Relaciones de ganar o perder: la persona neoliberal

This dissertation is based on the premise that language features are not viewed as having fixed or isolated social meanings. Many studies of the language of the U.S. South take social meaning for granted, simply associating regional indexical value with the geographic location of speakers. However, this dissertation attends to the ways language practices were linked with multiple intersecting social meanings when they were

associated with particular Southern types in interactions, and it attends to the ideologies of YLSM members that correlated various aspects of Southern language—its functions and its forms—with these different types of Southern identities.

7.2.1. Indexical meaning of Southern language

Viewing indexical values as emergent through language practice and as a result of language ideology, this dissertation highlights the flexible and culturally grounded nature of language’s social meanings. Through stylization, YLSM members associated linguistic forms—such as glide-weakened /ai/, the second person plural pronoun “yall,” and the demonstrative adjective “them”—with various types of Southerners. Moments of

be socially meaningful but not salient enough to warrant explicit metacommentary (Niedzielski & Preston 2003). For example, YLSM members mocked small-town cheerleaders by drawing on markedly Southern phonological features, and through the content as well as the form of their talk about these cheerleaders, they constructed them as an unrefined, socially ignorant Southern type (Example 4.6). One of the most often imitated individuals in the YLSM community was Dave Clarke, whose identity as a hyper-Southern, hyper-masculine redneck was articulated on numerous occasions. Across different conversations in which Dave was mocked for being a redneck, girls stylized various aspects of Southern language as part of his persona, including glide-weakened /ai/, the lowering of [ei] as [ai], and demonstrative “them.”

By examining interactions in which linguistic features were linked with social types, this dissertation also argues that social meanings are not unitary, pointing either to a single demographic dimension, such as geography or gender, or to a single social attribute, such as friendliness or incorrectness. While these are productive ways to illuminate various individual dimensions of social meanings, my analysis shows that YLSM members used language practices in such a way that drew on and constructed multiple social meanings and attributes at once. This observation motivated my analysis of the social types, as whole models of personhood (Agha 2007a), that YLSM members referenced while defining their own identities within the South. By referencing social types like preppy Southerners and redneck Southerners, YLSM members highlighted complex identities that exist at the intersection of multiple social dimensions, such as region, gender, and class. These different social types were associated with the use of

particular Southern language practices and were differently assigned the negative value of the widely recognized linguistic and social stigma of being Southern.

In Chapter 6, I highlighted the emergent social meanings of two specific linguistic resources, glide-weakened /ai/ and fronted /u/. Their rates and contexts of use by YLSM members Claire and Julie reflected the local value of these two vowels as regional linguistic features. While glide-weakened /ai/ was seen as an index of regional identity widely as well as locally, the case of fronted /u/ presented a nuanced picture of emerging indexical meanings. As both a feature of Southern language and of other regional

varieties of American English, fronted /u/ has a multivalent social meaning as either a Southern feature or an non-regional one. My analysis suggested that fronted /u/ remained potentially indexical of both Southern and non-Southern identities, and particular

indexical meanings could be identified through close attention to context, recurring associations, and the co-occurrence of linguistic features.

7.2.2. Ideologies of Southern language

My analysis of the regional meanings of so-called Southern linguistic features relies on participants’ underlying ideologies of Southern language, both popular and local YLSM ideologies. YLSM members defined Southern language and its social values according to widely circulating stereotypes of Southerners and Southern speech. For example, in Chapter 4, I illustrated how YLSM members conceived of Southern language in terms of its multivalent perceptions as both friendly and incorrect. Informed by these well-known perceptions of Southern speakers, YLSM members’ ideologies of the use of Southern language further mapped these qualities onto different aspects of Southern language and different types of Southern people in a fractally recursive pattern (Irvine &

Gal 2000), one which reproduced the linguistic and stigmatized distinctions that existed at a national level onto a local level. Thus, preppy Southerners like YLSM members were seen as employing the functions of Southern language to construct their identities as friendly while unrefined and redneck Southerners who used the forms of Southern language were heard as incorrect.

In their construction of Dave as a stereotypical hyper-masculine Southern

redneck, YLSM members reproduced the widely circulating linguistic stigma against this type. Yet they also suggested, as in the case of Russell, that Southern masculinity could alternatively be enacted by the locally defined preppy Southern social type that was seen as unmarked linguistically according to local standards. Finally, in Chapter 6, I

demonstrated how linguistic resources, such as in the stylization of other Southern voices, could be used to evoke widely and locally circulating stereotypes of Southern identities, both those typified by Dave specifically and those of different types of preppy Southern girls as well.

The social meanings of linguistic practices and features among the YLSM community were informed by the local cultural setting; they emerged not only in single linguistic interactions but also through their co-occurrence across members of the same community and various interactions within the community. For example, the

metacommentary examined in Chapter 4 demonstrated co-occurring themes: YLSM members often constructed their identities by alluding to Southern charm and Southern politeness while they mitigated their own perceived use of Southern linguistic forms and accents. Additionally, the analysis in Chapter 6 explored how individual identities were enacted in reference to locally relevant types: Claire consistently constructed her identity

as a preppy Southern girl, while Julie defined her own identity by maintaining some degree of distance from this regional type.