by Shayne Crawford
People develop intricate ways of expressing their belonging to a group of people. Within groups such as university cohorts, sports teams, school clubs & others, individuals infuse emerging sets of language practices into their personal vernacular in an attempt to climb the social ladder. Here are a few expressions that are popular in my community:
- something odd that you acknowledge i.e “weird flex, but okay”
- greetings i.e “waddup fam?”
- compliments i.e “that show was lit!”
- expressing certainty i.e “hundo p”
- expressing risk i.e to “send it”. This is a reference to a Canadian daredevil who does jumps off a ski-doo (snowmobile)
People use these expressions in an array of social situations to identify themselves with the party culture in the community. Eckert (2008) calls the constellation of ideologically related meanings an indexical field where variations are fluid and consistently changing. She further writes “each new activation has the potential to change the field by building on ideological connections” (p.453). While some forms are fun and trendy to use, these examples, nowadays popular with millennials, often come under scrutiny because of the social media destinations they are most commonly used on. However, the defective ideology of Instagram is an entirely different can of worms.
Eckert (2012) writes about these language features more elegantly, she writes that “the social semiotic system can be called up in ideological moves with respect to the population, invoking ways of belonging to, or characteristics or stances associated with, that population.”
The population that I am most familiar with is Bishop’s University and the Lennoxville bubble, the community that I, for the most part of my life, grew up in. It’s long had a reputation of being a party town and currently sits at number two in the top party universities in Canada. Party culture is heavily influenced by social media giants such as Instagram and Snapchat where many of these popular expressions are being used and abused for people to punch their ticket to higher snobiety.
I argue that party culture and social media create a co-supportive indexical field. Instagram and Snapchat are hubs for language creation and their content trickles down into communities like Bishop’s. The third wave of variation studies presented in Eckert (2012) puts an emphasis on indexing and rightfully so because an endless variety of informal language is created and maintained here. But does incorporating popular vernacular have benefits?
By activating this specific indexical field, you are essentially saying: “yes, I am active in the online social sphere and this is my biggest concern at the moment.” Of course, this type of languaging can be interpreted differently, but that’s what it means to me! It can also be used for a variety of beneficial purposes: to attract a mate, to ‘network’ or, as discussed above, simply to express familiarity to a social group.
The bottom line is that indexing exists in social structures of every society. It has benefits as well as defaults, and it is up to the individual to decide how much they will participate in them and for what purposes. So, if you ever hear “ayyo, that party was low key lit af fam” think a little deeper as to what kind of identity that person is attempting to portray and for what reasons.
Discussion prompt:
Eckert (2012) discusses language features and social status and refers to full tone Mandarin for Yuppies in Beijing and non-standard negation for burnouts in Detroit as examples of linguistic indexing. What types of linguistic indexing are you familiar with?
References
Eckert, P. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41: 87–100
Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. J1. Socioling. 12:453-476
I’ve noticed similar indexing, though I feel it’s important to connect it to the racial undertones present in modern day slang popular with Gen Z particularly (do millennials really say these things? Maybe I’m isolated in my own index where I don’t hear them much from people my age). Words and terms like “lit”, “fam”, “shook” and “low key” might be relatively newcomers on the slang scene, but this is only thanks to social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, as you mentioned. They have long been staples of the AAVE lexicon, at least according to people I’ve spoken with, but their sudden surge to the forefront of pop culture has only occurred because white people began using the words. I think here I would argue that their usage by white people goes beyond a desire to fit in with their own white peers, but also to appear “different” in some way from other white people. Are white people trying to “act black” by using these terms? That’s debatable, but my instinctive answer is “yes”, as blackness has long been associated with coolness and edginess by virtue of it being outside of the traditionally white dominant social structures of the States and Canada. I actually got called out by a black friend once for appropriating AAVE slang, and I didn’t even really realize I was doing it! I just knew it was a fun thing people were saying, but I hadn’t thought about how using language that has long been used to put down black people was not much different than wearing dread locks for fashion when black people are condemned for their “unprofessional” hair styles.
While I do believe that language is something that should be shared, sharing would imply that all parties have equal power and are treated equally based on their possession of the thing in question. A bindi will be considered fashionable on a white concert goer, but an Indian woman may be called a “dot head”. When a white woman chooses to wear a bindi, is she sharing in the culture, something that should logically end with her being called derogatory terms as well, or is she taking it and representing herself as someone different and more deserving of respect? I do think it is important for people be conscious of what message they are sending when they adopt new language uncritically, particularly when that language comes from a culture that is routinely put down for using the same language. A black girl making a video saying “ayyo, that party was low key lit af fam” may be labelled as “ghetto” while a white girl may get thousands of retweets, #relatable #yaaaaas. Just food for thought!
-Victoria
You addressed a pretty big gap in my post that I actually thought and read about, but decided to leave it out because I didn’t want to make my post too long. Eckert (2012) says it (indexing) is used to lay claim to admired qualities, as in white American boys’ use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) features to index a kind of masculinity (p.94). On top of masculinity, this type of indexing is an attempt to add a ‘cool’ or ‘edgy’ sense, as you write, to their identity. I think my last example “ayyo, that party was low key lit af fam” was a bit of a stretch, and not that many people white people from Bishop’s actually speak like that, and I wish I hadn’t included in my post because there’s a vast difference, in terms of the level of acceptable appropriation, between isolated indexing, i.e just using one word, versus using continually using AAVE vernacular for popularity purposes.
-Shayne
Even if people at Bishop’s don’t say that, I’ve heard similar things plenty of times from white high schoolers! I think its overuse is generally something people grow out of as they get older, like any other slang, but I’ve noticed that AAVE has been appropriated into queer language and the two of them have been steadily integrated into the cishet white lexicon as well and spoken by people of a wide range of ages (never heard “spill the tea” as frequently as I did last year). So many layers to this issue!
-Victoria
My goodness. I had no idea that all these to me, more or less incomprehensible turns of phrase were so current among younger English-speaking members of what I THOUGHT was my “speech community”! It just goes to show that sociolinguistic research has to pay very close and careful attention to where the data are and who is generating said data. Linguists with university jobs are probably the least reliable source about ongoing changes in spoken language…
Yank chiming in here— with the exception of “send it,” a lot of those terms have been popular for a good few years now and a lot of them are coming from AAVE. It’s interesting seeing the shift in language through the lens of Black American language and culture spreading to different spheres. Think, for example, about how The Rolling Stones were influenced by Black American music, such as R&B and Rock n’ Roll before it became popular on the other side of the Atlantic.