Linguistics Colloquium: On Linguistic Style: Doing Guido on the Jersey Shore

Doing Guido on the Jersey Shore. Maryam Bakht, Hunter College

Past Event

Thursday, April 7, 2011 3:20 PM to 5:00 PM EDT
JC 3rd floor room C

The MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” was made popular by its depictions of Italian American young adults and made infamous by its embrace of the controversial term 'Guido. ‘Jersey Shore’ presents us with a well-bounded linguistic example that allows us to expand the discussion of language and identity and, most crucially, linguistic
style. This paper is a sociolinguistic investigation of several features that create a more unique identity that eschews the default mainstream ‘White’ category by using socially- and ethnically-marked varieties of speech. One such variety, we argue, is New York City English, a regional dialect with a set of sociophonetic features (/r/ and the BOUGHT vowel) that has been demonstrated to possess salient associations with working-class Italian (and Jewish) New Yorkers (Labov, 1966). In addition, we examine lexical features that are used to emphasize the heteronormative dichotomy between being a ‘guy’ and a ‘girl’. However, gender, and the ways that gender is indexed by the cast members of the show, is both nuanced and multi-layered, especially when considering gender’s intersection with ethnicity. The use of a combination of these features helps to construct a Guido linguistic style. This data raise larger sociolinguistic questions regarding the ways that stereotyped and stigm
atized language relate to the use (and possible exploitation of) linguistic capital, as well as issues in discussing how the degree of self-awareness affects the formulation of linguistic markers and stereotypes (Silverstein 2003, Eckert 2008).

References

Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 453- 476.

Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23: 193-229.

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