LINGUIST

IC
PRESTIG
E
■ Reflect on three different conversations that you have recently
engaged in:
– a conversation in a public setting with someone you do not
know very well (e.g. at the shops, or on your way to school);
– a conversation with a very close friend; and
– a conversation at home with a member of your family.
How did your behavior and the structure and content of the
conversation (e.g. accent, word choice, language choice,
turn-taking and topic management) differ in each context, and
how was it influenced by the roles and identities of the people
involved in the conversations?
■ What is prestige?
■ The level of respect at which one is regarded by
others; standing
■ A person’s high standing among others; honor
or esteem
■ Widely recognized prominence, distinction or
importance
■ In sociolinguistics, prestige describes the level of
respect accorded to a language or dialect as compared
to that of other languages or dialects in a speech
community.
■ It is the degree of esteem and social value attached by
members of a speech community to certain languages,
dialects, or features of a language variety.
■ "The language of powerful social groups usually
carries linguistic prestige; and social prestige is
often granted to speakers of prestige languages
and varieties."
(Pearce, Michael. The Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies.
Routledge, 2007.)
■ According to German linguist Heinz Kloss, prestige
around language involves the following factors:
• high modernization
• international standing
• social status of those who speak it
• literary heritage
■ What do you mean by overt?
■ How about covert?
■ Overt – done or shown openly; plainly or readily
apparent, not secret or hidden
■ Covert – not openly acknowledged or displayed;
clandestine,; hidden
■ Overt prestige is acquired by those speakers who
have command of a standard dialect (or dialects)
that is socially defined as that spoken to gain
social status within the wider community; often
that of the elite.
■ “Greater prestige tends to be attached to the
notion of the standard, since it can function in
higher domains, and has a written form."
■ Covert prestige, on the other hand, is that acquired by
those speakers desiring to belong; to be considered a
member of a certain community.
■ When the need to be recognized as part of a particular
group becomes the deciding social factor, success is
defined by the amount of “success” that can be achieved
within a group vs. without.
 "In the case of overt prestige, the social valuation
lies in a unified, widely accepted set of social norms,
whereas with covert prestige the positive social
significance lies in the local culture of social relations.
It is, therefore, possible for a socially stigmatized
variant in one setting to have covert prestige in
another."
(Finegan, Edward, and John R. Rickford. Language in the USA:
Themes for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press, 2006.)
Examples
■ "A standard dialect speaker of English who intentionally
switches the use of social markers such as ain't and he
don't is said to seek covert prestige. Such prestige is
'covert' because its elicitation will often not, if successful,
be consciously noted."
■ "Deliberate (as opposed to instinctive) use of taboo
words..., usage which tends to characterize male more
than female speech, may also seek covert prestige, but the
strength of these as social markers makes this more
difficult to achieve."
■ One will ordinarily say It's me to the question Who is
it? asked by a familiar interlocutor, but, when asked the
same question by one from whom one seeks prestige, the
same speaker may say It is I.
■ Similarly, except after prepositions Americans
ordinarily say who in preference to whom: Who did you
ask?, not Whom did you ask? but in some
circumstances, the latter may be substituted. Such
usage is said to seek overt prestige because the often
dubious prestige one gets from such usage is ordinarily
consciously noted, hence 'overt.' (Hudson, Grover. Essential
Introductory Linguistics. Blackwell Publishers, 1999.)
■ Native English speakers often associate Yorkshire
English accents with being trustworthy and
hardworking. Therefore, actors with these voices are
hired to be the voice of companies who want to
promote these values.
■ The terms and conditions of prestige assigned to a
language variety are subject to change depending on
speaker, situation and context.
■ A dialect or variety which is considered prestigious in
one context will not carry the same status in another.
The relative status of language varies according to
audience, situation and other contextual elements such
as geographic location.
■ So how does prestige affect your language use?
■ A child who adopts the language of the upper class may
lose the respect and affection of his friend's respect and
even that of his family. So he cannot give up all the forms
of his local group. He will use a mixture of both the
forms of language. He will select positive images of both
classes. But he gives preferences to upper-class (it is
known as overt prestige) and the use of selected local
forms (covert prestige).
