LANGUAGE AND SPEECH, Vol.

23, Part 3, 1980

213

STYLISTIC VARIATION AND EVALUATIVE REACTIONS TO SPEECH: PROBLEMS IN THE INVESTIGATION OF LINGUISTIC ATTITUDES IN SCOTLAND

SUZANNE ROMAINE

University of Birmingham

This paper describes some of the difficulties involved in conducting language evaluation tests in Edinburgh and reports some results of a pilot study. Samples of speech were obtained from six different speakers, each one reading a text and speaking casually. These were presented to 10 subjects using Lambert's matched-guise technique. Subjects were asked to evaluate the speakers in terms of paired characteristics on a semantic differential scale. As in other evaluation experiments, the responses to linguistic behavior appeared to be mediated through the reaction to social groups. In this case, two dimensions of evaluation were highly salient: perceived identity of the speaker and the way in which the speech style of the speaker was evaluated in two different contexts.

INTRODUCTION

The investigation of linguistic attitudes is a crucial part of an ongoing sociolinguistic survey of Edinburgh speech, whose ultimate aim is to examine both actual speech and informants' attitudes towards it.^ This paper describes some of the difficulties involved in conducting evaluation tests in a Scottish linguistic situation, and reports some of the results of a pilot study. There are a number of problems in obtaining information about attitudes towards languages or language varieties which are common to all linguistic situations. The translation of attitude from the subjective domain into something objectively measurable is a common problem in any research that involves social categorization and/or perceptual judgments. Labov's (1966) investigation of New York City speech points out some of the more obvious difficulties that arise in dealing specifically with linguistic attitudes. Labov comments that although most informants have very strong opinions about language and are able to detect the presence or absence of certain stigmatized or socially diagnostic features and evaluate these in social terms with great regularity, the reactions to many linguistic variables are inarticulate responses below the level of conscious awareness. Conscious attention, it seems, focuses only on those items that have risen to the level of social awareness and have become part of the accepted folklore about language. This is why Labov (1966, p. 482) says that most perception of language is, in fact, perception of social experience and socially accepted statements about language. Further^ The sociolinguistic investigation of Edinburgh speech is a research project iu the Department of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh supported by a grant from the Social Science Research Council (cf. Romaine, 19 78).

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Linguistic A ttitudes in Scotland

more, this perception is mediated through a stereotyped view of a group which is believed to speak in a given way. It is thus common, both in New York City and in Scotland (cf. especially Romaine and Reid, 1976; Romaine, 1975; Macaulay and Trevelyan, 1973), for informants to condemn the language of a person or even a whole group as "sloppy" or "rough" because this is the way in which the individual or group is perceived. Language serves as a symbol of a particular social identity. Most informants, if pressed as to which particular features they find offensive, are able to mention only a few stigmatized and much talked-about stereotypes such as glottal stops, to take a Scottish example, although it is likely that the unfavorable reaction is the result of the co-occurrence of a number of features. In Scotland there appears to be an added dimension of variability in lexis, which can combine in particular with phonetic or phonological variation to modify the evaluational reaction to speech. There is a kind of "middle-class folklore" about what constitutes acceptable Scottishness in speech, so that a middle class speaker can "get away with," so to speak, the use of a number of marked Scotticisms, provided they occur against the background of a middle-class and not a working-class accent (cf. Romaine, 1975). Another problem in dealing with linguistic attitudes is that most informants do not have a vocabulary of socially and linguistically meaningful, precise terms with which they can evaluate speech. A consideration of these and other factors indicated that an investigation of linguistic attitudes in Scotland required several different approaches. Attitude is a more general concept than can be accurately determined from the answer to a specific question, or from the responses of an informant in a carefully controlled experimental situation. It was therefore decided that this problem should be explored more fully through two methods: experiments that attempted to quantify certain dimensions of informants' linguistic attitudes, and a questionnaire to be administered during a later stage of the survey, which would complement the information obtained in the experiments. Since it was expected that single responses obtained to specific direct questions would be a poor indication of a persons's attitude (and would not, in any case, carry much weight unless they were seen as part of the larger picture), a means of sampling a range of aspects of the attitudes towards language had to be devised, so that a number of dimensions could be used simultaneously. The basis of attitude measurement is that there are underlying dimensions along which individual attitudes can be ranged. By using an attitude-scaling procedure, an informant's response can be assigned a numerical score to indicate his position on a particular dimension of the attitude that is being investigated. Osgood's (Osgood et al, 1957) semantic differential was used here as a means of quantifying informants' reactions to samples of spoken language. The semantic differential is a technique of measurement consisting of a seven-point scale whose endpoints are described by adjectives that are polar opposites. Osgood first used the technique to measure the correlations given to concepts on different bipolar scales by factor analysis. The results suggested that attitude could be identified with evaluation, and that an attitude scale could be constructed from a series of bipolar rating scales that measure the evaluative factor. To fon-n an attitude scale then, the investigator has to decide on the dimensions of the attitude to be evaluated and find suitable adjective

