Abstract
As Coupland and others show, Bauman’s account of ‘performance’ provides a valuable perspective on speech stylisation across a range of public contexts. However, this chapter explores the limitations of performance as a window on crossing and stylisation in everyday practice, and although recognising other frames as well, it dwells instead on Goffman’s interaction ritual, cross-referring to two studies of adolescents in England. In the first, race and ethnicity were controversial, and the performance of other-ethnic styles was risky. However, interaction ritual constructed crossing and stylisation as urgent responses to the exigencies of the moment and this made them more acceptable. In the second, performance implies a reflexive composure that is hard to reconcile with informants’ experience of social class as an uncomfortable but only half-articulated issue, whereas interaction ritual provides a sharp lens on how youngsters used stylised posh and Cockney to register their apprehension of ongoing stratification.
The critical discussion in this chapter is personal testimony to the significance of Nik Coupland’s work, and I would particularly like to thank him for very astute comments on two earlier drafts. The chapter has also greatly benefited from critical discussion with Jan Blommaert, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Adam Lefstein, Barbara Johnstone, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Roxy Harris, Constant Leung, Lauren Small and Caroline Dover, as well as a number of anonymous reviewers. Finally, I am grateful to the UK ESRC for funding the research that the chapter refers to (Projects 00232390, R 000 23 6602 and RES 148 25 0042). A longer version of the paper appeared in Language in Society 38:149–76, 2009.
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Notes
- 1.
For comparable range in the characterisation of stylisation itself, see Coupland 2007:112–115, 154.
- 2.
This was part of a 28-month ESRC-funded project “Multilingualism and Heteroglossia In and Out of School” (1997–99), and data-collection involved interviews, participant observation, radio-microphone recordings of everyday interaction and participant retrospection on extracts from the audio recordings. Analysis focused on four youngsters (two males and 2 females) in a tutor group of about 30 14-year-olds, and the account of posh and Cockney stylisation centred on c. 65 episodes identified in 37 hours of radio-microphone audio data.
- 3.
It is worth adding here that my analysis certainly doesn’t take the links between stylized posh, Cockney and social class for granted, but as there isn’t space for arguing the connection here, the reader is referred to Rampton 2006: Chs. 6 and 7.
- 4.
For a narrative analytic perspective on these processes, see Georgakopoulou’s work on ‘small stories’, e.g., 2006, 2007.
- 5.
The mid-central starting point for the diphthong in the last syllable ([Ə]) was highly untypical of Hanif’s pronunciation of the vowel in the happY group elsewhere, was associated by Hanif with the accent of a cousin who lived in London’s East End when the sequence was replayed to him and is described by Wells as broad Cockney (1982: 319).
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Rampton, B. (2014). Dissecting Heteroglossia: Interaction Ritual or Performance in Crossing and Stylisation?. In: Blackledge, A., Creese, A. (eds) Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy. Educational Linguistics, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7856-6_15
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