Solidarity, stance, and class identities

Abstract

Scholars have explained working-class speakers’ continued use of stigmatised vernaculars as a response to their relative powerlessness in relation to the standard language market. Research has shown how, in the face of this powerlessness, working-class communities turn to group solidarity, and use of the vernacular is seen as part of this more general orientation. As a result, two competing social values—status and solidarity—have featured prominently in discussions around language and class. I expand these discussions using data from a linguistic ethnographic study of children's language in Teesside, England. I argue that meanings related to status and solidarity operate at multiple levels and cannot be taken for granted, and demonstrate that vernacular forms thatlackstatus within the dominant sociolinguistic economy may be used toassertstatus within local interactional use. I further advance discussion of the ways local vernaculars might be intimately linked to classed subjectivities. (Social class, variation, solidarity, status, stance, indexicality, identity, interaction, ethnography)*

The policy and policing of language in schools

“…In addition, sociolinguists have repeatedly made the case that deficit attitudes towards speakers using nonstandardised forms can lead to those speakers feeling insecure and facing threats to their identity (e.g. Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Moore 2011; Snell 2018b).…”

Grammar tests, de facto policy and pedagogical coercion in England’s primary schools

“…Recent work in educational sociolinguistics (e.g. Cushing 2020a , b ; Snell 2018 ) has shown how racialised and classed structural language stigma is increasingly normalised in England’s schools, partly as a result of post-2010 educational reforms which emphasise the requirement for teachers and students to use standardised English in schools. GPS test questions are here positioned as policy mechanisms which contribute to this stigma, reproducing an ‘imposition of uniformity and the imagined dichotomy between ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’’ (Milroy 2001 : 346).…”

Language, discourse, and class: What's next for sociolinguistics?

“…"I'm not gonna bullshit you" or regularly using "fuck" as an adverb), which could be viewed as an indexical order (Silverstein, 2003) and solidarity stance (e.g. Bennett, 2012;Cotter & Valentinsson, 2018;Snell, 2018) in working-class communities within certain regions of the US (e.g. New York and Boston).…”

“…Linguistic and discursive styles of speaking indexing class have been researched in various regional contexts in the UK and the US (e.g. Bennett, 2012;Cotter & Valentinsson, 2018;Snell, 2018), but the ways in which class is indexed in many other societies have only recently been addressed (e.g. Dong, 2018).…”

“…Since the mid‐20th century, sociolinguists have drawn upon numerous resources and perspectives in their insightful documentations and analyses of various symbols of class memberships indexed by linguistic, discursive, and other social semiotic meaning‐makings and enactments (e.g. Bernstein, ; Block & Corona, ; Eckert, , ; Heath, ; Labov, , ; Milroy, ; Rampton, ; Rickford, ; Snell, ; Trudgill, ). Their constructs of class identity have aligned with Goffman's () notion that “an important symbol of membership in a given class is displayed during informal interaction” in which these observable behaviours “involve matters of etiquette, dress, deportment, gesture, intonation, dialect, vocabulary, small bodily movements and automatically expressed evaluations concerning both the substance and the details of life” (p. 300).…”