Grieser, J. (2013). Locating style: style-shifting to characterize community at the border
of Washington, D.C. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: 19(2),
Article 10. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol19/iss2/10
Grieser (2013) looks into topically marked instances of style shifting in two African American speakers from the Washington, D.C. area in order to determine how individual speakers use patterns of style shifting to align with a specific identity within the Takoma neighborhood. When describing the Takoma area, Grieser notes that Takoma is among the wealthier neighborhoods in DC and is “relatively ethnically balanced” among Black and white residents. Takoma is also described as a neighborhood that borders suburban Maryland and urban DC.
This study focuses on an intraspeaker level of variation, which involves “variation within the speech of individual speakers” (Grieser, 2013; pg. 81). Intraspeaker variation in this case sheds light on how individual speakers perform style shifting as a means of expressing a sense of connection to the areas where they live and work (Grieser, 2013; pg. 82). Grieser also acknowledges the ways that a given space can have close ties to ideologies of varying facets of identity; including race/ethnicity, class, as well as attitudes regarding the dichotomy between urban and suburban spaces.
Using two sociolinguistic interviews conducted for the LCDC project, Grieser aimed to show the contexts in which two African Americans from different socioeconomic backgrounds produce variations of the interdental fricative (th) and (dh). When looking at the speech of Mona, a woman in her forties who grew up in a part of DC where the city’s wealthier Black population resided at the time (Grieser, 2013; pg. 83), it was found that she produced the stopped variant of the interdental fricative when speaking about gentrification; positioning her connection to the Takoma area and the Black community that lived there prior to the emergence of white migration. However, she shifts away from using this feature when discussing how the whites who migrated to the area were accepted as members of the community.
In the case of Peter, an older man from the Takoma area and a frequent user of AAE, Grieser analyzes an excerpt of his interview where he uses constructed dialogue to describe an encounter with a panhandler. In this excerpt, Peter uses the stopped variant when portraying the panhandler, but shifts to the “standard realization” of the interdental fricative when speaking as himself. Peter does this as a way of distancing himself from the panhandler in order to portray himself as “the educated hard worker” (Grieser, 2013; pg. 86).
Ultimately, Grieser writes that there is not a distinction between “Takoma-oriented talk and non-Takoma-oriented talk,” suggesting that members of the Takoma community take pride in Takoma being a space that is neutral in terms of attitudes regarding race.