Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T09:27:34.487Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Speech style and authenticity: Quantitative evidence for the performance of identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2011

Gregory R. Guy
Affiliation:
New York University
Cecelia Cutler
Affiliation:
City University of New York

Abstract

The question of what constitutes an authentic speaker, particularly with regard to African American Vernacular English (AAVE), has been the subject of some debate in sociolinguistics (Butters, 1984; Labov, 1980; Sweetland, 2002) and arises anew in the case of white hip-hop–affiliated youth (WHHs) who converge toward AAVE in their speech. This paper takes a quantitative approach to this question by examining how speech style alters the relationship between the frequencies of a variable in different linguistic environments. Guy (1991b) showed that the exponential relationship in English among rates of coronal stop deletion (CSD) in several morphological categories is systematically distorted by constraints on the surface-level phonology. Because stylistic variation appears to operate at this level, such distortion provides an internal measure of a speaker's stylistic shifting away from their neutral vernacular usage. Data on CSD deletion from WHHs who style shift toward AAVE show this kind of distortion when compared with the speech of AAVE speakers. This data provide strong internal evidence in support of the idea that some WHHs are “performing” a speech style that diverges from their unmarked style.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Alim, Samy. (2002). Street-conscious copula variation in the hip hop nation. American Speech 77(3):288304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1984). Problems in Dostoevsky's poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayley, Robert. (1994). Consonant cluster reduction in Tejano English. Language Variation and Change 6(3):303326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary. (1999). You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4):443460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butters, Ronald R. (1984). When is English ‘black English vernacular?’ Journal of English Linguistics 17:2936.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coupland, Nik. (2001). Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30:345375.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, Cecelia. (1999). Yorkville Crossing: A case study of hip hop and the language of a white middle class teenager in New York City. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4):428442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, Cecelia. (2002). Crossing over: White youth, hip-hop and African American English. Ph.D. dissertation, New York University.Google Scholar
Cutler, Cecelia. (2003a). The authentic speaker revisited: A look at ethnic perception data from white hip hoppers. Papers from New Ways of Analyzing Variation 31. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 9(2):4960.Google Scholar
Cutler, Cecelia. (2003b). Keepin' it real: White hip hoppers' discourse on language, race, and authenticity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 13(2):211233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, Cecelia. (2010). Hip-hop, white immigrant youth, and African American Vernacular English: Accommodation as an identity choice. Journal of English Linguistics 38(3):248269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):453476.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. (1980). Variation in the group and the individual: The case of final stop deletion. In Labov, William (ed.), Locating language in time and space. New York: Academic Press. 136.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. (1991a). Explanation in variable phonology: An exponential model of morphological constraints. Language Variation and Change 3(1):122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. (1991b). Contextual conditioning in variable lexical phonology. Language Variation and Change 3(3):223239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. (1992). Social and stylistic factors in variable lexical phonology. Paper presented at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation 21 conference. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R., & Boyd, Sally. (1990). The development of a morphological class. Language Variation and Change 2(1):118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hernández-Campoy, Juan Manuel, and Cutillas-Espinosa, Juan Antonio. (2010). Speaker design practices in political discourse: A case study. Language & Communication 30(4):297309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irvine, Judith, & Gal, Susan. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Kroskrity, Paul V. (ed.), Regimes of language. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Press. 3583.Google Scholar
Jacobs-Huey, Lanita. (1997). Is there an authentic African American speech community: Carla revisited. Penn Working Paper Series in Linguistics 4(1):331370.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1980). Is there a creole speech community? In Valdman, Albert & Highfield, Arnold (eds.), Theoretical orientations in creole studies. New York: Academic Press. 369388.Google Scholar
Le Page, Robert B., & Tabouret-Keller, Andrée. (1985). Acts of identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey. (2004). Going nucular: Language, politics, and culture in controversial times. New York: Public Affairs.Google Scholar
Public Enemy. Apocalypse 91. Release Date: October 1, 1991. Def Jam Records.Google Scholar
Rampton, Ben. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Rickford, John, & McNair-Knox, Faye. (1994). Addressee- and topic-influenced style shift: A quantitative sociolinguistic study. In Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward (eds.), Sociolinguistic perspectives on register. New York, Oxford University Press. 235276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rickford, John, & Rickford, Russell. (2000), Spoken soul. The story of Black English. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.Google Scholar
Sankoff, Gillian, & Blondeau, Hélène. (2007). Language change across the lifespan: /r/ in Montreal French. Language 83(3):560588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Santa Ana, Otto. (1992). Chicano English evidence for the exponential hypothesis: A variable rule pervades lexical phonology. Language Variation and Change 3(4):275289.Google Scholar
Saunders, Stephanie (producer) (2002, June 26), NAS interview. WWPR Power 105.1 FM radio.Google Scholar
Slomanson, Peter & Newman, Michael (2004). Peer group identification and variation in New York Latino English laterals. English World-Wide 25(2):199216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snider, Nastia. (2002). With a rank Southern drawl: Globalization, linguistic variation and language ideologies in the Australian country music scene. Paper presented at Linguistic Society of America Conference, San Francisco, CA.Google Scholar
Sweetland, Julie. (2002). Unexpected but authentic use of an ethnically-marked dialect. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(4):514536.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. (1974). The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Westwood, Tim. (2000). B.B.C.: The Westwood Interviews: Eminem & Dr Dre, May 6, 2000. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/artist_area/drdre/4958.shtml (accessed 8/27/2001).Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. (1969). A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro speech. Washington DC, Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt, & Fasold, Ralph. (1974). The study of social dialects in American English. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar