Solidarity, stance, and class identities

Abstract

Scholars have explained working-class speakers' continued use of stigmatised vernaculars as a response to their relative powerlessness in relation to the standard language market. Research has shown how, in the face of this powerlessness, working-class communities turn to group solidarity, and use of the vernacular is seen as part of this more general orientation. As a result, two competing social values-status and solidarity-have featured prominently in discussions around language and class. I expand these discussions using data from a linguistic ethnographic study of children's language in Teesside, England. I argue that meanings related to status and solidarity operate at multiple levels and cannot be taken for granted, and demonstrate that vernacular forms that lack status within the dominant sociolinguistic economy may be used to assert status within local interactional use. I further advance discussion of the ways local vernaculars might be intimately linked to classed subjectivities.