bennett 2012 journal of sociolinguistics

Journal of Sociolinguistics 16/1, 2012: 5–27

‘And what comes out may be a kindof screeching’: The stylisation of chavspeak

in contemporary Britain

Joe BennettUniversity of Birmingham, United Kingdom

This paper discusses stylisations of chavspeak, the supposed language of thechav, a recently emergent and explicitly stereotyped figure that has beenimplicated in ‘the demonization of the working class’ (Jones 2011). It arguesthat stylisations of chavspeak draw on a number of well-established stereotypesof non-standard Englishes in the British Isles, such that, rather than workingas a representation of actual sociolinguistic innovation, chavspeak stylisationscan primarily be seen as combinations of well-recognised stereotypes. Thesuggestion is made that, in terms of providing a representation of variationat the first order of indexicality, the enregisterment of chavspeak is highlyfragmented – a form from here and a form from there – but in terms ofideological force – intensifying sociolinguistic class stereotypes in accordancewith the more general stereotype of the chav – there is a coherence. Theintended humour of the stylisations is discussed as a feature that reinforcesthis ideological force, and the inclusion of stereotyped features of blackEnglishes is discussed as a possible emergent tendency in language ideologiesin the British Isles.

KEYWORDS: Stereotyping, enregisterment, stylisation, class, lang-uage ideology, chav

1. INTRODUCTION

The word chav1 entered the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 2004, as OxfordUniversity Press’ ‘word of 2004’ (Dent 2004), and defined as follows:

In the United Kingdom (originally the south of England): a young person of a typecharacterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-styleclothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status. (OEDOnline 2010)

This paper views the word as a label for a social stereotype and considers thesociolinguistic element of this stereotype, the supposed variety sometimes calledchavspeak. The question asked is, how is chavspeak ‘enregistered’ (Agha 2003)through linguistic stylisations and metalinguistic commentary? Resources are

C© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 20129600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA

6 BENNETT

identified at the phonological, lexical and discourse levels, and a general trendidentified towards the deployment of existing stereotypes at each level, such thatthe features deployed in chavspeak might be recognised by many readers of thesetexts as basilectal stereotypes. As such, chavspeak might be seen as a continuationand intensification of classed representations through the co-articulation of anumber of fairly well-established stereotypes, in fairly loose relation to actualpatterns of variation in contemporary Britain.

I discuss what role this enregisterment plays in contemporary languageideologies, and in the broader social ideologies, relating specifically to socialclass, in which talk of chavs is implicated (Hayward and Yar 2006; Moran 2006;Jones 2011). Stylisations of chavspeak work to reformulate language ideologies inways congruent with intensifying class ideologies, and serve as a useful resourcein the characterisation of the wider stereotype of the chav, such that linguisticstylisations are able to play a particular role in suggesting that chavs constitutea distinct culture and, thus, in the intensification of the representations of classdifference to which the word chav contributes.

2. CHAVS AND CHAVSPEAK

Three elements of discourse on chavs are worth outlining at the beginning ofthis paper. First, chav has been heavily criticised as a classed stereotype. For theauthor Tony Parsons writing in The Mirror, it is ‘a new name for the same oldstick that has long been used to beat the poor old proles’ (Parsons 2004). But thestrongest accounts of the stereotype have come from those that recognise it notjust as a continuation of existing ideas about class, but as having at least partiallytransformative properties too. Specifically, authors have pointed to the idea ofthe underclass (on ‘the underclass’ see Morris 1994; Bauman 1998; Levitas2005). Hayward and Yar, for example, suggest that chav ‘represents a popularreconfiguration of the underclass idea . . . attributing to individual cultural choiceswhat in fact can be seen as the outcome of a cruel capitalist perversity’ (2006:10; see also Nayak 2006; Jones 2011). From this point of view, discourse onchavs not only draws on well-established stereotypes of poorer social groups butintensifies the ideological force of these representations by suggesting that chavsare a distinct kind of person, marked off from a perceived mainstream of Britishsociety by virtue of their own faults.

Second, the stereotype of the chav is very loosely based on a diverse and slipperyset of properties associated with an even more diverse and elusive (set of) socialgroup(s). Those identified as chavs, for example, typically resist the designation(McCulloch, Stewart and Lovegreen 2006), and The Sun, the British tabloid with alargely working-class readership of over seven million, failed to find an audiencefor its 2004 ‘Proud to be a Chav’ campaign, which came to an end within aweek. Where research finds people identified by others as chavs, it finds themat various social positions, though always lower than that of their identifiers(Nayak 2006; Hollingworth and Williams 2009; Maxwell and Aggleton 2010).

C© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2012

THE STYLISATION OF CHAVSPEAK IN BRITAIN 7

This suggests that the idea of the chav is best seen as Moran views it; ‘not somuch a subcultural identity as a figure conjured up by others to suggest thatthe poor are stupid, feckless and profligate, and therefore deserve their poverty’(2006: 569). This is not to say that it is conjured from nothing – it seems likelythat actually socially distributed phenomena and already existing ideas aboutsocial class are reworked in discourse on chavs – but to resist viewing the label asdirectly representative of any particular existing group.

Finally, the stereotype of the chav is given extensive semiotic articulation.Chavs are consistently defined and described, at least in part, in terms of publiclyobservable phenomena, including, prominently, language. Language is centralto the descriptions of chavs in many of the chav ‘humour’ books (e.g. The LittleBook of Chavspeak, Bok 2004b), as well as in television comedies (e.g. Armstrongand Miller’s ‘chav pilots’). This paper isolates, so far as it useful to do so, thesociolinguistic element of this semiotic articulation, viewing it as a case of whatAgha (2003, 2005) calls ‘enregisterment’.

3. ENREGISTERMENT AND STYLISATION

Agha defines enregisterment as a set of ‘processes through which a linguisticrepertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognizedregister of forms’ (2003: 231) and applies the concept to show how discursivepractices about received pronunciation (RP) – and elsewhere other registers(2005) – have contributed to the development of the variety. In the work ofJohnstone and colleagues in Pittsburgh (Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006;Johnstone and Kiesling 2008), enregisterment is viewed as a process of raisingsociolinguistic phenomena through what Silverstein (2003) calls increasingorders of indexicality, and the relationship between these orders and theLabovian (1972: 178–180) distinction between indicators, markers andstereotypes is noted. Features that, in Labovian terms, serve as indicators canbe seen as first order indices, and may be raised to the status of markers –second order – and to stereotypes – third order (Silverstein 2003: 216–222;Johnstone and Kiesling 2008: 8–9). This perspective stresses the importancethat metalinguistic activities have in the creation of socially-held ideas aboutlanguage varieties and their meanings, and in turn, as part of a dialectic process(Silverstein 2003), what the significance of these ideas is for language use itself(see also Cameron 1995).

