Linguistic insecurity
Linguistic insecurity comprises feelings of anxiety, self-consciousness, or lack of confidence in the mind of speakers surrounding their use of language. Often, the anxiety comes from speakers' belief that their speech does not conform to the perceived standard and/or the style of language that are expected by the speakers' interlocutor.
Linguistic insecurity is situationally induced and is often based on a feeling of inadequacy regarding personal performance in certain contexts, rather than a fixed attribute of an individual. This insecurity can lead to stylistic, and phonetic shifts away from an affected speaker's default speech variety; these shifts may be performed consciously on the part of the speaker, or may be reflective of an unconscious effort to conform to a more prestigious or context-appropriate variety or style of speech.
Linguistic insecurity is linked to the perception of speech varieties in any community and so may vary based on socioeconomic class and gender. It is also especially pertinent in multilingual societies.
Description
Linguistic insecurity is the negative self-image that speakers have regarding their own speech variety or language as a whole, especially in the perceived difference between phonetic and syntactic characteristics of their own speech and the characteristics of what is considered standard usage, encouraged prescriptively as a preferable way of speaking, or perceived socially to be the "correct" form of the language. Linguistic insecurity arises based on the perception of a lack of "correctness" regarding one's own speech, rather than any objective deficiencies in a particular language variety. The perception is at odds with modern linguistic knowledge, which generally holds that all forms of language are linguistically equal as devices of communication, regardless of the various social judgments attached to them. Modern linguistics normally refrains from making judgments about language as used by native speakers, rejecting the idea of linguistic correctness as scientifically unfounded, or at least assuming that any notions of correct usage are relative in nature; popular linguistic ideas and social expectations, however, do not necessarily follow the scholarly consensus.In one of its earliest usages, the term linguistic insecurity was employed by the linguist William Labov in his 1972 paper on the social stratification of the pronunciation of /r/ to describe the attitude of employees at three different retail stores in New York City towards their own speech patterns in comparison to Standard English. Labov theorized that employees who had the most extreme shift in style from their own speech variety to the standard form were more insecure in a linguistic sense.
The term has since been used to describe any situation in which a speaker is led to hypercorrect, or shift one's patterns of speech because of a negative attitude or lack of confidence regarding one's normal speech. The lack of confidence need not be consciously acknowledged by speakers for them to be affected by linguistic insecurity, and changes in pronunciation and stylistic shifts indicative of linguistic insecurity may emerge absent of the speakers' intent. Linguistic insecurity may also be a characteristic of an entire speech community, especially in how it relates to other speech communities of the same language that employ a more standardized form.
Linguistic insecurity may be induced by the belief that language is an extraneously-regulated system, which needs to be formally taught to its native speakers, rather than being acquired in naturally. That is often the case in standard language cultures in which a codified standard idiom tends to be equated with the language as a whole.
Standard and prestige forms
As linguistic insecurity is related to the perception of how one speaks in comparison to a certain form, the notion of standard and prestige forms of languages is important. The standard form of a language is regarded as the codified form of language used in public discourse, and the prestige form is the one perceived to receive the most respect accorded to any variety of the language. Variables that differentiate standard and prestige forms are phonetic realization, vocabulary, syntax, and other features of speech. The status of those forms is related to the concept of language ideology, which explains how varieties of language are correlated with certain moral, social or political values. Many societies value the belief that language homogeneity is beneficial to society; in fact, the existence of a "common language" is an intrinsic part of an imagined community, which defines a nation.Image:RP vowel movement.png|thumb|300px|Vowels shifting in RP.
However, the concept of a language norm is highly flexible. Nations often codify a standard language that may be different from regional norms. For example, Standard English in the United Kingdom is based on the south-eastern dialect and accent, which are centered on London. In other parts of the UK, various dialects are spoken, such as Scots and Geordie; even in London, there exist Cockney and Estuary accents. Studies of young people in Glasgow show that they self-report linguistic insecurity, describe their own speech as 'slang' in comparison to the 'standard form', and attempt to incline their own speech to the standard.
