Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Style and Styling 193
also between different communities and aggregates of communities. So,
communities of practice do not stand in isolation, but need to be viewed
as part of a wider framework where they stand in a hierarchical relation
and are evaluated in terms of that hierarchy. In this framework, certain
communities may wish to pursue their difference from (what they see as)
other communities, a reason why it is not very helpful to study style in
isolation: without a ‘standard’ variety, there is no ‘vernacular’, and vice
versa (Coupland, 2007: 21).
Third, not only practices but also perceptions have become an indispensable
object of study. More in particular, practices and perceptions are
regarded as inextricably bound up with each other. This means that
social actors are viewed as the owners of images and understandings
regarding the quality, function, status or ‘taste’ of particular forms and
linguistic varieties, as well as of their relation to specifi c social groups
and communities (cf. Blommaert, 2005; Duranti, 1999). A certain way of
doing something may, for example, be evaluated as aloof, female, chic or
tough. These images and understandings subsequently guide people in
their communicative behaviour and lead to practices that mostly reproduce
these images and understandings, which then again channel subsequent
action (Calvet, 2006). Indeed, if sounding ‘posh’ (more precisely,
what you understand as being ‘posh’) is something you wish to avoid,
this will often make you want to draw on linguistic resources that steer
clear of a possible interpretation by others that you speak ‘posh’; you
may even mock some of your friends if you fi nd their speech verges on
‘posh’. In contrast, speakers may know of regular stylings (hip hop,
gothic) that they fi nd appealing for several reasons (because they evoke
images of masculinity, rebelliousness, etc.). Consequently, they might
adorn themselves with some of the sartorial building blocks the style is
regularly constructed with as well as appropriate its ‘voice’ and accompanying
linguistic resources (verb infl ections, specifi c words, pronunciation).
In this frame, many researchers from a variety of linguistic
subdisciplines have elucidated different kinds of such self- and otherstyling
(see, among others, Bucholtz, 1999; Cameron, 2000; Cameron &
Kulick, 2003; Coupland, 2007; Cutler, 1999, 2008; Eckert, 2000, 2008;
Pennycook, this volume; Pujolar, 2001; Rampton, 1995a, 1999, 2006; and
see Section 5 in this volume).
As said above, these images and understandings depend in some measure
on one’s own social position, interest and access to practices (Irvine,
2001: 23–24), and they are shaped by and interact with ideologised representations
of language and society that legitimise the existing social order.
In the same way as norms therefore, also images of language (such as
‘dialect is beautiful/ugly’) can be the sites of confl ict. But the insight that
practices and socially positioned perceptions mutually inform each other
has also had its effect on sociolinguistics as a scientifi c discipline. If