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Social category information plays a central role in speech perception and processing. To date, research on this topic has struggled to model how social category perceptions evolve over the time course of an interaction. In this article, we build on recent methodological developments to investigate trajectories of listener perceptions, focusing on how impressions change as linguistic, social and contextual details emerge. We base our arguments on an analysis of listeners’ real-time evaluations of the perceived competence of speakers of two British regional accents during a mock interview for a job in a law firm. Results indicate a need to move away from the view, predominant in sociolinguistics, of category perception as a discrete phenomenon toward a model of perception as inference under uncertainty. We discuss implications for theories of sociolinguistic cognition and for understandings of accent bias.

We investigated whether expression of social meaning operationalized as individual gender identitity and politeness moderated pitch range in the two languages of female and male Japanese-English sequential bilinguals. The bilinguals were resident in either London (UK) or Tokyo (Japan) and read sentences to imagined addressees who varied in formality and sex. Results indicated significant differences in the pitch range of the two languages of the bilinguals, and this was confirmed for female and male bilinguals in London and Tokyo, with the language differences being more extreme in the London bilinguals than in the Tokyo bilinguals. Interestingly, self-attribution of masculine gender traits patterned with within-language variation in the English pitch level of the female bilinguals, whereas self-attribution of feminine gender traits patterned with within-language variation in the English pitch level of the male bilinguals. In addition, female and male bilinguals significantly varied their pitch range in Japanese, but not in English, as a function of the imagined addressees. Findings confirmed that bilinguals produce pitch range differently in their languages and suggest that expression of social meaning may affect pitch range of the two languages of female and male bilinguals differently.

Do accent biases observed half a century ago (Giles 1970) and 15 years ago (Coupland and Bishop 2007) still hold in Britain today? We provide an updated picture of national attitudes to accent labels by replicating and extending previous studies. Mean ratings and relative rankings of 38 accents for prestige and pleasantness by a large representative sample of the British population (N = 821) attest to a remarkably stable, long-standing hierarchy of accent status. We find little evidence of demotion of conservative prestige varieties or reranking of accents, although we do observe a slight improvement in lower rankings. We focus in detail on age and life stage, finding that most of the age patterns observed in earlier studies were in fact instances of age-grading (lifespan effects), not real-time change in attitude. The midlife phase of life corresponds to conservative shifts in the perception of global, migrant-heritage, and stigmatised varieties. Our findings add change in speech evaluation to the growing body of research on lifespan change in speech production. Finally, although effects of ethnicity, social class, regional self- and other-bias, and age remain firmly in place, earlier gender differences in respondent behaviour have more or less disappeared.

Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change. SOAS Linguistics Webinars:Accent Bias and Fair Access in Britain April 28, 2021 Erez Levon Professor of Sociolinguistics,University of Bern Abstract:Accent is one of the most salient signals of social background in Britain,yet its role in unequal professional outcomes remains under-examined. Inthis talk, I present results from a set of recent studies conducted to examineaccent bias in Britain: 1) a nationwide survey of attitudes to accent concepts(labels), 2) a nationwide survey of attitudes to accent variation in speech, and3) a specialist survey of accent attitudes among legal professionals. Togetherthe studies show continuing bias in Britain, particularly against working-classaccents, but also incremental attenuation of bias by context. I discuss theimplications of these findings for the role that accent bias might play in impeding social mobility and professional advancement in the UK, and Imention possible interventions and policy initiatives that could help inovercoming the negative effects of accent bias.

This article seeks to partly redress the ways in which sexuality has been overlooked in multilingualism scholarship, especially in the Nordic countries. We do so by queering multilingualism in contexts of migration in two seemingly different contexts, Denmark and Israel, which however share a commonality: they are both widely recognized as ‘liberal’ countries with regard to sexuality. Through analysis of an eclectic corpus of data encompassing news reports, educational material and documentaries, we illustrate problematic language ideological ties that link certain languages – Danish and Hebrew – to notions of sexual liberation and freedom while associating other languages such as Arabic with intolerance and sexual backwardness. We also show the existence of sexual double standards: Denmark has a self-perception as being a nation that safeguards sexual tolerance. However, there are compulsory courses in Danish sexual morality for migrants. Taught in Danish, these courses are based on the belief that there are special rules for sexuality, which migrants must learn to demonstrate that that they ‘fit in’. Similarly, Israel has important legislation that recognizes the rights of sexual minorities and has succeeded in marketing itself as an attractive LGBT tourist destination. However, this alleged paradise of sexual liberation is not equally accessible to all who identify as queer. Paradoxically, queer Palestinian men from the West Bank are forced to hide themselves in the gay bubble, Tel Aviv. https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-434156

