social identities and development as well as ways of integrating the home language into instruction in order to foster both learning and community building.
Other lines of research investigate the use of AAVE in various other institutions such as churches (DeBose 2015) and courtrooms (Rickford and King 2016; Slobe 2016), again addressing issues of community and social network as well as inequalities and identities.
The use of AAVE in the media has also become an important line of research, both because the use of the dialect in this public space has increased and because sociolinguistics are increasingly tuned in to the importance of all types of media use as part of our linguistic performances. These studies look at features of AAVE and how they are used in public performances such as hip‐hop music (Cutler 2008, 2010) or Twitter (Jones 2015). The occurrence of Mock AAVE (Smokoski 2016) or what has been called CRAAVE (cross‐race African American Vernacular English) by Bucholtz (1999) is also addressed, showing that AAVE is used to construct specific types of identities, drawing on essentialized ideas about violent and physically tough Black masculinity, as in Bucholtz’s work, or Black women as ‘fierce’ and ‘sassy,’ as in a study on the use of AAVE by gay British men (Ilbury 2020). As we will discuss further in chapter 7, the use of particular linguistic features is often part of stances and the construction of identities in interaction.
This brief overview of research on AAVE has raised two broad issues that we will continue to deal with throughout this text. First, language varieties are often associated with particular social groups and as such are used to construct the social identities of speakers. Second, these associations are often essentialized and used to discriminate. In the following section, we will look at the processes through which linguistic features acquire social meanings.
Styles and Indexes: The Social Meanings of Linguistic Forms
In addition to different regional and social dialects, there are also features of language which are linked to what has been called style. Recent research has investigated the question of how certain linguistic features become ideologically linked to particular varieties, and also how these features and varieties are used to create stances and construct social identities. While we will touch on this last point, this line of research will be developed more in chapter 7; our focus in this section is a discussion of the concepts involved in the study of the social meanings of linguistic forms.
A key concept in the understanding of stylistic variation is that of indexicality. An indexical relationship between a sign and its meaning develops through co‐occurrence. The expression in English when there’s smoke there’s fire illustrates this. This phrase is usually used to mean that if there are rumors or accusations of wrongdoing, then they are probably true – the ‘smoke’ (rumors) would not appear if there was not ‘fire’ (actual wrongdoings). Thus smoke indexes fire. Another way of expressing indexical relationships is to say that an index ‘points to’ a particular entity or meaning. To use another nonlinguistic example, the occurrence of thunder indexes a storm – thus for instance in theater, the sound of thunder can be used to index (i.e., evoke for the audience) the presence of a storm (Johnstone 2016).
How is this relevant for language? Particular linguistic features can come to index speech styles, and these styles are linked to social identity categories. For instance, because the word pop to denote a soft drink such as Coke or 7‐Up is heard in certain regions of the US, while soda is used in others, the use of pop has come to evoke regional belonging (in the Midwestern US). This is true of all types of linguistic features, not just the lexicon – pronunciation, intonation, grammatical structures, or pragmatic and discourse strategies. We form associations between certain ways of speaking and the personas and social identities of language users.
However, it is important to note that exactly what social meanings are associated with particular ways of speaking may vary. This is exemplified in research on a style called ‘Mock White Girl’ (Slobe 2018). In all of the examples given, there are particular linguistic features which are used in all of the different Mock White Girl performances. One of these is uptalk, or raised intonation at the end of statements, another is the use of like as a quotative (e.g., I was like, no way!) or focus particle (e.g., He was like, old). While these features are often linked to particular personal characteristics (being blonde, liking Starbucks), the broader social meaning of being a White girl varies widely. In one context, the Mock White Girl features are used to link these ways of speaking to a childish person, in another to a perpetuator of everyday racism and microaggressions toward women of color, and in a third to trivialize the concerns of White girls. Thus while the linguistic features consistently index a social category, the ideological stance toward that category – and thus the social meaning of the use of the linguistic style – may vary. It should further be noted that these features have not been shown to be uniquely used by White females; thus the indexicality of these features is based on stereotyping.
This process of stereotypes of the speech of particular social groups is also addressed in recent work on raciolinguistics (Alim et al. 2016; Rosa 2016; Rosa and Flores 2017). This research investigates how connections are made between ways of speaking and racial categories, and how the ways of speaking associated with stigmatized social categories are devalued. This process involves assumptions and ideologies about language and language users. Rosa and Flores (2017) offer an example of how in the 2016 presidential election, Julian Castro, a Latinx man, was portrayed as linguistically deficient because of his (purported) lack of Spanish fluency, while Tim Kaine, a White man, was praised for his ability to speak (some) Spanish as a second language. Even assuming that there was any truth to the accusation of meager Spanish skills on Castro’s part (see Rey Agudo 2019 for a discussion of this), the fact that both men spoke English fluently and also (at least some) Spanish was seen as a deficit in one case and an accomplishment in the other. This evaluation is the result of assumptions about indexicality – speaking Spanish indexes a Latinx identity – and also ideologies about the Spanish of immigrant background English speakers being a liability, and the Spanish of White mainstream English speakers being an achievement. Many of the critics of Castro’s Spanish – and the Spanish of Latinxs in the US more generally – are not themselves Spanish speakers; but as White, mainstream English speakers, their assumptions about the linguistic deficiency of Latinx is taken seriously, and are part of the perpetuation of raciolinguistic stereotypes (Rosa and Flores 2017, 628–629). As this example, as well as the Mock White Girl example, shows, indexicality is an ideological process.
Scholars have also discussed different types of indexical meaning, a summary of which is provided by Johnstone et al. (2006). What is called the first order of indexicality refers to features below the level of consciousness. An example of this is regional features; while for outsiders these mark speakers as being from a certain region, for non‐mobile speakers they are not noticed because ‘everyone speaks that way’ (Johnstone et al. 2006, 82). Second‐order indexicality is when these features are recognized as belonging to certain ways of speaking, i.e., speakers can use them stylistically to index belonging or to distance themselves from the social group these ways of speaking are associated with. Third‐order indexicality correlates with what Labov (1972) called stereotypes; in this case linguistic features are widely recognized as belonging to particular varieties, and are used to construct identities of (stereotypical) members of the social group.
The process through which meaning becomes attached to linguistic form is called enregisterment (Agha 2006). This concept shifts the focus from a static description of what has been called a register (a way of speaking which is evocative of a particular context) to the dynamic process through which this association emerges. Johnstone (2016) discusses this process in terms of association of particular linguistic features and place, noting:
‘Enregister’
