Intersectionality and the social meanings of variation: Class, ethnicity, and social practice

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis article examines how the social meanings of phonetic variation in a British adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationship between ethnicity, social class, and social practice. I focus on the realisation of the HAPPY vowel in Sheffield English, which is reported to be a lax variant [ɛ] amongst working-class speakers but is undergoing change towards a tense variant [i] amongst middle-class speakers. I analyse the acoustic realisation of this vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondary school and find that the variable's community-wide associations of social class are projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation, which I suggest is a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographic evidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of the HAPPY vowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles, which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuring local social practices. (Intersectionality, indexicality, social meaning, identity, ethnicity, social class)*

Ethnicity and phonetic variation in Sheffield English liquids

“…Therefore, these data contrast with Stoddart et al's (1999: 76) claim that Sheffield Anglo English has clear laterals in initial position and instead supports the proposal that Sheffield Anglo English laterals are dark. It is not obvious whether this represents generational change or transcriber perceptions, especially given the small number of speakers in this study (but see Kirkham 2013Kirkham , 2015 for similar findings for medial-trochaic /l/ in larger sample of forty-three speakers). An analysis of /l/ in the word lip in the Survey of Sheffield Usage word list data yields F2ࢤF1 values of 879 Hz (male, born 1910s), 1152 Hz (female, born 1910s), 423 Hz (male, born 1960s), 1133 Hz (female, born 1960s).…”

“…H4 is grounded in previous work that finds substantial differences in the HAPPY vowel between Anglo and Asian speakers of Sheffield English (Kirkham 2015). Time-varying differences across the vocalic-liquid interval are therefore expected to be much larger in magnitude in this context due to expected differences in the resonance of the liquid, the quality of the vowel, and the coarticulatory relationship between the two.…”

“…However, the latter phase of this interval also shows striking differences between Anglo and Asian speakers, suggesting variation in the realisation of the vowel at the end of belly/Bally, which is sometimes referred to as the HAPPY vowel (Wells 1982, Harrington 2006. Kirkham (2015) also finds sociophonetic differences in Sheffield English /l/ + HAPPY vowel sequences in a larger corpus of spontaneous speech, with two groups of Pakistani, Somali and middle-class Anglo speakers producing an acoustically higher and fronter vowel in this context when compared with two groups of predominantly White & Black Caribbean and working-class Anglo speakers. The bottom left panel displays the word-medial iambic tokens, which show smaller differences between the ethnic groups than the word-medial trochaic tokens.…”

Maybe it's a grime [t]ing:th-stopping among urban British youth

“…Often, such research is carried out in mainstream high schools (e.g. Eckert 2000; Moore 2003;Mendoza-Denton 2008;Lawson 2009;Bucholtz 2011;Kirkham 2013), tracking and comparing the linguistic and social behaviour of different groups of students. In contrast, this article reports on a project that focuses on a particular group of young people from the outset-those who have been excluded from mainstream education for behavioural/disciplinary issues or because they find it difficult to adapt to the requirements of a mainstream school environment.…”

Class, Gender, and Rhoticity: The Social Stratification of Non-Prevocalic /r/ in Edinburgh Speech

“…Sociological literature continues to stress the centrality of class to our understanding of social structures, and the theorizing of social class is a subject of ongoing debate (Ash 2004:403;Kirkham 2015). Coupland (2016:417) The blurry difference between these terms is a well-recognized complication for any study of linguistic variation in Scotland (Stuart-Smith 2004;Johnston 2007;Maguire 2012).…”