Covert and overt prestige in speech

Any explanation, however, seem to be just a suggestion at the moment. Gender differentiation in language arises because, as we have already seen, language, as a social phenomenon, is closely related to social attitudes. Men and women are socially different in that the society lays down different social roles for them and expects different behaviour patterns from them. Language simply reflects this social fact. The larger and more inflexible the difference between the social roles of men and women in a particular community, the larger and more rigid the linguistic differences tend to be. Our English examples have all consisted of tendencies for women to use more 'correct' forms than men. The examples of distinct male and female varieties all came from technologically primitive food gathering or nomadic (кочевой) communities where sex roles are much more clearly delineated. If the social roles of men and women change, moreover, as they seem to be doing currently in many societies nowadays, then it is likely that gender differences in language will change or diminish also.

As far as English is concerned we have some interesting evidence about the way in which social values and sex roles affect speakers' attitudes towards linguistic variants - and hence their actual usage of these variants. We already have plenty of evidence to show that, in England, Standard English and the RP accent have high prestige. (It is well known, for example, that speakers who are paying considerable attention to their speech will move linguistically in the direction of prestige varieties).

What, however, of the argument that working class speech has favourable connotations for male speakers? The argument really hinges on the belief that lower class, non-standard linguistic varieties also have some kind of 'prestige', and that this is particularly so in the case of men. W. Labov has called this kind of 'prestige' covert prestige because attitudes of this type are not usually overtly (явный) expressed, and depart markedly from the mainstream of societal values (of schools and other institutions). Favourable words like 'good' and 'nice', for instance, are usually reserved for standard prestige varieties.

One example of the evidence, which shows that covert prestige exists. In the urban dialect survey of Norwich, informants were asked to take part in a 'self-evaluation test', in order to investigate what they believed themselves to say as opposed to what they actually did say. In this test, words were read aloud to the informants with two or more different pronunciations. For example: tune: l. [tju:n]; 2. [tu:n] (Both pronunciations are current in Norwich, the former, being the RP pronunciation, having more prestige than the latter). Informants were then asked to say, by marking a number on a chart, which of the pronunciations they normally used themselves. By comparing the results of this test with the data actually tape-recorded during the interviews, it became possible to note discrepancies between what informants thought or claimed they said and what they actually said. The results for the vowel of tune, student, music etc. were very interesting. Informants were divided into two groups: those who used 50 per cent or more [j] in their tape-recorded conversations were considered to be [j] glide-users, and those with less than 50 per cent non glide-users.

glide-use claimed glide-use non-claimed

actual glide-users 60 40

actual non-users 16 84

If we now break these scores down by gender, the results are rather revealing. Of the 40 per cent under-reporters, half were men and half women. But of the 16 per cent over-reporters, all were women. Male informants, one could see, were strikingly more accurate than their female counterparts. The women report themselves, in very many cases, as using higher-class variants than they actually do - presumably because they wish they did use them or think they ought to and perhaps, therefore, actually believe that they do.

Patterns of a similar kind, albeit of a more complex type, are also found in Western communities: it seems women are more conservative than men when it comes to linguistic changes which are operating in the direction away from the prestige standard - glottal stop realisations of [t] in English, for example. In those cases where there is some kind of high-status variety or national norm, changes in the direction of this norm appear to be led more frequently by women. In Hillsboro, North Carolina, for instance, women appear to be in the vanguard of the change from an older prestige norm to a newer one. Whereas educated southern speech of the type formerly considered prestigious in Hillsboro is r-less, women especially are now tending to use the more widespread national prestige norm with non-prevocalic [r] in words such as car and cart.

In Norwich, too, the same sort of pattern emerges, with women in the vanguard of changes towards prestige pronunciation. There is, however, one exception in Norwich English where a linguistic change has upset the normal pattern of gender differentiation. The variable involved in this unusual case is the vowel of words such as top, hot, dog. In Norwich this can have a low back rounded vowel, as in RP [top], or an unrounded vowel, [tap]. We may explain this in the following way: the vowel of top is currently undergoing linguistic change in Norwich: rounded vowels of the RP-type are on the increase.

The change, however, is taking place in an interesting and unusual way. The newer, rounded vowel is being introduced into Norwich English from RP by middle-class women who are favourably disposed to prestige forms and therefore use nearly 100 per cent of rounded vowels. It is also being introduced, however, by working class men, in imitation of the working class speech of London and the neighbouring county of Suffolk. These working-class accents, which also use [o], have favourable connotations (covert prestige) for Norwich men, and they therefore use more rounded vowels and have lower scores than working-classwomen. This, then, is an unusual case where overt prestige and covert prestige coincide, and it illustrates the role that gender differentiation can contribute much to linguistic change.

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