Eckert Jocks and Burnouts

5 Key excerpts on "Eckert Jocks and Burnouts"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

  • Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  On the whole, girls made use of linguistic resources to construct their category membership more than boys: burnout girls used vowel systems which most strongly indicated an urban orientation, while jock girls used vowel systems which were most firmly associated with suburban norms. Eckert (1989a, 1998) discusses this finding in terms of the girls’ more limited ability to accumulate symbolic capital in other ways; for instance, there was less opportunity for them to show their jock status through participating in sports, or to show their burnout status by working on cars, which were activities boys dominated. This study shows the use of ethnography not only to ascertain the social categories to be used as vari- ables in the study, but also to interpret the findings of the linguistic analysis. This study also draws attention to the concept of lifestyle. What is important for jocks is less their social class status, but that they have middle-class aspirations; they were college- bound and saw themselves as pursuing white-color jobs. As teens, they willingly partici- pated in the activities of the school (such as sports, hence their label). Burnouts oriented toward leaving school for the blue-collar workplace, and found activities in urban settings outside school more attractive. Thus these orientations, while linked to gender and social class, are indicative of a certain orientation to life, and here we find the agentive and not merely correlational aspect of this research. Exploration 5.6 Social Categories in High School Were there named social categories such as ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’ in your high school? If so, what were the terms used, and what were the criteria for being one or the other? Were there any linguistic practices linked to being in one group or the other?

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

  • Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The school where she did her research, which she calls ‘Belton High,’ was predominantly White, but stratified in terms of socioeconomic class. Her research showed how students’ use of variants associated with suburban versus urban identities correlated with membership in the categories they labeled ‘jocks’ or ‘burnouts,’ respectively. Although not all of the students considered themselves as belonging to one group or the other, they still oriented themselves toward these categories, labeling themselves as ‘in‐betweens.’ While these groups correlated to some extent with social class boundaries – with jocks being the college‐bound middle class, and burnouts being the more working‐class children destined for blue‐collar employment after high school – this correlation did not always hold true. On the whole, girls made use of linguistic resources to construct their category membership more than boys: burnout girls used vowel systems which most strongly indicated an urban orientation, while jock girls used vowel systems which were most firmly associated with suburban norms. Eckert (1989a, 1998) discusses this finding in terms of the girls’ more limited ability to accumulate symbolic capital in other ways; for instance, there was less opportunity for them to show their jock status through participating in sports, or to show their burnout status by working on cars, which were activities boys dominated. This study shows the use of ethnography not only to ascertain the social categories to be used as variables in the study, but also to interpret the findings of the linguistic analysis. This study also draws attention to the concept of lifestyle. What is important for jocks is less their social class status, but that they have middle‐class aspirations; they were college‐bound and saw themselves as pursuing white‐color jobs. As teens, they willingly participated in the activities of the school (such as sports, hence their label)

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Gender Articulated

  Language and the Socially Constructed Self

  • Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz, Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Burnout girls and jock girls construct strikingly different solutions to the dilemma created for them by the overarching gender structures they all experience, structures characterized by male dominance and heterosexist preoccupation with sexual differentiation. And each group judges the other’s strategic moves in response to these constraints very harshly. One result is that the overall differences in normative patterns of practice between burnout and jock girls are far greater than those between burnout and jock boys. After junior high, opposition—and conflict—between burnouts and jocks centers on opposition—and (primarily) symbolic conflict—between burnout and jock girls. This is reflected with startling clarity in patterns of phonological variation, to which we now turn.

  Pronouncing Selves

  The depth of the jock–burnout opposition in Belten High is borne out by differences in speech between the members of the two categories: differences in vocabulary, in grammar, in pronunciation. But more important, these speech differences are not simply markers of category affiliation. They carry in themselves complex social meanings, like tough, cool, slutty, casual, or mean, and these meanings are part of the construction of categories like those labeled by female, male, jock, burnout. Finding these meanings through correlations between the use of linguistic variables and indicators of social practice is a major challenge for sociolinguists. In this section, we focus on several phonological variables that enter into the construction of social identities in Belten High, and that simultaneously are part of what constitutes a “Midwest,” or Detroit, or Michigan accent. The production of linguistic styles is part of the production of identities, and local and regional pronunciations provide some of the resources that can be put to stylistic use.

  The following discussion focuses on two vowels that have symbolic significance in this community. The symbolic significance is associated with recent innovations in pronunciation, innovations that reflect sound changes in progress:

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  What Is Sociolinguistics?

  • Gerard Van Herk(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  gamers (or, again, any other local name; Eckert 2000; Gardner 2010; Bucholtz 1999). These labels reflect the poles – the extremes of expected social behavior in the school. Other students situate themselves with respect to these poles.

  It’s not just the labels that are locally generated, though: the things that group members do vary from place to place, including their language. In Eckert’s study of a suburban Michigan high school (Eckert 1989, 2000), the burnouts were more likely to meet up with urban Detroiters in parks or while driving around, and thus had more contact with incoming sound changes (like the Northern Cities Shift). So burnouts had more heavily shifted vowels, girl burnouts shifted even more (if you forget why, refresh your memory in chapter 7), and the burned-out burnouts (those who behaved the most like burnouts) shifted the most of all.

  That’s not to say that contact is the only thing that drives this kind of language change, in schools or anywhere else. Students presumably use language features to show where they fit in with respect to the communities of practice active in their schools. Shifting your vowels isn’t just something burnouts do; it’s something people do in order to be burnouts. This is illustrated nicely by some research here in Atlantic Canada, where rapid social change is really pushing language change. In Gardner’s (2010) study of high school students in Cape Breton Island (an economically and demographically declining area of Nova Scotia), most of the smokers (rebels) used local features, as we would expect. But so did people who ate their lunch in the cafeteria, the local keepers of the institution. Gardner attributes this to the fact that their futures are fairly clearly determined. In other words, they could afford to sound local, because their status wasn’t in question. The students who avoided

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Indexing Authenticity

  Sociolinguistic Perspectives

  • Véronique Lacoste, Jakob Leimgruber, Thiemo Breyer, Véronique Lacoste, Jakob Leimgruber, Thiemo Breyer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Auer 2007; Coupland 2007; Rickford & Eckert 2001). This not only brings forward the shifting and contingent nature of language variation but also considers linguistic variables to be indexing and performing more subtle social categorisations than large demographic values (place, class, gender), without losing sight of the relevance of these larger categories. Eckert’s seminal study on Jocks and Burnouts, for example, demonstrates how linguistic distinctions are employed to construct styles that relate to very local categories, which are, at the same time, linked to larger cultural and demographic patterns (Eckert 1989). The local situation is thus related to and embedded in larger cultural and social structures, which allow the speaker, in a process of bricolage (Eckert 2008: 456), to construct styles on the basis of categories that have been discursively constructed and made available through processes of enregisterment (Agha 2003: 231) on a broader level. It is thus no accident that, in Eckert’s study, the non-conformist group of pupils chooses the colour black as one of its means to index their non-conformity, and not, for example, rose pink. Such choices can also be observed with regard to language and, in this sense, linguistic variation “constitutes an indexical system that embeds ideology in language and that is in turn part and parcel of the construction of ideology.” (Eckert 2008: 454). While such processes of the local development of indexicalities are extremely complex in themselves, global “flows” (Pennycook 2007: Ch.7) of discourses, images and languages have brought about even further complexity. Meanings are not tied to space but can be mobile; the indexical systems from far-away places can affect local linguistic economies and enter into their constructions of ideology

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book