Like, it's just like a joke, no?

If you’ve spent even a day casually browsing the Internet, you’re probably aware of the stereotypes of a 'typical white girl'. She goes to Starbucks, she wears Uggs, she dyes her hair blonde and straightens it... it’s a similar concept across Anglophone spheres.

Not pictured: the Pumpkin Spice Latte.

There are, of course, language features associated with the stereotypical white girl too. And in this paper, Tyanna Slobe, a linguistic anthropologist, wanted to investigate how three different online performances utilised these resources to create their mock white girl characters. This relies on a concept known as indexicality – when certain groups use a particular feature more often, it can become associated with that group. For example, the use of the word like is often indexed with young people, as they have led the trend for it being used as a discourse marker.

Slobe also situated her work in the context of two different ideological perspectives. One is that of how mocking certain linguistic resources can perpetuate stigma against them: the language associated with white girls is often used to dismiss them as vacuous or unintelligent, and exploiting those resources can perpetuate that stereotype. On the other hand, they can be knowingly exploited in order to critique hegemonic identities in society. In the case of the stereotypical white girl, the identity can be satirised in order to point out the glaring omission of women of colour in cultural notions of femininity, and the problematic opinions that white women often hold.

Slobe looked at three different performances. One is a genre she describes as Saviour, a form of performance to encourage superficial notions of gender equality. One comes from the popular Sh*t white girls say Youtube series, looking specifically at two videos that discuss what white girls say to black and Latina girls. The third is from the social media platform Vine’s series  Teenage girl problems, where the white girl character is performed in a way that mocks her stereotypical concerns.

Two of these performances contribute to further stigmatisation of the character. One example that Slobe gives of the Saviour genre is an interview with Lake Bell, who adopts creaky voice – where the vocal cords are compressed so that less air passes through them and they vibrate less frequently – to discuss what she calls a “sexy baby virus”. Through performing this voice and indexing it in such a way, she means to imply that young white girls performing these stereotypically feminine vocal traits are responsible for the sexism they encounter in the work place, and the attitudes towards such language. Similarly, in the Teenage girl problems Vine, his performance of the white girl uses exaggerated gestures, eye rolling, and creaky voice to contrast the slow and carefully articulated male character, whilst performing trivial and irrational concerns. By indexing the communicative cues with the concerns, the Vine star portrays an ideological stance that ultimately stigmatises girlhood.

On the other hand, the Sh*t white girls say videos use the persona in a critical way. Franchesca Ramsay, the creator of Sh*t white girls say to black girls, also uses creaky voice to highlight parts of the white girl’s dialogue, but particularly to draw attention to the character’s racism, such as when she describes hair texture that feels like a “Brillo pad”. Similarly, she uses the right? tag question associated with white girl speech to highlight the affirmation the character wants for a racist statement. By specifically parodying the racist elements of the character, these resources satirise the white girl’s behaviour as an embodiment of naïve racism.

Ultimately, there are a number of ideological stances that the white girl character can be used for. So next time you see a meme featuring the character, you could think to yourself about what stance is being adopted, and what ideologies are being perpetuated or criticised as a result.

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Slobe, Tanyanna (2018). Style, stance, and social meaning in mock white girl. Language in Society 47(4): 541-567.

doi:10.1017/S004740451800060X

This summary was written by Marina Merryweather

Don't thank us for this post, it's really "no problem"

It’s probably not something you even think about. Someone asks you to pass salt or pepper at dinner, they say “thanks!” Someone is raising money for charity, and when you give a larger than expected donation, they say “thank you ever so much!” Or, maybe it’s Ariana Grande getting over Pete Davidson, and she says “thank you, next”. But what exactly would you say in response?

Aaron Dinkin of  San Diego State University decided to investigate exactly that. Aware that there is a perceived difference between older people using “you’re welcome” and younger people using “no problem”, and that prescriptivists are wringing their hands at the prospect of the latter replacing the former, he decided to take some results from an undergraduate sociolinguistic survey to see if this was really the case.

The methodology was quite simple. Students had to ask directions from people in the street or in shops, in and around Toronto. On receiving the directions they wanted, they had three levels of gratitude to give: “thanks”, “thank you”, and “thank you very much”. They were asked to note the response from a selection of categories, including a lack of response, “you’re welcome”, “no problem”, and other possible replies. They were also asked to note down demographic information about the person they asked, such as their ethnicity, rough estimates of their age, whether they were a native speaker, and whether they were someone in the street or a shop employee.

