Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Style and Styling 191
they nearly always reproduce them; and while they are doing that, they
are always unavoidably visible for others as (dis)affi liating with these
habits, and subsequently as producing an appropriate or inappropriate
identity. Every local happening is thus unavoidably related to, and is seen
as informed by an awareness of, established and widespread social patterns
and traditions (cf. Rampton, 1995a: 304ff.). From a social constructionist
point of view then, social norms are neither a set of predefi ned
rules anymore nor an internalised socialisation programme, but the daily
products of face-to-face interaction that also depend on this face-to-face
interaction for their reproduction. Note that in this perspective normative
behaviour is still creative, since it is seen as involving the construction of
normative behaviour.
Although social constructionism does not really theorise beyond the
idea that people use language to construct identities and relations, it may
be assumed that it also applies to the form of language, namely that all
language use can similarly be viewed as a question of (dis)affi liating oneself,
or, as a matter of styling in relation to established linguistic routines.
These routines may concern the use of the voice (pitch, tone, articulation),
and lexical, grammatical and interactional choice trends, ‘the repetition of
which contributes to the construction of a “congealed” social and personal
identity for the speaker’ (Cameron, 1995: 17). Speaking is not merely acting
out a linguistic programme or following rules, but at every moment actively
and creatively selecting from a range of available linguistic resources that
have social meanings to re-build one’s social world and all the relations it
contains – a creative process for which one is subsequently held accountable
as to how and if one has done that. In this way, ‘[s]tyle is at the same
time an individual and communal endeavour’ (Eckert, 2000: 41; Schilling-
Estes, 2002: 376). Additionally, if people are seen constantly to recreate their
social and linguistic environment, this puts into perspective the ‘authentic’
quality of speech. Its routine production may make it seem as if it is a fi xed
part of our nature, but all speech is constructed, styled to the occasion. And
if this is the case, Coupland indicates, also well-known concepts such as a
‘dialect’ have to be looked at with different eyes, rather than mere variation,
dialect styles have to be seen as a form of social action, that is as
instances of ‘styling place’ or constructing a local identity (2007: 121–125).
As already indicated, even if routines pull most actors back into line, it
is possible to deviate, and people also do. Certain (linguistic and other)
deviations can even come to be cherished, recognised and named (talking
like a Valley girl or a hip-hopper, being a burnout at school). But they may
also fade away (‘Mods’, ‘Teddy boys’, ‘punks’) when the actions that constitute
them are not repeated anymore. In sum, whereas variationist
sociolinguistics ‘says that how you act depends on who you are; [social
constructionism] says that who you are (and are taken to be) depends on
how you act’ (Cameron, 1995: 15; see also Norton, this volume).