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pairs to describe them. The semantic differential has a number of advantages which made it the most appropriate and easily implemented technique for this survey. Perhaps the most important of these is that it has been used quite successfully in the investigation of evaluational reactions to language (cf., e.g., Uldall's 1960 work on intonation contours). Even more relevant to this study, however, is the work of Lambert (cf. especially Lambert et ai, 1960; Lambert, 1967,1969,1971) concerning evaluational reactions to spoken languages using this technique. This will be discussed more fully in later sections. It provides us with a large body of data which can be compared with those obtained in this study. Apart from the technique's successful'application elsewhere, it has been shown that there are high correlations between the semantic differential and the Thurstone and Guttman scales. These correlations provide additional support for the use of the evaluative dimension of the semantic differential as an attitude-scaling technique (cf. Moser and Kalton, 1958). Lambert has done a number of experiments using the so-called "matched guise" technique, in which judges were asked to evaluate bilingual speakers on the basis of a sample of speech in each of two languages (French and English in most cases), without knowing that the same speakers were being evaluated twice. At first blush, it appears that this technique, though with some modification, has a great deal of relevance to the Scottish situation; while not bilingualism in its strictest sense, the linguistic situation is similar to it, so that a person's set of speaking styles can be seen as spanning a linguistic continuum ranging from Scots (i.e., the most fully local variety of Scottish English) to English. Variation occurs in response to a number of social factors which are only just now being examined in some detail in the ongoing survey of Edinburgh speech (cf. Romaine, 1978). Neither Lambert's matched-guise nor Labov's subjective-reaction test has been applied in any sustained and systematically controlled manner in Scotland.^ However, it seemed reasonable to expect two things: 1) It should be possible to obtain widely divergent reactions to the same speakers speaking in different styles, as did Lambert with Frenchand English-speaking Canadians and Giles (1970) with speakers of different accents of English. 2) Differing reactions should be isolable to contrastive uses of different variants of a variable, as Labov managed to demonstrate in New York. The present study was designed to test these expectations, as well as a number of evaluative dimensions, to see which were the most relevant. It was hypothesized before conducting the experiment that differences in reactions to various speakers would depend on what style the person was using, and that these differences would reflect the listener's attitudes towards a group that had similar characteristics to those perceived of a particular speaker, and his attitudes towards members of the listener's own group.

Cf. however, Bratt (1974) for an attempt to apply Lambert's matched-guise technique to test evaluational reactions of five-year-old children to different varieties of spoken English. Some critical comments on her approach can be found in Romaine (1975).

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Linguistic A ttitudes in Scotland

METHOD

Two samples of speech were obtained from six different speakers, four males and two females, speaking in two different situations, reading and conversation. These were presented to 10 subjects, who were asked to evaluate the speakers in terms of sets of paired characteristics on a semantic differential scale. The subjects who acted as judges were told they were taking part in an experiment to study what could be discovered about a person on the basis of a sample of speech. The subjects were given a total of 20 samples of speech, but they were not told that some of the same speakers would appear twice. "Filler voices," i.e., speakers for whom no evaluation was being sought, were added to make up the 20 samples. There were two parts to the experiment. In the first part there were 10 speakers, four female and six male (i.e., the six matched-guise speakers plus filler voices); each read the same few sentences from a text, which lasted about 3040 seconds. The subjects were given a sample speaker before the actual experiment to familiarize themselves with the procedure. In the second part of the experiment, subjects were told that they would hear "another" set of 10 speakers, again six males and four females, but that this time the sample of speech from each speaker would be taken from a natural conversation recorded with that speaker. Samples of speech of about 3040 seconds in duration were then played for each of the "matched guise" speakers along with samples from filler voices. Different speakers were used as filler voices in parts 1 and 2 to confuse the subjects and minimize the possibility of speaker recognition. In the second part of the experifnent, subjects were allowed to hear each sample of speech twice, since in each case something different was being said. In part 1 the subjects had been given a sample speaker and knew beforehand what each speaker was going to say; therefore, they were allowed to hear the "reading guises" only once. There was a break between the two parts of the experiment to relieve the tedium of the evaluation process, and more importantly, to minimize the likelihood of auditory retention of material from the first part, so that subjects would not be aware that some of the speakers appeared twice. If the subjects had suspicions, the break would make it difficult or nearly impossible to remember the order of the speakers to compare the ratings given in part 1 with those in part 2. The speech samples The selection of the two types of speech samples was made from a collection of taperecorded interviews; these contained a reading passage as well as free conversation from which two samples of speech for each matched-guise speaker could be obtained.^ The reading passage was included to give the subjects a standardized fonnat for making the evaluation of the matched-guise speakers. The passage was taken from a fairy tale and ^ These interviews were collected as part of an SSRC-sponsored project on the intonation of Scottish English. I would like to thank Karen Currie for making these tapes available to me.