This paper specifically suggests that stylisations of chavspeak can be seen asa mode of enregisterment, drawing on sociolinguistic use of Bakhtin’s (1981)concept (e.g. Coupland 2001; Rampton 2006). Such work, as Rampton putsit, conceives of stylisation as ‘double-voicing’, whereby ‘stereotypic elementsfrom elsewhere’ are brought into language use to create ‘condensed dialoguesbetween self and other’, and, in drawing on these recognisable ‘other’ voices, actsof stylisation ‘nearly always draw on . . . settled ideologies of language and groupvalue’ (1999: 422). Though not all researchers find this ideological function to


8 BENNETT

be quite so clear cut – speakers often incorporate elements recognisable as thevoices of others in subversive or self-mocking ways (Coupland 2001) – Ronkinand Karn’s (1999) work on ‘mock Ebonics’ demonstrates the embedding ofsociolinguistic stylisation – and the process of enregisterment that it implies – inbroader social struggles. The making, and the mocking, of linguistic variety isa way of saying things about people and, in particular, a means of sustainingsemiotic aspects of power relations. In the case of mock Ebonics, the heavilystereotyped linguistic stylisations ‘reproduce racism and privilege in everydaylife’ (Ronkin and Karn 1999: 363). The stylisation of chavspeak might thereforenot only be a way of making a supposed variety, but a way of making, andderogating, a perceived group of people, chavs, and of sustaining relations ofclass power. Stylisations are not only significant in linguistic-ideological ways,but in terms of broader social ideological tendencies too.

Johnstone’s (Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006; Johnstone and Kiesling2008) research into enregisterment centres around a regional variety of Englishand the ways in which first order variation is selectively raised to the secondand third orders as part of the social history of the region, such that, forexample, the first order indexicality of /aw/-monophthongisation in Pittsburghbecomes a stereotype of ‘Pittsburghese’. But it might already be suggested thatthe enregisterment of chavspeak differs from that of these varieties. First, the chavtexts differ from those involved in the enregisterment of regional variation (seealso Beal 2009) in their lack of self-identification. Chavs are other people, andchavspeak is how other people talk. Of course, the texts themselves don’t precludeself-identification – it is possible that they have readers that consider themselveschavs – but their explicitly derogatory stance on all things chav, along with thefact that chav seems very rarely to be used elsewhere in self-identifying ways,might be seen as a strong disincentive to view them in this way. Second, it isnot altogether clear what first order variation would provide the raw materialfor the stylisations of chavspeak. Presumably, features that serve, or at least areviewed as serving, to index class will be deployed, but such features are variousand highly locally variable in contemporary Britain (see, for example, the paperscollected in Foulkes and Docherty 1999); which of these features will be deployedin chavspeak? Indeed, it will be suggested below that stylists of chavspeak relyfairly heavily not directly on actual innovations in first order variation, but onwell-established ideological representations of linguistic variation, drawing in anumber of fairly diverse ‘sure-fire’ stereotypes. Any relations between chavspeakand first order indexicality will have to be seen as mediated by the processes bywhich some features become stereotypes while others do not. If chavspeak were tobe seen as a stylisation of an existing variety, it would be difficult to see what thatvariety would be. The question to be asked is thus, what features, drawn fromwhat patterns of variation and, especially, what existing ideas about variation(including existing stereotypes), are deployed in stylisations of chavspeak? In theanalysis section below, after a brief discussion of my data and methods, it is thisquestion that is addressed.



4. DATA AND METHODS

The texts that will be the focus of my analysis are two ‘impulse-buy humourbooks’ (Crombie Jardine 2010): The Chav Guide to Life (Bok 2006b), and Chav!A User’s Guide to Britain’s New Ruling Class (Wallace and Spanner 2004).The former is published by Crombie Jardine, ‘a very small publishing companyspecializing in impulse-buy humour and gift books for the adult market’ (CrombieJardine 2010), also responsible for The Little Book of Chavs, The Little Book ofChav Speak, and The Little Book of Chav Jokes (Bok 2004a, 2004b, 2006a). All ofthese books are listed on the publisher’s website as ‘topical and fun Little Books’(Crombie Jardine 2010), alongside such publications as The Little Book of Neds,The Little Book of Goths, The Little Book of ASBOs, Shag Yourself Slim and TheWorld’s Rudest Place Names. Such books are very inexpensive, with an RRP of£2.99. The Chav Guide to Life (Bok 2006b) includes material reproduced fromthe other books in the series, including all of that of The Little Book of Chav Speak(Bok 2004b). In a section entitled ‘Language: The native Chav lingo’ the bookprovides ‘a quick guide to learning the Chav language’ (Bok 2006b: 44), withpronunciation guides, list of ‘common phrases’ and a dictionary.

Chav! A User’s Guide to Britain’s New Ruling Class (Wallace and Spanner2004) is published in hardback and is a longer and more expensive book thanany of the Crombie Jardine series (RRP £9.99). Though the price of this bookmeans that it is slightly less ‘impulse-buy’ than the Crombie Jardine books, it toois marketed as ‘humour’ by its publishers, Bantam Press, an imprint of RandomHouse that specialises in ‘Humour’ books, including, alongside Chav!, titles suchas Pussy: For Cats that Should Know Better, Men: A User’s Guide, and The ParentalAdvisory Manual. Chav! includes a chapter entitled ‘Chavspeak: The Phrasebook’.Alongside The Chav Guide to Life, it is this chapter of Chav! that will be my focus.

My analysis identifies, at three linguistic levels – the phonological/orthographic, the lexical and the discourse/pragmatic – the features that aredeployed in stylisations of chavspeak in these texts. An attempt is made to interpretthe ‘indexical valence’ of these features (Rampton 2006: 302–308, after Ochs1996). That is to say that the features deployed in chavspeak stylisations areassumed to have particular potential social associations based on their pastuse (including past stereotyping). The existing literature on linguistic variationas well as a number of secondary texts will be referred to in justification ofinterpretations of these features’ meanings (Table 1). The textual context too –what features co-occur in stylisations and the metalinguistic comments madeabout them – will be used to inform interpretations of what the features deployedin stylisations might mean.

5. ANALYSIS

Chavspeak is stylised and commented on at various levels of linguisticanalysis (Table 2). Here, each level is discussed in turn, asking at


10 BENNETT

Table 1: Primary and secondary texts

Primary texts:Chav! A User’s Guide to Britain’s New Ruling Class (Wallace and Spanner 2004)The Little Book of Chavspeak (Bok 2004b)The Chav Guide to Life (Bok 2006b)

Secondary texts:Sociolinguistic literature (e.g. Sutcliffe 1982; Wells 1982)Dictionaries (The OED; The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang)Television/film comedies:

Little Britain (BBC 2003–2006);The Catherine Tate Show (BBC 2004–2007);The Armstrong and Miller Show (BBC 2003–present);Da Ali G Show (Channel 4 2000);Ali G Indahouse (Mark Mylod 2002);Bo’ Selecta! (Channel 4 2002–2004)

Songs:M-Beat featuring General Levy (1994) Incredible, Renk Records;Bob Marley (1980) ‘Ride natty ride’;The Artful Dodger featuring Craig David (1999) ‘Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo

Selecta)’, Relentless Records

each what features are deployed and what meanings they are likely tocarry.

5.1 Chavspeak phonology and its orthographic representation

The phonological forms commented on and given orthographic representationin Chav! and The Chav Guide to Life might be seen as drawn from thosethat are, in Britain, maximally recognisable as classed variants, forms that,for most readers, are likely to have a well-established third-order identity.These forms include TH-fronting, glottal stops, zero H variants, the [in]variantin words like walking and Cockney MOUTH monophthongisation (Wells 1982:302).

