5. Speakers of all languages employ a range of styles and a set of subdialects or jargons. Just as soon as we accept the notion that we all speak a dialect, it is necessary to complicate things further. We may realize that we do belong to a speech community, although we may not like to call it a dialect, but we often forget that our speech patterns vary greatly during the course of our everyday routine. In the morning, at home, communication with our spouses may consist of grumbled fragments of a private code:

Um-hmm.
You gonna . . .?
Yeah, if. . .
‘Kay

Yet half an hour later, we may be standing in a meeting and talking quite differently: “The cost-effectiveness curve of the Peoria facility has declined to the point at which management is compelled to consider terminating production.” These two samples of speech suggest that we constantly range between formal and informal styles of speech— and this is an adjustment which speakers of all languages constantly make, Learning the sociolinguistic rules which tell us what sort of speech is appropriate in differing social situations is as much a part of language acquisition as learning how to produce the sound of fbl or lil. We talk differently to our acquaintances than to strangers, differently to our bosses than to our subordinates, differently to children than to adults. We speak in one way on the racquetball court and in another way in the courtroom; we perhaps talk differently to stewardesses than to stewards.

The ability to adjust our language forms to the social context is something which we acquire as children, along with sounds, words, and syntax. We learn, in other words, not just to say things, but also how and when and to whom. Children discover, for example, that while the purpose of most language is to communicate meaning (if it weren’t they could never learn it in the first place) we sometimes use words as mere acknowledgments. (Hi. How are you doing? Fine. Bye.) Youngsters also learn that to get what you want, you have to address people as your social relation with them dictates (Miss Jones, may I please feed the hamster today?). And, of course, children learn that in some situations one doesn’t use certain words at all—though such learning may sometimes seem cruelly delayed to parents whose off-spring loudly announce in restaurants: ‘I hafta go toilet!”

Interestingly, these sociolinguistic rules are learned quite late in the game. While a child of seven or eight does command a remarkably sophisticated array of sentence types, for example, he has a great deal left to learn about the social regulations governing language use. This seems logical, given that children do learn language mostly by listening and experimenting. Only as a child grows old enough to encounter a widening range of social relationships and roles will he have the experience necessary to help him discover the sociolinguistic dimensions of them.

While there are many ways of describing the different styles, or registers, of language which all speakers learn, it is helpful to consider them in terms of levels of formality. One well-known example of such a scheme was developed by Martin Joos, who posited five basic styles, which he called intimate, casual, consultative, formal, and frozen.² Joos’s model is only one of many attempts to find a scale for the range of human speech styles, and is certainly not the final word on the subject, it does illuminate some of the ways in which day-to-day language varies. At the bottom of Joos’s model is the intimate style, a kind of language which “fuses two separate personalities” and can only occur between individuals with a close personal relationship. A husband and wife, for example, may sometimes speak to each other in what sounds like a very fragmentary and clipped code that they alone understand. Such utterances are characterized by their “extraction”—the use of extracts of potentially complete sentences, made possible by an intricate, personal, shared system of private symbols. The intimate style, in sum, is personal, fragmentary, and implicit.

The casual style also depends on social groupings. When people share understandings and meanings which are not complete enough to be called intimate, they tend to employ the casual style. The earmarks of this pattern are ellipsis and slang. Ellipsis is the shorthand of shared meaning; slang often expresses these meanings in a way that defines the group and excludes others. The casual style is reserved for friends and insiders, or those whom we choose to make friends and insiders. The consultative style “produces cooperation without the integration, profiting from the lack of it.”³ In this style, the speaker provides more explicit background information because the listener may not understand without it. This is the style used by strangers or near-strangers in routine transactions: co-workers dealing with a problem, a buyer making a purchase from a clerk, and so forth. An important feature of this style is the participation of the listener, who uses frequent interjections such as Yeah, Uh-huh or I see to signal understanding.

This element of listener participation disappears in the formal style. Speech in this mode is defined by the listener’s lack of participation, as well as by the speaker’s opportunity to plan his utterances ahead of time and in detail. The formal style is most often found in speeches, lectures, sermons, television newscasts, and the like. The frozen style is reserved for print, and particularly for literature. This style can be densely packed and repacked with meanings by its “speaker,” and it can be read and reread by its “listener.” The immediacy of interaction between the participants is sacrificed in the interests of permanence, elegance, and precision.

