Indexing Authenticity

Véronique Lacoste, Jakob Leimgruber, Thiemo Breyer, Véronique Lacoste, Jakob Leimgruber, Thiemo Breyer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110384604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The concept of authenticity has received some attention in recent academic discourse, yet it has often been left under-defined from a sociolinguistic perspective. This volume presents the contributions of a wide range of scholars who exchanged their views on the topic at a conference in Freiburg, Germany, in November 2011. The authors address three leading questions: What are the local meanings of authenticity embedded in large cultural and social structures? What is the meaning of linguistic authenticity in delocalised and/or deterritorialised settings? How is authenticity indexed in other contexts of language expression (e.g. in writing or in political discourse)? These questions are tackled by recognised experts in the fields of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and contact linguistics. While by no means exhaustive, the volume offers a large array of case studies that contribute significantly to our understanding of the meaning of authenticity in language production and perception.

Section 1:

Indexing local meanings of authenticity

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Penelope Eckert

The trouble with authenticity

1 Introduction

Authenticity has long been an elephant in the room in the study of sociolinguistic variation. It is embedded in the notion of the vernacular, in our relation to the rest of the field of linguistics, in our field methods, and in prevalent understandings of the nature of the indexical nature of variation. The vernacular emerged early on in the study of variation as the holy grail of language study – as the authentic production of the authentic speaker, the natural object of scientific investigation. Labov (1972) defined the vernacular as the speaker’s most automatic linguistic production, directly produced by, and reflective of, the speaker’s grammar. This production, free of interference from conscious processes, could be witnessed only in the most unreflective, spontaneous, speech untainted by the corrective forces of standard norms. The ultimate inauthentic speaker emerged as the middle class speaker, seen as suppressing the vernacular in response to the demands of the standard language market (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1975). Labov (1972) characterized middle class speech as more self-conscious and contrived than working class speech, and Kroch (1978) suggested that the socioeconomic stratification of variation results from stratified resistance to vernacular innovation. In other words, class emerges as a cline of (in)authenticity. Equally inauthentic are speakers who do not produce the language of their assigned population group, such as middle class Nathan B., whom Labov eliminated from his New York City (Labov 1966) sample for his consistent use of a working class pattern. In other words, authenticity in this tradition is based on conformity to membership in enduring structural categories, and linguistic authenticity entails using the patterns of variation associated with those categories. Authenticity, then, is something the analyst bestows on speakers and their speech performances.

Over the years, though, leading up to the current Third Wave of variation studies (Eckert 2012), we have come to view variation as a more robust and dynamic indexical system. Correlations with abstract demographic categories such as gender and class are not the source of indexicality, but the outcome, resulting from patterns of activity that constitute those categories. In turn the broader structure acts as constraint on those patterns of activity so that there is a continuous reproductive relation between structure and practice. Variation enters into stylistic configurations as speakers construct personae in the moment and through time – personae, needless to say, that may inhabit the broader categories into which they fit, but also personae that don’t quite fit the categories, that push the envelope and bring about change. And just as new concepts require new words (e.g. software, metrosexual), ever-changing social dynamics require ever-changing indexical resources. The mechanism for indexical change is what Silverstein (2003) has called indexical order in which, for example, a linguistic variant associated with a social category comes to index some salient quality associated with that category. The continual extension of indexical potential creates – and continually modifies – an array of potential meanings, or an indexical field (Eckert 2008). Thus, for example, depending on context, an aspirated /t/ can index such things as formality, prissiness (Podesva 2004), nerdiness (Bucholtz 2011) or even anger.

This more dynamic view of variation as integral to social practice, and as constructing as well as reflecting social categories, makes the structural notion of authenticity moot. Authenticity cannot be a state of possession of qualities that define an enduring category; rather, it is something that people claim. And more importantly, at the same time that it is a claim about the individual’s possession of those qualities, it is a claim about what those qualities are. In other words, the claim to authenticity ties the construction of the self to the construction of the categories one aspires to. Bucholtz and Hall (2004, 2005), on the basis that identity is inherently relational, point out (2005: 605) that a claim of similarity to another or to others is never total, but always partial, “... produced through contextually situated and ideologically informed configurations of self and other.” In other words, when people strive to identify with chosen others, they claim not global similarity, but similarity with respect to selected qualities. They refer to this claim to selected qualities as adequation, and the process of adequation itself reinscribes those selected qualities as definitive. Indeed, the desire to claim authenticity arises from some assessment of the qualities of that entity that make it desirable, and this assessment – to the extent that it is shared by numerous others – reflects back on, and changes, the category. To the extent that a linguistic variable is deployed in an authenticity claim, the process of adequation will contribute to its ever-changing indexical field.

2 Authenticity and variation

Labov’s study of Martha’s Vineyard (Labov 1963) was the first clear study of variation and authenticity. The diphthongs PRICE¹⁰ and MOUTH had conserved the historical central pronunciation [ɐj] on Martha’s Vineyard, as on islands along the Atlantic coast of North America more generally (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 1998), while on the mainland, this nucleus had lowered to [a]. For some years, Vineyard speakers had been following the mainland trend to lower the nucleus. But Labov found that some speakers were reversing this lowering trend, in an apparent move to recapture one of the most salient features of the distinctive island dialect. Led by the English ethnic fishing community whose control over the local economy was under threat from the mainland-controlled tourist industry, this revival of a ‘traditional’ local pronunciation constituted a claim to island authenticity. “It is apparent that the immediate meaning of this phonetic feature is ‘Vineyarder.’ When a man says [rɐjt] or [hɐʊs], he is unconsciously establishing the fact that he belongs to the island: that he is one of the natives to whom the island really belongs.” (Labov 1963)

