Perceptions and ideologies of "like" and "youse" in Western and Northern Sydney

This study consists of interviews with 19 native speakers of Australian English aged 16 – 26, who are from two regions of Sydney that are geographically and socially distant: Western Sydney (5 boys, 5 girls) and the Northern Beaches (4 boys 5 girls). The study aims to determine whether there is a relation between a speaker’s socio-regional origin (i.e. their region), their use of like and youse (reported and actual), and the assignation(s) of social meaning to these forms. This also known as indexicality (Silverstein 2003). Participants were not limited to a single ethnic background.

The interview had a unique structure designed to suit pairs of participants. These findings are based on the third section, which attempts to overcome the ‘observer’s paradox’ (Labov 1972: 113) by recording pairs of participants (who are familiar with one another) as they discuss a set of questions about features present in Australian English, without the interviewer present. Two of these features are vernacular like, and the non-standard, second person plural pronoun youse. Studies on like that have focused on speaker attitudes are limited in number and have predominantly been about varieties other than Australian English (D’Arcy 2007; Dailey-O’Cain 2000). The status of youse in Australian English has also not received in-depth examination. These findings indicate that youse and like have not only acquired social indexical meaning(s) in Australian English, but that these meanings, and perceptions of use, do vary according to speaker socio-regional origin.

Northern Beaches speakers almost universally say they use like, regardless of gender. Western Sydney speakers instead explicitly distance themselves from like on the basis of its perceived usage by ‘blonde prancy-ass girls’. Importantly, all Western Sydney speakers who claimed to use like were all female. In reality, male Western Sydney speakers had the highest rate of use of like, while male Northern Beaches speakers had the lowest. In the case of youse, the ideological split is between those who claim to use it, for whom it is the unmarked variant, and those who claim to not, for whom it is highly marked and negatively associated with ‘derros’ and ‘uneducated people. There is also substantial overlap between socio-regional origin and claiming to use youse (or not).

References

D’Arcy, A. (2007). Like and language ideology: disentangling fact from fiction. American Speech, 82(4), 386-419. doi:10.1215/00031283-2007-025

Dailey-O’Cain, J. (2000). The sociolinguistic distribution of and attitudes toward focuser like and quotative like. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(1), 60-80.

Labov, W. (1972). Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society, 1(1), 97-120.

Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication, 23(3), 193-229.