Language, Gender, and Power in Fraternity Men's Discourse

In language and gender research, it has been noted that the fact that men hold power in society should be an important consideration when analyzing the differences between women’s and men’s language. But it has not been shown exactly how the power of men affects their speech. This study examines how members of a community of men use language, and the role of power in that language use. I investigate how the member’s identities as men affect their language use and how they actively employ language to create identities. All the men create powerful identities through language using the same general process; however, the specific linguistic manifestation of power differs from speaker to speaker, situation to situation, and even moment to moment. The general sociolinguistic process the men use to create powerful identities is role indexing: They index community- or culturally-based roles understood to be powerful (i.e., capable of affecting other people’s actions through social alignment) by using linguistic forms and strategies identified with these roles in the community and culture. The community studied is an undergraduate fraternity (and all-male social club) at a university in the United States. The fraternity men construct powerful identities because the ideology of their community organizes the world into competitive hierarchies. Power for the men is therefore a role at the top of a hierarchy. This local ideology reflects the ideology of the larger culture—hegemonic masculinity—which values some kinds of identities more than others. Men’s power is thus a role at the top of a hierarchy; however, men identify with roles in different hierarchies, leading them to construct different kinds of powerful identities. I suggest how power works in the men’s language in discourse, and how the same processes lead to variation patterns in their language-use system. Most importantly, variants have general, abstract meanings when considered globally; it is only when used in concert with other linguistic forms and strategies, and other social signaling systems, that specific meanings become clear

Language Style as Identity Construction: A Footing and Framing Approach

Despite the prevalence of conceptualizations of style shifting as a reactive phenomenon, conditioned by contextual factors such as formality and audience, style shifting increasingly has come to be viewed as a proactive phenomenon which speakers freely use to shape and re-shape context, as well as their personal and interpersonal identities (e.g. California Style Collective 1993, Coupland forthcoming). In this presentation, we suggest that an explanation for style shifting based on the interactional sociolinguistic notions of footing and frame indexing (e.g. Goffman 1981, Tannen and Wallat 1993) provides a neat encapsulation of some of the central tenets of these more proactive approaches, while at the same time addressing their limitations

Dude

Older adults, baffled by the new forms of language that regularly appear in youth cultures, frequently characterize young people’s language as “inarticulate,” and then provide examples that illustrate the specific forms of linguistic mayhem performed by “young people nowadays.” For American teenagers, these examples usually include the discourse marker like, rising final intonation on declaratives, and the address term dude, which is cited as an example of the inarticulateness of young men in particular. This stereotype views the use of dude as unconstrained – a sign of inexpressiveness in which one word is used for any and all utterances. These kinds of stereotypes, of course, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the functions and meanings of these linguistic forms. As analyses of like and rising intonation have shown these forms are constrained in use and elegantly expressive in meaning. Dude is no exception. In this article I outline the patterns of use for dude, and its functions and meanings in interaction. I provide some explanations for its rise in use, particularly among young men, in the early 1980s, and for its continued popularity since then

The ‘Gay Voice’ and ‘Brospeak’: Towards a Systematic Model of Stance

Taking Elinor Ochs’s (1992) notion of indirect indexicality as a starting point, this chapter explores the significance of stance for studies of sexuality. Stance helps organize identity registers and is thus central in the creation and display of sexuality. After defining stance and reviewing ways in which it has been used in studies of language and sexuality, the chapter analyzes representations of two sexual identity registers: a ‘gay voice’ homosexual identity and a ‘brospeak’ heterosexual identity. The analysis reveals how these representations are based on different configurations of stances that in turn constitute differentially enregistered personae or characterological figures. The chapter concludes with an outline of the ways that the concept of stance may be used in further research, especially with respect to the analysis of sexuality in interaction

Recasting Language and Masculinities in the Age of Desire

In this paper I reconsider a piece of data originally analyzed in Kiesling (2001), in light of a number of theoretical developments in language and gender, language and sexuality, and gender/masculinities studies more widely. Specifically, I explore how we can break down and be more specific about the cultural conception of hegemonic masculinity (as discussed by Connell, 1995) by subdividing it into a set of separate, interacting cultural discourses. These discourses set up the essentialized and naturalized oppositions characteristic of gender, and thus hegemonic masculinity. Another new development in the field of language and gender is the discussion of desire as a theoretical construct by Cameron and Kulick (2003). I suggest that another kind of desire that we should think about (in addition to sexual desire) is ontological desirethe desire to have or emulate qualities of a particular identity to create an identity. This kind of desire helps us understand language and masculinities because it tells us more about the processes of identification and the motivations for them

Changes to zooplankton community structure following colonization of a small lake by Leptodora kindti

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109963/1/lno2004494part21239.pd

Enclave, endangered, or simply stable? Explaining the Western Pennsylvania vowel system.

One generalization that can be made about North American dialects of English is that they are changing, in some cases rapidly (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006:304). Also according to the Atlas of North American English (ANAE), however, the Western Pennsylvania (WPA) variety is an exception, relatively stable against a backdrop of dramatic change occurring nearby. Sociolinguists are primarily interested in change, so we have tended to pay relatively little attention to its counterpart. But even if stability appears to be the exception rather than the rule in the history of spoken language, a full account of language variation and change requires exploring the factors that favor stability as well as those that drive change. This study first tests ANAE’s claim about the the stability of the WPA variety, using a much larger dataset. Analysis of vowel formant measures from sociolinguistic interviews with 52 Anglo-American speakers from the Pittsburgh area generally confirms ANAE’s findings both about the quality of WPA vowels and about their stability across apparent time, which is causing this variety to become increasingly different from those of neigboring dialect areas. To account for this, we propose demographic reasons including population loss and the lack of large-scale in-migration, as well as ideological reasons including geographic exceptionalism that leads WPA speakers not to expect their accent to be like others’. Stability is often discussed in the context of enclave and/or endangered dialects, where competition from other varieties and the lack of a critical mass of speakers means that variation may arise or acquire social meaning (eg. Dorian 1989). Since WPA is neither an enclave nor endangered, at least in the short term, our study suggests more generally that we need to think about other contexts for stability