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was neutral in terms of content, and since the content was the same for all speakers, it was assumed that there was minimal extraneous variation along this dimension which might have influenced judgment. In linguistic terms all of the speakers were on their best behavior, as might be expected from the context of the situation. The second sample of speech from conversation was included so that some of the more marked variables characteristic of Scottish speech, which do not normally occur in reading, would appear. Variables that were either of interest to me and/or had been previously studied (cf. for example, Macaulay and Trevelyan, 1973 and Romaine, 1975) were represented in the speech samples of part 2. Obviously, only a limited number of variables which will ultimately b*e studied as part of the larger investigation of Edinburgh speech were included, since there is a limit to the number of samples of speech that informants can reasonably be expected to evaluate. This paper will report some of the results obtained for the evaluation of speakers' use of glottal stops.* In addition, one speaker had two guises in part 2 (plus one guise in part 1): one in which no glottal stops occurred, and another in which virtually every voiceless plosive was replaced by or co-articulated with a glottal stop.^ This was included to see whether the reaction to a specific variable might be isolated in a way similar to Labov's subjective reaction test in New York. The samples of speech were chosen not only for the specific instances of the variable in question, but also with a view to obtaining neutral subject matter, which would not reveal anything about the speaker's background. Judges and speakers Since the purpose of the large investigation is to describe Edinburgh speech, all of the speakers who appeared in matched guises had been born, raised and educated in Edinburgh. The fact that after the experiment several judges expressed surprise at this is illustrative of the range of variation represented in the speech samples. In fact, one person who took part in the experiment expressed profound dismay that she had failed to recognize one of the speakers, DR, as an Edinburgh person, or indeed as a Scot. DR, of course, was chosen precisely for the reason that he is not perceived for all practical purposes as an Edinburgh person on the basis of his speech. He speaks RP (i.e., "received pronunciation"), which he acquired in a fee-paying school in Edinburgh; nevertheless, as a native of Edinburgh, he is part of the Unguistic continuum. Interestingly enough, both DR and the woman who failed to identify him as an Edinburgh person were graduates of the same fee-paying school. Speaker SM, on the other hand, was selected because she represented what might be called middle-class, Scottish Standard English (SSE). There is not much difference in SM's speaking and reading styles. Speaker EF, however, although still middle class (or perhaps lower middle class), displays quite a contrast in reading and ^ The other samples of speech contained instances of other phonological, lexical and syntactic variables which will not be discussed here (cf. Romaine. 1978). 5 In Scots, glottal stops may replace voiceless plosives, namely, /t/ (and to a lesser extent in some accents /k/ and /p/) in certain positions. This occurs in medial position, e.g., bottle; word-final position, e.g., cut; in certain final clusters, e.g., he\i\and initially in the word to in going to future forms.

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Linguistic A ttitudes in Scotland

speaking. And finally, speaker DC, for whom three samples of speech are presented, is an upper working-class male. The results for two other speakers (both working-class men) are not presented here, as their samples of speech involved instances of other variables, but the results from these speakers conform to the general trends outlined later. The subjects who acted as judges were fairly homogeneous in terms of social background; all were connected with the University of Edinburgh, either as students or researchers in the Departments of Linguistics and English Language. No attempt was made to find a stratified random sample of subjects owing to the preliminary nature of the pilot study; there is no intention to make any claims about the representativeness of the sample for any larger group. The pilot study was being conducted primarily as a test of methodology; for this reason a small non-random sample served the purpose. Apart from time considerations and the preliminary nature of the experiment, there is some justification for the small number of subjects used, which has to do with the alleged regularity of certain forms of social behavior. Labov (1966) has claimed that of all forms of social behavior, language is exceptional in that the pervasive patterns of linguistic structure are manifested just as reliably in a few tokens and speakers as they are in a much larger number. The assumption here is that the reaction to linguistic behavior is as regularly structured as the linguistic behavior itself.^ Each subject who acted as a judge was asked to answer a few brief questions about his or her background so that if there were any noticeable deviation in response between individuals, an explanation might be found in external factors. In fact, all of the subjects, eight females and two males, responded quite consistently. The semantic differential Each subject was given 20 copies of a form on which to make the evaluation of the speakers. The ratings were made on a seven-point scale with each position closer to or further away from either end point of the scale represented by opposite characteristics indicating the degree to which the judges associated the speaker with a particular category. There were 20 such pairs of opposites listed on each form. Some of these had been used before in evaluational tests, and some were being tried for the first time here (cf. Appendix). The paired items were chosen because they represent aspects related to language attitudes or are dimensions along which evaluation may be seen to take place. The individual items have been grouped under the following larger headings in the analysis of the results. I. II. III. IV. V. VL Personality traits (Items 2 , 3 , 5 , 8 ) Status characteristics (Items 1, 7) Absolute characteristics (Items 4, 6) Speech or code characteristics (Items 11, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20) Identity (Items 9, 10, 12) Solidarity and linguistic security (Items 13, 15, 16)

^ This seemed to be the case in the pilot study: for further details see Romaine (1978).

