Speech Communities - Mosaics

Christianna Bennett 11 | 2 | 2011 EXAM 2 SPEECH COMMUNITIES – MOSAICS – NON-UNIVERSALS

There is an emerging viewpoint in the world of linguists and sociolinguists that is beginning to encompass a radical theory about the complexity, rather than the universality of the global speech community[ies]. Scholars, theorists, and contributors to the field are beginning to sift through the matrixes that define speech in the world and have started to find that generalizations and the use of “universals” are naïve ways of depicting the global speech condition. Patricia Nichols and Mary Bucholtz are two contributors to the new idea of the fractal, mosaic-type complexity that they believe defines the globe in terms of regional dichotomies. The old, universals way of describing the world falls apart through the lenses of these two scholars and is explicit in their writing about “nerdiness” and race in California [Bucholtz] and innovation and standard language use in the rural south [Nichols]. In both cases, the writing shows paradoxes that arise when the viewer steps back at different scales – from local to regional to national – and likewise when the viewer examines one region in comparison to another. Furthermore, Marcyliena Morgan’s definition of the “speech community” encompasses the overarching ideals inherent to the new wave of linguistic thinking, defining the importance of “social context” and linking this to community identity. Much like a kaleidoscope, the viewer can see speech communities change at the regional scale, not according to global, national universals as language was once understood to be defined by.

Patricia Nichols opens her discussion of speech community mosaics by pointing out the naivety of defining something such as “women’s language” [Nichols 1983: 54]. She references Wittgenstein’s

question of “private language,” saying “there can be no such entity… language exists and is experienced as a communal activity… we must speak of which women as members of which social group” highlighting that it is necessary to specify the who, what, when, where, and how of a people not merely a superficial descriptor such as gender [Nichols 1983: 54]. Furthermore, this is superficial because it generates no cultural ties or indicators. Despite the idea that feminism or masculinity is natural, it is a cultural abstraction that appears in different forms and is different according to various languages, cultures, and sub-cultures. Gender-orientation does not necessarily index biological fact and thus one must examine the regional behaviors and norms to establish what might be true about gender in a specific locale [Gordon 2011]. This is just one example of how the idea of “universals” begins to fall apart as a global scheme.

Nichols develops her research for this study in a historically rich area, Sullivan’s Island, in the Charleston Harbor of South Carolina. This region has been described as the “Ellis Island” for Black Americans entering the country and here, one can trace changes across generations in the families from this area, examining how social change has had an effect from one generation to another [Nichols 1983: 55]. Nichols takes advantage of this historical tracery, as well as the unique physical characteristics of the landscape, as she begins to create a “dialogue” between mainland communities and an island community. She finds that in this area there are three types of language being used: [1] an English creole called Gullah, [2] Black English, and [3] a regionally standard variety of English [Nichols 1983: 56]. Her research calls upon her to understand who uses these different varieties, when and why they use it, and how the usage has changed due to social factors over time. She emphasizes that the “language use of individuals encompasses different portions of the speech continuum and reflects individual life experiences and choices” [Nichols 1983: 56]. This idea of “individual life experiences and choices” is integral to emerging concept of regional versus universal

mosaics, especially because it is the generator for why the global condition is not universal, but rather regionally-defined.

In her research, Nichols finds that middle-aged women in the island communities are the most innovative, as well as users of the most standardized English among the subjects studied. This appears paradoxical, but when she examined the regional condition, Nichols found that the majority of the current population – the older generations, as well as the men, and those still in school – all tend to exhibit more use of creole terminology, thus making this the cultural “norm” for the area. The females due to social changes have recently taken up jobs off the island, and on the mainland, especially in positions that require them to speak to a variety of customers. These jobs are included in the areas of travel and tourism, nursing, and sales, thus exposing the women to people from more various backgrounds and speech communities. This forces the women to learn are more standard form of English to effectively communicate with their clientele. The men on the other hand, have worked for many generations in the lumber yards, and have now moved into carpentry positions. These jobs generate their own speech communities with little extension to the outside world, therefore the men are co-creating a very specific identity with little interaction with the outside world. Likewise, the school children are embedded within their own cultural, regional niche. The elderly women also contribute to creole being the regional standard because before social changes occurred in the area, allowing women to find jobs in culturally-exposed positions, they were stay-at-home wives and mothers, confined to the regional speech of their husbands.

In a similar way, Mary Bucholtz examines speech and racial identity, and how these two entities begin to blur what was once seen as “universals” – black and white across the globe.

Bucholtz’s research is on the study of high school teenagers in the California public school system.

