ESSAY ON American English Social Dialect Variation and Gender Natalie Shilling-Estes

Natalie Shilling-Estes wrote an article focusing mainly on the description of language variation in American English, bouncing from the regional to ethnic to gender based variation. The professor begins her article by trying to direct the attention of the readers on the development of the research on gender and social dialect variation in American English since the early 1960s. Through the concept known as social dialects one should think of the patterns of language use which characterize groups of speakers who share similar social backgrounds. This variation of language and social traits are studied by sociolinguistics, such as Natalie Shilling-Estes, in order to develop a fuller understanding of the nature of language and its role in society. The dialect variation is present in any language; for example, English speakers may say either goin or going, aint or isnt or other words or expressions such as these. Speakers who use similar language forms share the same dialect or variety of a language. Such groups usually share also other characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, origin, social class background or others. For example, members of the upper social classes in New York City pronounce the r in words like hard, store more often than do individuals of lower social status, and thus sets themselves apart from lower-class groups. Language is one of the features that shape the identity of an individual or a group. In the same manner as individuals are unified by a common language, and distinguished by it from other language groups, so can dialects unify and separate groups within a language. The main purpose of Natalie Shilling-Estes article is to trace the development of the study of gender and social dialect variation in the United States. She treats the matter chronologically by first including and discussing the early survey studies in which gender was seen as equivalent to the biological sex and as secondary to class in its effects on language variation and change. Natalie Shilling-Estes includes in her article the opinions and studies of William Labov and even quotes him when discussing the idea that social class and ethnicity have a greater effect on language variation than gender.

She then announces her focus on later studies based on more localized groups such as social networks. These studies in particular implemented the idea that gender is no longer the factor which makes a simple binary distinction between males and females, but came to represent a complex social construct. Later on, in her study, Natalie Shilling-Estes focuses on the concept that the Community of Practice stands for. This concept brings along important changes such as the shift from the idea that the speakers identity is mainly static to the image in which speakers are seen as dynamic and highly agentive, and language is not only shaped by but plays an essential role in shaping social groups and societal forces. In this essay I will focus mainly on Natalie Shilling-Estes discussions and opinions concerning Communities of Practice. When bringing into discussion this concept, Natalie admits to the idea that speakers are in continuous change and that they redesign the various aspects of their identities in social interaction, idea to which I definitely agree. The community of practice according to Penelope Eckert is a collection of people who engage on an ongoing basis in some common endeavor. It came to be known the important fact according to which communities of practice appear in response to the existence of a common interest and play an important role in forming the characters of their members and their orientation to the world around them. This concept, community of practice, was first developed as the basis of a social theory of learning by Jean lave and Etienne Wenger but then the notion was brought into sociolinguistics by Penelope Eckert and McConnell-Ginet in 1992 as an approach to theorize language and gender. The most important aspect of this concept is its capacity to identify a social group not in virtue of shared characteristics such as class or gender or neighbourhood or workplace, but in virtue of shared practice. In a course of regular mutual activity, a community of practice develops ways of doing things, perspectives, values or/and ways of talking. According to Penelope Eckert the community of practice is thus a rich locus for the study or situated language use, of language change, and of the very process of conventionalization that underlines both. I think it is safe to say that individuals in a community of practice collaborate in order to be known as a group which managed to create a personal and maybe unique style, including a linguistic style. What makes a community of practice different from just any group of speakers is not the selection of the speakers so much as the nature of the responsibility for

this selection. The value of this approach relies on the analysts capacity to discover communities of practice that are mainly significant to the sociolinguistic study. When treating this particular subject, the communities of practice, Natalie Shilling-Estes brings into discussion some important case studies such as Mary Bucholtzs study on nerds or uncool girls in a California high school, Wongs study on two gay Cantonesespeaking men or Kieslings investigation of gendered identity in heterosexual men. The increasing focus on individual agency and experience has led to increasing interest in matters of personal identity. In Mary Bucholtzs study the main position is taken by a simple concept such as the nerd. Mary Bucholtz tries to define the person known as the nerd by including him/her in a social category and by stereotypically labelling him/her as intellectual overachiever and social underachiever. On the opposite side we can find coolness which can be defined as engagement with and participation in the trends and practices of youth culture. In rejecting coolness, according to Mary Bucholtz, students who consider themselves nerds signal their distance from both the practices and the positions of trendier youth. Instead, they embrace the values of nerdiness. According to Mary Bucholtzs study, nerd girls dont even try to be cute or sophisticated, rather, they promote the image of untrendiness and intelligence.

An important aspect on which Mary Bucholtz focuses in her study is the usage of dialect variation. For example, whereas the cool girls found the talk about current slang the most enjoyable part from the interview conducted by the professor, the nerds at this high school chose to separate themselves from these particular linguistic forms and focus mainly on their use of superstandard English. By avoiding these particular linguistic forms, the nerds symbolically distanced themselves from their cooler side. The characteristics of a language are seen as a reflection of the essential characteristics of its users. Evoking the registers of scholarship and science, nerds use of superstandard English produced a very different kind of identity than did the colloquial Standard English used by cooler students. In this particular discussion, Natalie Shilling-Estes focuses on both womens speech and mens speech as well. By doing so, the professor signals important intragender differences in mens speech based on the different communities of practice in which they participate.

At this point, he brings into discussion Wongs study based on the description of how two gay men use both conventionally masculine and conventionally feminine linguistic features. This study case shows that the gay men use these linguistic features in quite different ways when talking with gay versus straight friends. According to this study and also according to many studies that were to come it is safe to say that gay speech is not just a simple monolithic entity but can differ from interaction to interaction.

In her article, Natalie Shilling-Estes sustains an important idea according to which in same manner as different men and different women may exhibit different types of maleness and femaleness, so too can a particular man or woman present different types of gendered identity in different contexts, or even in a single context, depending on the conversational purpose.

Communities of practice emerge in response to common interest or position, and play a significant role in forming their members participation in and orientation to the world around them. It should be clear that the speech of community and the community of practice approaches are both necessary and complementary, and that the value of each depends on having the right abstract categories and finding the communities of practice in which those categories are most relevant.