The Social Stratification of /r/ in New
York City Department Stores – William Labov
■ A sociolinguistic study of New York City from a random
sample of the Lower East Side
■ Preliminary investigations were conducted which included
70 individuals interviews and many anonymous
observations in public places which led to the definition of
the major phonological variable which were to be studied.
– The presence and absence of consonantal /r/ in
postvocalic position in car, card, four, fourth, etc.
What empirical tests were carried out on
the basis of exploratory interviews?
■ The linguistic variable (r) is a social
differentiator in all levels of New York City
speech
■ Rapid and anonymous speech events could be
used as the basis for a systematic study of
language
■ Social stratification pervaded in the the life of
the city. The normal workings of the society
have produced systematic differences between
certain institutions or people, and these
differentiated forms have been ranked in status
or prestige by general agreement.
■ Stratification within a single occupational group
– the sales people of large department stores in
Manhattan
What is social stratification?

■ It is the product of social differentiation and

■ If any two subgroups of News York City

■ Advertisement
■ Prices of goods advertised
■ Physical plant of the stores
What were the stratifying effect upon the
employees of these stores?
■ Prestige of the store
■ Working conditions
■ He asked the shop assistants where the locations of the
department stores which he knows are in the fourth
floor. He also added a factor by pretending that he did
not hear them so the assistants will repeat saying the
word to see if there is a change in their pronunciation.
■ Excuse me, where are the women’s shoes?
■ Fourth floor.
■ Excuse me?
■ Fourth floor.
Findings
■ The sales assistants from Saks used the /r/ sound
most, showing that the current overt prestige
form in New York was to pronounce the /r/.
■ Those from S. Klein’s used it least as they would
have used more covert prestige, so they would
not have pronounced the /r/ sound, and said an
utterance along the lines of ‘flaw.’
■ Those from Macy’s showed the greatest upward
shift of pronouncing ‘floor’ rather than ‘flaw’
when they were asked to repeat the utterance.
Conclusion
■ Labov found that the pronunciation of /r/
increased as the class of the store increased, as
well as an increase of /r/ in careful speech. The
more careful the speech was the more likely the
/r/ was pronounced.
■ The overuse of /r/, known as hypercorrection,
was most common in the lower middle class
(Macy’s), as they were most likely to be aware
of which speech forms were ‘classy’ and would
use there forms in careful speech to improve
prestige and appear to belong to the higher
middle class.
■ Hypercorrectness was found to be the strongest
in the language conscious middle class women,
showing that overt prestige seemed more
common in women than in men.
Prestige, Status, and Function
■ The essential difference between prestige, function,
and status is the difference between past, present, and
future.
■ The prestige of a language depends on its record, or
what people think its record to have been. The function
of a language is what people actually do with it. The
status of a language depends on what people can do
with it, its potential.
■ Status, therefore, is the sum total of what you can do
with a language--legally, culturally, economically,
politically and, of course, demographically.
■ Classical Latin has had a lot of prestige but it has
few functions. Swahili has a lot of functions, but
little prestige. Irish Gaelic has status, official
status, but few exclusive functions.
Standard and Prestige
■ The standard variety or simply the standard of a
language is the variety which enjoys the highest status
and the highest prestige in a speech community.
■ ‘Prestige’ is the social value which is ascribed to a
linguistic variety. A prestigious variety is one that is
socially widely accepted and most highly valued.
■ The standard variety of a language is generally codified,
i.e. written down.
■ This prestigious, codified variety becomes the
legitimized standard.
■ The language as a whole is thus regularized and
standardized, whereas varieties with less prestige
become marginalized.
■ The standard is usually the institutionalized variety of a
language. That is, it is used for official purposes (law,
politics…) and in the media.
■ Although other varieties of a language may be regarded
as less prestigious than the standard, they are not
inferior to the standard, neither are they of less quality.
