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Language Diversity - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Women talk a lot
      - They use false starts because they haven't thought of their
      - Men are responsible for introducing new words
        
        .
    - - Hedging
      - Empty emphatic adjectives
      - Hyper-correct grammar
      - Criticism - O'Barr and Atkins. They argued that these features (hedging) are linked to powerlessness and context, not gender. Anyone, regardless of gender, uses these inferior features when in a position of powerlessness
  - - - Men's conversational style is problem solving, exchanging information and being direct and assertive. Report Talk
        
        Use direct language
      - Women's conversational style is building an emotional connection and being empathetic and supportive. Rapport Talk
        
        Back-channelling shows support, indirect language e.g euphemisms
      - Criticism - The Difference Model reinforces stereotypes, ignores individual variation and intersectionality
        
        .
  - - - Women do more conversational work to initiate and maintain conversations as men fail to and often use back-channelling. E.g by using tag questions a
      - Criticism - Used a very small sample, only 3 couples so her findings aren't representative
    - - Men dominate in mixed-sex conversations by interrupting, controlling topics and taking longer conversational turns
      - Criticism - Their study was very small, only 11 mixed-sex conversations were recorded. Beattie analysed significantly more conversations and found that men and women interrupted each other with very similar frequency
    - - Men control the language system, which embodies patriarchal structures
        
        Semantic derogation, female terms undergoing pejoration and have negative connotations e.g mistress
        
        Much more derogatory terms for women than men
  - - - Differences in language use are not determined by gender but instead by other factors like conversational context, social class, age, and regionality. Highlights intersectionality, the fact that language is determined by several factors.
  - - - Believes gender is not a stable identity but instead a performance and a social construct
        
        Language can be used as a tool to perform a certain identity by using either masculine or feminine language features
        
        Also involves actions, gestures, styling/physical appearance
      - Criticism - Ignores physical experiences like pregnancy
- - - - Giles Matched Guise Research 70s
        
        An actor gave the same speech on capital punishment to different audiences using different accents: RP, regional urban and regional rural.
        
        The audience found the RP accent the most intelligent but cold. The northern accents were considered warm and friendly. The 'softer' regional accents were seen as the most persuasive.
        
        Criticism - Requiring the participants to rate the voices on numerical scales forces artificial evaluations which wouldn't happen in casual social interactions. There may have also been masked opinions with the listeners answering the socially acceptable, predictable answer instead of their personal opinion.
      - ..
    - - Regional accents were stronger in the past as there was less geographical mobility
      - Accent/dialect loyalty is when you don't want to lose your regional accent as it is a crucial part of your identity
      - Milroy Belfast Case Study 70s
        
        She went to working class communities in the inner city of Belfast. Found that women had stronger regional accents than the men
        
        The women had stronger social networks, higher density and multiplexity, they worked and socialised in the same area so there was less geographical mobility and their regional accents were constantly reinforced, meaning that they were less likely to undergo accent levelling
        
        The men travelled out of the inner city more often, had weaker social networks and lower density and multiplexity. So their regional accents were reinforced less due to geographical mobility making their accents weaker.
        
        Criticism - Milroy used a small sample size so her findings are overgeneralisations. Additionally, the unique political and religious conflict in Northern Ireland influenced local community structures so it's difficult to transfer Milroy's findings to less volatile, peaceful urban environments.
- - - - He asked the workers for an object he knew was on the 4th floor, pretended he didn't hear the first time, and asked them to repeat, giving him 2 tokens of data, a casual and a conscious one.
        
        In S.Klein and Macy's, the workers omitted the post-vocalic 'r' in the first spontaneous, casual response, which is a marker of lower socioeconomic status and is likely to be judged pejoritavely (accent bias)
        
        When the workers were asked to repeat themselves, they felt under scrutiny and judged. In this second conscious response, they code-switched to the more socially acceptable/prestigious pronunciation saying the post-vocalic 'r'. Labov called this hyper-correction.
        
        Saks workers used the standard pronunciation in the first casual response the most. Macy's workers hyper-corrected the most as they are the most socially aspirational, wanting social mobility. S.Klein were the least socially aspirational and hyper-corrected to the prestigous accent the least.
        
        Criticism - Labov recorded the data alone so could have easily misheard. The employees would have undergone training on how to talk to customers
  - - - He got different groups of people from different social classes and got them to have an interview, read a passage and tell a funny story - all contexts with different levels of formality
        
        In informal casual contexts, higher classes used standard forms and vice versa with the lower classes
        
        But he found that as the context became more formal e.g. with the interviews and when they felt under scrutiny, speakers across all the groups shifted their pronunciation and dialect to the more socially prestigious form.
        
        He found that women across all social classes used standard pronunciation and hyper-corrected more often than men, especially working-class men who were more attuned to covert prestige and used non-standard forms to signal a group identity
        
        Women used language to get more status as they were more socially aspirational and attuned to overt prestige at the time due to having fewer opportunities and lower social status than men
        
        After the activities when the speakers had to self report, men under-reported the use of Standard English and women over-reported the use of standard English showing the social pressure of being more overtly prestigious is higher for women.
        
        1 more item...
        
        Resistance identity - consciously doing the opposite of what society expects, in this case giving them covert prestige
- - - - Overt Prestige - Using formal language
    - - Covert Prestige - Using informal, socially-unacceptable language e.g slang and taboo