TRANSGRESIÓN SOCIOLINGÜÍSTICA Y PATRONES TRADICIONALES DE SEXISMO EN UNA COMUNIDAD DE HABLA VERNÁCULA.

The unexpected patterns of nonstandard sociolinguistic behaviour by a female former President of the Government of Murcia (Spain) during the mid 1990s were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively by Hernández-Campoy & Cutillas-Espinosa (2010, 2012, 2013) and Cutillas- Espinosa, Hernández-Campoy & Schilling-Estes (2010). Diagnosing it as a case of Speaker Design (see Coupland 2001, 2007; or Bell 2014), they concluded that with the use and hyper-use of Murcian dialect features the President was not shifting her speech in reaction to formality, or even in accommodation to the many Murcians in her audience, but to purposely project an image upon her local constituency. She was deliberately designing her local speech to project an image that should stress her Murcian identity as well as her socialist ideals by strategically establishing the association of, on the one hand, the Murcian dialect with regional identity, local working class and progressive ideas, and, on the other hand, of the standard (Castilian Spanish) with conservative ideas and the accent of privileged social classes (the bourgeoisie). With this instrumentalisation of vernacularity in publicly broadcast political speech, stylistic variation is creatively and strategically used to identity creation and projection. Yet in solely focussing on the social psychology of this speaker, these authors disregarded that of the Murcian speech community -whose vernacular variety is stigmatised and has covert prestige (see Jiménez-Cano 2001)-, as well as their reaction. Therefore, the aim of the present paper is to complementarily explore the sociolinguistic attitudes and value judgements of this local speech community towards this speaker. Even though the President might have designed her political speech to appeal to her voters, evidence suggests that she did not appeal to the Murcian public in general, as her dialectal speech caused quite a bit of controversy and debate. She clearly violated expectations not only for occupation and social class but also for gender, since it has been shown, at least in the industrialised Western world, that women's speech tends more standard than that of men (see Trudgill 1972): while working class (non-standard) speech seems to have connotations of masculinity because of its association with the roughness and toughness of the vernacular world and culture stereotypically, and often considered to be desirable masculine attributes, it is, contrarily, not considered to be desirable feminine characteristics, where refinement and sophistication are much conventionally preferred (see Coupland & Jaworski 2009). The sexism still pervading a local speech community in the 1990s and the connotations of masculinity associated with working-class speech contributed to generate a hostile atmosphere against a female non-standard-speaking citizen standing as President of Government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]