The Chav Guide to Life includes a section dedicated to ‘Th/F’: ‘Don’t say “th”when “f” will do . . . Say “fanks” not “thanks”’ (Bok 2006b: 46). The bookalso includes ‘ave and aun’ie representing the zero H variant and glottal stoprespectively, and in relation to the latter, a section on ‘last letters’:

Try not to pronounce the last letter of a word. If you do, Chavs may get confused . . .

Say ‘abou’ (‘abaahh’ is the correct pronunciation) not ‘about’. (Bok 2006b: 44)

Further, readers are advised ‘Never [to] pronounce ‘ing’ at the end of a word. Thiswill just make you sound like a Chinese person to a Chav . . . Say ‘blazin’ (good)and ‘steamin’ (drunk)’ (Bok 2006b: 45). In both books, sequences of aaah areused to represent the MOUTH vowel. In Chav!, for example, Abaaaht, Taahn



Table 2: Features of chavspeak. Examples taken from Chav!, The Little Book of Chavspeak(Wallace and Spanner 2004) and The Chav Guide to Life (Bok 2006b)

Feature of chavspeak Example

Phonology/orthography:Emphatic orthographicrepresentation of stereotypednon-standard phonological features.

Aaah ya gaahn daahn taahn laytaah?

Lexis:• Lexical ‘borrowings’ from

(stereotypes of) BlackEnglishes, often metalinguisticallymarked as ‘inauthentic’.

Wa g’wan, easy now, phat, a’ight, bo

• Overlexicalised language of pettycrime and violence.

fingerprint . . . Used in place of ‘signature’in Chav speak.

Discourse:• Use of language to talk about

‘trashy’ topics and to cause apublic nuisance.

Oi! Ge’ us 4 Bacaaardibreezas, moosh.(Would you please break the law andpurchase four Bacardi Breezers forme, as I am too young to buy alcohol.)

• Communicative incompetence. they may actually forget to form coherentsentences and what comes out maybe a kind of screeching – or white noise!

and Paaand mate, glossed as ‘about’, ‘town’ and ‘That will be one pound,my good friend’, are used. And Chav!, like The Little Book of Chavspeak, alsoincludes representations of TH-fronting (muvaaa), [in] (mingin’), along with themetalinguistic claim that chavspeak is ‘a sort of hybrid cockney’ (Wallace andSpanner 2004: 29).

These forms are likely to be recognisably classed for most British readersof these books. TH-fronting and glottal stops, for example, are nationallywidespread classed variants, associated perhaps particularly with urban accents(Docherty and Foulkes 1999; Stuart-Smith 1999; Kerswill and Williams 2000).H-dropping, of course, has long been a stigmatised non-standard form(Mugglestone 2003) and is found in accents throughout England (Trudgill 2000:28–30). Even where stylisations seem associated with regionally specific accents– such as the MOUTH vowel, and Chav!’s ‘hybrid cockney’ claim – it seems likelythat it is the nationally well-established class associations of Cockney stereotypesthat are likely to be relevant. An interesting feature of these stylisations ofchavspeak phonology, though, is that this class stereotyping might, in some areasof Britain, bear something of a dated relationship to actual patterns of variation.MOUTH monophthonigsation and H-dropping may well be disappearing in thespeech of young working-class people in the South East of England (Cheshireet al. 2008; Kerswill, Torgensen and Fox 2008), but are deployed here instylisations of chavspeak. In language ideological terms, a close relationship with


12 BENNETT

locally-specific patterns of first order variation is surely less important thanthe presence of maximally recognisable stereotypes – a role that H-dropping, forexample, is likely to fulfil well. Chavspeak relies heavily on very easily recognisablestereotyped forms, rather than working as an up-to-date representation of anyparticular patterns of variation at the first order of indexicality; it is a stylisationthat brings together features that are likely to be recognised by readers acrossBritain as existing class stereotypes.

It is worth pointing out, though, that complicating any understanding ofthe phonological stylisations here is their orthographic representation. Thisrepresentation means that they remain rather open to interpretation andit seems likely that there will be divergent readings of these features; onereader from Lancashire, in the North West of England, told me that he reada strong Manchester accent into the aaahhhs, for example. The work of Jaffeand Walton, however, where informants gave quite uniform readings of anorthographic representation of Southern U.S. English, going from ‘one smallpart of a text (orthography) to a complex whole (a voice)’ (2000: 580) in similarways, suggests that these readings might not be so divergent (although suchsimilarity would require further work to fully corroborate in this instance). Themetalinguistic commentary that accompanies the chavspeak stylisations and therelatively heavy emphasis on stereotyped consonant features such as TH-frontingand H-dropping might also work to narrow the range of possible interpretationssuch that it seems especially unlikely that these representations will be read asanything other than classed depictions of extreme basilectal features. And, ofcourse, the use of orthographic representation itself reinforces the idea that thisis a variety that diverges from a normative standard (Jaffe 2000). As RaymondWilliams writes, ‘[i]t has been one of the principal amusements of the Englishmiddle class to record the hideousness of people who say orf, or wot’ (1961:245). Ronkin and Karn (1999) give ‘asystematic graphemic representations ofphonetic segments’ as a strategy of mock Ebonics that suggests ‘“laziness ofspeech” and “disorders of language”’ (1999: 366). I suggest that this is thefunction, too, of the orthographic representation of chavspeak.

5.2 Lexical stereotypes of Black Englishes

The chav, by most accounts, is ‘white’ (Nayak 2006; Hampson 2008), butstylisations of and commentary on chavspeak, in these texts and elsewhere – forexample, in Armstrong and Miller’s ‘chav pilots’ television sketches (BBC 2007–present) – make apparent features of Black Englishes prominent. Chavspeak is‘hybrid cockney’ taking in ‘Jamaican Yardie’, and the ‘young chav will ditchhis middle-England accent and suddenly take on the voice and characteristicsof his LA [Gangsta Rap] heroes’ write Wallace and Spanner in Chav! (2004:29, 91). But despite this metalinguistic claim made in Chav! it is in The ChavGuide to Life’s ‘dictionary’ that lexical items associated with stereotypes ofWest Indian and British Black Englishes, as well as African American Englishes



can be found. The following is an example of a lexical item associated with BritishBlack Englishes influenced by West Indian Englishes, given here with the glossprovided in The Chav Guide to Life:

wa g’wan

phrase

‘Wa g’wan’ is a contraction of the English phrase ‘What is going on?’ InChav speak it is a ‘hip-hop’ term of greeting. (Bok 2006b: 94)

Wa g’wan, a phrase derived from West Indian English, is certainly not a ‘hip-hop’term of greeting, but its designation as such here, with ‘hip hop’ in quotationmarks, might perhaps be seen as an attempt to associate the form with aninauthentic blackness, to suggest that chavs see themselves as ‘hip hop’ whenthey use it. The definition given to wagwon? in The Concise New Partidge Dictionaryof Slang (Dalzell and Victor 2008: 6), ‘“what’s going on?” Either directly from,or in imitation of, West Indian speech’, tellingly suggests that the associationsof the form might be mediated by existing imitations. That is to say that itmight be that existing third order indexicality comes into play here for manyreaders. And, indeed, this selection of forms that might be recognised as holdingexisting higher-order meanings – recognisable already as stereotypes of BritishBlack Englishes, or perhaps of white use of Black Englishes – seems in fact to bea dominant feature at the lexical level. In particular, a number of lexical itemslikely to be known through their use by prominent television comedy charactersare included.

