Style dominance: Attention, audience, and the ‘real me’

Abstract

Social constructivist approaches to style have moved away from the cognitive asymmetry that underpinned Labov's original attention-to-speech model, namely that a first-learned vernacular often has cognitive primacy. This study explores the interplay of cognitive and interactional effects in style variation. It reports on three related dynamics of style variation in one individual—Fareed Zakaria, an Indian-American media personality. First, we see Zakaria's robust English bidialectalism with American and Indian audiences. This strong audience effect is complicated by the second finding, which points to asymmetric style dominance in Zakaria's first-learned Indian style, which he subtly defaults to regardless of audience when his attention is diverted by such tasks as quickly counter-arguing or inserting parenthetical information. The third part of the study relates style dominance to agency: In a reflexive intra-personal process of biographical indexicality, speakers such as Zakaria may exploit their personal style biography and use their dominant variety to perform no-nonsense ‘real me’ stances in interaction. (Audience, attention, style variation, indexicality, repertoire, processing, bidialectalism, second dialect acquisition, speech rate)*

Style-shifting in Multicultural London English in an all-girls homework club

“…When examining the raw data, the girls most likely show phonetic variation within their interactions, as well as style-shifting between situations (cf. Eckert, 1996;Sharma & Rampton, 2015;Sharma, 2018). Nevertheless, our data show that the preadolescent girls we examined appear to style-shift in a relatively new variety of English that is most likely still undergoing change.…”

Two languages, one variable? Pharyngeal realizations among Arabic–Hebrew bilinguals

“…Even within what Eckert (, ) calls “third wave variationist sociolinguistics,” in which attention to speaker agency and the complexity of social meaning are at the forefront, most of the theoretical advancements take the monolingual speaker as their starting points (with some key exceptions, e.g. Sharma, ). In this vein, “the social of meaning of a variable” is usually used as shorthand for “the social meaning of a variable in a given language.” While in many cases this may seem completely unproblematic, the pharyngeals in Jaffa show that, although linguistic systems may be neatly separated, the social interpretation of multilingual use can challenge such rigid linguistic distinctions.…”

The role of linguistic ideologies in language contact situations

“…This type of analysis requires that we take into account not only interactional contexts, but speakers' style dominance as it pertains to their acquisitional history. Sharma () introduces the term style dominance (the order in which styles are acquired over the course of an individual's lifelong linguistic development) to show that, despite the robust bidialectalism of Fareed Zakaria, an Indian American media personality, his first‐learned variety (Indian English) dominates in moments of heightened processing load. The methodological novelty of Sharma's work resides in her operationalization of style dominance , achieved via the analysis of 12 linguistic features that contrast between Indian and American English.…”

“…In understudied varieties or languages, therefore, overcoming this challenge may require elaborating other metrics. Sharma's () work nevertheless makes an important contribution to the elaboration of social meaning in context and to the study of how cognitive factors constrain the flexibility that bidialectal individuals use to perform their identities.…”