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As can be seen on the actual scoring sheet given to the subjects (cf Appendix), the items were not presented in these groupings, or with all the positively scored attributes on one side, but in a mixed order. The category headings serve to focus on particular dimensions of attitudes. Scoring Scores range from one to seven for each item. A score of seven was assigned to one member of each pair and a score of one to the opposite end as given in the Appendix. A high score does not always imply a value judgment. For example, whether a person sounds old or young does not imply the same type of value judgment involved in a pair such as "educated/uneducated," although in each case we are interested in a relative and not an absolute judgment. To take another example, in the case of the item "masculine/feminine" it was made clear to the judges that the object was not to decide whether the speaker was a man or woman (which seemed obvious in the samples anyway), but to estimate how masculine or feminine a speaker sounded. This of course implies a value judgment, but not a "constant" one. The implicit assumption is that it is positive for a man to sound masculine, but negative for a woman to sound masculine, and vice versa. In some cases there is external reference for the characteristic in question; in other words, the characteristics could be compared with objective or physical facts; e.g., the speakers were all from Edinburgh whether they sounded like it or not. However, in most of the paired items this is not the case, e.g., we have no means of estimating the honesty or friendliness of the speakers. This reflects an important difference between attitudemeasurement experiments and certain psychophysical ones using similar scales. The latter rely on some objective, external physical dimension as a point of reference for comparison with the experimental stimuli and the responses to them. In this case, however, the emphasis is on the perceived picture of each speaker and the comparison of each speaker with himself and with other speakers in different controlled contexts. All items do not necessarily imply a choice between good or bad qualities; a high score is not always the "best." Average scores were figured for the 20 items for each of the matched-guise speakers and presented under the appropriate category heading.

RESULTS

The results in general indicate the existence of patterns similar to those found in othev experiments involving evaluational reactions to the spoken language. These are summarized below. The figures and tables show the mean ratings assigned to each of the matchedguise speakers in two situations, reading and speaking. The speakers are referred to as EF (Fig. 1, Table 1), DR (Fig. 2, Table 2), SM (Fig. 3, Table 3), and DC (Fig. 4, Table 4). 1 will confine my comments to the most important trends that can be observed. 1. The reactions to the different traits of the speakers change depending on the guise of the speaker, although these changes are not always in the same direction or of the same

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6.0

Linguistic Attitudes in Scotland

5.5
5.0 4.5
4.0

y
\ \ \
_i

5.5.
3.0
"co O CO
p n "^'^

2.0

1.5
1.0

.5
0

1 1

Fig. 1.

Profile of speaker EF. SoUd line = reading; dashed line = speaking. 1 = mean personality rating 2 = mean status rating 3 = mean code rating 4 = mean identity rating

TABLE l

Profile of speaker EF; mean ratings for personality, status, code and identity

Characteristic Personality Status Code Identity

Mean Rating Speaking Reading 4.6 4.1 4.5 5.5 4.5 3.1 3.1 5.9

Direction of change from part 1 to 2

Size of change 0.1 1.0 1,4 0.4

S. Romaine
6.0

221

5.5U
5.0

4.0

5.0
O
CD

in

2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0

.5
0

Fig. 2.

Profile of speaker DR. Solid line = reading; dashed line = speaking. 1 = mean personality rating 2 = mean status rating 3 = mean code rating 4 = mean identity rating

TABLE 2

Profile of speaker DR: mean ratings for personality, > status, code and identity

Characteristic Personality Status Code Identity

Mean Rating Reading Speaking 4.5 5.7 5.1 4.2 4.1 3.4 2.9 3.2

Direction of change from part 1 to 2

Size of change 0.4 2.3 22 1.0

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Linguistic Attitudes in Scotland

5.0

i-. 5
4.0

^.5 3.0
o C/5
CtJ

2.5 2.0
1.5

1.0

.5
0

Fig. 3.

Profile of speaker SM. Solid line = reading; dashed line = speaking. 1 = mean personality rating 2 = mean status rating 3 = mean code rating 4 = mean identity rating

TABLE 3

Profile of speaker SM: mean ratings for personality, status, code and identity

Characteristic Personality Status Code Identity

Mean Rating Speaking Reading 4.5 4.9 5.4 5.0 5.1 5.0 4.9 5.8

Direction of change from part 1 to 2 -+ +

Size of change 0.6 0.1 0.5 0.8

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magnitude. In general, most of the speakers, with the exception of SM (Fig. 3), the SSE speaker, are evaluated less favorably on the basis of a sample of conversation than they are on the basis of a sample of reading. In other words, the speakers are perceived as generally being less well-educated, of lower social status, sloppier etc. Not surprisingly, all the the evaluational dimensions relating to speech characteristics show some shift in a negative direction from reading to speaking, since it is a commonly held belief that much of conversational speech is ungrammatical, sloppy etc. 2. All of the speakers except DR, the RP speaker (Fig. 2), are perceived as sounding more Scottish and more like EdinburgTi people when speaking than reading. This is also not an unexpected result, since the features that are associated with the Scots end of the linguistic continuum ranging from Scots to SSE have been functionally restricted to the more casual and familiar domains of speaking. 3. When the judges considered the question of whether they thought they spoke like any of the speakers or would like to, all of the Scottish judges (N = 8 ) reported that not only did they not think they spoke like any of the speakers, but also that they would not want to, with the exception of SM, the SSE stereotype. DR, the RP speaker, on the other hand, was emphatically rejected, i.e., none of the judges thought they spoke Hke him, nor did they want to. Two of the subjects were not Scots, and their answers to the same questions are particularly revealing. DR fared favorably with this group; in fact he is the only speaker to receive a positive rating from the non-Scottish group in part 2; the rest of the more Scottish-sounding speakers are given considerably lower ratings. Isolated reactions to a variable As an additional "experiment within an experiment," one speaker, DC, was presented to the judges in three guises or "styles"; one in which he read the same passage as the other speakers, and two other guises of conversation in which the use of glottal stops was contrastively controlled. It was hypothesized that different reactions would be obtained on the basis of these samples of speech, and that it was probably likely that any differences in evaluation from one conversational style (which contained a high frequency of glottal stops) to another (which contained no glottal stops) would more or less represent the isolation of a subjective reaction to a specific linguistic variable, in so far as this is possible (Fig. 4). This general prediction is confirmed; DC is evaluated differently in almost every instance, depending on which guise he appears in. However, the hypothesis that the ratings would shift unidirectionally from most positive in reading to least positive in speaking style 2, which contained a high frequency of glottal stops, with the other conversational sample of speech representing an intermediate position, was not borne out. A clue to the somewhat skewed distribution of responses can, I think, be found in a closer examination of DCs "way of speaking." It becomes clear that DC is perceived as being clearer, more correct, more polite, more careful and less broad in the intermediate speaking style, rather than in the reading passage. More will be said about this interesting pattern in the final section.

