Last week we discussed ideologies and attitudes about language, questioning in some ways how reliable speakers’ explicit statements about their own language ideologies and attitudes can be. This week those explicit statements, or “talk about talk,” (Johnstone 2006: 80) are our focus. I will start with a summary, with a focus on relevant terminology, and then reflect upon my personal relationship to the accents, particularly Received Pronunciation.
SUMMARY
Three types of ‘meta’ talk are introduced and discussed by the authors:
metadiscourse The explicit discussion of language by language users that “[calls] attention to how utterances are functioning in a particular context…. language referring to language.” (Rymes 2014: 3).
metapragmatics The “activities that point to a feature’s appropriate context of use” (Johnstone 2006: 80) or conversational tools used to “signal the function of any communicative act” in an implicit way (Rymes 2014: 3 discussing Silverstein 1993).
metacommentary Linguistic or non-linguistic commenting that “signals an understanding of what a sign means without necessarily arbitrarily systematizing communicative elements, but by pointing to that sign’s situated communicative value” (Rymes 2014: 3). It includes both explicit metadiscourse, as well as implicit metapragmatic functions.
Rymes (2014: 5-14) categorizes metacommentary into six types and the second type, “Marking the Sounds of Language” or commentary about pronunciation (Rymes 2014: 7), is the focus of our other three articles. Rymes’ use of the term ‘marking’ connects this type of metacommentary to a long history of sociolinguistic thought about ‘marked’ speech.
Barbara Johnstone (2006) investigates ‘marking’ as a term of art in sociolinguistics in her article about Pittsburghese and thoroughly contextualizes the term. Johnstone renames traditionally used jargon with streamlined titles, incorporating the term ‘indexicality’ from third-wave variationism. She creates a large table to compare jargon and here are some main points from her table (following quote from Johnstone 2003: 82-83) :
Indicator / nth-order / First Order Indexicality: Labov = “…Speakers are not aware of the variable…” Silverstein = “a feature can be correlated with a sociodemographic identity…” Johnstone = “…everybody speaks that way.”
Marker / n+1th-order / Second Order Indexicality: Labov = “…the use of one variant or another is socially meaningful.” Silverstein = “…the features have been enregistered…” Johnstone = “Regional features become available for social work…”
Stereotype / Third Order Indexicality: Labov = “A variable feature that is the overt topic of social comment” Johnstone = “People noticing… link regional variants…with…identity”
Silverstein (2003) is above quoted as using the same procedural term as Asif Agha, “enregisterment” or the “processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms” (Agha 2003: 231). Enregisterment is the process by which sound become ‘marked,’ connecting it clearly with Rymes’ second type of metacommentary. Agha argues that in the case of RP, or Received Pronunciation, the process of enregisterment occurred over a few hundred years through a “speech chain” (2003: 245) comprised of millions of people engaged in speech events and shared metacommentary. His view is opposed to the notion of a ‘top-down’ creation of standard language, such as Bourdieu’s concept of “‘the legitimate language’” as coming from governmental authorities (Agha 2003: 269).
Agha (2003), Johnstone (2006), and Rymes (2018) all assume a level of speaker agency, arguing that when a feature has been marked by metadiscourse, there is possibility for an agentive response from speakers. This agentive response is available regardless of whether the feature in question is associated with a burgeoning standard or non-standard variety of pronunciation. Agha writes about how speakers positioned themselves in relation to the metadiscourse about pronunciation of British English in the 19th century. Many speakers took on the attitudes and ideologies of that discourse, opting for the practices marked as ‘correct’ to be enforced as normative, leading to the enregisterment of RP. Johnstone shows the same process can be used to enregister a covert prestige associated with locality and solidarity. Features once considered to mark class in south-western Pennsylvania are subsequently linked to an ideology in which language is inherently tied to region, producing the enregisterment of a Pittsburghese accent. Rymes follows the use of metadiscourse into its new home, online social media, and relates enregisterment to narrative practices of identity assertion through online accent performance with Philly accents.
REFLECTIONS
I have a relationship with all three of these accents and with the YouTube Accent Challenges. Previously, I have coached actors on each of these accents, sometimes using YouTube Accent Challenges as source material. I actually own a copy of Sam McCool’s New Pittsburghese: How to Speak Like a Pittsburgher, which was a gift from an actor friend of mine from Pittsburgh. Many actors I work with complain about the difficulty in making the distinctions between Philly and New York accents, something that the YouTube users in Rymes’ research explicitly noted (2018). In my personal life, my family is from eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, with extended family from Philadelphia, and I lived in the UK while completing my first MA and was explicitly taught ‘traditional’ Received Pronunciation. To me, all of these accents are enregistered, and are salient to me as registers of speech.
