Penelope Eckert

New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research

Gendered linguistic practices emerge as people engage in social practices that construct them not only as girls or boys, women or men ‐ but also as, e.g., Asian American or heterosexually active. Adequate generalizations about gendered language use and explanations of such generalizations require understanding the place of particular linguistic practices in the life of what Lave & Wenger 1991 and Wenger 1998 call a Community of Practice: a group whose joint engagement in some activity or enterprise is sufficiently intensive to give rise over time to a repertoire of shared practices. Eckert’s ethnographic /sociolinguistic work (1989, 1999) in preadolescent and adolescent communities of practice illustrates ways in which gender and other aspects of identity are co-constructed. We use these and other sociolinguistic data to suggest some of the many different kinds of generalizations, emerging from studies of language and gender, that look to communities of practice. (Community of Practice, gender, variation, social practice, local meaning, ethnographic sociolinguistics, identity construction) At lunchtime in the spring of 1997, in an ethnically very heterogeneous junior high school in northern California, a crowd of Asian-American kids hangs out in a spot that is generally known in the school as “Asian Wall.” Girls stand around in their high platform shoes, skinny bell-bottoms, and very small T-shirts, with hips cocked. As they toss their heads, their long sleek black hair (in some cases tinted brown) swishes across their waists, the slimness of which is emphasized by shiny belts. Some of them talk to, some lean on, quiet-demeanored boys with Language in Society28, 185‐201. Printed in the United States of America

Where do ethnolects stop

The paper discusses the complex role of ethnicity in the construction of a peer-based social order in preadolescence, and argues that the indexical value of “ethnic” variables is constructed among, rather than simply within, ethnic groups, and hence incorporates concerns that span ethnic boundaries. In Northern California, white Anglo speech is showing a split in /ae/ as it raises before nasals and backs elsewhere, while Chicano speakers commonly back both classes of /ae/. Based on ethnography in two Northern California elementary schools, this paper shows that the Chicano pattern does not simply index ethnicity, but indexes place in the peer-based social order as well, and as such is available to speakers regardless of ethnicity.

Cooperative competition in adolescent “girl talk”

Differences between male and female participation in speech events are based in differences in gender roles in society as a whole. Fruitful discussion of such differences, therefore, must account for the function of male and female interaction within a social theoretical framework. Such an approach is taken here to girl talk, a typically female speech event involving long and detailed personal discussions about people, norms, and beliefs. It is argued that the function of girl talk derives from the place of females in society, particularly as a function of the domestication of female labor. Deprived of direct power, females are constrained to focus on the development of personal influence. Thus constrained to define themselves, not in terms of individual accomplishments, but in terms of their overall character, females need to explore and negotiate the norms that govern their behavior and define this character. Girl talk is a speech event that provides females with the means to negotiate these norms and t...

Beyond the Statistics of Adolescent Smoking.

Statistical studies can identify the demographic characteristics of the adolescent smoking population but cannot reveal how clusters of demographic categories combine in the culture of the community to form salient social categories, or how social processes link these categories to smoking and smoking-related behavior. Because smoking and smoking-related behavior function as a key social symbol, anti-smoking campaigns that are based on an inaccurate understanding of the social context in which smoking occurs can reinforce this behavior. Participant observation in a suburban high school suggests that adolescents begin smoking as part of a complex symbolic process growing out of the process of social differentiation between future members of the working class on the one hand and the middle class on the other. It points out inadequacies in two existing anti-smoking programs in the schools that result from ignoring the social dynamics of smoking.

New ways of analyzing sound change

The three dialects of English, W. Labov a test for mixed rules, D. Sankoff and P. Rousseau the development of ME i in England - a study in dynamic dialectology, M. Ogura, W. S. -Y. Wang and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza the socio-politics of literacy - new methods in old English dialectology, T. Toon changing realizations of A in (a)tion in relation to the front a back a opposition in Quebec French, W. Kemp and M. Yaeger-Dror burnouts vs. rednecks- the effects of group membership on the phonemic system, T. Habick social polarization and the choice of linguistic variants, P. Eckert the impact of the Ozark drawl - its role in the shift of the diphthong /ey/, C. C. Mock ethnic boundaries in linguistic variation, R. Knack.

Language And Adolescent Peer Groups

This article focuses on the use of linguistic resources from the perspective of the creation and maintenance of adolescent groups and categories, and specifically on the use of aspects of verbal style in the creation and maintenance of distinctiveness. It explores the use of a variety of types of linguistic resources, phonological and grammatical variation, lexical innovation, language crossing, and interactive style. It shows how oppositions with which the group defines itself generally also serve as organizing principles within the group, accounting not only for intergroup but for intragroup differences in language use.

