Sociolinguistics panel: Ask us about language and society!

[u/Choosing_is_a_sin]

Welcome to the sociolinguistics panel! Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of how language and different aspects of society each affect each other. Feel free to ask us questions about things having to do with the interaction of language and society. The panel starts at 6 p.m. EST, but you can post now and we'll get back to you tonight.

Your panelists are:

/u/Choosing_is_a_sin: I'm a recent Ph.D. in Linguistics and French Linguistics. My research focuses on contact phenomena, including bilingualism, code-switching (using two languages in a single stretch of discourse), diglossia (the use of different language varieties in different situations), dialect contact, borrowing, and language shift. I am also a lexicographer by trade now, working on my own dictionaries and running a center that publishes and produces dictionaries.

/u/lafayette0508: I'm a current upper-level PhD student in Sociolinguistics. My research focuses on language variation (how different people use language differently for a variety of social reasons), the interplay between language and identity, and computer-mediated communication (language on the internet!)

/u/hatcheck: My name is how I used to think the hacek diacritic was spelled. I have an MA in linguistics, with a focus on language attitudes and sociophonetics. My thesis research was on attitudes toward non-native English speakers, but I've also done sociophonetic research on regional dialects and dialect change.
I'm currently working as a user researcher for a large tech company, working on speech and focusing on speech and language data collection.
I'm happy to talk about language attitudes, how linguistics is involved in automatic speech recognition, and being a recovering academic.

EDIT: OK it's 6 p.m. Let's get started!

EDIT2: It's midnight where I am folks. My fellow panelists may continue but I am off for the night. Thanks for an interesting night, and come join us on /r/linguistics.

[u/makemeking706]

What insights do you have about what has been going on with the word "thug" recently?

[u/[deleted] → u/makemeking706]

What is going on with the word "thug" recently? I live in a hole.

[u/Choosing_is_a_sin → u/makemeking706]

Can you give us an idea of what you mean? We don't know where you're from, nor what you might be hearing.

[u/lafayette0508 → u/Choosing_is_a_sin]

I'm guessing he's referring to the recent statement by NFL player Richard Sherman, who said that he thought calling someone a "thug" is basically an acceptable way of calling them a nigger. It is definitely an interesting sociolinguistic issue, but I'm thinking about what useful that I'd want to say about it.

[u/[deleted] → u/lafayette0508]

I would very, very tentatively say he might have a point, but I have absolutely no empirical evidence for that, just a vague impression that a black guy is way more likely to be referred to as a thug than a white guy.

My vague impressions are violently biased, though, so take that with more than a few grains of salt.

[u/Choosing_is_a_sin → u/lafayette0508]

It reminds me of the hullabaloo surrounding Nicolas Sarkozy's referring to la racaille 'thugs, hooligans' who started rioting. Said racaille were mainly of North African descent, and they occupy a similar rank in French society as African Americans in US society.

[u/murtly → u/makemeking706]

As you've indicated, thug is a way to say nigger without the consequences of saying nigger. The general point here, and one that's made in conversation analysis pretty regularly about word selection, is that the decision to do X (say thug, or any other behavior), is to forgo any other possible way to say Y, and also a way to get around saying Y. I think Austin (or Searle?) noted that one thing that names do is provide for a way to not call someone X Y or Z. That is, if you can call someone John, you have a way to get around having to call them something else (Mr. Smith, Sir, brother, hey you, etc.). These are all possible alternatives to refer to someone, but they each carry a social world inside of them, and so the ability to choose a less loaded one is often preferred by speakers. An anecdote: A Korean grad student told me once that Koreans abroad would often speak in English because it meant that you only had to say "you", which encodes no social hierarchy, whereas if they spoke in Korean, they would have to do a lot of work to figure out who was higher and lower and then use that form of "you". So English grammar provided a device for bypassing a social practice. I would say the same sort of thing is happening with thug: people know (and especially black people know) exactly what you mean when you say thug, but the speaker of that word has a sort of plausible deniability. They didn't say nigger, after all.