Metapragmatic comments and orthographic performances of a New York accent on YouTube

Abstract

Abstract This paper adopts a metapragmatic approach (Urban, 2006) to analyze responses to YouTube videos on ‘how to talk like a New Yorker’ in a corpus of YouTube comments (N = 2,649). The analysis illustrates how linguistic features associated with this way of talking are experienced and negotiated by locals and non‐locals in their metapragmatic comments and performances of the accent and how they come to be socially recognized as indexical of a certain set of speaker attributes (Agha, 2005; Bolander, 2016). Analyzing user‐generated reactions to linguistic variation complements traditional variationist work by illustrating how people experience sociolinguistic difference (Leone‐Pizzighella & Rymes, 2017; Rymes, 2014). It also shows how digital sharing and commenting practices expose shifts in language ideologies that mirror the changing status of American English within the Inner Circle.

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