Uses of Southern‐sounding speech by contemporary Texas women

Abstract

Anglo-Texas women typically do not think of themselves as Southerners, but many can use speech forms that came to Texas from the American South. The relationship of Texas women to Southern speech is complex, and Texas women orient to and use Southern forms in various ways. Several of the possibilities are brie¯y illustrated. These examples serve to raise questions about language crossing and stylization in contexts in which the variety being adopted does not clearly`belong' to an outgroup, and to suggest some new avenues for thought about what`regional varieties' are and how regionally-marked speech forms can serve as rhetorical resources.

‘Locally acquired foreign accent’ (LAFA) in contemporary Ghana

“…What the listener detects might therefore be described in Bakhtinian terms, as dialogic reverberations (Bakhtin ), as echoes of ‘otherness’, associated in this case with previous experience of American speech, in most cases distant and passive, rather than local and interactive. Successfully sounding American in such circumstances is ‘an ethnographic question’, rather than a matter for variationist linguistics (Johnstone : 509). Moreover, Trudgill points out that the model of the singers he studied was apparent from accompanying lexical features still perceived at the time as Americanisms, such as guy (‘bloke’) and call (‘phone’).…”

Social stereotypes, personality traits and regional perception displaced: Attitudes towards the ‘new’ quotatives in the U.K.1

“…More specifically, do people in other varieties, just as in the U.S., associate be like with the stereotype of the California ‘Valley Girl’? In the light of the growing interest in globalization phenomena (Blommaert 2003; Heller 2003; Johnstone 1999; McConnell 1997; Meyerhoff and Niedzielski 2002, 2003; Milroy 2004; Pennycook 2003), this article sets out to investigate perceptual load at the transnational level. Given that socio‐psychological information is high context information (von Hippel 1994), that is information that needs a certain amount of interpersonal contact to be transmitted and maintained, we might assume that attitudinal information is not easily transmitted across the Atlantic.…”

Speaker Design in the Context of Southern American English: Process Models and Empirical Evidence

“…(Indeed, as Johnstone (1999: 519) put it, "The idea that linguistic choices can serve rhetorical purposes has a history of several centuries"; adding that "[this] idea has been rediscovered by sociolinguists several times".) regarding Southern American English (i.e., the regionally characteristic type/s of English spoken in the southern united States), 2 which serves as my case in point in this paper, Speaker Design has been documented for example in Johnstone's (1999) study of Texas women's language use, where 'sounding like a Southern Belle' turned out to be considered "particularly useful as part of a sexually-charged manipulative strategy" (Johnstone 1999: 514). Thus, in one of the cases described, a female Texan sales representative called Terri king is quoted as saying, "my Southern drawl makes me $70,000 a year!"…”