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Linguistic Attitudes in Scotland

^

4.0

^."^
3.0
o CO

2.0
1.5 1.0
.5

Fig. 4.

Profile of speaker DC in three styles. Solid Une = reading; dashed line = speaking 1; dotted line = speaking 2. 1 = mean personality rating 2 = mean status rating 3 = mean code rating 4 = mean identity rating

TABLE 4

Profile of speaker DC: mean ratings for personahty, status, code and identity in three styles

Characteristic Reading Personality Status Code Identity 4.8 2.5 3.7 4.8

Mean Rating Speaking 1 4.2 3.4 4,1 5.8

Speaking 2 4.4 2.4 3.3 5.9

S. Romaine Reactions to Momingside speech

225

As an interesting sidelight, an example of a "Morningside" accent was included in the experiment as one of the filler voices in part 2P Although much has been said about this type of accent in impressionistic terms, no one has really described it or attempted to elicit systematic reactions to it. Yet it is a stereotype which is well-grounded in Scottish folklinguistic belief. The great deal of laughter that ensued after the subjects listened to the Morningside speaker was evidence that they had quickly recognized the linguistic hallmark of this stereotype, the raised /a/ in the word actually. The results showed that the Momingside sp^ker compared favorably with the other speakers in terms of personality and status characteristics, but the judges indicated they would not like to speak in this way; nor did they consider it likely that the speaker would be a friend of theirs. One other result is very revealing; the Morningside speaker received the lowest rating of all the speakers on the item honest/dishonest.

DISCUSSION

The results of this experiment and others like it are perhaps the most graphic illustration that can be offered in demonstration of the fact that different ways of speaking have different social values and meanings attached to them. As in the case of other evaluational experiments that make use of language as stimuU, the responses to linguistic behavior appear to be mediated through the reaction to different social groups, in so far as these are characteristically identifiable by speech. In this case, the key to the interpretation of the results lies in two areas of evaluation, perceived identity of the speaker and the way in which the speech style of the speaker is evaluated in two different contexts. The question of identity will be considered first. Lambert's work with English- and French-speaking Canadians elicited a general stereotyped reaction to two languages, French and English, in a situation where language as a whole is symbolic of community and national identity. As Lambert expected, the differences in the favorableness of the subjects' reactions to the speakers depending on which language was used refiected their attitudes towards members of their own group and members of the other language group. Thus, a low evaluation of a French Canadian guise tells us more about group biases and the social context in which French exists in Canada today than it does about language. In the Scottish experiment we can see a very strong demonstration of Le Page's (1978) view of speech as an "act of identity." The split between the evaluation of personality and status underlines this. The speaker with the highest perceived status scores well on attributes linked with socio-economic success, but the more Scottishsounding speakers, who do not score as well on status, are still very well-liked, i.e., they receive favorable personality ratings, in some cases more so than the RP speaker. This '^ The term Morningside comes from a residential district in Edinburgh that contains a high proportion of the professional and middle classes. It is used to refer to a type of accent that is posh and hypercorrect (compare "Kelvinside speech " in Glasgow).

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Linguistic A ttitudes in Scotland

