Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

180 Part 3: Language and Variation
own ways of doing, only to be startled when something or someone
confronts us with our own style and shocks us out of our perceptual habit,
as also Mourad did in his recast above, or as might befall a tough female
CEO when confronted with gossip among her male staff about her ‘unsexy’
behaviour.
Clearly, given all this, it is fair to say we are surrounded by an immense
variety of ways of doing and thus live in a thoroughly styled world. An
important consequence of living in such a world is that one cannot ‘not
style’: everything we do will unequivocally be interpreted and evaluated by
others as a certain way of doing things as compared to other ways of doing.
In everything we do we make ourselves available for others to see us as styling
this way or that: there is no ‘unstyled’ hair, ‘unstyled’ clothing, and
indeed there is no such thing as ‘unstyled’ language or ‘non-social’ language
(cf. Blommaert, 2005: 10). Every speaking act can be seen as a pulling together
of different meaningful linguistic resources, making a temporary edifi ce, so
to say, of different linguistic bricks. This is always done in combination with
selecting other meaningful, but non-linguistic elements. Although this
chapter will mainly focus on linguistic styling, it will emphasise that linguistic
features are only some of the meaningful resources we have at our
disposal in daily life for styling, and are usually combined with and infl uenced
by non-linguistic resources (producing certain vowels differently
may combine with long hair, smoking and hanging out at specifi c places at
school, cf. Eckert, 2000). As we will see at the end of this chapter, styles are
also part of our learning process: an indispensable part of our social competence
is to learn about the value of linguistic elements and to recognise, act
upon and use several linguistic styles. Which styles speakers learn, however,
depends in some measure on their interest and on the social position
(and the related access to particular styles) they occupy.
Finally, ‘styling’ may be said to relate to ‘style’ as speaking does to
speech. Speech and style are then the products, or the sediment, of the
preceding interaction; the interaction itself, in turn, may be seen as
‘styling/speaking-in-action’. A number of current authors have also identifi
ed ‘stylisations’, which have come to be viewed as exceptional, unexpected
and spectacular acts of styling designed to attract attention and
invite others to decipher the special effect they create in the situation-onhand
(Coupland, 2001; Rampton, 2001a, 2006).
In view of the above, the primary goals of the study of style and styling
may up to this point be summarisd as follows:
(1) What linguistic and non-linguistic ways of doing exist in specifi c
communities, and how are they related to the available battery of
resources?
(2) How are these ways of doing related to the meaningful system that participants
in these communities orient to, reproduce or deviate from?