Individual language choices do not happen in a vacuum. Every speaker operates within a community that holds expectations about how language should be used, and community attitudes exert powerful pressure on linguistic behaviour.
Social expectations are the norms and conventions that a community holds about appropriate language use in particular contexts. These include:
- Expectations about formality in different settings
- Expectations about who uses which variety (e.g. who is expected to use SAE)
- Expectations about gender and language
- Expectations about age-appropriate language
- Expectations about which varieties are prestigious
These expectations operate even when they are not explicitly articulated. Speakers learn them through socialisation — through school, family, media and community interaction — and typically internalize them early in life.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Social expectations about language are powerful precisely because they are often invisible and unspoken. Speakers who violate them — accidentally or deliberately — face social consequences, while those who meet them are rewarded with social acceptance and sometimes institutional advancement.
Community attitudes are the evaluative beliefs that community members hold about language varieties, including:
- Which varieties are “correct” or “prestigious”
- Which varieties are associated with intelligence, education or success
- Which varieties signal in-group membership
- Which varieties are stigmatised
These attitudes shape individual language behaviour through:
Overt pressure: explicit teaching, correction and social criticism (Don’t say “youse”, Speak properly)
Covert pressure: the implicit rewards and punishments attached to language choices — getting hired, being taken seriously, being accepted into a social group
Accommodation: the tendency to shift language toward the variety of someone you want to connect with or impress (convergence) or away from someone you want to distance yourself from (divergence)
EXAM TIP: When discussing how social expectations shape language, give specific examples of both the expectation and the linguistic response it produces. For example: The expectation that formal job interviews require SAE means that job applicants often shift toward General or Cultivated Australian English features, even if they use Broad Australian features in casual contexts.
One of the most fascinating aspects of sociolinguistics is that speakers often adjust their language to meet social expectations unconsciously. William Labov’s research on language variation showed that speakers:
- Use fewer stigmatised features in formal contexts (style shifting)
- Are often unaware of how much their speech varies across contexts
- May report preferring standard forms while actually using non-standard ones in casual speech (linguistic insecurity)
Linguistic insecurity is the feeling that one’s language variety is inferior, leading to:
- Overcorrection toward prestige forms in formal contexts
- Hypercorrection (applying standard rules in situations where they don’t apply: between you and I)
- Self-deprecation about one’s “accent” or “dialect”
This insecurity is itself a product of community attitudes — it shows that speakers have internalised the negative evaluation of their variety even when that evaluation is linguistically unjustified.
Different communities have different social expectations about language:
| Group | Social expectation | Language effect |
|---|---|---|
| Working class | In-group solidarity valued; Standard variety may signal alienation from community | Maintenance of Broad accent; use of in-group slang |
| Professional middle class | SAE proficiency associated with competence and career success | Shift toward formal register in work contexts |
| Youth communities | In-group slang valued; Standard variety may signal uncoolness | Adoption and maintenance of current youth slang |
| Academic communities | Technical precision and formal register expected | Dense Latinate vocabulary; hedged claim structures |
| Aboriginal communities | Community language valued as cultural identity marker | Maintenance of AAE features despite institutional pressure |
COMMON MISTAKE: Students sometimes assume that all groups simply aspire to SAE and that non-standard use is always a failure. Many groups actively maintain non-standard features because of their covert prestige — their social value within the community. Language choice is complex and often involves competing social pressures.
Education is a major institutional force in shaping language expectations:
- Schools explicitly teach SAE as the target of literacy education
- Non-standard grammar and spelling are marked as errors
- Academic register and formal essay conventions are required
This creates a situation where many students arrive at school with a home variety that differs from the school’s language expectations. Navigating this gap requires developing style shifting skills — the ability to move between varieties depending on context.
APPLICATION: Think about the different social contexts you operate in — home, school, sport, social media, part-time work. What language expectations operate in each? How do you adjust your language across these contexts? This metacognitive awareness of your own style shifting is excellent preparation for analysing this process in others’ language.
VCAA FOCUS: VCAA Unit 4 AOS 2 requires students to understand how social expectations and community attitudes shape individual and group language choices. Be prepared to discuss specific social variables (class, age, ethnicity, gender) and explain how the expectations attached to each produce identifiable language features.
