High School Nerds: Hyperwhite?
A July 29th New York Times article about some research by linguist Mary Bucholtz on nerds in California high schools has been bouncing around the internet lately. The thesis of the research, as presented by the article is that nerds are distinguished from non-nerds as “hyperwhite,” meaning that unlike cooler students, they don’t appropriate elements of black culture. Dirk Deppey linked it on Journalista, and offered this critique:
[N]erdiness is also an absence of redneck culture, Jewish culture, Hispanic culture, Native-American culture, old-money culture and any of hundreds of other kinds of culture. Likewise, — though I’m sure this is something of a stretch for cultural-studies types — one shouldn’t discount the possibility that nerd culture is pro-something, rather than anti-black culture, or that it may in fact have nothing whatsoever to do with race. And come on, statements like “a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having” are, if anything, antithetical to practical nerdishness: Just ask the Japanese. (Isn’t Quentin Tarantino’s worship of 1970s blacksploitation films part of what makes him a nerd?) Still, don’t let any of this stop you from seeing life exclusively through a simple black/white dichotomy, Ms. Bucholtz!
The next day, he linked to this post by Jason Tocci, which approvingly quoted the above critique.
What both Deppey and Tocci, and to a certain extent the original article, are missing is that Burcholtz is a linguist. Her work is about language use and how it reflects culture. Their focus is on media studies (specifically comics in Deppey’s case). A big part of the problem, of course, is that the article in question comes through the popular media–and not even the popular science media. The Times article came from the Style section, which is hardly the best place to get news about scientific research. Fortunately, the actual study she published can be found with about five minutes of Googling. It’s entitled “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness.” It was originally published in in 2001 in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. You can read the complete article here.
Now, the article is written for an audience of linguists, so it throws around a lot of terminology that won’t be familiar to people who haven’t had at least some undergraduate level linguistics (and probably a little bit of specifically sociolingustics). So I’m going to use my intro-level understanding of linguistics and slightly higher than intro level understanding of sociolingustics to walk through what she’s actually saying. Because even though she’s talking about language, something we all use every day, linguistics and anthropology are sciences and while we certainly don’t have to agree with her findings, dismissing them without understanding them is unfair.
The first thing to understand about the article is that it refers exclusively to high school nerds. So adults who have a knee-jerk reaction saying “that’s not me!” can take a step back and consider it from that perspective. In fact, her research is limited to one high school in California, and never pretends otherwise. The article is less about nerds as a whole than it is a case study of one group of people who are “racially marked” in spite of adhering to racial norms. This concept of “markedness” is critical to understanding what Burkholtz is saying. In short, this concept says that certain features are “marked” in society and others are “unmarked.” In white mainstream society, whiteness is an unmarked feature–it’s considered the norm and deviations from it are remarked on. White people in white-dominated places don’t think of themselves as having a race at all. This is also true of dialect. People who speak mainstream (or standard) English don’t think of themselves as speaking in a dialect. Of course, they are. Everybody speaks in a dialect. It’s just that Standard English is unmarked.
These are purely social constructions. Objectively, there’s no difference between Standard English and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in terms of which is a dialect and which is not–they’re simply different. In fact, Standard English doesn’t really exist as a spoken language–it’s an abstraction in our minds. We don’t speak the way we write, but we have a prescriptive vision of the pure kind of spoken English, English without an accent. In mainstream society this unmarked dialect is strongly associated with the unmarked race–white. There are white people who speak in ways that are marked–the redneck culture that Deppey mentioned is one of these. Although these people are white, their form of whiteness is marked. They speak with something less than Standard English, therefore their whiteness is poisoned. They are incompletely white.
It’s also important to remember here that “black” and “white” are also pure abstractions, socially constructed. They are not limited to color of skin, but to significant linguistic and cultural factors. In the same way that black students who are seen to achieve academically can be marked as trying to be “white,” white students can be marked as somehow outside the unmarked norm.
This is all background that Bucholtz cites at the beginning of her paper if you want to follow the paper trail on this stuff, you can look at her references. Suffice it to say that up till now there’s not a lot here that I didn’t read in sociolinguistics textbooks in college. If you want a good intro to these and other concepts and how they impact rights, I recommend Rosina Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent. She does a good job of laying out the results of years of linguistic research and why they matter.
