Folklinguistics and Social Meaning in Australian English

Abstract

Folklinguistics and Social Meaning in Australian English presents an original study of Australian English and, via this, insights into Australian society. Utilising folklinguistic accounts, it uncovers everyday understandings of contemporary Australian English through variations across linguistic systems (sounds, words, discourse and grammar). Focusing on one variation at time, it explores young speakers' language use and their evaluations of the same forms. The analysis of talk about talk uncovers ethnic, regional and social Others in social types and prevailing ideologies around Australian English essential for understanding Australian identity-making processes, as well as providing insights and methods relevant beyond this context. These discussions demonstrate that while the linguistic variations may occur in other varieties of English, they are understood through local conceptualisations and often as uniquely Australian. This book harnesses the value and richness of discourse in explorations of the sociocultural life of language. The fi ndings show that analysis attending to language ideologies and identities can help discover the micro-macro links needed in understanding social meanings. The volume explores a wide range of language features but also provides a deep contemplation of Australian English. Cara Penry Williams has a master's degree in applied linguistics and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Melbourne. After many years of teaching and

Appeals to Semiotic Registers in Ethno‐Metapragmatic Accounts of Variation

“…Importantly, being posh was also largely undesirable and in Australia while there is often judgment of speaking ‘badly’ one should also not speak ‘too’ well. In addition, most of what is more iconic and most spoken about in Australian English is the more nonstandard forms (Penry Williams , ).…”

“…To address the problems of the approaches I have highlighted above, while drawing on their insights, I suggest that language can be analyzed as use, mention or voicing (Penry Williams , ). Each of these is flexible in some ways, largely describable with the addition of the division of speaker following Goffman () and Bakhtin's () vari‐ and unidirectional discourse.…”

“…Extract 4 is in response to a question about the variation between the palm (/ɐː/ in Australian English) and trap (/æ/) vowels in a subsection of what Wells () calls bath words (see, e.g., Bradley , ). Jacqui had just completed a short task in which she read aloud words and said if they rhymed or not, including two words which are principal carriers (Niedzielski and Preston ) of this variation but which often receive different social evaluations in the city of Melbourne due to some of the complexities of this variation (Penry Williams ; ).…”

“…Folklinguistic discourse has limitations but there has been too grand a dismissal of its value (Kroskrity ; Wolfram ). Attention to such discourse provides access to understandings of the social meanings of forms, locally salient identity categories and the depth of language ideological work which may lie beneath even a short comment on language (Penry Williams ; ). I use the term ethno‐metapragmatics here, roughly equivalent to folklinguistics , in order to highlight the links to metapragmatics and how evaluation is achieved.…”

“…Although similar commitments can be said to be held by most disciplines, linguistics seems to continually need to reassert that its own interests run contrary to public interest, no doubt because of the long history of prescriptivism dominating discussions of use in many languages. Folklinguistic accounts though, with proper attention to their ideological work, can reveal much about the social worlds of community members (Penry Williams ; ). Furthermore, as Preston () argues, accuracy is far from the point of understanding the talk that circulates about talk itself.…”