Usually, one variety has become the standard because of
various external, non-linguistic reasons (e.g. political,
social or historical circumstances).
■ The term ‘Standard English’ resists easy definition.
English is spoken in many countries all over the world.
In all English-speaking countries, different local
standards have emerged and can be distinguished.
They exist alongside British Standard English and
American Standard English.
■ Other than the standard variety of a language, dialects
are often stigmatized. They are regarded in a rather
negative way as deviant cases of speech and are
accredited with low prestige. Labels of ‘good’ and ‘bad’
English reflect the general attitude towards standard and
non-standard varieties of the English language.
■ ‘Prestige’, however, is not entirely equal to
‘Standard’. In fact, any language variety, be it
standard or non-standard, can have prestige
among its speakers.
Observer’s Paradox
■ This is a sociolinguistic term which was
introduced by Labov (1972) who noted that
“the aim of linguistic research in the
community must be to find out how people
talk when they are not being systematically
observed; yet we can only obtain this data by
systematic observation.”
■ The observer’s paradox is also known as the
Hawthorne effect in social sciences.
■ Observer’s paradox as a problem lies in the process of
investigating language style and usage among
individuals through speech collection. In the process, a
sociolinguist sets out to account in the best possible
way about the variations occurring between what
people say against what they believe they say.
Interviewees perceive that their intelligence is being
sort, and hence they alter their speech to suit these
notions.
■ As a result, the sociolinguist as a field expert
faces the problem of non-reality. He cannot
discern whether what the interviewee is real or
not hence the idea of unknowable. The
interviewee’s speech performance is influenced
by the presence of the interviewer hence
observer’s paradox (Crowley, 2007).
What influences the information
collected?
■ Social class
■ Bilingual social groups
■ Age
■ Gender
■ Education
■ Cultures of the informant
■ Social Class
■ In cases where the two are of unequal status, the
informant takes the higher side and thus this influences
the information collected. This results to information
that reflects self-importance or even looks down effect
unto the interlocutor hence any attempt to analyze the
data results to wrong conclusions (Stockwell and
Trask, 2007).
■ Bilingual Social Groups
■ In such social groups, it is very difficult to
maintain an interactional conversation between
two people due to the process of code switching.
Informants keep on switching to the other codes
available hence this becomes a challenge to the
smooth flow of the desired speech language.
■ At times, both the interlocutor and informant are
of the same social group and ethnicity. In this
case, code switching is influenced by the need to
fulfil the cultural demands of politeness hence
promoting code switching. Again this problem is
aggravated by the problem of status equality
between the two persons (Wei, 1994).
■ Age
■ The informants have their own views about age. If
an interlocutor is of a lower age than the
informant, chances of false linguistic data
collected are high. This is even compounded by
issues in gender variations.
■ Gender
■ The informants may think that the interlocutor is
interested in studying their knowledge hence
they may give misleading data that result to
flawed analysis of the language in the social
context (Crowley, 2007).
■ Education
■ The education level of the informant and that of
the interlocutor may at times be very different
hence promoting a situation where the informant’s
responses are impacted greatly.
■ The interlocutor at the same time may despise an
informant who has very low levels of education.
This may create an unnatural relationship
between the two.
■ Cultures of the Informant
■ In this case, the informant may find it difficult to
interview a culture that is superior just as it
would be to maintain professional equality when
dealing with one that is lower than his (Aarts,
and McMahon, 2006).
■ This problem is seen in the context of social
relationship or rapport that the interlocutor must
create in order to set out a conversational setting
for effective collection of data (Crowley, 2007).
Pair Work
■ Record a friend or any person of your choice telling a
story from their own personal experience (i.e.,
something interesting that has happened to them) first
to an adult, and then to a child of about five (5) years
old who is the same gender as the adult. Note any
differences in the vocabulary chosen and the
grammatical patterns used in the different contexts.
Account for the differences in style by considering the
characteristics of the different people they were talking
to.
■ A4, Verdana, double-spaced
■ Attach the transcript of the recorded
conversation.
■ Create an appropriate title to your written output.