The dominant narrative of Israeli nationalism is based on a foundational tension. On one hand, Zionism was motivated by a desire to create a new category of Jewish personhood that would be distinct from its European counterpart. Yet, on the other hand, normative Israeli identity has never been conceptualised as a fully ‘‘Middle Eastern” category. Rather, cultural and historical links to Europe have been strategically deployed to sustain and legitimate pervasive systems of social stratification and marginalisation that exist both within Jewish Israeli communities as well as between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. In this paper, we describe how Arisa, a queer Israeli music group, critiques this dominant Eurocentric imagining of Israeli identity. Drawing on developments in the study of mediatised performance, we examine a promotional music video that Arisa released in 2014. We illustrate how in the video Arisa parodies normative conceptualisations of Israeli authenticity and the gendered, sexual and ethnic stereotypes that undergird them. At the same time, we demonstrate how Arisa’s critique functions by reinscribing tropes of (Jewish) Israeli exceptionalism, thus feeding into dominant discourses of Israeli homonationalism. In the paper, we discuss the complex intersections between these two aspects of Arisa’s performance as they relate to the politics of mediatised performance more generally.

This chapter discusses the relationship between language and sexual politics. It focuses on the ways language is used to police membership in different gendered and sexual groups, to construct self and others along gendered and sexual lines, and to negotiate belonging in different communities and institutions. The first half of the chapter summarizes prominent research in this area. Topics covered include struggles over labeling practices, discursive constructions of sexual authenticities, and the role of language and sexuality in the creation and reproduction of national ideologies. The second half turns to a detailed case study of language and sexual politics among lesbians in Israel. The chapter describes how the women in question use particular linguistic practices, such as variation in Hebrew gender morphology, to construct distinct sexual selves, and, in the process, challenge prevailing sexual norms in Israel. The discussion also highlights future directions for language and sexuality research, focusing on the importance of an adequate theory of power.

The main argument of this article is that Israel seeks to govern its expat citizens not so much through the mobilisation of their ‘rational capacities to evaluate truth claims but through affects’ (Isin, 2004:225). Such viscerality of Israeli nationalism can be seen in the ways in which specific emotions – mourning, shame, guilt and fear of loss – are activated through particular semiotic choices. These affective resources, in turn, are marshalled together in order to create a sense of nostalgia, a desire to return ‘home’, which is deeply imbricated with processes of territorialisation of Israel as the Jewish homeland par excellence, and consequently engenders a problematic regime of identities – Israeli Jewish versus Diasporic Jewish. By exploring an example of how national (be)longing is activated through the circulation of emotions across texts and spaces, the article not only seeks to contribute to current discussions about affect in linguistic landscape scholarship, but also offers a fresh perspective on critical sociolinguistic work on nationalism.

This paper proposes an empirical method for the quantitative analysis of stance-taking in interaction. Building on recent conceptualizations of stance as the primary building-block of variation in language style, we describe how to implement an analysis of stance within a variationist framework via an examination of the particular speech activities within which stances are embedded combined with a consideration of the specific interactional goals these activities achieve. We illustrate our proposals with an investigation of variation in /s/-quality in the speech of cast members from two British reality television programs. Examining nearly 2000 tokens of /s/ in over 6 hours of recorded speech, we demonstrate how different acoustic realizations of /s/ in the sample correlate with the level of “threat” of a given speech activity, and we argue that this interactionally based analysis provides a better explanatory account of the patterns in our data than an analysis based on large social categories would. Through this paper, we therefore hope to contribute not only to the development of a more robust method for examining stance in quantitative sociolinguistic research, but also to help clarify the relationship between stances, speech activities and speaker identities more broadly.

