Rights statement: Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Final published version, 220 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Intersectionality and the social meanings of variation
T2 - class, ethnicity, and social practice
AU - Kirkham, Sam
N1 - Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
PY - 2015/10/15
Y1 - 2015/10/15
N2 - This article examines how the social meanings of phonetic variation in a British adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationship between ethnicity, social class and social practice. I focus on the realisation of the HAPPY vowel in Sheffield English, which is reported to be a lax variant [ɛ̈] amongst working-class speakers but is undergoing change towards a tense variant [i] amongst middle-class speakers. I analyse the acoustic realisation of this vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondary school and find that the variable’s community-wide associations of social class are projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation, which I suggest is a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographic evidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of the HAPPY vowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles, which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuring local social practices.
AB - This article examines how the social meanings of phonetic variation in a British adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationship between ethnicity, social class and social practice. I focus on the realisation of the HAPPY vowel in Sheffield English, which is reported to be a lax variant [ɛ̈] amongst working-class speakers but is undergoing change towards a tense variant [i] amongst middle-class speakers. I analyse the acoustic realisation of this vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondary school and find that the variable’s community-wide associations of social class are projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation, which I suggest is a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographic evidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of the HAPPY vowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles, which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuring local social practices.
U2 - 10.1017/S0047404515000585
DO - 10.1017/S0047404515000585
M3 - Journal article
VL - 44
SP - 629
EP - 652
JO - Language in Society
JF - Language in Society
SN - 0047-4045
IS - 5
ER -