Prestige forms may also demonstrate linguistic insecurity. Again in the UK, Received Pronunciation, a prestige accent, has been affected by other varieties of speech. Though the standard form historically aimed towards RP, it is not a perfect imitation. The result is that speakers of RP now demonstrate changes in phonetic realization in the direction of the standard.
Despite those shifts, those who use RP accent tend to give the impression that they are well-educated and part of a higher socioeconomic class. That is because those traits are often associated with RP-speakers and index specific concepts that are presupposed by the community. Similarly, in general, forms of speech gain their status by their association with certain class characteristics. The indexicality does not need to be passive; for example, in Beijing, young urban professionals actively adopt usages considered typical of prestigious Hong Kong and Taiwan speech in an effort to index themselves as cosmopolitan. The indexicality also does not need to be positive; for example, speech forms may also index negative characteristics. In his study of attitudes towards varieties of American English, Preston demonstrates that people often associate the Southern accent with a lack of sophistication, which indexes its speakers with such an accent as being backwards and conservative, and that its speakers themselves perceive their language to be inferior and thus exhibit linguistic insecurity.
Effects
Speakers experiencing linguistic insecurity exhibit alterations of their normal speech, which are reflective of their insecurity and often are a result of the speakers' attempt to compensate for the perceived deficiencies in their own speech variety. The effects of linguistic insecurity may come in the form of changes in pronunciation, as in the case of the retail store employees in Labov's example, or even syntactic deviations from the speaker's normal speech variant.Hypercorrection
One documented linguistic effect of linguistic insecurity is hypercorrection, the overapplication of a perceived rule of grammar to appear more formal or to appear to belong to a more prestigious speech community. A common instance of hypercorrection in English is the use of the personal pronouns "you and I" as a correction of "me and you" in situations in which the accusative personal pronoun "me" is more appropriate. Because the use of "you and I" is internalized as the more grammatically-sound form in the mind of many English-speakers, that rule becomes overapplied in a situation when a speaker wants to compensate for perceived linguistic deficiencies. A speaker may try to avoid feelings of linguistic insecurity and perceived stigmatization by projecting a more educated or formal identity and emulating what is perceived as a more prestigious speech variety.Inadvertently, hypercorrection may index a speaker as belonging to the very social class or societal group that led to the linguistic insecurity. For example, the linguist Donald Winford found after studying Trinidadian English that there was a knowledge that there was a stigmatization associated with less prestigious phonological variants, which created a situation in which individuals belonging to a "lower" social class would attempt to replicate phonological aspects of the more prestigious forms of English but did so unsuccessfully and thus engaged in hypercorrection.
Code-switching
In addition to hypercorrection, code-switching may also be performed by people who speak multiple languages and dialects. It may happen when speakers of one language fluently switches to another language in an interaction or conversation. Sociocultural studies in code-switching suggest identity is a factor to be taken into account. Identity can play a large role in linguistic insecurity as certain identities experience economic and social advantage. The identity factor is prevalent when marginalized groups switch to speak the more dominant standard language in the interaction.Shifting registers
Speakers experiencing linguistic insecurity may also undergo, either consciously or unconsciously, a change in register from their default language variety. Linguistic register refers to a variety of speech in a given language that corresponds to a specific situational purpose or social setting. An example of the phonological impact of register in English is when speaking in a formal setting, it is customary to pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal rather than substituting it with the sound that is typical of -ing endings in informal speech. A register shift cannot always be accounted for by documenting the individual phonological differences in speech from people's default speech variety to the newly-registered speech variety, but it instead may include a difference in the overall "tenor" of speech and in the way that speakers defer to their interlocutors who are more experienced in interacting in that register.Having to navigate in a linguistic register markedly different from their own speech variety can be a catalyst for hypercorrection and other behavioral effects of linguistic insecurity, which can further contribute to a sense of communicative inadequacy if the speakers feel that they do not convincingly interact in that linguistic register.