bo

adjective

‘Bo’ is used in Chav speak for expressing the positive qualities of any item.For emphasis can be preceded by ‘well’ or ‘proper’. Also refers to the smellemanating from armpits. (Bok 2006b: 58)

Bo is a word likely to be recognised by many young British people throughthe television programme Bo’ Selecta! (Channel 4 2002–2004) a programmewhich features the comedian Leigh Francis performing pastiche impressions ofcelebrities, most of which draw on obvious stereotypes; the racism, for example, isclear and overblown in Bo’ Selecta!’s ‘Michael Jackson’s’ (the white comedian inblackface) repeated use of stylised (purportedly) African American utterances likeget your white ass out of here. One of the celebrities the programme caricatures isthe black singer Craig David, who first found fame with the song Re-Rewind (TheCrowd Say Bo Selecta) (Relentless Records 1999), a hit from the (largely) blackworking-class U.K. Garage music scene. Craig David, at the time of Bo’ Selecta!’sbroadcast, a twenty-year-old singer from the South Coast of England, is partiallytransformed into a stereotyped northerner.2 ‘Bo’ in the song’s lyric is used as aterm expressing approval of a song, asking for the DJ (‘selecta’) to rewind thetrack, starting it from the beginning. Never an adjective, Bo’ Selecta! made it


14 BENNETT

one, ‘Proper bo, I tell thee’ being the Craig David character’s catchphrase. Sothe ‘bo’ referred to in The Chav Guide to Life, while it might have its roots inthe multicultural language of U.K. Garage music, can also be understood as anintertextual reference to Bo’ Selecta!, a television programme starring a whiteactor caricaturing a number of prominent black celebrities. It is arguably thecase that ‘a’ight’ and ‘massive’, too, can both be seen as intertextual referencesto the deployment of existing stereotypes in television comedy, in this case toAli G (Channel 4 2000):

a’ight

expression / greeting

Used as a greeting, normally coupled with a slack jaw and a swift click of thefingers. (Bok 2006b: 55)

massive

noun

In Chav speak, unlike in English, the term ‘massive’ is a noun, not anadjective. Chavs are not massive, rather a ‘massive’ is something that is‘had’. It refers to a large collection of Chavs, usually found loitering withintent around cash machines, leisure complexes and scrap-yards. (Bok2006b: 76)

The form here transcribed as ‘a’ight’ is listed as ‘aiii!’ in Dalzell and Victor(2008: 684). It was, they write, ‘Popularised in the UK in the late 1990s byAli G’. Ali G, a character created and played by the white comedian SachaBaron-Cohen, dressed, behaved and spoke in ways that were to be understood asblack, and much of the comedy of the programme focused on his attempts at ahyper-masculine stereotype of blackness, always bathetically undermined by hisnaı̈vity and the banality of his day-to-day life in the London commuter-belt townof Staines. Ali G would use ‘a’ight’ with the ‘swift click of the fingers’ describedhere (a feature prominent, incidentally, in The Sun’s (2004) ‘Guide to Chav bodylanguage . . . innit!’)

‘Massive’ – a word which it is implied is not English in its chavspeak use – isalso associated with the Ali G character, though perhaps less clearly. The OEDentry, a draft added in 2000, classes the word as ‘Brit. slang (orig. Caribbeanand in British Afro-Caribbean usage)’ and defines it as ‘[a] group or gang ofyoung people from a particular place; the people who follow a particular typeof music, esp. a form of dance music, regarded as such a group’. From the early1990s onwards the word was frequently used in British English slang in thesense given by the OED, associated especially with jungle music, a multiculturalworking-class dance music originating in London in the first years of the decade,and which drew heavily on West Indian reggae music. The single ‘Incredible’by M-Beat ft. General Levy (Renk Records 1994), which was big hit in theU.K. in 1994, includes numerous references to the ‘junglist massive’, that is



to fans of jungle music. Undoubtedly, the word was commonly used outside‘junglist’ circles by the end of the decade, but it is difficult to know to whatextent it operated as a third-order lexical stereotype of a perceived group ofpeople. A move towards stereotyping is perhaps suggested by the use of theword by Ali G. Ali G claims membership of the ‘Staines massive’, and M-Beat’s‘Incredible’ is used as the title song for the Ali G feature film (Mylod 2002),playing over images of the character driving into Staines, past playgrounds andduck ponds, and narrowly beating a pensioner in a flat cap and three-wheel carto the last remaining disabled parking space. The bathetic set up of the Ali G hereis reminiscent of that recurring in representations of the chav, whose ‘massives’are ‘usually found loitering with intent around cash machines, leisure complexesand scrap yards’ (Bok 2006b: 76), and in the Bo’ Selecta! kestrel-fancyingCraig David.

Other lexical items listed in The Chav Guide to Life – wack, phat and yo – seemlikely to be associated with African American Englishes. Phat is a word withorigins in African American Vernacular English. The OED (draft revision, 2008)classes it as ‘slang’, ‘orig. among African-Americans’, ‘[p]articularly associatedwith the hip-hop subculture’, and as meaning ‘excellent, admirable, fashionable,“cool”’. Wack is defined in the OED (from the 1997 additions) as an adjectivemeaning ‘bad, harmful, unfashionable, boring’. Dalzell and Victor (2008: 714)note that ‘both Italian-American and black communities lay claim’ to yo, but itseems to be associated with African American Englishes by most British Englishspeakers. For many readers of these chav texts, all of these will be – whatever theiractual use in British Englishes – recognisable stereotypes of African AmericanEnglishes.

In summary, it seems that the lexical items discussed in this section areprobably not directly indicative of the kind of genuine multicultural innovationtaking place in contemporary Britain (e.g. Cheshire et al. 2008). Rather they are abundle of third-order stereotypes of Black Englishes. In this respect, the supposeduse of Black English in chavspeak is similar to the stereotype of Jafaican.3 The chav,like the speaker of Jafaican, is represented as a kind of ‘race traitor’, albeit a fairlymild and perhaps just harmlessly delusional one. Stockwell discusses the workof one of his students, Virginia Barnes, on the recognition of patois words amongwhite people across England. Stockwell suggests that Barnes’ work ‘indicatesthe potential for the development of modern vernacular that borrows freely fromdifferent ethnic origins and better reflects the multiracial nature of Britain’ (2002:46). The stigmatisation of white use of forms marked as black in chavspeak mightbe seen as a conservative force acting against such a possibility. This tendency,which is quite subtle in these representations of chavspeak, relying on a batheticundermining of apparent white use of Black Englishes, is, elsewhere, expressedin more violent terms. On the discussion pages of the white supremacist websiteStormfront (2006), for example, chavs are condemned for ‘lov[ing] to copy otherraces’ and ‘talk[ing] . . . act[ing] . . . dress[ing] like black people’. They ‘DO NOTdeserve to be white’ writes one contributor. So, alongside the existing class


16 BENNETT

stereotypes implied by the basilectal phonological stylisations, the deployment ofstereotyped features of Black Englishes in the mouth of the white chav might workto police ethnic-linguistic boundaries, a reinforcing of the ‘whiteness’ of chavs,as against the potential for the development of new multicultural working-classforms.

