Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Chapter 7
Style and Styling
JÜRGEN JASPERS
Introduction
Unlike what fashion magazines often imply, this chapter is about how,
on a linguistic level at least, everybody has style. In fact, there is no escaping
from style. In every word we say we creatively select linguistic, as well
as other resources, that have social meaning and thus make ourselves
available for others to see us as styling this way or that.
The fact that people engage in different ways of speaking has attracted
much attention from sociolinguists in the past decades. Initially, quantitatively
oriented sociolinguists tried to map with what frequency speakers
conventionally shifted styles in different social contexts, and consequently
showed how social hierarchies are inscribed on routine speech patterns.
But this approach only paid scant attention to exceptional and self-
conscious speech.
More recently therefore, interaction-oriented scholars have tried to
reconcile both conventional styles as well as contrived fragments of speech
as two manifestations of the same process: language users continually
employ familiar and less familiar linguistic and other meaningful tools to
(re)build their social surroundings as well as the self and other identities
that are part of it. This has brought about a signifi cant shift in interest in
the principles of styling rather than the resulting styles.
Since learning is increasingly viewed as identifying oneself with new
social practices and promises – indeed, a kind of styling – teachers and
policy makers may need to take into account that not only instructed styles
(such as standard varieties) can be a daunting social hurdle, but also styles
of instruction may become a stake in local social struggle.
The Linguistic and the Social
During my ethnographic fi eldwork in a secondary school in Antwerp,
Belgium, I once asked Mourad, one of the students I was following, how
the weather had been in Belgium, since I had just been on a brief holiday
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