The social life of cultural value

Abstract

Introduction My main concern in this chapter is with processes of linguistic enregisterment, processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms. The empirical case on which I focus is a particular phonolexical register of Standard British English, nowadays called Received Pronunciation, or RP. I shall be concerned in what follows with the historical processes through which the register emerged as a status emblem in British society and became linked to a distinctive scheme of cultural values. Yet my larger purpose is to draw attention to a series of reflexive social processes – processes of value production, maintenance and transformation – through which a scheme of cultural values has a social life, as it were, a processual and dynamic existence that depends on the activities of social persons linked to each other through discursive interactions and institutions. I argue that cultural value is not a static property of things or people but a precipitate of sociohistorically locatable practices, including discursive practices, which imbue cultural forms with recognizable indexical sign-values and bring these values into circulation along identifiable trajectories in social space. Though the specific objects of value I consider here are linguistic forms, the processes of valorization, circulation and reanalysis I describe are quite general. They apply to – indeed, treat language like – any other cultural form.

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