5.3 Overlexicalisation and anti-language

The second tendency at the lexical level is the overlexicalisation of particularsemantic fields. In this respect, chavspeak is represented as an ‘anti-language’(Halliday 1978), the language of an ‘antisociety’, ‘a society that is set up withinanother society as a conscious alternative to it’ (1978: 164). ‘The principle,’Halliday writes, ‘is that of same grammar, different vocabulary; but differentvocabulary only in certain areas, typically those that are central to the activities ofthe subculture and that set it off most sharply from the established society’ (1978:165). In the antilanguages with which Halliday is concerned, overlexicalisationoccurs in fields associated with criminal activity. In the dictionary section of TheChav Guide to Life, chavspeak, too, is represented as being overlexicalised in whatmight loosely be defined as the areas of: crime and public disorder; unemployment,poverty and welfare; family dysfunction; and consumerism. I list a number of wordsthat I identify as belonging to each field below. The material in the second columnin italics is extracted from the definitions (Bok 2006b: 53–98).

Crime and public disorder:fingerprint used in place of ‘signature’ in Chav speaklife what some Chavs end up gettingnick refers to the English ‘prison’, a place where many Chav families

have been known to spend Christmasrefrigerator classed in English as ‘white goods’; for Chavs, however, the term

‘stolen goods’ is more appropriateshoplifting the favoured hobby, or indeed job, of most Chavs

Unemployment, poverty and welfare:money another legend from Chav mythology . . . Although ‘money’ is

freely dispensed by the DSS . . . most Chavs will never know whatit is like to hold a real £20 note4

poor the social status most Chavs aspire to beingquit what Chavs do after twenty minutes in any type of gainful

employment

Family dysfunction:brother a sibling of the same parents – the identity of whom is often

unknowncousin a person ripe for marryingfather a creature out of Chav mythology



mother often found whiling away the days watching daytime TV in herdressing gown, yelling at little Chavs, and smoking 60+cigarettes a day

nah used most commonly as a direct response to the questions, ‘Is thatyour baby?’ . . .

Consumerism:luv a sexual emotion shared between a Chav and his Nova or a

Chavette and her hair moussesharp used to describe a Chav who is wearing brand new white trainers,

the latest Nickelson pastel-coloured polo shirt and freshly ironed3-stripe tracksuit bottoms

Lexical items relating to disparate areas of social life are brought together herein such a way that a range of activities and attitudes are drawn together as thepractices of a particular culture. The definitions of the words serve to restrict theirapparent meaning in chavspeak to the fields indicated, such that the relevantfact about a cousin is that s/he is ripe for marrying. The combination of thesefields – criminality, welfare dependency, family dysfunction and consumerism –is reminiscent of the categorising move that Bauman attributes to the idea of theunderclass: the underclass is ‘An utterly heterogeneous and extremely variegatedcollection indeed’ (1998: 66).

Plunging them all into one category is a classificatory decision, not the verdict of facts;condensing them into one entity . . . In reality, ‘single mother’ and an ‘underclasswoman’ are not the same creatures. It takes a great deal of effort (though littlethought) to make the first into the second. (Bauman 1998: 67–68)

And the fields that are combined here to make up the chavspeak lexicon arecongruent with those themes that combine to make up the idea of the underclass.Criminality, unemployment, welfare ‘dependency’, family dysfunction, and theostensibly ‘trashy’ consumerism that is indicated here have all been suggestedto be properties of discourse on the underclass (Morris 1994; Levitas 2005)and, have also been linked to the word chav (Hayward and Yar 2006; Nayak2006). Thus, chavspeak is overlexicalised in such a way as to suggest not thedangerous anti-language of a serious criminal underground but that of a petty,dysfunctional underclass.

5.4 Communicative incompetence at the discourse level

At the discourse level, two tendencies are apparent. First, related to the lexicalrepresentation discussed above, chavspeak is represented as being used forparticular activities and to talk about particular topics. In stylising chavspeakutterances that evoke particular contexts and functions of use, the authorscreate the impression that chavs are people who like to do particular things. TheChav Guide to Life gives a list of the following chav topics of conversation:


18 BENNETT

Football, fighting, sex, Big Brother, being bored, winning the Lottery, Argoscatalogues, the latest Nike advert on the box, Kung Fu, Coronation Street, BadGirls, Footballers’ Wives, Eastenders, Trisha, sex, money, becoming rich by doingnothing, being spotted by the producer of a reality TV show and becoming famous,sex, money. (Bok 2006b: 52)

The emphasis here is on private activity, on the kinds of things that chavs mighttalk about, and thus, by implication, the kinds of things that they think about.Some of these preoccupations are are the phenomena of ‘low culture’ – realitytelevision programmes, soaps and a Nike advert. Others are ‘get-rich-quick’schemes – winning the lottery, becoming rich by doing nothing. The recurrenceof sex and money not only suggests that these are prominent preoccupationsof the chav psyche but perhaps that chav concerns might repeat themselves inthis way, that the chav psyche is primitive not only in its concerns but in itsstructuring.

The stylised sentences in Chav! generally emphasise a very different use ofchavspeak, giving utterances that might be used in public interaction. Some ofthese interactions are confrontations between chavs and their children, such asthe example below:

Do vat again Chesney, and I’ll bleedin’ beltchyerr one!(Please don’t do that again, Chesney, or I will be forced to administer some form ofcorporal punishment.) (Wallace and Spanner 2004: 32)

Family dysfunction was noted, above, as an overlexicalised area in chavspeak,and these stylised utterances continue this theme, suggesting that chav parentsare likely to use violence against their children. Other stylised utterances areinteractions with other people in public, variably hostile:

Giss a faaag, mate?(Excuse me, but can you let me have one of your cigarettes, please?)

Yerr wan’ aany draw?(Would you like to purchase some cannabis resin?)

Oi! Ge’ us 4 Bacaaardibreezas, moosh.(Would you please break the law and purchase four Bacardi Breezers for me, as Iam too young to buy alcohol.)

Call vat a large chips? Yerr ‘aving a faaackin’ laarf aintcha?(Are you jesting? I think this portion of chips is slightly smaller than it should be.)

Wha’chooyoulookinatmoosh?(Excuse me, but can I help you?) (Wallace and Spanner 2004: 31–35)

These stylised utterances each imply a context in which a chav is interactingwith a stranger. In each, the interaction is, if not actively hostile towards thestranger, then likely to be understood as a nuisance, an imposition on theaddressee’s privacy. The glosses of these utterances are interesting in that aswell as contrasting the stigmatised chavspeak with a hyper-formalised ‘standard’



English, they include no direct translations of the swear words used but do includevarious markers of negative politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987) absent fromthe chavspeak utterances – ‘excuse me’, ‘please’, ‘would you like’, ‘I think’. Theimplication of this might be that rudeness is a feature of chavspeak. Moreover,these utterances, in evoking particular contexts of use – contexts that are mademore explicit in the glosses – allow the authors to represent chavspeak not onlyas a way of saying particular things but as a way of doing particular things.Stylising chavspeak is a means by which the apparent public activities of chavscan be articulated.