The results, not surprisingly, did not exactly match the stereotypes of “you’re welcome” versus “no problem”. While it was true that younger people were more likely to use “no problem” than their older counterparts, regardless of how they were thanked, there were more pertinent differences in the data. For one, 18% of the of the elicitations got no response at all, and this was found to correlate with using shorter forms – more people said nothing in response to “thank you”, and even more did not respond at all to “thanks”. However, if people did reply to “thanks”, they were more likely to use “no problem”. Meanwhile, when the students used “thank you” or “thank you very much”, all participants were more likely to say “you’re welcome” in response, irrespective of age.

There was also the response “no worries” – only younger participants used this, and they almost exclusively used it in response to “thanks” on its own. Dinkin concluded that in younger populations, “no problem” was beginning to lose its status as an informal response, and evolve as a broader reply while “no worries” was beginning to fill the informal gap left behind. However, “you’re welcome” still held its status as being pragmatically more polite to use with more elaborate forms of thanking.

He also wrote that more could be done to analyse the changes in response to thanks – for example, comparing the data here to responses in other communities, or even doing similar studies in the US to see how it compares to Canada. However, even the results as they stand leave a lot to consider. So how should we respond to “thank you, next”?

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Dinkin, Aaron. J. (2018). It's no problem to be polite: Apparent‐time change in responses to thanks. Journal of Sociolinguistics 22(2): 190-215. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12278

This summary was written by Marina Merryweather

Um, fill(er) words

Do conscientious people say I mean and I know more often?

When we think of language we often think of neatly constructed sentences, but everyday casual conversation is peppered with hesitations, repetitions and sounds that you may not necessarily find in the dictionary. These linguistic phenomena often go unnoticed, with the exception, perhaps, of David Beckham TV interviews. Charlyn Laserna, Yi-Tai Seih and James Pennebaker’s research, however, was on features of this kind, They focused on uh and um (filled pauses) and also on words and phrases such as I mean, you know and like (discourse markers), calling both together ‘filler words’.

Although sometimes thought of as superfluous or even careless, filler words may give clues about the sort of person who utters them. The researchers investigated not only how filler words were used across genders and age groups, but also whether they correlate with certain personality traits.

They analysed transcriptions of spoken conversations from 263 participants with ages ranging from 17 to 69. The speech was recorded over 2-3 days using electronic devices programmed to automatically take audio recordings at set time intervals, thus capturing spontaneous natural speech.

The rate of use of each of the five filler words (I mean, you know, like, um and uh) was analyzed in the conversations, and because this study investigated these two types of filler words in relation to one another, interesting comparisons could be made. People who were young, female, or both young and female were more likely to use discourse markers. This supports previous studies regarding the use of the discourse marker like. The rate of filled pauses was not associated with gender; it was, however, associated with age, decreasing later in life.

The researchers then became curious about the way usage of these two types of filler words develops or changes over a person’s lifetime. They divided participants into four age categories:

·      early college (17-19)

·      late college (20-22)

·      early adulthood (23-34)

·      and adulthood (35 and older)

They found that the increased use of discourse markers among women only emerges during the early and late college years; as people become older, the gender difference disappears. They explain that this may be due to the way adolescents transition into adult roles.  Graduating from college and entering a job market or changing career may lead people to change the way they use filler words.

The 252 participants had also completed questionnaires regarding five personality traits - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The study found that an increased use of discourse markers was associated with conscientiousness, while none of the traits were related to the use of filled pauses.

The researchers explain that this may be because conscientious people are generally more aware of themselves and their surroundings, so when they converse with others, they use more discourse markers, such as I mean and you know, to share their opinions or rephrase them for their addressee.

Importantly, the findings indicate that filler words could potentially provide a quick behavioral measure of speakers’ personality traits. The researchers anticipate that one day people may use their interpretation of these verbal cues to improve the quality of their communication with others.

Um, like maybe…….

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Laserna, Charlyn M., Yi-Tai Seih & James W. Pennebaker (2014). Um . . . Who Like Says You Know: Filler Word Use as a Function of Age, Gender, and Personality.Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33: 3, 328-338.

doi: 10.1177/0261927X14526993

This summary was written by Danniella Samos

Do birds of a feather tweet together?

Do you think you would be able to guess the gender of the author of an anonymous tweet? David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein and Tyler Schnoebelen found some distinct but complex differences in the way men and women use language on the Twitter microblogging site.

The researchers amassed a corpus of over 9 million tweets from more than 14,000 American users. They then assigned gender to each account using historical census information on given names. Using computational methods and statistical tests, they found that:

·       pronouns are used more frequently by women. These include alternative spellings such as u and yr;

·      emotion terms (sad, love, etc.) and emoticons are also associated with female authors.;

·      although previous research has found that kinship terms are used more often by women, in this study  it really is a mixed bag. Most kinship words including mom, sister, daughter, child, dad and husband are used more by women. However, a few words, including wife, bro, and brotha, are associated with male authors;

·      some abbreviations such as lol and omg are used more by women, as are ellipses, expressive lengthening (e.g. coooooool), emoticons, exclamation marks, question marks, representations of sounds like ah, hmmm, and grr as well as hesitation words such as um;

·      assent terms such as okay and yess, are all used more by women, but yessir is used more by men. Similarly, negation terms nooo, and cannot are associated with women, while nah, nobody, and ain’t suggest the author is likely to be a man.

