girls and boys and found that boys tended to use more non-standard grammatical forms than girls. Using non-standard English gives a person covert prestige. They seem a bit rebellious and independent. Men are more likely to seek covert prestige than women. This may be to be respected by friends, colleagues, or others.

Lakoff (1975) identified features she felt were characteristic of women's speech: hedges and fillers, apologestic requests, tag questions and indirect requests. She also pointed out that women tend to speak less than men, use fewer expletives and more intensifiers. She argues that these features reflected women’s inferior social status. She said that women’s language is weak compared to men’s language, and this prevents women from being taken seriously. This explanation is called the deficit model.

O’Barr and Atkins (1980) suggested an alternative explanation to the deficit model. They analysed American courtroom trials, and found that male and female witnesses who were of low social status and/or inexperienced with the courtroom practices, both showed many of the liguistic features that Lakoff labelled female. This suggests that the kind of language Lakoff describes as female is not only found in women, but might be more to do with individuals feeling powerless.

Cameron (2007) argues that there are few differences between men and women’s language, and situation affects how people speak much more than gender.

Language can be explained in terms of dominance and difference. Zimmerman and West (1975) recorded interruptions in conversations between men and women, and found that 96% of the interruptions were by men. This suggested that men are more dominant in male-female conversation, and Zimmerman and West therefore argued that this reflects dominance in society. On the other hand, Tannen (1990) described male and female conversational style in terms of difference. Men are concerned with status and independence, whilst women are interested in forming bods. Men give direct orders and don’t mind conflict, whilst women usually give polite, indirect orders and try to avoid conflict. Also, men are interested in gaining factual information and finding solutions to problems, whilst women aim to show understading by compromising, and offering support rather than solutions.

There are problems with these explanations. Other researchers have cast doubts on some of the explanations of differences in male and female language. Beattie (1982) suggested that interruptions could be supportive and show that the person is listening. Cameron (2007) argues that a lot of research is biased because there has been more focus on the differences between male and female language, rather than the similarities.


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Language and Power

The language of power is about dominance in conversations. Power shows itself in different ways. Non-verbal communication is using posture, positioning, gestures, eye contact and facial expressions to convey feelings and attitudes. Maintaining eye contact longer than usual can be an attempt to assert dominance and smiling at someone and pausing as you walk past them can be a way of initiating a conversation. Non-verbal aspects of speech, like pitch, intonation, volume, pace and stress, can also be used to assert control. Using Standard English and RP are also a way of asserting power, as these variants of English carry the most prestige.

Jargon can be used to dominate. Jargon is the specialist vocabulary used in particular fields of activity, especially occupations. Non-specialists can feel intimidated by the specialists and excluded from the high-status group. In cases like this, the specialists have more power and can dominate the situation.

Language, Technology and the Media

Technology has a huge impact on language, and it’s always changing as new things are invented. Every piece of new technology needs new words to describe it. This can involve giving existing words new meanings, or inventing completely new terms.

Radio language is different from TV language. TV language has the support of pictures, gestures and facial expressions, and sometimes text. On the radio there are no visual clues, so listeners have to rely on what speakers say and how they say it.

Telephone language shares many features with face-to-face dialogue. This includes non-fluency features like fillers and false starts, and non-verbal aspects of speech like intonation and stress. However the lack of non-verbal communication means that telephone language includes quite strict turn-taking because there are no visual clues to indicate when the speaker has finished. There are also few pauses.

Mobile phones have had a big impact on language. Probably the biggest influence mobile phones have had on language is text speak. Text messaging is creative - not standardised. Because of that everyone uses it slightly differently. It is a mixed mode of communication, because it’s a written language that contains many features of spoken language. These distinctive features have come about because of need to communicate quickly.

The internet has also affected language. The language used over the internet (in e-mails, live chat and forums) shares some of the linguistic features of mobile text messaging. However internet language is dependent on context and how formal the situation is.

The media can be biased. Bias is the tendency to take sides and view things subjectively. It can also show prejudice towards social groups. Prejudice is a preconceived opinion of a person or group, that is not based on experience. Often it includes negative judgement about different ethnic, religious, gender or ability groups. The language of the media can create and reinforce negative opinions.

Adverts

Adverts are designed to persuade. When you’re looking at any advert, there are a few basic things you have to look at: subject matter, purpose, form, the target audience and the hook (what is used to get the audience’s attention). Adverts use language in specific ways to achieve their purpose. The lexis of an advert is designed to be persuasive, it use different sentence functions as hooks, e.g. exclamatives, declaratives, imperatives and interrogatives. The visual appearance is important, and so are the phonetic features, e.g. alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhyme. The tone of an advert varies, depending on subject matter, audience and purpose. Adverts also have a discourse structure. This is made up of different elements: the hook, further persuasion and/or information, and instruction on what the reader should do next. Adverts need to engage the audience. Creative language is more likely to grab the audience’s attention and stick in their minds.

Language and Occupational Groups

Different occupations have their own sociolects. Occupational sociolect is the distinctive language used by particular occupational groups. It’s found in both spoken and written forms. Occupational language can be seen as elitist - excluding people who don’t understand it. Specialists in a job use it to communicate quickly and precisely  with other specialists in the same job. You would not necessarily expect non-specialists to understand it. Occupatioinal language has a special lexis. The occupational words are specialist terms used in specific jobs - often called jargon. They can refer to concept, processes, conditions, roles or objects. These word may not be familiar to non-specialists.

When you’re analysing the grammatical features of occupational language, focus on elements like word classes, syntax and sentence functions. Some kinds of occupational language have phonological features like repetition, alliteration and rhyme.

All occupations use jargon. Jargon is fashionable, and changes over time - partly due to advances in technology. It can also be confusing if people use technical vocabulary in situations where everyday language would be more appropriate. Sometimes more complex vocabulary is used in place of more simple language on purpose, because it sounds more impressive. It can bu used deliberately to obscure a harder truth.