RP is the accent I’m asked to teach most often, along with so-called ‘General American.’ I own more than ten books that describe or prescribe the features of RP (a lot of metadiscourse!). My collection includes one text for actors that enregistered historical styles, or perhaps communities of practice under the umbrella of RP. This handbook, How to do Standard English Accents by Edda Sharpe and Jan Haydn Rowles (2012), introduces contemporary RP as “Neutral Standard English” and then categorizes “Upper-Class Varieties” and “New Wave Varieties” giving exemplary speakers (term from Agha 2003: 265) for each type. Here are some clips of exemplary speakers that Sharpe and Rowles (2012) suggested for each type of RP they enregistered (it is worth noting that these speakers are very homogenous, though that is never explicitly mentioned in this book) :
Neutral Standard English “Although clearly a southern English accent, it lacks strong local accent features, and is a useful tool that has the convention of being non gender, race, age, class, or region specific.” (Sharpe & Rowles 2012:129)
exemplary speaker: Janet McTeer
Traditional RP “…fairly standard, old-fashioned, upper or upper middle class, but not overly eccentric accent. Here we will describe a ‘generic’ sound, free form overt indicators of character…” (ibid. 137)
exemplary speaker: Judi Dench
Imperial Lords and Ladies “…archetypal accent of the older upper classes.” (ibid. 149)
exemplary speaker: Virginia Woolf
exemplary speaker: Harold Macmillan
Military, Matrons, and the Landed Gentry “..an off-shoot of the Imperial Lords and Ladies, these are the unromantic ‘stuff and nonsense’ brigade.” (ibid. 161)
exemplary speaker: General Mike Jackson
Debs, Dandies and Bright Young Things “…a sound that may be heard in British actors during the ‘Hollywood’ years of the 1950s, but its origins were in a generation before that.” (ibid. 170)
exemplary speaker: Glynis Johns
Wartime Wendies and BBC Berties “…like a newsreader…” (ibid. 181)
exemplary speakers: Six different British Pathé narrators (particularly Bob Danvers-Walker)
The Original Sloane Rangers “In 1982 British writer Peter York and co-writer Ann Barr coined the term ‘Sloane Ranger’. It combines the name of the character the Lone Ranger with the Chelsea location of Sloane Square, and was used a s a label for the young and fashionably wealthy who frequented that area.” (ibid. 191)
exemplary speaker: Princess Diana, 1981
The New Wave “…what of the 21st century?” Three types below:
The Regular Set: “…no airs and graces…” exemplary speaker: Emma Watson
The Chelsea Set: “… the younger adults still attached to the up-market style of West London… proud of their class…” exemplary speaker: Tara Palmer-Tompkinson
The Shoreditch Set: “… young adults who are trying to blend in, who consciously or unconsciously hide their class, and who may have discovered the apparently cool alternative of London’s East End scene.” exemplary speaker: Prince Harry, 2013
(all above quotes in the New Wave Section are from ibid. 201)
Something that seems to be happening with RP today is the marking through metadiscourse of anything that deviates from the descriptions of RP by Daniel Jones in the early 20th century. Now that recording technology exists, people can more easily assert that RP is an object, and sounds a particular way. Deviation can suggest a ‘new accent’ rather than a change in RP, particularly for individuals who hold an ideology in which language change is believed to be language decay. In this vein, I have heard people claim that RP is no longer used at all, as no one sounds like Virginia Woolf. I’ve heard others claim RP has simply changed with the times and it is still the standard, educated, class based accent. Agha takes part in this discourse at the end of his article, discussing comments on Estuary English, and mentioning Rosewarne’s suggestion that, “Estuary English may be tomorrow’s RP” (2003: 268). This continuation of enregisterment of varieties of RP, both historical and style based, is very interesting to me. Even one or two very slight phonetic or prosodic changes seem to create second-order indexicality and open up the possibility of metacommentary and metadiscourse, leading into third-order indexicality.
Sharpe and Rowles are the most noteworthy accent coaches for actors in the UK, and their metadiscourse on RP and its 20th/21st century evolution is very influential in the entertainment industry. I would argue the performance of accent is a type of metacommentary: accent performance comments on markers and stereotypes through the performance of salient features. Films can greatly assist and speed up the enregisterment of ‘new’ accent varities. So Sharpe and Rowles’ enregisterment of these varieties of RP is interesting because actors will use these varieties, performing them back to audiences, perhaps solidifying the registers through their metacommentary.
Cited: How to do Standard English Accents. Sharpe, Edda, and Rowles, Jan Haydn. London: Oberon
Books. 2012.