result is not a novel one. Sometimes minority groups evaluate the speech of their own group higher than that of groups that are dominant in socio-economic terms. For example, Lambert found that there was a tendency for French Canadian guises to be evaluated more favorably than English guises on certain stereotyped characteristics associated with French Canadians, e.g., religiousness; although on all the other personality characteristics both the English and French judges evaluated the French-speaking guises lower than the English-speaking ones. Cheyne (1970) found in an evaluative experiment that Scottish subjects rated their own group as mote generous, friendly, good-hearted, humorous and likeable than English speakers, thus displaying "accent loyalty." Milroy and McClenaghan (1977) report a similar result for the evaluation of Belfast speech; a southern Irish speaker and an RP speaker were rated higher on characteristics connected with socio-economic success, but much lower than a Belfast speaker on personality characteristics. In fact, the Scottish and Ulster speakers were evaluated similarly in this experiment, thus demonstrating that the hnguistic affinity between the two speech communities has a perceptual correlate. The authors conclude that the results of their experiment reflect very well the sociopolitical circumstances of Ulster today. Nationalistic feeling can be expected to be very strong at the moment in Scotland, and speech is certainly one of the most overt markers of in-group identity. The most positive expression of linguistic solidarity can be found when, in spite of any socio-economic superiority of the dominant group or implied denigration of the subordinate group, a speaker affirms the linguistic norms of the community in which he lives. This is a key issue. It "explains," for example, Labov's seemingly paradoxical discovery that people may condemn others in their own group on the basis of the way they speak, but yet they do not want to change (or do not change) the way they speak themselves (cf. also Trudgill, 1974). From what we now know about covert and overt reactions to speech and how these are interrelated, the conclusion that people speak the way they do because they want to must stand as a basic socio-linguistic principle. The acceptance of this principle depends on the recognition that each variety has its own prestige, i.e., either overt or covert. More importantly perhaps, people do not dislike the speech of those they recognize or perceive as similar to themselves, even though on some occasions they may say so. This notion of identity must underlie the interpretation of the results obtained in this experiment. It explains to a great extent why SM receives a positive rating, as do the other Scottish-sounding speakers on most personality traits, and DR does not. Although DR is a native Scot who was born, raised and educated in Edinburgh, as were the other speakers, his speech does not betray his local identity. There is no way on the basis of such a short sample of speech that the judges could be sure that DR was a Scot. SM, on the other hand, is recognizable as a local Edinburgh product; moreover, she is most similar to most of the subjects who evaluated her, i.e., middle-class women. It might be interesting to repeat the same experiment with a different group of judges, this time telling them that all of the speakers are from Edinburgh to see if DR receives a more favorable rating. Not surprisingly, social processes that are refiected in linguistic structure are also

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manifested in the evaluation of linguistic structure. The way in which linguistic groups are distributed in society and the attitudes which one group has toward another are important factors in predicting language maintenance and shift. This has been demonstrated quite convincingly in an experiment by Gatbonton-Segalowitz (1975) in which French Canadians were asked to react to a number of matched-guise speakers and some monolingual English and French speakers. The French Canadians were divided into three groups on the basis of their answers to questions concerning French separatism for Quebec and related socio-political issues: nationaHstic, liberal and non-nationalistic. The judges were asked whether each matched-guise speaker would be acceptable as a leader of a group consisting only of French Canadians. Both pro-French groups, i.e., the nationalistic and liberal, reacted more favorably to the French-only guises than either the double-language guises or the English-only guises, while the non-nationalistic group showed the reverse pattem. These findings have considerable relevance in Scotland at the moment, where in the midst of ongoing socio-political change, attitudes towards Scottish nationalism will no doubt be reflected in the way in which different speakers are evaluated.^ It can be expected that nationalistic feelings will be manifested in a desire to preserve and cultivate things that are perceived as Scottish, and there are certainly ample linguistic means for demonstrating Scottish identity. These and other questions will be investigated in further work by direct questioning of informants and more experiments. The experiment also indicated that the reactions to speakers were not mediated solely through the perceived degree of formality, politeness, correctness etc. of the speaker in each context. The results reinforce my belief that Labov's notion of the structure of a styUstic continuum is not one that can be applied in any consistent way in Scotland, or indeed in any fairly complex linguistic situation. The reactions obtained to DC in three styles of speaking demonstrate this. If a stylistic continuum of the type postulated for New York City existed (which has been taken largely for granted elsewhere, for example, in Norwich, cf. Trudgill, 1974), then we would have expected DC to be perceived as most formal in reading, less formal in the unmarked conversational style (Sj) and least fomial in the marked conversational style (S2). The fact that this result was not obtained is an indication, I think, of my own, Macaulay's and the Milroys' belief that reading and speaking are two very different types of speech behavior which are not in the same linear continuum, at least not for all speakers. The gap between reading and speaking is greater for some speakers than for others; in addition, the range of variation appropriate to reading a text can be considered quite narrow. Both the Milroys (1977) and I (cf. Romaine, 1975, 1979) have cited the failure of certain significant phonological variables to pattern along a continuum from least formal (spoken) to most formal (reading) in Belfast and Edinburgh respectively as sufficient justification for regarding conversation and reading as separate parts of a ^ ft is important to note that this experiment was conducted in late 19 78 before the so-called Scotland Bill, which would have granted Scotland considerable autonomy and provided for the establishment of a Scottish Parliament, was put to Scottish voters in 1979. This referendum was defeated for lack of sufficient support.