Whether or not we accept Joos’s scheme to classify the different gradations of formality, we can probably sense the truth of the basic proposition: we do make such adjustments in our speech constantly, mostly unconsciously, and in response to the social situation in which we are speaking. What we sometimes forget is that no one style can accurately be called better or worse than another, apart from the context in which it is used. Though we have much reverence for the formal and frozen styles, they can be utterly dysfunctional in certain circumstances. If I said to my wife: “Let us consider the possibility of driving our automobile into the central business district of Chicago in order to contemplate the possible purchase of denim trousers,” she would certainly find my way of speaking strange, if not positively disturbing. All of Us need to shift between the intimate, casual, and consultative styles in everyday life, not because one or another of these is a better way of talking, but because each is required in certain contexts. Many of us also need to master the formal style for the talking and writing demanded by our jobs. But as Joos has pointed out, few of us actually need to control the frozen style, which is reserved primarily for literature.⁴

Besides having a range of speech styles, each speaker also uses a number of jargons based upon his or her affiliation with certain groups. The most familiar of these jargons are occupational: doctors, lawyers, accountants, farmers, electricians, plumbers, truckers, and social workers each have a job-related jargon into which they can shift when the situation demands it. Sometimes these special languages are a source of amusement or consternation to outsiders, but usually the outsiders also speak jargons of their own, though they may not recognize them. Jargons may also be based on other kinds of affiliations. Teenagers, it is often remarked by bemused parents, have a language of their own. So they do, and so do other age groups. Some of the games and chants of youngsters reflect a kind of childhood dialect, and much older persons may have a jargon of their own as well, reflecting concerns with aging, illness, and finances. Sports fans obviously use and understand various abstruse athletic terms, while people interested in needlecrafts use words that are equally impenetrable to the uninitiated. For every human enterprise we can think of, there will probably be a jargon attached to it.

But simply noting that all speakers control a range of styles and a set of jargons does not tell the whole story. For every time we speak, we do so not just in a social context, but for certain purposes of our own. When talking with a dialectologist, for example, I may use linguistic jargon simply to facilitate our sharing of information, or instead to convince him that I know enough technical linguistics to be taken seriously—or both. In other words, my purposes—the functions of my language—affect the way I talk. The British linguist M. A. K. Halliday has studied children in art attempt to determine how people’s varying purposes affect their speech.⁵ Halliday had to consider children, in fact, because the purposes of any given adult utterance are usually so complex and overlapping that it is extremely difficult to isolate the individual purposes. By examining the relatively simpler language of children, he was able to discover seven main uses, functions, or purposes for talking: instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative, and representational.

The instrumental function, Halliday explains, is for getting things done; it is the I want function. Close to it is the regulatory function, which seeks to control the actions of others around the speaker. The interactional function is used to define groups and relationships, to get along with others. The personal function allows people to express what they are and how they feel; Halliday calls this the here I come function. The heuristic function is in operation when the speaker is using language to learn, by asking questions and testing hypotheses. In the imaginative function, a speaker may use language to create a world just as he or she wants it, or may simply use it as a toy, making amusing combinations of sounds and words. In the representational function, the speaker uses language to express propositions, give information, or communicate subject matter.

Absent from Halliday’s list of functions, interestingly, is one of the most common and enduring purposes of human language: lying. Perhaps lying could be included in the representational or interactional functions, in the sense that a person may deceive in order to be a more congenial companion. Or perhaps each of Halliday’s seven functions could be assigned a reverse, false version. In any case, common sense, human history, and our own experience all tell us that lying—or misleading or covering up or shading the truth—is one of the main ends to which language is put.

As we look back over these three forms of language variation—styles, jargons, and functions—we may well marvel at the astounding complexity of language. For not only do all speakers master the intricate sound, lexical, and grammatical patterns of their native tongue, but they also learn countless, systematic alternative ways of applying their linguistic knowledge to varying situations and needs. We are reminded, in short, that language is as beautifully varied and fascinating as the creatures who use it.

<sup>2. Martin Joos, The Five Clocks (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962).
3. Ibid., p. 40.
4. Ibid., pp. 39-67.
5. M. A. K. Halliday, Explorations in the Functions of Language (London: Edward Arnold, 1973).</sup>