The second tendency at the discourse level is the representation of chavspeakas incoherent. Towards the end of Chav!’s ‘phrasebook’, Wallace and Spannerwrite:

You should by now be getting an ‘ear’ for Chavspeak. However, during an argument,when situations get a little heated, Chavspeak can become almost indecipherable.In these circumstances, it is important to remember that chavs will say whatever itis they need to say in one long stream of vocalisation. They will not pause for breathor stop to think about exactly what it is they are trying to say. As there is nothing achav likes better than a row, in all the excitement they may actually forget to formcoherent sentences and what comes out may just be a kind of screeching – or whitenoise! (Wallace and Spanner 2004: 34–35)

This can be related to rather extreme tendencies in long-standing ideologiesregarding the ‘inarticulacy’ of ‘non-standard’ varieties, the idea that suchvarieties are simply not language at all (Milroy 2001). Crowley discusses thedivision of society in early-twentieth-century Britain into ‘the articulate and thebarbarians’ (2003: 180). The language of the ‘barbarians’ to ‘articulate’ earswas not even a language, it was simply noise; ‘working-class speakers,’ Crowleywrites, ‘make noise but are not counted as engaging in discourse because thenoises they make are not part of the “standard language” system’ (2003: 185).This description of chavspeak as a ‘kind of screeching – white noise’ is a fairlyexplicit continuation of this language-ideological stance, and it is one supportedmore implicitly by the repeated ‘English’ glossing of chavspeak.

Chavs in these books are rude and incoherent; their language varies froma ‘mutated’ form of English to ‘white noise’. Though these texts, in adoptingthe generic forms of dictionaries and phrasebooks purport to serve as a guideto the communicative competence (Hymes 1974) of chavspeak, so that readersmight ‘converse with a chav’ (Wallace and Spanner 2004: 29), they are fairlyclearly to be read as implying a communicative incompetence on the part ofthe chav. And, looking beyond the texts at hand for a moment, it is strikinghow clear a characteristic this apparent communicative incompetence is intelevision comedies seen as, or purporting to represent chavs. In Little Britain(BBC 2003–2006), The Catherine Tate Show (BBC 2004–2007) and TheArmstrong and Miller Show (BBC 2007–present), characters identified aschavs persistently fail to communicate effectively with those around them. In


20 BENNETT

particular, they fail to communicate according to the norms of particular stateinstitutions – schools, courts, the army. Though proper analysis of these textsthemselves is necessary, it might be argued that this can be understood assuggesting that those disenfranchised are in effect their own worst enemies,excluding themselves from participation in ‘mainstream’ society by dint of theirown communicative incompetence. In a South Bank Show (ITV 2005) interview,Matt Lucas, co-creator of Little Britain explains the inspiration for one of theprogramme’s most popular characters, Vicky Pollard:

I think part of the inspiration for Vicky Pollard came from a short film that meand a few others had made at university where we went up to people and we justasked them how are you . . . and that’s sort of where Vicky came, wasn’t it? To havea character who was really really inarticulate. And then we thought why is sheinarticulate and I guess in our you know in the sketch we wrote in our courtroomfor the radio show it was because she’d done something wrong and she was alwaysbuying time.

6. DISCUSSION

My analysis has pointed to a number of tendencies in the stereotyping ofchavspeak. Here I ask what the significance of these tendencies might be, first,for the stereotype of the chav more broadly, and, second, for contemporaryBritish language ideologies. I then discuss some possible objections to theseinterpretations.

The significance of language for the stereotyping of the chav seems mostobviously to be that, as a publicly observable phenomenon, language is availableas a material on which to peg various social associations (Hudson 1996:211–216). Here well-established basilectal stereotypes are deployed and theirlinguistic stigmatisation drawn on in stereotyping the chav. Furthermore, theoverlexicalisation of certain semantic fields and the stylisation of utterancesthat evoke particular contexts and activities serve to tell readers about muchmore than just language; they represent the kinds of things that chavsapparently think about and do. So perhaps most importantly, in these texts,the representation of a language is a means by which a supposed culture isrepresented, and the texts purport, ironically, to be a guide to that culture.Chavspeak phrases are glossed into ‘standard’ English, and readers are givenadvice regarding chav communicational norms, a guide to the supposed‘communicative (in)competence’ (Hymes 1974) of chav culture. Of course, theirony arises from the fact that the features of this supposed competence are veryrecognisably drawn from long-established stereotypes of the communicativelyincompetent ‘masses’ (Crowley 2003). These are very recognisable as ‘wrong’ways of using language in contemporary Britain. Chav!’s blurb makes the irony ofthis suggestion of cultural distinctiveness clear, describing chavs as ‘the amazingcultural phenomenon that is sweeping Britain and,’ bathetically, ‘a shoppingcentre near you’ (Wallace and Spanner 2004). Significantly, the suggestion



that the socially excluded, or the poor, constitute a culture distinct from, butwithin, ‘normal’ society is a move that has been suggested to be central tocontemporary right-wing discourses on the underclass (Morris 1994; Bauman1998; Levitas 2005). In the stereotyping of chavspeak, then, language ideologiesconcerning the incorrectness of the non-standard and the inarticulacy of thepoor are implicated in broader social ideological trends, discourses about notonly the kinds of language that people use, but the kinds of people that exist inBritish society.

The second question I wish to address is what the significance of chavspeakis, specifically in terms of language ideologies. In most ways, commentaryon, and stylisations of chavspeak seem very much to contribute to dominantrepresentations of stereotyped ‘non-standard’ language. Very old and very well-established basilectal stereotypes are deployed, as are metalinguistic commentsthat belong to a well-established strand of language ideological thought. Buttwo emergent tendencies are perhaps worth noting. First, the deployment ofblack English stereotypes might be seen as means by which representations ofclass and ethnicity are co-articulated. Though I think it doubtful that thesestereotypes work very well as representations of actual multicultural working-class innovation, they are likely to find purchase as recognisable stereotypes,to do the job of saying ‘chavs think they can speak like they are black, butwe know better – we know they sound ridiculous’. Another emergent tendencyis perhaps an emphasis on those aspects of language ideological thought thatare particularly congruent with the idea of the underclass. If, as commentatorssuggest, a conception of social class in which a homogeneous mainstream iscontrasted with a distinct underclass is increasingly dominant in contemporarysocio-political thought, then this seems likely to have implications for ideasabout linguistic difference. Some of these consequences are likely highlighted inthe texts analysed here; in particular, perhaps, a revival of the ideas identified byCrowley (2003) concerning the linguistic incompetence of the ‘barbarians’, andthe stereotyping of extreme basilectal forms.