LANGUAGE AND POWER IN THE PREADOLESCENT HETEROSEXUAL MARKET

This article locates variation in the social practice of a preadolescent cohort as it establishes an integrated status system in the move toward adolescence. Based in an emerging heterosexual market, the status system links gender with heterosexuality and power. It is argued that the emergence of the common female lead in sound change is located in this social moment, as the heterosexual market transforms gender relations, redefining gender around heterosexuality. Heterosexual speech must be studied as an accomplishment and in the context of the power relations within which sexual categories are constructed.

The Problem with Binaries: Coding for Gender and Sexuality

Gender has emerged as the primary social constraint in variation, but the complexities of correlations with a gender binary make it clear that gender must be examined as it interacts with other social constraints (e.g. class). Recent interest in sexuality as a social variable has emerged similarly to that found in studies of gender, with a problematic focus on a binary based on gender choice of sexual partner. This paper examines the problems with the binary treatment of gender and sexuality in variation studies, and considers the consequences and options for the coding and use of large corpora.

Variation, meaning and social change

Introduction The perspective that I will develop in these pages, what has come to be referred to as the “Third Wave” approach to variation, takes as basic that the meaningfulness of sociolinguistic variation is not incidental, not a by-product of social stratification, but a design feature of language. Sociolinguistic variation constitutes a system of signs that enables the nonpropositional expression of social concerns as they unfold in interaction. It allows people to say things without putting them into words, making it essential to social life and part of the pragmatics that link speech to the wider social system. I will argue further that language is not just a system that happens to change, but a system whose change is central to its semiotic function. Variation is a system of signs that enact a continually changing social world, and it is the potential for change in the meanings of these signs that makes language viable for human life. This perspective appears to conflict with some of the basic tenets of the view of variation that emerged from work in the First Wave and that endure in much current work in variation. To some extent, this is because the First Wave grew out of the structuralist study of sound change and is primarily concerned with presocial cognitive forces giving rise to change and with macrosocial patterns of variation as structuring the regular social contact that accounts for the spread of change. This limits the view of social meaning to forces deriving from the macrostructure of society, hence external to language. My argument will be that social meaning in variation is an integral part of language and that macrosocial patterns of variation are at once the product of, and a constraint on, a complex system of meaning. Three waves real quick The First Wave of survey studies found a robust and repeated pattern of variation correlating with macrosociological categories, showing that change enters communities at the lower end of the socioeconomic hierarchy, and spreads upward. According to the model that emerged in the First Wave, sound change is presocial, originating in the most unconscious and systematic reaches of the speakers linguistic system and emerging in the speakers most unmonitored speech, the vernacular.

Sociophonetics and Sexuality: Toward a Symbiosis of Sociolinguistics and Laboratory Phonology

In recent years, interest in variation has grown well beyond sociolinguistics, with benefits on all sides. the field of sociophonetics now brings together communities of people asking quite different questions about phonetic and phonological variation, as laboratory phoneticians and sociolinguists bring distinct theoretical and methodological expertise and concerns to the table. this special issue is based on a panel on sociolinguistic variation and sexuality organized by the Committee on the Status of Women in linguistics at the 2010 annual meeting of the linguistics Society of American (lSA). the purpose of the panel was to speed up the emerging collaboration among researchers from phonetics and from sociolinguistics who are working on issues of sexuality, as well as to inform the lSA membership of important issues raised in the study of sexuality. particularly important in this enterprise is bringing together the more complex models of social variation that have been developed in recent years in the study of sociolinguistic variation with the phonetic and experimental advances of laboratory phonetics. to the extent that researchers are squarely planted in their own subdisciplines, each tends to use fairly two-dimensional representations of the other. the ubiquitous F1-F2 vowel plot that dominates work in sociolinguistics gets at a very small dimension of the phonetic signals that even individual vowels bring to the stylistic table. Similarly, two-dimensional categories such as male or female, gay or straight, offer very blunt social-analytical instruments. this may caricature the work done in this field, but we do so in order to emphasize the importance of bringing together the richness of phonetic and social analysis in any sociophonetic study. experimental studies of speech perception and field studies of production provide important complementary methods and can be most productively done iteratively and in close consultation. As a long-term goal, we seek to bring together theoretical developments in social constructionist approaches to sexuality; advances in the development of cognitive models that incorporate both linguistic and social information; and methodologi-