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The people's critical linguistics: Using archival data to investigate responses to linguistic informalisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2020

Joe Spencer-Bennett
Joe Spencer-Bennett*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham, UK
*
Address for correspondence: Joe Spencer-Bennett, English Language and Linguistics, Frankland Building, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom[email protected]
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Abstract

Arguments about the sociopolitical significance of the informalisation of English have been central to the critical study of language in society since the 1980s. This article demonstrates that informalisation was also a key concern of ordinary users of British English in the 1980s. Correspondents in the British Mass Observation Project articulated judgements of informalisation that were in many ways continuous with those of academic linguists. The article argues that such critical arguments about language were part of a ‘structure of feeling’ (Raymond Williams) of late twentieth-century Britain. This suggests a rethinking of ordinary language users’ relations to their linguistic experience, not as unthinkingly ‘prescriptivist’, nor as merely ‘commonsensical’, but as exhibiting a nuance which academic linguists would do well to engage with more fully. The article makes the case for the use of social-historical archives in investigations of metalanguage, as a means by which the social significance of language can be better understood. (Critical linguistics, folk linguistics, terms of address, informalisation, synthetic personalisation, prescriptivism)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 283 - 304
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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