Hating one's own speech

[galey modan]

Hi Eric,

No research on people hating the way they speak comes to mind, but I'm sure
if you search for the term "linguistic insecurity", whatever is out there
will come up. Also relevant is the research on language shift looking at
what happens when people devalue their language variety in practice, even
if they may value it ideologically. Examples are Sue Gal's "Peasant Men
Can't Get Wives" or Don Kulick's _Language Shift and Cultural
Reproduction_.

best,

Galey


2013/5/17 daria schwalbe <daria.schwalbe at gmail.com>

> Hi Eric,
> 'hate' is a very strong word. I did come across a variety of negative
> attitudes expressed towards ones own language during my own feldwork among
> the Yupik (eskimo) population of Chukotka (Siberia) and Alaska. Usually
> these expressed discoursively in phrases which outline one form of speaking
> being better, richer, more correct or, as Shannon writes, 'proper'  way of
> speaking than the other. Explicitely, the negative attitudes towards
> ones language (rather than way of speaking) are expressed through claims of
> it being unneccessary, unsuitable, slow, hard lto learn, etc. There are
> also cases of mockery of ones way of speaking (particular accent),  but
> never directly "i hate the way i speak". i think you might find some
> interesting cases in studies on urban migrant socieies, and also maybe
> analysis of rap-texts. cheers
>
>
> 2013/5/17 s.t. bischoff <bischoff.st at gmail.com>
>
> > Hello Eric,
> >
> > I'm not sure if this is what you are interested in but...an undergraduate
> > student of mine did a case study within his own family regarding heritage
> > language loss. His family came from a Puerto Rican Spanish background and
> > his parents spoke Puerto Rican Spanish as their L1. He found that his
> > parents decided not to teach him and his siblings Spanish (the parents
> L1)
> > because they felt their variety of Spanish "wasn't the good kind" of
> > Spanish. The parents instead encouraged the children to learn "proper
> > Spanish" in school as an L2 (English being the children's L1 at this
> > point), which was an option for the children once they were in high
> school.
> > He wasn't able to come across anything in the literature that reflected
> > this, however. It is curious that the parents claim to have made a
> > conscious decision to not teach their variety of Spanish to their
> children
> > because they saw it as a non-prestige or low variety.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Shannon
> >
> >
> > On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 3:10 PM, Eric Henry <Eric.Henry at smu.ca> 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
> > >
> >
>