Throughout their history, dictionaries have been understood as sources of authority, whether that authority has been claimed by their makers or imputed by their audiences. In English-language contexts, that authority has taken various guises – moral, colonial, and legal, among others. Such authority rests, in part, on the linking of words, word forms, and grammatical structures to judgments about speakers, communities, and social relations. While those judgments have largely been aligned with codifying and maintaining a perceived “standard,” dictionaries have been sites of resistance, too. This chapter explores both assertions of authority and resistance. Given the long history of dictionaries and their substantial variety, the chapter adopts a case-study-like approach. It uses examples to explore how dictionaries have on the one hand upheld the civic, cultural, and social order, and on the other celebrated the linguistic practices and lexical innovations of marginalized communities and stigmatized varieties.

Chapter 24 examines the topic of language and gender in the context of Korean studies. Korean is well-known for its highly sophisticated honorifics and other resources that index hierarchy, formality, personal closeness, etc. Korean speakers “perform” gender using politeness distinctions as a primary resource. Studying how gender is performed requires the examination of language and gender in local contexts as they are indexed and constructed. This chapter also looks at the relative frequency of men’s use of formal language such as caney “you”, yey “yes”, and the supnita style, in comparison to women. The result of this is that women may feel like “interlopers” in prestigious professions where formal language is the norm. On the other hand, as Korea is rapidly moving away from a hierarchical society and toward a more egalitarian one, informal language, including caki “you”, ney “yes”, the eyo style, and other patterns associated with women, is becoming preferred over formal language to some extent across genders. This is especially evident among the younger generation.

This chapter explores the cognitive links necessary to create and use indexical meaning of sociolinguistic variation, specifically, whether different sociolinguistic behaviors – speech perception, speech production, and sociolinguistic evaluation – depend on the same associative links between linguistic and social concepts. Three effects are replicated and the correlations between them examined: 1 influence of speaker gender on /s/ production; 2 influence of linguistic forms (/s/ variants) on speaker evaluation (masculinity judgments); 3 influence of social information (masculinity) on speech perception (placement of the /s/-/?/ boundary). Despite successful replication of all three effects, little evidence was found for correlations across participants: that is, participants with a particularly strong tendency to infer masculinity from hearing a speaker’s /s/ production were no more likely than others to show a large shift in their /s/-/?/ boundary in response to the perceived masculinity of the talker, or to have a particularly gender-typical /s/ production themselves. This provides preliminary evidence that the mental associations used in indexical practices may develop independently of one another.

Chapter 5 moves beyond regional accents to the importance of speech sound patterns for speakers’ presentations of their affiliations and for listeners’ interpretations of others.The chapter considers what sociophonetics offers the understanding of language and the social world and outlines some of the fundamental ways that the major social categories of social class, gender, ethnicity and age impact phonetic variation and change.Taking each of these topics in turn, the chapter unpacks how sociolinguistic studies of socially driven variation have established a foundation that underpins contemporary sociophonetic research and then transitions to survey sociophonetic research that investigates the influence of these four social factors on speech production.The chapter then turns to the role of these factors in speech processing, providing an overview of how factors such as class, gender and ethnicity have been shown to affect how listeners process variation in speech.The chapter closes with a discussion of how such research has contributed greatly to our understanding of how social factors correlate with linguistic factors.

In this chapter, we examine the relationship between the vernacularity of caretaker speech as represented by the participants’ mothers and the subjects in the FPG sample. In this chapter, we examine the relationship between the vernacularity of caretaker speech as represented by the participants’ mothers and the subjects in the FPG sample. The analysis indicates that a significant relationship between the relative vernacularity of AAL-speaking mothers and their children exists across most of the early lifespan. Further, the analysis of the impact of relevant social and family factors on the development of AAL vernacularity reveals gender as a significant determiner at only the earliest and the latest points in the early lifespan. Finally, the analysis uncovers the nuanced picture of the relationship between mothers’ and children’s vernacularity – that adolescent females from low-vernacular families are likely to become low-vernacular speakers (like their mothers) in older adolescence. Finally, we see the departure of the children from the parents in the early stages of schooling, following the roller coaster trajectory described in the overall trajectory of vernacularity described for morphosyntactic features.