One final piece of linguistic jargon that is important to understanding Bucholtz’s thesis is “register.” This simply means a way of speaking that is specific to a given context. For example, a person testifying in court is likely to use a formal or hyperformal register, depending on their level of comfort. A person speaking with friends uses a different, less formal register. There’s a variety of features that linguists look to to determine register–word choice, syntax, level of ellipses. A full discussion of that is beyond this post, but suffice it to say that linguists are very good at figuring out what register people are using.
The novel phenomenon that Bucholtz is looking at is that some people have a marked racial identity in spite of the fact that they adhere to the writing-influenced norms of Standard English. In fact, they have a marked racial identity because of their perceived over-adherence to these norms. This is the opposite of what we usually see–white people with a marked identity because they don’t adhere to mainstream norms. The group she’s talking about are high-school aged nerds.
She studied this by going to a large urban high school with a lot of diversity. In spite of the variety of races represented, race was generally seen as a European American/African American dichotomy by the students. Note that this is a research finding, not something that Bucholtz brought into the research. Although the European American students were more aware of their whiteness than people in nearly all-white schools (like the one I attended in Boise, ID), European American norms were still the unmarked racial identity. This form of identity can only exist as a reaction to black identity–unmarked standards are only ever really formed in response to the marked standards. But ironically, the unmarked majority took a large quantity of their slang and other cultural features from the marked African American minority. This created an odd balancing act. White students who took too much of African American culture–for example those who were too into hip-hop, were marked in the traditional way, as somehow not quite white. Yet the definitions of cool were intrinsically linked with African American identity. In fact, it’s been argued that the very concept of cool is borrowed from African American culture–even the word itself originated from the version of AAVE spoken by jazz musicians the first time that that dialect emerged from the South and was exposed to a mainstream audience.
But students marked as nerds, both by other students and by themselves, are also seen as outside the mainstream, in spite of the fact that they don’t use dialect from outside Standard English. In fact, they speak in a formal, hyperformal, or academic register even when talking amongst themselves–something that cool students never did. They speak in a way derived from writing, pronouncing words as they are written rather than as they are spoken in Standard English. Bucholtz labels this Hyperstandard English–a form of English that adheres to the norms of Standard English so closely that it becomes marked. They refused to use slang–when asked about current slang terms, they responded in an academic way and humorously offered literal definitions. In one case, a nerd did use a slang term, but it was marked with a hesitation and a false start, and she modified the term (wack) so that it fit the patterns of Standard English rather than AAVE (wacked). Because of the racial dimension of their marking, Bucholtz declared them “Hyperwhite”–adhering to the white norms in such a way that they become marked for it.
The point isn’t really, as Deppey takes it, that nerds are defined as a reaction to black culture. The point is that they are defined as a deviation from the unmarked white culture–but in the opposite way of what people usually are. This would be interesting to study, but I imagine that in places where the primary marked group is not black but, for example, rednecks, you would find an unmarked majority that samples elements of that identity and a group of hyperstandard nerds who reject it entirely. Note also that this definition does not preclude nerds from being members of other races, but it does mean that nerds of other races are marked as such in part because of their adherence to white norms. She points to the example of Asians, a nerd stereotype. She discusses how Asians are considered, in mainstream culture, to be the “almost white” race–this is a racial ideology that dates back hundreds of years.
Now, none of this is to say that Bucholtz’s argument can’t be argued against. But if people are going to argue against it, they should argue what she’s actually saying, rather than arguing with what they imagine she’s saying.
If you are a nerd reading this and you still don’t think it describes you or the nerds you know, I recommend reading the article itself, particularly the actual descriptions of nerd behavior. I didn’t think that her research would have described the kinds of nerd I remember being in high school and am today, but reading it I did recognize a lot of myself and my friends.
EDIT: In one of his comments to his post Tocci responds to the actual article as well, and acknowledges the more complicated version of racial identity that I’m trying to get at here. This was actually posted before I wrote this, but I managed to skip over it somehow, as is abundantly clear by my posting the link two comments down from him doing the same thing. Oops.
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August 2nd, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Thanks, Connor, for doing the interesting and in-depth write-up and reflection I haven’t taken the time to do. I must confess that I’ve only read Mary Bucholtz’s 1999 article on this topic, “‘Why be normal?’: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls.” I’m surprised to find it’s also available for free as a PDF; I usually expect these things to be locked away if you don’t have access through a university library.
