Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
Frying and tweeting. Perception and production aspects of social meaning as a change determinant
- Date
- Friday 20 February 2026
- Time
- Series
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.24
Abstract
Since Eckert’s (2012) seminal distinction between First-, Second-, and Third-Wave approaches to social meaning, sociolinguists have increasingly recognized that speakers are more than “token-bundles of demographic characteristics” (p. 99), and that the production of social meaning is a dynamic and highly contextualized process. Consequently, many sociolinguists have argued that social meaning-making does not readily lend itself to rigid quantitative analysis. In this paper, however, I propose a “Fourth Wave” approach which quantifies contextualized social meaning as a predictor of two recent diffusions in Netherlandic Dutch.
Vocal fry is a type of phonation (caused by the slackening of the vocal cords) which sounds like the sizzling of frying bacon. Vocal fry is well-known and well-theorized in the US/UK, but in The Netherlands, it was linguistically “discovered” only in 2019; to date, there have been no sound empirical accounts of the reasons for its Dutch diffusion. I present recent corpus and speaker evaluation work (carried out with Shelley Wiersma) to demonstrate that vocal fry is associated with a number of identifiable social meanings (nonchalance in formal contexts, and dynamism in engaged contexts) which plausibly determine its diffusion.
In a second case study, I focus on a somewhat older innovation, the stigmatized non-standard use of the object pronoun hun “them” as a subject. With Roeland van Hout, I collected Twitter data to obtain a sufficient number of tokens of subject-hun, but also to investigate the validity of two hypotheses, viz. (1) that subject-hun is a “vivid contrast” profiler which thrives in contexts of evaluation and qualification, and (2) that it is propelled by the cool prestige that has been confirmed as a social meaning correlate of many other diffusions (also in the UK, see Stuart-Smith et al. 2013 for an overview).
If we want to demonstrate that the diffusion of hun is co-determined by cool prestige, it is essential that we can compare such social meaning propellers to grammar-internal predictors in one encompassing analysis. Such an integrated analysis presupposes that we can infer social meaning predictors from production data. For this ambition too, Twitter fosters possibilities that standard corpora do not offer.
On a theoretical note, my paper is a plea for an inclusive laboratory sociolinguistics which recognizes the crucial importance of both social and functional meaning triggers in diffusion processes.