·      swearwords and taboo words are mostly used by male writers whereas women choose milder terms such as darn.

The researchers suggest that the male/female distinction used in much previous research is too simplistic. For example, some linguists claim that women use language in a more expressive way than men by lengthening words like yess and noo. However, using swearwords may also be seen as expressive, and this is done more frequently by men. Similarly, the fact that women use more abbreviations such as omg and lol goes against the common view that women prefer to use more standard language. And although men mention named 'entities' such as Apple or Steve about 30% more often than women, this does not support previous claims that men use language mainly to convey information while women tend to engage with others. When one looks more closely at the data it becomes clear that many of the named entities are sports figures and teams, and are  used by men to engage with others with similar sports interests.

The researchers then identified groups of tweeters who used similar sets of words, regardless of their gender. Many groups turned out to have a substantial majority of either men or women. While some of these clusters matched the linguistic expectations  for their gender, others didn’t. For example, although swearwords are generally preferred by men, some of the male-associated clusters used taboo terms far less often than women. On a closer look, many of these messages turned out to be work-related, where taboo language would be discouraged.

Finally, the researchers wanted to find out whether individuals with a greater proportion of same-gender people in their social networks use more linguistic items associated with their gender. In other words, do birds of a feather tweet together?

Well, sort of. There was a strong correlation between the use of gendered language and the composition of people’s social networks. The women in the dataset had networks which were on average 58% female. However, women whose tweets contained the most strongly marked female characteristics had social networks which were 77% female. Conversely, women who displayed the least gender-marked language had social networks that were on average only 40% female. The results for the men followed a similar pattern.

This fits with previous work showing that people change the way they communicate to match their addressees. People can use language to position themselves in relation to others, and they can do this by either conforming to or defying gendered expectations. So, it seems that it is not so straightforward to match language use with gender after all.

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Bamman, David, Jacob Eisenstein & Tyler Schnoebelen (2014) Gender identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2): 135–160.

doi. 10.1111/josl.12080

This summary was written by Danniella Samos

Please excuse me while I use the Bathroom Formula.....

Everyday language is usually the most interesting to study.  A perfect example of this is how we excuse ourselves when we need to use the bathroom/go to the toilet/powder our nose/visit the little boys’ room etc….As you can see the possibilities are endless!  In a fascinating study Magnus Levin investigated how and why speakers use this ‘Bathroom Formula’.

The ‘Bathroom Formula’ refers to the phrases speakers use to express their need to leave an ongoing activity in order to go to the bathroom.  It is a highly complex formula as in most situations it would be inappropriate to just disappear without giving an explanation and yet the explanation itself in this instance could cause embarrassment or be deemed impolite.  Therefore the speaker needs to be resourceful and draw on predictable expressions to negotiate this potential difficulty.

In his data, taken from British (BE) and American (AE) English, Levin identified six different ways of using the Bathroom Formula:

1)     Going to a place: ‘I’ll have to go to the loo.’ (BE)

2)     Specifying the activity: ‘I’m gonna go pee.’ (AE)

3)     Asking for directions: ‘Where’s the little boys’ room at?’ (AE)

4)     Asking permission: ‘Please may I go to the toilet?’ (BE)

5)     Promising to be back: ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ (AE)

6)     Using a metaphor: ‘I’ve got to wash my face.’ (AE)

In both British and American English (1) was the preferred way of using the Bathroom Formula, regardless of gender or age of the speaker.  We would expect children to use (2) the most; however, interestingly, Levin found that adults also quite often specify the activity they intend to perform with words like pee and tinkle.  Also surprising is that 86% of these speakers are women, who describe what they are going to do just as often in conversations with men as with other women.  It seems that verbs like tinkle are seen as polite and inoffensive enough to use in any company. 

Many other uses of the Bathroom Formula were found to be intermixed; for example, (5) was used with at least one of the other categories and served to make the interruption in the conversation seem less impolite.  The metaphors used in (6) were nearly always quite conventional (wash my hands/face, powder my nose or spend a penny, for example) and the following, rather bizarre, conversation between two American men helps to illustrate why this may be:

A:              Thanks for getting bags and stuff

B:              Oh, no problem.  They were two for one so

A:              Alright.  I’ll be right back….I’ve got to go deliver something
       around the corner OK. I just smelled gun powder

B:              Really

A:              It’s somebody…still lighting off fireworks

B:              (laughs) I wouldn’t doubt that

The only way that the speaker manages to convey his real need to go to the bathroom through his peculiar metaphor is by using the highly conventionalised phrase I’ll be right back to introduce it, which gives his friend a clue about what’s really going on.  So, using a tried and tested formula that everyone recognises, like wash my hands, is more accessible for the listener.  This is why new metaphors for going to the bathroom tend to fall out of use so quickly – they’re just too much work to use! In fact, Levin found that people rarely use metaphors at all when excusing themselves; it’s just that, when they do, they ‘stick out’ in the conversation and so are more memorable.