She defines four groups of language communities and cultural identities in the school, those being: [1] hyper-white “nerds”, [2] whites adopting black “coolness”, [3] blacks adopting black “coolness”, and [4] blacks adopting “nerdiness.” Here language-use and vocabularies are defined by [a] race and [b] coolness versus nerdiness. Like Nichols’ analysis of gender, these two facets of culture are naturalized by language, they become subconscious definitions of the world and individual constructs around herself, but in fact they are not natural or essential elements of the world and can be pulled apart and examined as constructs of peoples’ worldviews.

Bucholtz begins by studying the “black origins of youth culture in the United States… that a variety of youth subcultures are often traceable to an African American source… that these practices become detatched from blackness – deracialized… and at the same time become normalized” by American teenagers [Bucholtz 2001: 86]. Due to this “deracialized” condition and the extensive use of African American language, the ideaology of “coolness” as African American expressions becomes the norm in many high schools across the nation. Then there are the hyper-white nerds who stand in opposition to the Afro-coolness subculture in their communities. These individuals strive to create a different community based on race and anti-African American vocabularies. Many of the subjects Bucholtz studied exhibit extreme practices for avoiding the use of the language of their colleagues. Even to the point of claiming that they do not understand certain standardized terms such as the slang term “blood,” and going even further to redefine it in scientific terms as an expression of their perceived “sophistication” [Bucholtz 2001: 90]. The main indicator that these students’ identities are not essential to either race, nor nerdiness/ coolness is the fact that the identities are being “performed” rather than are a naturally-occurring fact. Bucholtz states, “it is at such moments that nerdiness moves from practice to performance that is partly explicable in light of Claire’s identity change-in-progess… blending of causal and formal which shows a display of knowledge without the embrace of the identity usually

associated with such knowledge” [Bucholtz 2001: 93]. Here, the researcher is tilting the kaleidoscope to being to reinterpret what the true, essential elements of these subjects are and here, she is discovering that the previous universal understandings about “race” and “nerdiness” are actually much more

community-defined.

She

states,

“whiteness

is

separated

from

blackness

in

ideaology

but

inextricable from it in practice” [Bucholtz 2001: 95]. Bucholtz also capitalizes on the overarching idea of the “fractal” when she says, “linguistic and other social practices by which nerds were socially marked with respect to other, cooler, white students, also caused them to be racially marked with respect to both blacks and whites. While semiotic practices of iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure allowed nerds to challenge local ideaologies based on subcultural identity, these same processes also imposed a set of racial ideaologies on both nerds, and their cooler counterparts, black and white” [Bucholtz 2001: 96].

Today, the world is a complex blending of what was once seen as “black-white” “malefemale” “nerd-cool” universals. These ideologies no longer hold true due to changes in social norms, behaviors, and new culturally-found beliefs especially concerning ideas about equality that render “race” and “gender” as superficial layers to a human identity - rather than being biological fact. These concepts are not natural, but naturalized by language and can be peeled back to find an individual’s true identity. Likewise, the global community is shifting from being defined by these universals. The world has become a much more fractal, regionalized place in which those who study linguistic and cultural phenomena must avoid categorizing their subjects according to universals. Rather, like Mary Bucholtz,

Marcylinea

Morgan,

and

Patricia

Nichols,

contributors

to

the

fields

of

linguistics

and

sociolinguistics must understand the world as a network of interlocking identities, each different when

viewed at various scales. This is important for accurately framing communities, individuals, and the systems working on the global scale at-large.

VISUALS:

Fig 1. View of the world as national, continental universals. Highly indescriptive and vague.

Fig 2. Mosaic-type view of the United States according to the term used to describe soft-drinks by region.

WORKS CITED Bucholtz, Mary. 2001.

The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness. Journal of

Linguistic Anthropology II [I]: 84 – 100.

Gordon, T. 2011. Selected class lectures October 2011.

Morgan, Marcyliena. 2006.

Blackwell, pp3- 22.

Speech Community. In Duranti, A. ed., A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology.

Nichols, Patricia C. 1983. Linguistic options and choices for black women in the rural south. In B. Thorne, C. Kramerae and N. Henley, eds. Language, Gender, and Society. Newbury House, pp54 – 68.

VISUALS Fig

1.

“Political

World

Map”

by

http://future.wikia.com/wiki/File:Political_World_Map.jpg Fig

2.

“Generic

Names

for

Soft

Drinks

by

Wikia

County”

May

by

24,

Alan

http://www.floatingsheep.org/2011/10/expanded-pop-vs-soda-debate.html

2011.

McConchie

Found

2011.

Found

at

at