1. How valid/objective is our interpretation of metacommentary? Does its objectivity matter?

2. The majority of the author’s examples are based on children’s metacommentary and take place in a classroom. I wonder if this setting was chosen on purpose. Could it be that society forces adults to act in certain ways (not to say or wear certain things) that make this idea of metacommentary analysis more easily applicable to children?

3. It was interesting to see that while explicit metacommentary can have a positive connotation, the overarching message could be negative and make children stop speaking the language (e.g. Spanish). I wonder about other examples in the classroom when languages other than English were implicitly banned. Did this work and did children actually stop using their home language?

Readings for this week are mostly concerned with some of the following concepts:

• Metacommentary is ‘how language comments on itself’ (Rymes) or ‘talk about talk’ (Johnstone).
• Social indexicality is ‘the relationship between sign and meaning’ (Johnstone).
• Enregisterment is ’when a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’ (Agha). There is also the concept of de-enregisterment (Rymes).
• Speech chain is ‘how discursive interaction drives language perception and is how this change is being sedimented into society’ (Agha).

The main idea of this week is that people talk about how they talk. They create meanings/social indices based on people’s speech. There is also societal and historical influence on how people talk because of different media. In the past, there were newspapers and magazines and now there are YouTube comments. Through different media and people’s perception of speech, some varieties would become enregistered over other ones (e.g. received pronunciation of British English). In both the past and present, people were and are interested in how they talk, and how other people think they talk.

Barbara Johnstone talks about the Pittsburghese dialect which is characterized by a set of phonological features (e.g /aw/ monophthongization, need+ X’ed construction (needs washed), or word (yinz)). For Johnstone, Pittsburgh is not simply a location, but a ‘social construct’ connected to what locals experience about the place. The main theme of the article is that Pittsburghers talk about Pittsburghese. But how is this way of speaking linked to peoples’ identities? To answer this Johnstone goes back to the history of the region from when Pennsylvania was Scotch-Irish and when immigrants came for employment opportunities in the steel factories. However, later when steel industry collapsed, Pittsburghers moved out of the region. This is when people themselves noticed differences in their speech. This seems interesting, but a bit odd that for such a long time people didn’t notice that they spoke differently. I guess this is Johnstone’s point as well that different Pittsburghers have different ways of noticing Pittsburgh’s speech. Some don’t notice anything different at all, some have positive feelings while others have negative opinions about the dialect because of a perceived link to working-class life. The local dialect has become a very popular topic of conversation among Pittsburghers whenever they discuss their city. So, there is a link between dialect and place. ‘Talk about talk’ is a locally meaningful social practice as Johnstone illustrated through Pittsburghese. Johnstone also argues that there are ‘material constraints’ on the process of enregisterment of Pittsburghese based on available technology (newspapers and dictionaries). Commodification (t-shirts that have lists of Pittsburghese words and even toy dolls that speak Pittsburghese) is another way in which Pittsburghesebecomes enregistered.

Asif Agha talks about the Received Pronunciation (RP) of British English, how it was spread, and how it developed the cultural connotation it has today. He refers to it as the process of enregisterment as well. Interestingly, RP is spoken by a very small population, however, people have the competence to recognize it (but not to speak it). Agha first describes the phonetic distinctions and how these distinctions translate into social metadiscourses and metapragmatic judgments. For example, in British cartoons, there are two characters, one depicting social failure and the other an aristocratic gentleman. The author says that any British reader knows which accent is aligned with which character. The aristocrat speaks RP and the social failure do not. Here, interestingly, even without those characters speaking, people already attributed certain meaning to their speech. Agha also comes up with the rank for accents’ speech levels in Britain where the highest one is “unmarked RP” and the lowest one is urban accents. Then he talks about speech chains, which probably gave rise to this RP register. The way people talk about language changes its language perception and how they themselves are being sedimented into society. There are multiple ways in which this is achieved, such as through literature, news, or face-to-face conversations. 

Betsy Rymes talks more about everyday interaction, how people talk and make sense of each other. Her focus is metacommentary or ‘how language comments on itself’ (Rymes). She highlights five different types of metacommentaries: marking code, the sounds of language, address terms, and comments on clothing/appearance. In a way, those codes can be deceiving. While the explicit metapragmatic discourse could suggest desire to speak (such as in ‘I wanna speak Spanish’), the overarching idea can actually be to stop usage of Spanish in a classroom. Rymes says that these metacommentaries can be a useful analytical tool because they show what is socially salient to people. About this article, I wonder how valid are the comments on other people’s speech because they seem pretty subjective.

Andrea R Leone-Pizzighella and Betsy Rymes talk about Web.2 environment, a new methodological way of describing sociolinguistic research on interactive platforms like YouTube. They tried to analyzed stories about accents that emerge from human interaction. They chose two Philadelphia accent narrators (male and female) and observed how their narrative was noted/perceived in the comment section on YouTube. They observe that YouTubers themselves provide detailed biographical comments on their speech (again, talking about how they talk), while youtube viewers provide commentary about their performance and claims if it sounds authentic or not. This article also compares two different narrative models, an older “logico-scientific” model that uses scientific proofs, statistical regularities and a new “narrative” model that is more interested in gripping drama and audience involvement. I do think that in the 21^st century, we need to use more actual methodological models. This one seems particularly interesting because it provides ‘self-conscious portraits’ created by language users themselves and assesses the validity of those portraits by examining the commentary on them posted by Internet peers, which is unique to our time.