At this stage, though, I think it worth raising two possible objections to myinterpretations of chavspeak. Firstly, its stereotyping is explicitly humorous andexplicitly ironic; perhaps it is not to be taken seriously. In relation to VickyPollard in Little Britain (BBC 2003–2006), for example, the comedian Jo Brandhas been reported as saying: ‘I’d say half the population are taking it in the wayit’s intended. Others are just laughing at someone who’s poor and slaggy’ (Logan2009). This formulation suggests that, while the possibility of misunderstandingexists, there are ultimately innocent intentions behind such texts. Similarlyinnocent intentions are evoked by one of the authors of Chav! (and webmaster ofthe Chavscum website) in an interview in The Independent:

It’s office fun, ‘a laugh’ and it identifies the taste divide in society. ‘Peopleimmediately had a handle on it,’ says Chavscum’s webmaster. But in its rathervibrant forum, Chavscum has drawn plentiful criticism. ‘There’s this idea that


22 BENNETT

I’m some middle-class person laughing at the working-class population. Well, I’mworking-class, so it’s not that. Nor is it about having a pop at people on benefits. Isee chavs as distinct from the traditional working class. I’m criticising their attitudeproblem. (Bennett 2004)

In this text, however, the slippage from ‘laughing at’ to ‘hav[ing] a pop at’to ‘criticising’ is suggestive that laughing at and criticis[ing] may be one andthe same. Furthermore, the humour rather disappears in Chav!’s ‘About theauthors’ section, in which the hateful intentions of the text come to the fore: ‘Clint[Spanner, co-author of the book] . . . likens himself to Sigourney Weaver . . . heconnects . . . with her role in the film Alien as he tries to locate the queen chav’snest so that he can get rid of her eggs and call her a bitch’ (Wallace and Spanner2004: 256). So ‘laughing at’ is not innocent; it is part of an explicitly ideologicalpractice. Theoretical support for this interpretation comes from Billig (2001)who suggests of the creators of Ku Klux Klan affiliated racist joke websites, onwhich similarly overt stereotypes are deployed humorously, that ‘[t]he jokersknow that blacks are not gorillas or apes. They know that the stereotypesare exaggerations’ (2001: 286). But ‘these jokes, that are not just jokes, mockrestraints against racist violence. They celebrate such violence, encouraging thatit should be imagined as enjoyment without pity for the dehumanized victims’(2001: 286). Perhaps, the ironic humour of these texts serves a similar purpose,mocking the demands of rational debate about social and linguistic variationand mocking restrictions on violence, if not physical then symbolic, mockingrestrictions on overtly ideological discourse. Where, for example, the author ofThe Chav Guide to Life writes ‘Linguists argue that this is simply an example oflanguage change in modern society. The truth, however, is that Chavs just don’ttalk properly’, a naked language-ideological appeal to the ‘common-sense’ of a‘standard language culture’ (Milroy 2001), it is the fact that these texts are to beread as humorous that allows this. The humour then, seems not to threaten theforce of the stereotyping of chavspeak but to reinforce it.

A second possible limitation is one that may appear much more significant.The extent to which the tendencies I have identified in these texts constitute astereotype of chavspeak that is shared by their readers or by the British public morewidely is not clear from these texts alone. Nor is it clear that chavspeak is anythingmore than very partially enregistered, that it is widely recognised as a coherent(even if imagined and heavily stereotyped) variety. There are a number of factorsthat imply at least some widespread acceptance, but these might ultimatelysuggest little more than that the word chav may have become a ‘buzzword’ forthe articulation of diverse ideas loosely related to class. First, the book Chav!originated in the Chavscum website – a site which invited contributions fromusers and included an active discussion forum. There has, thus, been at leastsome wider participation in the practices that have lead to the stereotyping ofchav discussed here, but it is difficult to gauge the extent of this participation.Second, the claims of these books were uncritically adopted by a number of



national newspapers, The Sun, for instance printing both a chav dictionaryand a guide to body language (2004a, 2004b). While this suggests that therepresentations identified here may have been given a much wider readership,it indicates nothing about how this readership might have responded. Third,Montgomery’s (2006) perceptual dialectological research in which informantsidentified areas of England as being chav suggests that the notion that peoplecan be identified sociolinguistically as chavs is not one limited to the authorsof the texts discussed here. But what criteria his informants might have used,and indeed whether these were linguistic at all, is far from clear. Fourth, myown experience of teaching sociolinguistics in British universities suggests thatthe idea that there are people called chavs and that they speak in a particularway – marked by similar phonology and lexis to that suggested by these texts – isaccepted by at least some undergraduates in English, but again, how widespreadthis identification might be is unclear.

So, the possibility remains that these are diverse phenomena, linked only bythe use of ‘word of 2004’ chav (Dent 2004). But perhaps the relative loosenessof chavspeak, the possible inconsistency of enregisterment, is itself of theoreticalinterest. Especially at the phonological and lexical levels, existing stereotypes,or third order indices, have been drafted into representations of chavspeak. Suchstereotypes are far from presenting complete pictures of any existing varieties,but select stereotyped features from a range of varieties, all of which are likely tobe identifiable as heavily classed. The stylisation builds on existing stylisationssuch that class meaning is brought to the fore and relations to actual variationin contemporary Britain are highly fragmented and obscured by linguistic andsocial ideology, by ideas about non-standard languages and about class. Differentstylisations of chavspeak might vary, and they might be called other things,such that what it actually is linguistically that has been enregistered maybe unclear, but, in the combination of existing classed stereotypes – whatever,formally these stereotypes might be – perhaps there is likely to be coherence at ahigher ideological level, in that similar ideas about class and about how languageand class interrelate might be found. Establishing the truth in this would requirefurther investigation into the range of loosely associated metalinguistic activitiesthat might be implicated in sociolinguistic ideologies surrounding class.

7. CONCLUSION

I have suggested that these texts work to enregister chavspeak, and thatthis enregisterment is rather fragmented and proceeds primarily through thecombination of loosely associated existing stereotypes that have their originsin diverse patterns of first-order variation, such that what is important aboutchavspeak is not how it works to stylise any existing variety but how it worksto suggest an extreme classed variety – how it foregrounds classed stereotypesahead of all else. In this respect, it contributes to the idea that chavs exist as anunderclass, marked off from the rest of society to a fairly extreme degree by their


24 BENNETT

language and by the supposed behaviours in which that language is implicatedat the discourse level. The humour deployed in these books, as well as in thetelevision comedies to which they relate, seems to reinforce this stereotyping,and, as Billig (2001) suggests regarding racist jokes, to free the users of thesetexts to be overtly stereotypical and knowingly ideological. It is questionable towhat extent the phenomena identified in these texts are representative of widertendencies, but whether or not they are, this paper has highlighted the continuedexistence of very old sociolinguistic ideologies in the apparently new discourseon chavs, as well as pointing to the possible emergence of new and disturbingideological formations regarding ‘non-standard’ languages in Britain. The extentof these emerging tendencies is a matter worthy of further investigation, as,more broadly, are the – quite specific – ways in which sociolinguistic variation,through processes of enregisterment, becomes a resource for the maintenanceof social relations of power.

NOTES

1. Throughout this paper, I italicise chav and chavspeak to indicate that my use ofthese words is not intended to refer to any real people or real language varieties,but to phenomena at the ‘secondary level’ of representation (Rampton 2006: 213).

2. ‘I decided to take our Kes out for a play. She’s a peregrine falcon. I bought her froma man in Huddersfield who’s got a dog with one leg. Beautiful, I tell thee’ he saysin episode 1, which plays out throughout Bo’ Selecta! as an extended reference toBarry Hines’ Kestrel for a Knave/Kes, about a working-class Yorkshire boy.

3. ‘Jafaican’ is a term with some currency in British English used to refer, usually ina derogative way, to a supposed variety of English spoken by white young peoplebut influenced by Black Englishes. The implication of the morphology is that thisis a ‘fake’ variety.