When I read the 1999 article, I kind of bristled reading Bucholtz describe her one day spent with students as “ethnographic.” I was interested by the linguistic research approach, and I think it does prove useful for the kind of argument she is trying to make, but I feel it must be somewhat limiting as a research method if you want to make broad claims about culture and identity. A more immersive, multi-method ethnography—potentially including participant observation, participant observation, textual analysis, etc.—seems better suited to bigger cultural questions to me. It sounds like she’s expanded her research agenda significantly since the first article I read, though, so I’m very interested to see where she goes with it in her book.
Just speaking from personal experience, though, I will note that there’s a lot evident in the way people speak. In my own family, I have a less pronounced (if even noticeable) Boston accent compared to my parents and my younger brothers. This probably has a lot to do with hanging out and working with a “nerdy” peer group in high school, whereas my brothers hung out with athletes and worked jobs like valets and waiters. In this case, accent seems more obviously a matter of socioeconomic class than of race, though of course the two are frequently related. Like you, I think, I don’t quite see my own history in Bucholtz’s argument, but parts of it sound familiar and interesting.
August 3rd, 2007 at 7:39 am
N.B., I’m not a social linguist, nor do I play one on TV. It’s been interesting teasing apart constructs like “fractally recursive” in this context.
“… unmarked standards are only ever really formed in response to the marked standards.” Unmarked standards are just unmarked. There’s no need for a Manichean opposite.
This is my problem with the Bucholtz’s argument. She identifies the normative (sorry, ‘racially unmarked’) group as the trendy white kids. Fair enough, but she doesn’t seem to realize that *the nerds don’t.* Even though they explicitly tell her that. (Bucholtz, p.7) They’re not rejecting “black” culture, they’re looking toward a world outside of their high school. But Bucholtz just glides along hammering everything into the proper shape.
There’s also that dangling thread about black crypto-nerds, which would be a MUCH more interesting avenue to follow but she lets it go after vaguely blaming the white nerds. (p. 12)
In short, I’m not impressed.
August 3rd, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Thanks for the linguistics background/perspective. Linguistics can point out very interesting things about people, culture, knowledge, and conscious and unconscious choices.
However, Bucholtz’s study would have the same flaw if it had been about an in-group that liked mixed berries (and sometimes ate peaches, too), an out-group that liked and had popularized peaches, and a group that ate blueberries (but not *other* berries, and never peaches), if her study still insisted on describing the group as rejecting peaches. It overlooks the possibility that maybe the third group just really, really likes blueberries, perhaps due to some property blueberries have that the other fruits don’t. Looking at why they might make the positive choice [towards blueberries, or formal language] could turn up useful information. Not in Bucholtz’s study, though. She frames it from the start as rejection.
This is the flaw Deppey put his finger on, “one shouldn’t discount the possibility that nerd culture is pro-something, rather than anti-[something]”.
August 4th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Church: I think you’re wrong that nerds don’t identify trendy white kids as the unmarked group. Don’t forget that at least some of her subjects self-identified as nerds. The fact that they apply a label to themselves means that there is something separating them from what they percieve as the norm. And in fact they refer fairly regularly to not wanting to be the norm while at the same time saying that they speak in “normal” language–this goes to the core of the paradox that Bucholtz is looking at. This is a group of people that behaves so normally that they are considered abnormal. But whether the distinction is internalized by the marginalized group or not, the fact remains that nerds are a marked group within the society of the high school. Bucholtz is exploring what linguistic features mark them as different form the norm. What the nerds think of the question isn’t the issue.
Sarah: In order to make your fruit metaphor work, we have to add a few more details. Let’s imagine a world where people eat diets based on various kinds of fruit. These diets vary greatly among different groups of people, often on race or class lines. White people from Middle America eat a diet consisting largely of blueberries–although different groups of people call different berries “blueberries.” But generally that amount of variation is not remarked on. In fact, the blueberry diet is so standard that people don’t call it a blueberry diet–they call it “diet.” There is another peach-based diet that originates among black people. But people don’t call it a “peach-based diet.” They call it a “broken diet.” This is in spite of the fact that the peach-based diet is just as nurishing as the Standard Diet, and in spite of the fact that there’s a lot of variation in what people call simply “diet.” The peach-based diet is racially marked because it is associated with a disadvantaged group. Other diets that mix in levels of other fruit are also considered imperfect “diets.” Not coincidentally, these diets are always associated with groups that are somehow disfavored in society–rednecks, New Yorkers, etc. The middle class diets are always simply consided Standard Diet. So now we go to your high school where a lot of black students eat peaches and those that don’t are singled out as strange. Some white kids eat a lot of peaches, and they’re also singled out as weird kids trying to be black. But ironically, the trendy main group of kids also eat some peaches–just not as many. And then there’s another group of white students who eat almost exclusively blueberries. Because blueberries are the defining fruit of the Standard Diet, we would expect these students to not be remarked on at all–but they are. They’re singled out because their diet is too standard. The motive for why they eat only blueberries isn’t important–this is linguistic research, not psychology research. This kind of research is not designed or equiped to look at motive in any coherent way. It’s designed to be descriptive, to explain what happens. What Bucholtz is observing is that this group is marked becasue they adhere too closely to the white norms that are usually unmarked.