This article examines how social stereotypes influence listeners' perceptions of indexical language. Building on recent developments in linguistics and social psychology, I investigate the extent to which stereotypical attitudes and beliefs about categories of speakers serve to enable the association of linguistic features with particular social meanings while simultaneously blocking others. My arguments are based on an analysis of listener perceptions of the intersecting categories of gender, sexuality, and social class among men in the UK. Using a modified matched-guise paradigm to test three category-relevant variables (mean pitch, spectral characteristics of /s/, and TH-fronting), I demonstrate how the perception of social meaning is governed by a combination of both attitudinal and cognitive factors. This finding is important because it illustrates the listener-dependent nature of sociolinguistic perception. Moreover, it also provides further empirical support for an understanding of social meaning as an emergent property of language-in-use. (speech perception, attitudes and stereotypes, sexuality, phonetic variation)*

Our goal in this article is to illustrate some of the semiotic complexity of pinkwashing and homonationalism in the Israeli context, a complexity that we argue is inadequately modelled by a perspective that focuses solely on the“agentive”or“intentional”actions of the state. Instead, we draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to demonstrate how a series of seemingly mundane practices involving an intricate web of state, para-state and non-state actors contribute to pinkwashing, and hence to the reproduction of Israeli homonationalism.

According to Raewyn Connell, ‘being a man’ involves actively positioning one’s self in relation to culturally dominant images of masculinity. Yet, crucially, these images change depending on the social and historical context. In this paper, we examine contemporary discourses of masculinity as they are represented in the British press. In particular, we focus on the ways in which masculine representations are both racialised and classed, and how they are positioned in relation to one another within a broader ideological field of gender and power. Analyses are based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a large corpus (44.1 million words) of newspaper articles on masculinity that appeared in the UK between 2003 and 2011. Our findings underscore the importance of adopting an intersectional approach to the study of language and masculinity, and provide support for recent critical re-evaluations of the foundational concept of hegemonic masculinity.

In this paper, I argue for the need to integrate intersectionality theory more fully in language, gender, and sexuality research. I outline the basic principles of what an intersectional approach to identity and identity-linked speech entails, focusing particularly on the belief that an adequate description of lived experience, and hence social practice, requires us to consider the ways in which multiple systems of social categorization (e.g., gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, social class, and place) intersect with one another in dynamic and mutually constitutive ways. I review research on the linguistic perception and production of gender and sexuality that has adopted an intersectional perspective to date and argue that while certain aspects of the theory have long had a foothold in work in this area, the field’s engagement with the full ramifications of intersectionality as an analytical framework has been partial. I conclude with suggestions about how to anchor a more comprehensive approach to intersectionality in sociolinguistic research.

In this paper, we revisit the impact of gender and social class on language (e.g., Eckert 1989, 2000, Labov 1990, Milroy et al. 1994, Dubois & Horvath 1999) through an investigation of /s/ in southeast England. Previous work on /s/ variation in English has suggested that, for a number of varieties, backer, more [-esh] like variants are associated with males while more fronted realisations are associated with women. Subsequent work in the UK has also indicated that for some speakers /s/ may also be associated with class (Stuart-Smith 2007). Our study contributes to this area through examining the possible interaction of class and gender with regards to /s/ realisation. Our data come from two British reality television programmes: Made in Chelsea and The Only Way is Essex. The class stratified sample – upper-class Chelsea and working-class Essex – provide an interesting test site for examining how gender and class based identities may manifest linguistically in the relevant communities (e.g., Schilling-Estes 1998, Coupland 2001). \ud Results of a multivariate analysis of 1200 tokens of /s/ produced by 24 speakers in our sample demonstrate a systematic pattern of sex-differentiation across all speakers: women have significantly higher peak frequencies than the men, as consistent with previous work on this feature (e.g., Munson et al. 2006, Stuart-Smith 2007). Further analysis reveals that this differentiation is quantitatively much more extreme in Essex than it is in Chelsea. In discussion, we suggest that Essex speakers may exaggerate their realisations to create hyper-gendered articulations of /s/ and support these interpretations with information regarding other social practices in which Essex speakers engage. More broadly, we consider the ways in which gendered indexicality interacts with social class and argue for the need to treat gender and class as interdependent sociolinguistic constructs.

