Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Evaluative Reactions to the Language of Disadvantage 153prestige’ now associated with BEV in popular culture. The attractivenessof nonstandard dialect is not restricted to teenagers, however: there isalso the socially broader phenomenon of covert prestige.‘Covert prestige’ rests upon the related facts that the perceiveddirectness and vibrancy of nonstandard speech are understood as‘macho’ qualities and that masculinity itself is a favored quantity. Thecontinued existence of nonstandard forms and the disinclination toabandon them will clearly be strengthened if their allure crosses groupboundaries. Labov (1977, 2006) commented upon the covert-prestigephenomenon in New York, contrasting its effects with the ‘hypercorrect’usage of nonstandard speakers who may (he suggested) feel linguisticallyinsecure about ‘stigmatized’ features of their dialect, and who mayattempt higher-status speech forms, particularly in formal contexts. Infact, in settings of the greatest formality, Labov reported that his lowerclassrespondents’ use of prestige forms actually surpassed that of uppermiddle-classspeakers. Furthermore, when asked about their customarylinguistic practices, the former tended to exaggerate their use of higherstatusforms. The point of interest here, of course, is not the lack ofaccuracy of such self-reports but, rather, the psychological underpinningsthat give rise to them. 2 Of course, the downgrading of personalspeech styles that is revealed by hypercorrection rarely leads to wholesaleabandonment of maternal nonstandard dialects, and it is here thatthe more latent prestige of the dialects can be seen as a sort of counterbalance.Work in Britain has supplemented and confirmed these findings. In asummary, Trudgill (2000) notes that the masculinity of working-classspeech may derive from the tough or rugged nature of working-class life;this rests upon evidence assembled much earlier. Trudgill (1972), forinstance, had asked respondents in Norwich to indicate the pronunciationsthey usually gave to words commonly having more than onepronunciation (e.g. the word tune may be pronounced either tyōōn ortōōn, with the former being the more ‘prestigious’ variant). While Labovhad found a general tendency for respondents in New York to overreportthe use of higher-status pronunciations, Trudgill’s results indicatedthat males, both working class and middle class, often claimedto use nonstandard forms even when they did not customarily do. (Thetrans-Atlantic variation, it has been argued, might be the result of aweaker assimilation of middle-class norms among members of theEnglish working class, or to Trudgill’s more subtle analyses of sexdifferences.) It seems clear that working-class, nonstandard forms havean attraction that cuts across class boundaries, and it is this attraction that