This indexical move was a textbook example of indexical order. A feature that had simply marked a speaker as a Vineyarder came to be used stylistically within the island to index a particular kind of Vineyarder, making salient a particular aspect of island identity. The simple association of the centralized diphthongs with the general Vineyard dialect, hence with membership in the native “Vineyarder” population, constitutes an “nth” order indexical. Any link between a linguistic form and a population opens the potential for the form to become linked in turn with associations with that population. In the Vineyard case, the fishing population’s claim to authenticity led them to claim the linguistic form as indexical of their particular authentic status. In this case, Vineyard authenticity did not simply distinguish islanders from mainlanders: the English-descent fisherfolk who engaged in this linguistic move were laying claim to greater island authenticity than other islanders as well. Kiesling (2005, 2009) has argued that variables take on indexical value as speakers take stances in interaction, and although Labov gathered his data in one-on-one interviews, it is probable that this new pronunciation moved onto the public stage in authenticative, legitimating moves, as people took stances in conversations that involved island issues and particularly the fate of the island. This linguistic move constituted simultaneously a claim to personal legitimacy and an ideological position. And it did not simply claim authentic membership in a pre-existing category, “the Vineyarder,” but reinscribed that category as embodying a specific island ideology and as peopled by a new version of an old authentic persona. It placed this persona, and the issues that distinguished it from past personae, into the indexical field associated with this particular linguistic form.

Indexical moves of this sort don’t occur randomly, but at junctures that are sufficiently important to motivate a collaborative ideological move. It has been said that linguistic change accelerates during times of social upheaval, and we can see this in the case of the quiet upheaval that was taking place on Martha’s Vineyard at the time of Labov’s study. This is not to say that all change requires upheaval, but the propagation of a change involves indexical moves, and indexical moves are useless if they don’t create some kind of distinction. Archeologist Ian Hodder, based on studies of style in archeological artifacts, links stylistic moves in material culture to the need for legitimation:

decoration and shape distinction may relate not so much to the existence of social categories but to a concern with those categories .… Where social groups are threatened or contradicted, or are otherwise concerned with self-legitimation, ‘stylistic behaviour’, in the form of numerous contrasts and variations in pottery, stone, metal and other types, may be most marked. Stylistic behaviour is ... linked directly ... to ideologies and strategies of legitimation. (Hodder 1982: 193).

3 Ethnicity and the crowd

Perhaps the social category that has proven the most resistant to a fluid perspective on variation has been ethnicity, and most particularly the linguistic varieties associated with racialized ethnic groups. In the US, the “ethnolects” associated with African Americans and Latinos have been viewed as separate from the co-territorial white Anglo dialects, and as indexing, purely and simply, ethnicity. The emphasis has been on difference or divergence and, occasionally, on the extent to which speakers participate in regional (i.e. white Anglo) sound changes (e.g. Bailey & Maynor 1987; Labov & Harris 1986). Bucholtz’s study (1999, 2011) of white boys appropriating features from African American Vernacular English, though, shows just the kind of indexical claims discussed above. These boys are not laying claim to African American ethnicity, but to what they perceive as the special coolness associated with African Americans. Coolness, indeed, is a powerful notion in youth cultures, and plays an important role in indexical fluidity. And coolness itself is as diverse as the people seeking it.

In what follows, I will examine the complex indexicality of the ethnic variety known as Chicano English, in a preadolescent population in Northern California, and will consider what it can mean to claim Chicano authenticity. The study unfolds in two schools, Steps and Fields, which serve adjacent but very different catchment areas. Steps serves a poor neighborhood, and its student body is diverse. Eight percent of the students are white Anglos, and the majority are Latino and Asian American. There are also a small number of Pacific Islanders and African Americans. Fields serves a solidly middle class population. Its student body is eighty-two percent white Anglo, and the remaining eighteen percent mirror the non-white Anglo ethnic makeup of Steps. The differences between the dominant speech patterns at Steps and Fields are generally heard as ethnic differences, with Chicano English being the unmarked variety at Steps, and White Anglo English being the unmarked variety at Fields. But this is an oversimplification. Neither dialect is monolithic, and neither simply indexes ethnicity. Indeed, to some extent, the indexical complexity of both dialects arises in the same conditions, and for the same purposes. And it is this similarity that brings together their indexical fields.

My ethnography followed an age cohort in both schools through fifth and sixth grades, and into middle school in seventh grade¹¹. During this time, the kids were moving from childhood towards adolescence, collaboratively reorganizing themselves into a peer-based social order. At the center of this movement in both schools was the emergence of a “popular crowd” that led the cohort into adolescent practices. Crowd activity centered above all around the pairing up of boys and girls as heterosexual couples, which lasted anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks, rarely months. The pairing was not so much about relationships between the individual boys and girls who made up the couples, but about the crowd itself. The crowd arranged the pairings, and the couples generally spent little time together. Rather, the constant turnover of couples created a social market, as individuals accrued value on the basis of whom they were paired with, and of their role in pairing up others. The activity, in other words, was not about heterosexuality so much as about creating social structure and specifically a status system. The crowd stood out in a variety of ways – by its sheer size in contrast with other kids’ smaller friendship groups and its concomitant domination of space and visibility; by its transformed gender relations, not only in the heterosexual pairing b...

Table of contents

• linguae & litterae
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Authenticity: A view from inside and outside sociolinguistics
• Language, society and authenticity: Themes and perspectives
• Section 1: Indexing local meanings of authenticity
• Section 2: Indexing authenticity in delocalised settings
• Section 3: Authenticity construction in other mediatised contexts
• Index