August 4th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
OK, after several re-readings, I’m coming to the conclusion that this isn’t really as interesting as it first seemed.
First, appologies to Mary. She actually nailed my assesment in her conclusion. “The use of superstandard English is thus both a rejection of the cool white local norm and an investment in a wider institutional and cultural norm.”(p13) The problem is, there was a whole lot of racial baggage that she waded through first, apparently for padding.
Some of that is a jargon problem. I’m realizing now, that either Bucholtz or sociolingustics in general use the worst kind of jargon. She says things like nerds are “rejecting blackness” which sounds like an active dismissal, but really is a refusal to adopt what a locally normative group of white kids have decided is ‘cool.’ In other words, “rejecting blackness” means that the nerds are not moving the Wenn diagram of their speech to overlap the AAVE speech, as the trendy kids are. In other words, they’re not adapting to local peer pressure. It just sounds way more sinister (to a layman) than it is. (There’s a whole other avenue about why white teens appropriate black speech that is unexplored or mentioned.) Why sociolinguistics seems to have adopted that model would be an interesting avenue to explore. (Has anybody done anS-L of assesment of S-L papers? I’d be curious to see what their conclusions were.)
The use of the term “racially unmarked” rather than a less loaded one like “normative” is jargon of the worst kind. It obsfucates rather than defines. There seems to be no way to be distinct without invoking race. It may be that this is a sociolinguistic truism, in which case it would be hard to get a paper accepted without paying homage to it. I’m almost willing to cut Mary some slack, except that she’s contributing to the problem.
To sum: my latest reading is that all she is really saying is that trendy white high school kids appropriate dialect and slang from black kids into their own slang. White nerds reject slang. Therefore the speech of nerds and black kids doesn’t overlap as much as the speech of “cool” white kids and black kids.
Yawn.
The really frustrating part of this paper (well, aside from the insane jargon) is that the truly interesting avenue (why aren’t there black nerds? Why is it harder to be black and smart than white and smart?) gets mentioned, but is unexplored.
August 6th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Connor: How do the additional details you supplied for the fruit metaphor address the study flaw that Deppey and I see? I.e., “one shouldn’t discount the possibility that nerd culture is pro-something, rather than anti-[something]”.
I don’t think Bucholtz’s study succeeds at being “descriptive, to explain what happens.” Bucholtz had the option of framing nerds’ linguistic behavior more neutrally than she did.
August 6th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
My point is that the study isn’t about isn’t nerds being pro- or anti- anything. It’s about what, linguistically and to a certain extent culturally, distinguishes them from the unmarked majority. What distinguishes them is the fact that they adhere to the white norms of Standard English to a greater degree than others. One of the ways that happens is by not using slang that originates in the African American communities. They are so normal that they are abnormal, so white that they aren’t the same as other white people–ergo, “hyperwhite.” Why they do this is a psychological question that this study is not equipped to answer. The subjects do offer some of their own reasons–they don’t want to be “normal,” they see the use of slang as stupid, etc. Bucholtz hints at what I think is one of the reasons. The nerds in her study read a lot and speak in the way that they read–using pronunciations that originate from the way words are written. Many of the norms of Standard English originate in the rules of written English (which are very different from the norms of spoken English), so we would expect people who read more than they talk to people to have some of the style characteristics she points out in nerds. But it would be a whole different study to explore whether that is a root cause.
The relevance of the added details to the fruit metaphor is to explain why the issue is inherently racial–the problem with your metaphor is that it stripped race out of the question. But since Standard English is defined only in opposition to nonstandard English, and nonstandard English is basically just the kinds of English spoken by disliked groups–especially racial groups, there’s no way to separate the ideology of Standard English from racial ideologies. And also to try to explain that the reason why they weren’t eating peaches isn’t the question–merely the fact that eating only blueberries separated them out of the norm when we would expect it to be the most normal of all.