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Linguistic A ttitudes in Scotland

speaker's linguistic repertoire. A greater styHstic difference is often characteristic of many lower middle-class rather than of middle-class speakers. This can be seen in the differing evaluations of the speakers in parts 1 and 2. This stylistic "gap" can be demonstrated impressionistically if we listen to the matched guises for all the speakers; some speakers really do sound like different people. This suggests that Lambert's findings need to be re-examined in view of this result; namely, to what extent are judgments about languages and the groups who speak them mediated through judgments of stylistic propriety? In other words, to what extent was "French/English" perceived as an appropriate or inappropriate vehicle for the speech stimuli in the experiment (cf. also Taylor and Clement, 1974)? It is not simply the case that differences in evaluation are related monotonically to style, so that judges think reading sounds better than conversation, and hence speakers are on the whole perceived more favorably in a reading guise. If this were true, then we would have expected the shift in evaluation from part 1 to part 2 to be unidirectional for all speakers. Yet all of the speakers (except for SM) are evaluated less favorably on other dimensions seemingly unrelated to style, when they are speaking in conversation. SM, however, does not "shift" stylistically to the same degree as the others; this is in turn refiected in the ratings that the judges assign to her; i.e., both guises are similarly evaluated. This emphasizes the point that reading and speaking do not differ to the same extent for all speakers. This point should be viewed again with respect to a more general phenomenon which Labov (1966) has referred to as "hypercorrection by the lower middle class.',' This term refers to the observation that lower middle-class speakers may typically go beyond or exceed the highest status groups in their tendency to use forms considered appropriate and correct for more formal styles; hence, there is often a greater gap between the most and least formal styles of these speakers than there is for middle and upper class speakers. At first glance, this "crossover pattern" appears to be a deviation from the classic sociolinguistic finding that socially diagnostic variables will exhibit parallel behavior on a stylistic continuum; that is to say, if a feature is found to be more common in the lower classes than in the upper classes, it will also be more common in the less formal than the most formal styles, with each social group occupying a similar position in each continuum. When this apparent deviation is viewed in the larger context of the social structures that the linguistic structures reflect, this is not really so unexpected. The lower middle class typically has a high tendency for upward social mobility, and one of the ways in which this aspiration is manifested is linguistically.

CONCLUSION

There are still a number of problems or uncontrolled variables in experimental design, which relate not only to the present experiment but also to the larger body of work done on evaluational reactions to the spoken language. These deserve additional consideration here.^ ^ A more detailed discussion of these and other issues relating to experimental design can be found in the larger report.

iS". Romaine

22*^^

In choosing samples of natural speech (rather than synthetic speech, which was ruled out as being too artificial) of two different types, the problem of obtaining reactions to idiosyncratic voice qualities has not been solved. This difficulty was also encountered by Milroy and McClenaghan (1977), who noted that great care was taken to avoid highly salient and idiosyncratic voice settings. A similar claim could be made for the speech samples in this experiment, although in further work it might be preferable to ask other phoneticians to evaluate the speakers in terms of dimensions relating to voice quality. It is not without considerable importance to examine the effect that voice quality might have in influencing judgments of this type, but I think this is a more serious problem for subjective reaction tests of the type Labov (1966) conducted, where the claim was made that the reaction to a specific variant of a variable was being isolated. Strictly speaking, this claim is, of course, inflated; even though Labov used carefully controlled reading passages, the specific variants occurred in context with other speech. It is not unreasonable to assume that all available levels of linguistic expression can and will be used by hearers as diagnostic of the speaker's identity. This will include, among other things, lexical choice, morphological and syntactic variation, phonetic/phonological variation and tempo, in addition to parahnguistic features such as voice quality. The use of natural speech in evaluational experiments does of course permit all this variation to enter into the judgmental process. It is paradoxical, however, that this is perhaps the best argument we can cite both in favor of and against using natural speech stimuli. Stereotyped features do not occur in a linguistic vacuum; they occur in context with a whole range of other features. In this experiment and others, e.g., Lambert's and Milroy and McClenaghan's, reactions were obtained to speakers/groups as a whole; since certain voice quahties or components of these may be characteristic of these groups, then these should occur along with segmental features. The important thing is, as Milroy and McClenaghan point out, to avoid idiosyncratic voice quahties, which may be perceived as unpleasant, in so far as these are identifiable. Giles' work (cf. especially Giles, 1970) has demonstrated that the same pattern of prestige evaluation could be produced when different stimulus speakers were used to illustrate various accents as well as when one speaker was used in different matched guises. It seems then that without varying the task, there is no easy way to separate paralinguistic features (of which voice quality is only one), from the segmental context in which they are embedded. If we do, then the experimental situation is very much removed from reality, since people never hear speech of this type, let alone evaluate it. The results of this study did suggest some modifications in the experimental method that might make it more easily administered. For example, it seems that certain characteristics can be better, i.e., more consistently, evaluated on the basis of speech than others, and that certain characteristics that pattern together might be represented by one item that produced a strong response. Furthennore, some items can be eliminated entirely, since they either produced ambiguous results or did not seem to be relevant to linguistic attitudes in this particular case. For example, the dimension "mild/broad" was not interpreted in the same way by all the judges, so that, in fact, both the RP speaker and the most Scottish-sounding speaker were classified as very broad by some judges. This