Since its inception as a field, sociolinguistics' primary goal has been to account for observed patterns of language variation and language change. To that end sociolinguists have focused attention on understanding the properties of both the linguistic systems in which variation occurs and the braoder social matrices in which those systems are embedded. The reason for this dual focus is that, from a sociolinguistic perspective, language never exists in a social vacuum.In the words of Labov (1963, p. 275), 'one cannot understand language (variation and) change apart from the socila life of the community in which it occurs'. In this chapter I discuss ethnographic fieldwork as one of the principal mtahods through which sociolinguists come to apprehend the social lives of the community and community members they study. I begin with a brief overview of what the term ethnography can be taken to mean before turning to a more practicalk discussion of the various methodolological steps that conducting ethnographic fieldwork involves.

Beliefs about a language rarely correspond to how it is used. This is especially true for Hebrew, a language that has been subject to continued ideological “preservation” efforts ever since its (re)vernacularization in the early 20th century. Recently, attention has turned to the maintenance of Hebrew gender morphology, which is perceived in both scholarly and popular opinion as threatened by a process of leveling to gender syncretized forms across a range of word classes and inflectional paradigms. In this article, I investigate the extent to which sociolinguistic evidence supports this perception in cases of animate reference. I argue that while the claim of widespread gender neutralization of these forms is descriptively valid, its characterization as a change-in-progress is inaccurate. Rather, I suggest that Hebrew is already fully syncretized for gender in certain relevant morphological contexts and that the perception of an ongoing process of change reflects a prescriptive belief about how Hebrew should be, not how it actually is.

Sociolinguistic research has traditionally examined stylistic variation as a way of understanding how speakers may use language indexically. Quantitatively, research has sought to correlate observed patterns of variation across such external parameters as context or topic with the ways in which speakers linguistically orient themselves to their immediate surroundings or to some other socially-salient reference group. Recently, this approach has been criticized for being too mechanistic. In this paper, I present a new method for examining stylistic variation that addresses this critique, and demonstrate how an attention to speakers’ motivations and interactional goals can be reconciled with a quantitative analysis of variation. I illustrate the proposed method with a quantitative examination of systematic patterns of prosodic variation in the speech of a group of Israeli men who are all members of various lesbian and gay political-activist groups.

Scholars of American Judaism have argued that American Jews are losing their sense of a distinctive Jewish identity, and the cultural practices concomitant with that identity. This general attrition has resulted in what many label the mosaic identity of American Jews, whereby multiple group affiliations exist in tandem and in conflict. Utilizing a reworked framework of language style (based on Bell 1984, 2001), I demonstrate how the claim that Jewishaffiliated practice is compartmentalized and relegated only to specifically Jewish contexts is supported through an examination of the variable pronunciation of word-final /t/. This paper illustrates the ways in which quantitative and qualitative analyses canwork together to create a more developed picture of Reform American Judaism.

This article describes a controlled experiment designed to determine what people listen to specifically when judging a speaker’s sexuality. Four experimental stimuli were produced by digitally shortening the syllable duration and narrowing the pitch of one male speaker reading a passage. Listeners rated various combinations of the four stimuli on 10 affective scales, including straight/gay and effeminate/masculine. Altering the two variables was insufficient to alter listeners’ perceptions of the speaker’s sexuality to a level of significance. However, significant correlations between the different attitudinal scales illustrated that perceptions of sexuality are ideologically linked to other perceptions of personality and personhood.

This article illustrates the use of an empirical method for examining the perceptual identification of gayness in male speakers. It demonstrates how, by digitally manipulating the speech of isolated individuals, it is possible to obtain reliable evidence that pitch range and sibilant duration may act as indexical of a gay male identity. Further scrutiny of this result, however, illustrates that linguistic indexicality is not as straightforward as it originally appears. Subsequent analyses of the data highlight the ways in which the perceptual evaluation of sexuality is a highly contingent process, dependent upon a variety of sociolinguistic factors. An envelope of variation in listeners' affective judgments of a speaker is shown to exist, and it is argued that research on the perception of identity must go beyond identification of salient features, and also consider when and why these features are not salient.I greatly benefited from the insight and assistance of the following people, whom I would like to thank: Renee Blake, Lisa Davidson, Penny Eckert, Rudi Gaudio, Ron Butters, Keith Walters, Barbara Johnstone, and three anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting in Oakland, California, in January 2005, and the 72nd Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 2005. I thank the participants at those events for their questions and comments. All errors are, of course, my own.