August 6th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
“… since Standard English is defined only in opposition to nonstandard English…” This makes no sense to me. I don’t add “boop” to verbs to indicate past tense, but that’s not because I hate those who do. I can’t. Nobody does it.
August 6th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
“My point is that the study isn’t about isn’t nerds being pro- or anti- anything. ”
Then Bucholtz’s word choices cloud the discussion.
“It’s about what, linguistically and to a certain extent culturally, distinguishes them from the unmarked majority.”
Framed in a much more loaded way.
My fruit analogy stripped out race as a factor because I don’t see where it’s been established that “the issue” (what distinguishes them from the unmarked majority) is inherently racial.
“merely the fact that eating only blueberries separated them out of the norm when we would expect it to be the most normal of all.”
We whom? If the norm includes a mix of blueberries and other food, why would unbalancing the mix make it *more* normal? To focus on one component (even the majority component) as the make-or-break of whether a diet fits the norm, instead of looking at the balance, seems like a misleadingly discrete way to look at the issue.
August 6th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Well, because nobody adds “boop” to verbs to indicate past tense, that’s not just non-standard, it’s ungrammatical for all versions of English. But there are other features that are perfectly grammatical in some dialects of English and ungrammatical in others. That’s just language variation. But what variation is marked as nonstandard is highly related to racial and class lines. Consider the following three utterances:
1. “She ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
2. “She isn’t goin’ anywhere.”
3. “She isn’t going anywhere.”
(This isn’t the best linguistic format, but I don’t want to bother trying to do IPA here.)
All three are perfectly grammatical, well-formed utterances in some dialects of English. They all communicate more or less the same piece of information, and they all do it with equal effectiveness. However, #1 is nonstandard. 2 and 3 show a piece of variation, but in most registers of spoken English this variation would not be marked. There’s nothing special about it–it’s just not disfavored. That’s what I mean when I say that Standard English is only defined by the opposite.
August 6th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
That is a recursive (in the original sense) argument. Anything is grammatical as long as it is accepted. Anything that is not accepted is non-grammatical. That’s the definition of grammar. The Boop grammar is just as well formed as the “-ed” grammar we’re used to, it’s just that no one happens to use it. But it doesn’t require someone using it to be non-standard. It’s not AAVE either, but it doesn’t require a non-black person to use it to not be AAVE. And if a black person used it, it still wouldn’t be AAVE.
Yes, the difference between 2 and 3 would not be noticed most of the time, because it’s a (slight) difference in pronunciation, not usage. Number 1 is a bit weird (unless you’re a native french, or AAVE, or ASL speaker) becaue double negatives are counted differently in (SW/SS) english. It’s not as weird as “-boop” but it’s in the same ballpark. Well, same city. Maybe region. Point made.
Sarah, I’m with you on the berry argument. I’m thinking at this point that sociolinquists are literally incapable of framing the debate any other way.
August 6th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Sarah:
I’m not sure how to respond to your assertion that Bucholtz’s framing and word choices cloud the issue. Which framing and word choices are you talking about?
And on the berries, you’re actually coming close to the point of the article. Except it doesn’t really work with the blueberry issue because in the metaphor “blueberries” are just a stand-in for “features associated with Standard English.” In a sense, Bucholtz is saying that nerds are a group of people who have thrown off the balance between standard and nonstandard features. This (among other things, such as use of an academic register and use of Latinate terms rather than Germanic ones) marks them as different. In previously explored cases, racially marked groups are so marked because they fail to adhere to the socially expected norms of their race, not because they adhere to those norms too rigidly. That’s what makes nerds unusual, and that’s the point of the article.
Church:
I’m not even sure what the discussion is about at this point. The hypothetical -boop dialect is not grammatical for anyone, so I’m not sure how it is relevant. When I say grammatical, I’m using it in the linguistic sense: the internal set of rules we all have for our versions of our language. I think we’re using it the same way, but I wanted to be sure. There are variations in these internal grammars based on what version of our language we have learned. Number 1 up there is grammatical in some versions of English, ungrammatical in others. This is true of other expressions as well. But the question of which version of English is Standard English is determined by who speaks which version. The version spoken by people in control is what is considered Standard English. That’s why you can’t separate the idea of Standard English from race–in a world with no racial or social disparities in society, number 1 would be just as standard as the others. But since we live in this world, numbers 2 and 3 are standard, while number 1 is not. It’s not that anyone is incapable of framing the issue in other ways, it’s that there is no separating Standard English from racial disparities–they feed off of one another.