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Linguistic Attitudes in Scotland

suggests that any accent that is greatly different from one's own is likely to be perceived as broad. An example of an item that did not pattern as predicted, or seem relevant, was the dimension "tough/gentle." Earlier sociolinguistic work both in Britain and the United States (cf., in particular, Trudgill, 1974; Labov, 1966) indicated that working-class speech had the connotation of "toughness" and "masculinity," but there was no real evidence of this in these results (cf. also Edwards, 1979a). Finally, simplification of the task itself might also be profitably considered. There is no reason for assuming that there are a given number of degrees of meaningfulness, in this case seven, along which subjects can evaluate a characteristic. A three-point scale, for example, in which a dimension might be evaluated as very, average or not very, would yield less finely discriminated judgments, but it is just as likely that it will produce clearer results. One of the drawbacks in the use of the semantic differential with seven points is that judges differ somewhat in their utilization of the entire range of the scale; there is a tendency to avoid the ends. One final comment is relevant. What is perhaps very remarkable about experiments of this kind, which no one to my knowledge has mentioned, is the finding that subjects undertook the task so willingly; i.e., they were quite willing to make these judgments about others (cf. also Edwards, 1979b). Of course, in an experiment the appropriate behavior is for people to cooperate. Only one subject mentioned afterwards that he had experienced some degree of discomfort in being asked to evaluate other people in this way. Perhaps this finding is just as (if not more) revealing about human nature than the results of the experiment.

APPENDIX

Scoring Sheet for the Evaluation of Speakers

Sppaker nn

This1 person sounds: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. educated negative friendly masculine honest young lower class tough urban

Points 7 1 7 7 7 1 1 1 7 uneducated positive unfriendly feminine dishonest old upper class gentle rural

S. Romaine 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Scottish mild like an Edinburgh person like the way I think I speak 7 clear as if he/she could be a friend of mine like the way I would like to speak formal incorrect polite sloppy 7 7 7 7 1 7 1 7 7 7 not Scottish broad

231

unlike an Edinburgh person not like the way I think I speak at all unclear as if I wouldn't want to know him/her at all not Hke the way I would like to speak informal correct rough careful

The points assigned to each member of a pair of adjectives are given here for reference; they did not appear on the forms given to the judges.

REFERENCES
(1974). Evaluative reations to speech varieties in 5 year old children. M. Litt. thesis. University of Edinburgh. CHEYNE, W. (1970). Stereotyped reactions to speakers with Scottish and English regional accents. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 9, 77-79. DiL, A.S. (ed.) (1972). Language, Psychology and Culture: Essays by Wallace E. Lambert (Stanford). E D W A R D S , J . (1979a). Social class differences and the identification of sex in children's speech. Journal of Child Language, 6,121-127. E D W A R D S , J . (1979b). Judgements and confidence in reactions to disadvantaged speech. In H. Giles and R. St. Clair (eds.). Language and Social Psychology (Oxford). G A T B O N T O N - S E G A L O W I T Z , E . (1975). Systematic variations in second language learning. Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University. G I L E S , H . (1970). Evaluative reactions to accents. Educational Review, 22, 211-227. G I L E S , H . (1971a). Ethnocentrism and the evaluation of accented speech. British Journal of Social and ainical Psychology, 10,187-88. G I L E S . H . (1971b). Patterns of evaluation in reaction to RP, South Welsh and Somerset accented speech. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 10, 280-281. LABOV, W. (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Washington, D.C.). LAMBERT, W.E., HODGSON, R.C., GARDNER, R.C. and FiLLENBAUM, S. (1960). Evaluational reactions to spoken language. In Dil (1972), pp. 80-97. LAMBERT, W.E. (1967). A social psychology of bilingualism. In Dil (1972), pp. 212-236. LAMBERT, W.E. (1969). Ethnic identification and personality adjustments of Canadian adolescents of mixed English-French parentage. In Dil (1972), pp. 266-90.
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(1971). The effects of speech style and other attributes on teachers' attitudes towards pupils. In Dil (1972), pp. 338-351. LE P A G E , R . B . (1978). Projection, focussing, diffusion. Society for Caribbean Linguistics: Occasional Paper, 9. M A C A U L A Y , R . K . S . and T R E V E L Y A N , G. (1973). Language, Education and Employment in Glasgow. A report to the Social Science Research Council. MiLROY, J. and MiLROY, L. (1977). Speech and context in an urban setting. Belfast Working Papers in Language and Linguistics, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1-85. MiLROY, L. and M C C L E N A G H A N , P. (1977). Stereotyped reactions to four educated accents in Ulster. Belfast Working Papers in Language and Linguistics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1-10. MOSER, C. and K ALTON, G. (1958). Survey Methods in Social Investigation (London). OSGOOD, C , SUCI, G.J. and TANNENBAUM, P.H. (1957). The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana, IU.). R O M A I N E , S. (1975). Linguistic variability in the speech of some Edinburgh schoolchildren. M. Litt. thesis. University of Edinburgh. R O M A I N E , S. and R E I D , E . C . (1976). Glottal sloppiness?: A sociolinguistic view of urban speech in Scotland. Teaching English. The Journal of Teachers of English in Scotland, 9, 12-18. ROMAINE, S. (1978). A Sociolinguistic Investigation of Edinburgh Speech. Interim report to the Social Science Research Council. R O M A I N E , S. (1979). The social reality of phonetic descriptions. Northern Ireland Speech and Language Forum Journal, 5, 21-36. T A Y L O R , D . M . and C L E M E N T , R. (1974). Normative reactions to styles of Quebec French. Anthropological Linguistics, 16, 202-218. T R U D G I L L , P. (1974). The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich (Cambridge). U L D A L L , E . T . (1960). Attitudinal meanings conveyed by intonation contours. Language and Speech, 3, 223-234.