In this chapter, I examine and compare the communicative behaviour of three groups – Dance Boys, Fly Eights and Cash Money Brothers. I clarify how patterns of speech among these groups can be understood as linguistic styles and how they differ across the groups. Following Eckert (1989, 2000), I define linguistic style as a combination of a particular set of linguistic features distinguishing social groups. In explaining how styles are created, I draw on Kallmeyer and Keim (2003:30) who suggest “the construction of a communicative social style is connected with the formation of specific linguistic and communicative patterns and rules on different linguistic levels. Elements from all expressive levels are combined to form a unique expression
Do you ever think about the way you speak and why? Well, Paul Robert does an excellent job explaining why people use the dialect they use in Speech Communities. He discusses that people change their use of language throughout their lives to conform to either society or to what kind of person they want to be, or to just conform to who they need to be at a particular moment, in which I agree. People’s choice of language, including myself, are affected by many of their surroundings, such as where they live and grow up at, their peers, and a person’s work place.
Language is a very important and significant part of individuals’ life. It is considered as one of the best device of social behavior. Language is a means with the help of which people communicate and send a social message to one another. But language does have very special characteristics according to which it changes and very depending on many factors. According to the researchers there are no two people who speak identically. Their languages vary as per their geographic location, age, gender, ethnicity, social background etc. many a time, it is observed that even the members from same family speak differently due to differences in their location ( Biber & Conrad, 2014). For example, in my neighborhood, there is a difference in the ways of
Everyone has various styles of speaking and various ranges of vocabulary that they utilize depending upon with whom they speak. This concept, known as code switching, portrays an integral part of our lives in today’s society. The fact that different groups of people speak in different ways necessitates the use of code switching. One would not speak to a group of high school students in the manner that one would speak to a scholar, or speak to a prison inmate in the same regard that one would speak with the President of the United States. Speaking in standard American English and then in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), or Ebonics, portrays the most prominent use of code
Anthropologists and sociologists agree that people commonly learn communication skills in younger years specifically in “sex-separate peer groups” (Tannen 345). Young girls are typically more reserved and generally confide their feelings and ideas in smaller groups with close friends. On the contrary, boys enjoy competing for attention in larger groups. The article mentions, “boys are expected to use language to seize center stage: by exhibiting their skill, displaying their knowledge, and challenging and resisting challenges” (Tannen
● Language/ Diction: colloquial, how they speak( in a 13 year old’s point of view)
Deborah Tannen graduated from The University of California, Berkely, M.A. in 1979 with her PHD in Linguistics. She is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. Tannen has written many books where she applies her theory of Linguistics to everyday situations. Some of her books are: That’s Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationship (1986), Talking from 9 to 5: How Women’s and Men’s Conversational Styles Affect Who Gets Heard (1994), The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue(1998), and I Only Say This Because I Love You (2001).
Although Jim did learn speech it became noticeably odd to others around him as he had developed his own, unique grammatical characteristics and his poor articulation meant he didn’t acquire normal language skills (Sachs et al 1981). Bruner suggests that this was due to lack of social interaction in his learning of speech, which again highlights the importance of nurture in promoting a child’s language development.
Linguistics appears in everyday life. It is applied to speech, the different language varieties, and even social groups. Linguistics is the scientific study of the language. When we make judgments and analyze our language or other’s language, we are practicing linguistic. In an effort to learn more about the language in Louisiana, I developed a Real-World-Ready project to explore people’s reactions and initial thoughts to different dialects in Louisiana.
According to Lev Vygotsky (1978), language plays a central role in social interaction since it is the primary means for making social
This paragraph relates to the social interaction and described in the Chapter 3 about language and Chapter 5 that include group and social structure. We can see the characteristic of social interaction among persons, means response to someone behavior and can reflect the norms an values of the dominant culture and our socialization experiences within that culture (page 106). The social reality reflects a group’s power within a society and they are who define the values in that society. In Manchester we observed a diverse culture that has interaction between them and with people out of their own boundaries. That is why maintain respect to the values and norms of the American culture. In relation to the cultural variation we identify the language
Furthermore in the verbal conversation between Mitchell and Scotty, they utilize speech repertoires, which are “sets of complex language styles, behaviors, and skills…” (O’ Hair, et al., 2017, pg. 80) in the form of code switching which is how communicators exchange differing repertoires based on the context. (O’ Hair, et al., 2017). Because Mitchell and Scotty reunite in a casual situational setting- Scotty’s small bait shop- they find the incentive to engage in a relaxed and informal way called low language, which is used “in more casual or comfortable environments” (O’ Hair, et al., 2017, pg. 81). Scotty uses diction such as “we’re cool now....I’m gayer than three crawdaddies in a bucket…’cause...like...oh yeah...I just
One’s culture is an important aspect to take into account when identifying why people communicate the way they do. “Culture means shared norms, values, and beliefs related to how people live and how people communicate” (Stewart, 2002, p. 25). People learn how to communicate from the people they are raised by and spend their time with, they adapt their ways of speaking, values, possibly even their attire. Specifically, “what it means to belong to a culture is to communicate in certain ways—to use certain expressions that members of other cultures don’t use, to prefer certain kinds of meetings, to honor certain styles of speaking, to maintain certain distances, to touch in certain ways, and so on” (Stewart,
Communication within one cultural group sharing traditions and national or regional identity is often effortless. The social and cultural meanings between the same cultures in regard to communication are understood the way they are intended. When discourse happens within members of the same social groups; they will communicate, talk, discuss in similar places that all members of that culture attend or visit like bars, schools, shopping malls, community meetings, party events, the office, etc. The meaning arrived at or the knowledge and accepted truth toward an issue is more or less the consensus of a
To be believable, the way that they speak must be that of a language that such boys would be expected to use at their ages. They should make grammatical mistakes, they should use the kinds of expressions and even slang that someone from England that is a school boy would use. They should talk in incomplete sentences and sentence fragments. British slang is used throughout the many conversations the boys had. Jack, at one point in the book says.
Intentionally or intuitively, we constantly use convergence and divergence in our daily communication routine. While the process itself is automatic; the manner of not doing either does not exist, because one of the two is always being chosen. Convergence is the process of adapting ones speech style to match others they want to identify and divergence is the use of linguistic mannerisms that emphasizes a person’s differences from others. A person would be able to understand these two concepts through personal examples by comparing and contrasting the differences in each term, discussing what aspects of these communicative techniques were conscious and which were