Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

178 Part 3: Language and Variation
abroad. Mourad immediately replied, but I failed to understand, no doubt
partly because we were walking among dozens of others in a noisy school
hall. As soon as I asked him to repeat, though, I suddenly realised I had
heard ‘shit weather’ (in Antwerp dialect). Yet, Mourad repeated his answer
and said: ‘bad weather, in your language’, in a less dialectal voice. On
another occasion, in an interview with Mourad and two of his classmates,
I had just asked in which cases they thought they would be needing
Standard Dutch, when Mourad suddenly switched into an exaggerated
Standard Dutch voice to say ‘so you are a repeater’ to Moumir, in order to
highlight the fact that the latter had just inadvertently, and to the amusement
of his classmates, given himself away as a grade repeater (see Jaspers,
2006 – I will come back to this example at the end of the chapter).
Both examples draw attention to distinctive ways of speaking. In the
fi rst, Mourad seems to have thought I did not immediately catch what he
said because of the dialectal quality of his utterance, which he seemed to
perceive as different from my own regular Dutch. Also, in addressing
Moumir in an educated, Standard Dutch voice in the second example, he
not only managed to poke fun at his classmate and friend, but also implicitly
suggested that educational success and failure often entail different
ways of speaking. But while addressee-designed vernacular-to-standard
shifts such as Mourad performs in the fi rst example have been intensely
studied as ‘style shifts’ (though admittedly, studies of style shifting have
traditionally discussed phonological and/or morphological shifts rather
than lexical ones), much sociolinguistic work has tended to ignore what
Mourad does in the second. It has, moreover, tended to avoid forging links
between styles in speaking and more popular notions of style in the social
world. Naturally, the term ‘style’ in the social world is generally related to
fashion, as in expressions such as ‘she is really stylish’ and implicitly in
pejorative utterances like ‘he wears white socks!’ and ‘that is so last
season!’. But although this popular conception of style is different from
the sociolinguist’s defi nition of it, it may be unwise to see them as unrelated
(cf. Irvine, 2001): in both cases, style is used to talk about distinctiveness
appreciated in an evaluative framework which contains other styles
(e.g. wearing other kinds of socks). An approach that attends to both the
linguistic and the social thus needs to develop a framework that can
account for popular talk about style as well as phonological differences.
Defi nition and Primary Goals of Study
If style shifts and popular talk about style are not unrelated, how can
we defi ne style? A good starting point is to say that ‘style refers to a way
of doing something’ (Coupland, 2007: 1). And since humans do a lot of
things, this can apply to practically anything, going from how we walk,
the ways we do our make-up and build houses, to the way we dress, sing,
act and indeed, the ways in which some of us teach. Usually though, when