August 7th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Connor, sorry if I’m not being clear. Yes, I’m using ‘grammar’ in the same way. My point was that the idea that “Standard English is defined only in opposition to nonstandard English” is demonstrably false. The -boop construction is certainly not SE, but you don’t need a -boop dialect to oppose it. SE, and all dialects, are defined internally.
What determines which dialect is the standard is a different question. Your (I’m assuming sociolinguistics’) answer being race, by way of the race of the group in control. The ‘group in control’ part of it may have some merit, but the race part of it is a needless complication. Even in a racially homogenous country, you’ll get variations. One of them will become the standard.
However, race appears to be central to sociolinguistics. I think this is why the terminology appears to be loaded. It really wasn’t meant to handle situations where race isn’t the issue. You end up with twisted language, such as a group being “racially marked” regardless of the group’s race.
August 7th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
“The -boop construction is certainly not SE”
Ah! but here’s the rub. If there was a group of people who did use that construction, the question of whether it’s Standard English or not would be determined not by anything inherent in the construction but based on who speaks it. Standard English isn’t a single defined dialect the way AAVE is. Two people can speak dialects of English that are very different from each other, and still be considered to be speaking Standard English. When we talk about Standard English, what we really mean are all dialects of English that are not disfavored. That’s what I mean when I say that it’s only defined in the negative. We don’t really know what Standard English is, we only know what it’s not. If you’re interested in the evidence for this claim (because it’s a bigger question than this comment thread can contain, really) I once again recommend seeing if a library in your area has English With an Accent by Rosina Lippi-Green. She goes into some of the research that backs it up.
Of course, you do run into issues like this in nearly racially homogeneous places like Japan. And in a place like that it would not make sense to look at it in terms of race–region and class are more important there. But we’re not talking about Japan. We’re talking about the United States. And in the United States, race is a central part of how language constructs identity.
August 8th, 2007 at 8:26 am
Ah! Separated by a common language. I’ll have to find a copy of that book.
“Two people can speak dialects of English that are very different from each other, and still be considered to be speaking Standard English. ” I think I have a different definition of ‘dialect’ than you (and a lot of people, judging from WikiP) do. No matter, certain accents/dialects definately are more ‘acceptable’ than others. But even there, race is only one factor. Northeastern cities often have regional accents/dialects, spoken largely by whites, that are considered substandard outside of local areas (and often even within them.) There are a lot of dynamics in society, and race is but one of them.
Again, I’m not sure how much of this is due to sociolinguistics and how much is just Bucholz, but I suspect the former, based on that amusing bit at the beginning of the 2001 paper where she solemnly notes that scholars have recently realized that whites are not a monolithic group. It sounds like a sociolinguistic study of Japan or Iceland would be difficult to write about, which makes me think they’re being a bit light on the actual science.
August 8th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Connor: I’m talking about Bucholtz’s word choices right from the start: “reject” (and multiple repititions of that word in various forms throughout), and “ideologically position nerds as hyperwhite”. This is not neutral description. It is negative description. Moreover, perhaps racial framing is the “norm” among US sociolinguists (if I’m reading your discussion with Church correctly), but combined with Bucholtz’s word choices, the framing is inflammatory, and oversimplifies and clouds the picture.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine Bucholtz had done the same study, but in her opening paragraph and all the way through, she describes choices as being both *towards* certain directions as well as *away from* other directions. She describes groups in terms of in-group-ness and out-group-ness (and other-group-ness?) with reference to other relevant factors in addition to race. That would be a better paper.
If only she HAD stuck to saying that “nerds are a group of people who have thrown off the balance between standard and nonstandard features. This (among other things, such as use of an academic register and use of Latinate terms rather than Germanic ones) marks them as different.” She could have made her point (claim) that adhering to norms too rigidly is what makes nerds unusual as a marked group (linguistically speaking) in more neutral linguistic terms. She chose not to (or she chose her words poorly).
By the way, from above, “The motive for why they eat only blueberries isn’t important–this is linguistic research, not psychology research.”
For something that is linguistic research, not psychology research, Bucholtz makes a lot of claims about the students’ motives.
August 15th, 2007 at 9:16 am
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.