The people's critical linguistics

Using archival data to investigate responses to linguistic informalisation

Bibliographic Data

ID7901480
AuthorsJoe Spencer-Bennett (0000-0002-2835-9686, University of Birmingham, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume50
Issue2
Pages283-304
Publication date2021-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage in Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-4045 • E-ISSN: 1469-8013
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0047404520000305
OpenAlexW3022398787
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited50

Arguments about the sociopolitical significance of the informalisation of English have been central to the critical study of language in society since the 1980s. This article demonstrates that informalisation was also a key concern of ordinary users of British English in the 1980s. Correspondents in the British Mass Observation Project articulated judgements of informalisation that were in many ways continuous with those of academic linguists. The article argues that such critical arguments about language were part of a ‘structure of feeling’ (Raymond Williams) of late twentieth-century Britain. This suggests a rethinking of ordinary language users’ relations to their linguistic experience, not as unthinkingly ‘prescriptivist’, nor as merely ‘commonsensical’, but as exhibiting a nuance which academic linguists would do well to engage with more fully. The article makes the case for the use of social-historical archives in investigations of metalanguage, as a means by which the social significance of language can be better understood. (Critical linguistics, folk linguistics, terms of address, informalisation, synthetic personalisation, prescriptivism

Applied linguistics · Linguistics · Metalanguage · Sociology · Gender Studies in Language · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy

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