Hating one's own speech

Fri May 17 19:02:41 UTC 2013

It's a bit late to copyright "linguistic insecurity," since the term/concept has been in the literature for over forty years. 

The locus classicus is Labov's The Social Stratification of English in New York City
 (1966), wherein he presents the results of a semi-formalized projective
 test called "The Index of Linguistic Insecurity," also noting that "when most New Yorkers say that outsiders
dislike New York City speech, they are describing an attitude which is actually
their own ... New Yorkers show a general hostility towards New York City speech
which emerges in countless ways.  The
term 'linguistic self-hatred' is not too extreme to apply to the situation”
(Labov 1966: 488-489; and see Labov 1972, Sociolinguistic Patterns [Univ Pennsylvania Press], pp. 117, 133 et passim).  

Not unrelated is the condition dubbed schizoglossia by Einar Haugen:

"Schizoglossia may be described as a linguistic malady which may
arise in speakers and writers who are exposed to more than one variety of their
own language. Under favorable or more precisely, unfavorable conditions, the
symptoms may include acute discomfort in the region of the diaphragm and the
vocal chords. If the patient refuses to 'leave his language alone,' we are
assured by Robert A. Hall that he may also be afflicted by general insecurity,
which expresses itself as 'false humility' and 'needless self-depreciation.'
The damage to his character, we are told, may be 'incalculable.' Pursuing this
thought, I may add that the victims of schizoglossia are often marked by a
disproportionate, even an unbalanced interest in the form rather than the
substance of language.  In extreme cases
they may even turn into professional linguists, just as schizophrenics
sometimes become psychoanalysts in order to study in others the symptoms of
their own ailment" (Haugen 1972 [1962]: 148-49; The Ecology of Language (Anwar S. Dil [ed.], Stanford U Press).

Macaulay observed in his classic study that “it would be
possible to present a fairly impressive picture of ‘linguistic self-hatred’ in
Glasgow” (Macaulay 1975:153). Macaulay’s interviewees routinely distinguished
between a general Glasgow accent of which they generally approved, and what
they called a ‘broad’ one, linked to working-class identities, which one
university lecturer described as “‘the ugliest accent one can encounter, but
that is partly because it is associated with the unwashed and the violent’”
(Macaulay 1975: 154).  And yet Macaulay
notes that “it would have been difficult if not impossible to use the method of
Labov’s Index of Linguistic Insecurity” to analyze the Glasgow data, “because
the notion of ‘correctness’ in pronunciation is explicitly problematic in
Glasgow, as in most of Scotland, on account of nationalistic feelings”
(Macaulay 1975: 152). 

Many of Macaulay’s findings for Glasgow are echoed in
Watt’s more recent study of Tyneside English (Watt 2002). Linguistic insecurity
is rampant, and yet “many Tynesiders view RP very negatively:  resentment against any perceived form of
‘southern hegemony’ and ‘centralized aggression’ pervades Tyneside society”
(Watt 2002: 55).  One commentator wonders
if Tyneside English “may be at greater risk from its own image” than from
external forces, insofar as it is seen as “indelibly linked to ‘working-class
status’ and with it ‘a traditional/reactionary life-style’” (ibid.). The
emblematic Geordie utterance is “The English divvent want we and the Scots
winna have we” (at p 54)—and Watt’s Tyneside consultants readily offered up
“evaluations such as ‘if you were about to undergo brain surgery and met the
surgeon beforehand you would be horrified to hear him speaking in a broad
Geordie dialect’” (from a Tyneside student; Watt 2002: 55); another opined that
“‘Geordie sounds like ordinary English spoken backwards’” (ibid.).

References

Haugen, Einar. 1972. The Ecology of Language. Anwar S. Dil, ed. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.

Labov, W.  1966. 
The Social Stratification of English in New York City.  Washington, DC: Center for Applied
Linguistics.

Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press (esp. p. 17, p. 33ff).

Macaulay, Ronald K.S.  1975. 
Negative prestige, linguistic insecurity, and linguistic
self-hatred.  Lingua 36: 147-161.

Watt,
Dominic.  2002.  “I don’t speak with a Geordie accent, I speak,
like, the Northern accent”: Contact-induced leveling in the Tyneside vowel
system.  Journal of Sociolinguistics
6(1): 44-63.

And see
additionally:

Deumert, Ana. 2004. Language
Standardization and Language Change.  The
Dynamics of Cape Dutch. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (esp. pp. 248ff).

Moore, Robert. 2011. “If I actually talked like that, I’d pull a gun on
myself”:  Accent, avoidance, and moral
panic in contemporary Irish English. Anthropological
Quarterly 84(1): 41-64.

--- On Fri, 5/17/13, Steve Bialostok <stevebialostok at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

From: Steve Bialostok <stevebialostok at YAHOO.COM>
Subject: Re: Hating one's own speech
To: LINGANTH at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Date: Friday, May 17, 2013, 12:52 PM

This isn't research per se, but if you watch the film American Tongues (from the 80s but still quite good), there is one explicit example of "linguistic insecurity" (nice term, Galey, copyright it now!). In it, a white woman feels inferior due to her Brooklyn accent; she goes through speech training (to speech pathologist, Dennis Becker)  to “correct” her pronunciation. In a lighter scene, a group of young women from New Orleans claim they could attract men more easily if they didn’t speak with their "accents." 

There is also a scene where a woman describes ending a relationship with Yale graduate because as they drove south toward his home in Georgia (to meet his parents), he suddenly began using what she called “hillbilly talk.” By the time they reached his hometown, she got a flight back to New Haven. She says something like, "I didn't want all those southern babies growing inside of me with their 'you alls'.

Steve