The same happens with potentially more offensive expressions like take a piss and have a dump.  Levin found that they are very rarely used and because of this are more noticeable when they occur, hence their force.  Generally people choose a ‘safe’ and inoffensive conversational path, sticking to tried and tested formulas that everyone knows.  As Levin writes, ‘things which are heard often tend to be noticed less.’

Levin found that, overall, women used the bathroom formula more than men but he is unsure as to why – It may because in general women use the toilet more often than men?  Or maybe because women are generally more polite than men?  More studies are needed to investigate this.  However, more interesting than the differences between speakers is the lack of variation when it comes to using the Bathroom Formula – we all generally stick to the same phrases.  Levin puts this down to our desire to be as unobtrusive and discreet as possible.

Now, if you’ll excuse me …

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Levin, Magnus (2013) The Bathroom Formula: A corpus-based study of a speech act in American and British English. Journal of Pragmatics 64: 1-16.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.01.001

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle 

Putting Gender in Writing

A lot of sociolinguistic work has focussed on how males and females use linguistic features in spoken language.  This research has led to certain features being associated more with male use, such as I references (e.g. I think….) and quantity references (e.g. it was 24 metres), while references to emotion (e.g. a happy occasion) and verbs expressing uncertainty (e.g. it seems to be…) are linked to female use.

But are these gender-associated language features also used in written language?  Anthony Mulac, Howard Giles, James J. Bradac and Nicholas A. Palomares enlisted the help of 127 19-21 year old students and asked them to produce a written description of 5 different photographic images depicting nature scenes (such as a mountain reflected in a lake).  The experiment had five stages.  Participants had to:

• ·       write a description of the first image (this was the control task - as no other instruction was given, the researchers assumed that this was a natural reflection of the participants’ language use)

• ·       write a description as if they were:

a.     a man describing it to a man

b.     aman describing it to a woman

c.     a woman describing it to a man

d.     a woman describing it to a woman

By imposing these conditions, Mulac and his colleagues could test whether the writers’ language altered according to the gender of the perceived recipient of the description or the gender persona that they were told to adopt.

Each description from the participants was anonymously coded for gender-specific language features (such as those mentioned above) and the control description was used as a base for comparing their language use in the other four scenarios. 

The results showed gender differentiation in the the control task. In the natural descriptions (with no instruction from the researchers), males and females used more of the features associated with their gender.  The researchers note that this is evidence of gender-linked language at an unconscious level.

 In addition, when the participants were asked to write as either a male or female, there was an increase in their use of appropriate gender features.  For example, males writing under the guise of a female adopted more ‘female’ features, such as emotional references, while females writing under a male guise increased the use of ‘male’ features like quantity references.  This, the researchers suggest, means that, in addition to unconscious knowledge of gender-linked language, there are some features of language that are gender-linked stereotypes.  These stereotyped features can be accessed and manipulated by people when they want to present different gender affiliations. 

In contrast, the results did not show any manipulation of gender features according to the perceived audience (for example, males didn’t alter their language use according to whether they were writing to a female or male).  Also, the results didn’t show any increase in gender features when writing to someone of the same gender.  Previous research had suggested that, for example, a male conversing with another male may increase his use of ‘male language features’ in order to promote his sense of maleness.  Instead, Mulac, Giles, Bradac and Palomares suggest that, as respondents used a combination of features when writing to other people, they were styling their speech so that it did not heavily emphasise one gender or another.  They were, in a sense androgynous.

In conclusion, therefore, the researchers propose that individuals have gender schemata and stereotypes.  The former generate gendered language features in an unconscious sense (hence the control descriptions show many gender-associated features).  The latter allows us to consciously draw on our knowledge of gendered language when we are prompted to do so.  It is interesting that both the schemata and the stereotypes produce similar linguistic features, as the features used by participants (be it consciously or unconsciously) were consistent across the tasks.

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Mulac, Anthony, Giles, Howard, Bradac, James J. and Palomares, Nicholas A. (2013) The gender-linked language effect: an empirical test of a general process model. Language Sciences 38: 22-31

doi: 10.1016/j.langsci.2012.12.004

This summary was written by Jenny Amos