Hating one's own speech

[Jim Wilce]

If "hate" is too strong a word, "shame" is not. Bonner 2001 and 
McEwan-Fujita are among those who have documented language shame. It 
seems to me a crucial concept (along with pride!) in relation to studies 
of language shift and revitalization (McEwan-Fujita 2010). It's worth 
looking at classic work on shame by Elias, Scheff, Lynd, Giddens, 
Honneth, etc. See also my attempt to theorize language and shame/ 
language shame in /Language and Emotion/ (e.g., pp. 116-118), and shame 
more generally in /Crying Shame/ (2009, especially chapter 7).

Bonner, Donna M.
2001 Garifuna Children's Language Shame : Ethnic Stereotypes, National 
Affiliation, and Transnational Immigration as Factors in Language Choice 
in Southern Belize. Language in Society 30(1):81-96.
Elias, Norbert
2000 (1939) The Civilizing Process. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell.
Giddens, Anthony
1991 Modernity and Self-Identity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Honneth, Axel
1995 The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political 
Philosophy Albany: State University of New York Press.
Lynd, Helen Merrell
1966 [1958] On Shame and the Search for Identity. New York: Science 
Editions.
McEwan-Fujita, Emily
2010 Ideology, affect, and socialization in language shift and 
revitalization: The experiences of adults learning Gaelic in the Western 
Isles of Scotland. Language in Society 39(1):27–64.
Scheff, Thomas
2000 Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory. Sociological 
Theory 18(1):84-98.
Wilce, James M.
2009a Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of 
Lament.
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
2009b Language and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jim Wilce

On 5/16/13 12:10 PM, Eric Henry wrote:
> A student asked me for some resources today on "people who hate how they speak." It got me thinking about the devaluation of nonstandard dialects or accents by standardizing language ideologies, and how they are adopted and reproduced even by the speakers themselves.
>
> A lot of the cases that came to mind though are more ambivalent than negative - that is, while the speakers may perceive their own speech to be problematic (especially in official or institutional interactions), they still maintain positive social value in other domains (the domestic or local sphere). I'm trying to think of any research on situations where speakers aesthetically stigmatize their own speech across the full range of interactional contexts. Any thoughts? Feel free to reply on or off list.
>
> Thanks,
> Eric Henry
>


-- 
Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology
Northern Arizona University
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22/
Editor, Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
Now Available: Language and Emotion
For more information see www.cambridge.org/9780521864176