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Production, Perception, and Patterning: "Performance" Speech in an Endangered Dialect Variety

In this presentation, I examine a speech register that has received little attention in mainstream sociolinguistic literature, performance speech. Performance speech can be defined as the style of speech associated with speakers' attempting to display for others a certain language variety, whether a language or dialect alien to their own speech community or their own language or language variety. Because sociolinguists typically focus on utterances which minimize the attention paid to speech, they have tended to dismiss performance style, in which speakers focus on speech itself as they demonstrate for others what they perceive to be salient features of the language variety on display. Even in discussions of style which downplay the "attention to speech" criterion (e.g., Bell 1984), performance speech is cast aside, perhaps because it is considered unnatural, a mere byproduct of the sociolinguistic interview. However, a number of sociolinguistic studies which focus on dialect imitation (e.g., Preston 1994, Butters forthcoming), as well as anthropology-based studies of communicative patterns (e.g., Bauman 1975) show that performance style does occur in natural conversation and, indeed, may play a central role in the daily speech patterns of certain communities. An examination of performance speech may thus yield essential data on fundamental issues related to language in its social context. In addition, the investigation of performance speech lends valuable insight into specialized sociolinguistic situations, including those that contextualize endangered languages and language varieties. Endangered languages are often characterized by an unusually sharp focus on the language itself, and on the successful "performance" of the rare or dying language for speakers of