4. DSS stands for Department of Social Security. Now replaced by the Departmentfor Work and Pensions, this was the government body responsible for welfarepayments for people out of work.

REFERENCES

Agha, Asif. 2003. The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication 23:231–273.

Agha, Asif. 2005. Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology15: 38–59.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, Texas: University of TexasPress.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 1998. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Maidenhead, U.K.:Open University Press.

Beal, Joan. 2009. Enregisterment, commodification and historical context: ‘Geordie’versus ‘Sheffieldish’. American Speech 84: 138–156.



Bennett, Oliver. 2004. Sneer nation. The Independent January 28.Billig, Michael. 2001. Humour and hatred: The racist jokes of the Ku Klux Klan.

Discourse & Society 2: 267–289.Bok, Lee. 2004a. The Little Book of Chavs. Bath, U.K.: Crombie Jardine.Bok, Lee. 2004b. The Little Book of Chav Speak. Bath, U.K.: Crombie Jardine.Bok, Lee. 2006a. The Little Book of Chav Jokes. Bath, U.K.: Crombie Jardine.Bok, Lee. 2006b. The Chav Guide to Life. Bath, U.K.: Crombie Jardine.Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in

Language Usage. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.Cheshire, Jenny, Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill and Eivind Torgersen. 2008. Ethnicity,

friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect change: Linguisticinnovation in London. Sociolinguistica 22: 1–23.

Coupland, Nikolas. 2001. Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30:345–375.

Crombie Jardine. 2010. About us. Last accessed 1 December 2010 at http://www.crombiejardine.com/aboutus.html

Crowley, Tony. 2003. Standard English and the Politics of Language (2nd ed.). London:Sage.

Dalzell, Tom and Terry Victor (eds.). 2008. The Concise New Partridge Dictionary ofSlang. London: Routledge.

Dent, Susie. 2004. Larpers and Shroomers: The Language Report. Oxford, U.K.: OxfordUniversity Press.

Docherty, Gerard and Paul Foulkes. 1999. Derby and Newcastle: Instrumentalphonetics and variationist studies. In Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.)Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. London: Arnold: 47–71.

Foulkes, Paul and Gerard Docherty (eds.). 1999. Urban Voices: Accent Studies in theBritish Isles. London: Arnold.

Halliday, Michael. A. K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold.Hampson, Tom. 2008. Stop using chav: it’s deeply offensive. Last accessed

12 September 2009 at http://www.fabians.org.uk/publications/extracts/chav-offensive

Hayward, Keith and Majid Yar. 2006. The ‘chav’ phenomenon: Consumption, mediaand the construction of a new underclass. Crime, Media, Culture 2: 9–28.

Hollingworth, Sumi and Katya Williams. 2009. Constructions of the working-class‘Other’ among urban, white, middle-class youth: ‘Chavs’, subculture and thevaluing of education. Journal of Youth Studies 12: 467–482.

Hudson, Richard A. 1996. Sociolinguistics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Hymes, Dell. 1974. Ways of speaking. In Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer (eds.)Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UniversityPress: 433–451.

ITV. 2005. Little Britain: A South Bank Show Special. 25 December.Jaffe, Alexandra. 2000. Introduction: Non-standard orthography and non-standard

speech. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4: 497–513.Jaffe, Alexandra and Shana Walton. 2000. The voices people read: Orthography and

the representation of non-standard speech. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4: 561–587.Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus and Andrew E. Danielson. 2006. Mobility,

indexicality and the enregisterment of ‘Pittsburghese’. Journal of English Linguistics34: 77–104.


26 BENNETT

Johnstone, Barbara and Scott Kiesling. 2008. Indexicality and experience: Exploringthe meanings of /aw/-monophthongization in Pittsburgh. Journal of Sociolinguistics12: 5–33.

Jones, Owen. 2011. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. London: Verso.Kerswill, Paul, Eivind Torgensen and Susan Fox. 2008. Reversing ‘drift’: Innovation

and diffusion in the London diphthong system. Language Variation and Change 20:451–492.

Kerswill, Paul and Ann Williams. 2000. ‘Salience’ as an explanatory factor in languagechange: Evidence from dialect levelling in urban England. Reading Working Papersin Applied Linguistics 4: 63–94.

Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell.Levitas, Ruth. 2005. The Inclusive Society (2nd ed.). Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave

Macmillan.Logan, Brian. 2009. The new offenders of standup comedy. The Guardian July 27.Maxwell, Claire and Peter Aggleton. 2010. The bubble of privilege: Young, privately

educated women talk about class. British Journal of Sociology of Education 31:3–15.

McCulloch, Ken, Alexis Stewart and Nick Lovegreen. 2006. ‘We just hang outtogether’: Youth cultures and social class. Journal of Youth Studies 9: 539–556.

Milroy, James. 2001. Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization.Journal of Sociolinguistics 5: 530–555.

Montgomery, Chris. 2006. Northern English dialects: A perceptual approach.Unpublished PhD dissertation. Sheffield, U.K.: University of Sheffield.

Moran, Joe. 2006. Milk bars, Starbucks and the uses of literacy. Cultural Studies 20:552–573.

Morris, Lydia. 1994. Dangerous Classes: The Underclass and Social Citizenship. London:Routledge.

Mugglestone, Lynda. 2003. Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. Oxford,U.K.: Oxford University Press.

Nayak, Anoop. 2006. Displaced masculinities: Chavs, youth and class in the post-industrial city. Sociology 40: 813–831.

Ochs, Elinor. 1996. Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In John Gumperzand Stephen Levinson (eds.) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge, U.K.:Cambridge University Press: 407–438.

Oxford English Dictionary [OED] Online. 2010. Chav. Last accessed 13 January 2011at www.oed.com

Parsons, Tony. 2004. A wide gap between chav and chav-nots. The MirrorOctober 25.

Rampton, Ben. 1999. Styling the other: Introduction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3:421–427.

Rampton, Ben. 2006. Language in Late-Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School.Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Ronkin, Maggie and Helen E. Karn. 1999. Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism andparodies of Ebonics on the Internet. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 360–380.

Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life.Language & Communication 23: 193–229.

Stockwell, Paul. 2002. Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.Stormfront. 2006. Chavs. Last accessed 13 January 2011 at www.stormfront.

org/forum/t286439



Stuart-Smith, Jane. 1999. Glasgow: Accent and voice quality. In Paul Foulkes andGerard Docherty (eds.) Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. London:Arnold. 203–222.

Sutcliffe, David. 1982. British Black English. Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell.The Sun. 2004a. The chav dictionary . . . Innit! 19 October.The Sun. 2004b. Guide to chav body language . . . Innit! 20 October.Trudgill, Peter. 2000. The Dialects of England (2nd ed.). Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.Wallace, Mia and Clint Spanner. 2004. Chav! A User’s Guide to Britain’s New Ruling

Class. London: Bantam Books.Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English 2: The British Isles. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge

University Press.Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.

Address correspondence to:

Joe BennettCentre for English Language Studies

University of BirminghamEdgbaston

BirminghamB15 2TT

United Kingdom

[email protected]


bennett 2012 journal of sociolinguistics

Documents

enregisterment of chavspeak

wellestablished stereotypes

intensifying class ideologies

basilectal stereotypes

social stereotype

chavspeak stylisationscan

linguistic stylisations

stylisations of chavspeakwork