#language art

What is an idiolect?

It’s the way a single person talks in a single language. Most people’s idiolects belong to a dialect or regiolect (a regional variety), a sociolect (a variety associated with a social group), and some amount of registers (varieties used in different social contexts). Some examples of dialects of English, with varying scope, include General American, North San Francisco Bay English, Older Southern American English, and Scottish English. Some examples of sociolects of English include African American English, surfer slang, the “gay lisp”, and Received Pronunciation. (All sociolects are somewhat regional in nature, too.) Some examples of registers of English are the way you’re asked to write in essays in grade school, the way you talk with your family, the way you talk with your friends, and the way you talk on the internet. (Prescribed registers like Grade-School Essay English are usually plagiarized off of old high-prestige sociolects, so they can feel sociolectal. But the way you write grade-school essays is your grade-school essay register, and that’s a register, not a sociolect.)

These categories can collectively be called “language varieties” or “lects”. The boundaries between lects are fuzzy. The way you tell whether an idiolect belongs to a lect is whether it has some features that are part of that lect: pronouncing a vowel a certain way, using certain words instead of other ones, that sort of thing. But these features never cluster together cleanly into lects where everybody has all the features of that lect. Each feature has a slightly different geographic and social distribution. Here’s a bit of Rick Aschmann’s wonderful map of American English phonological features:

This isn’t even all of them. You can see him picking out dialects, but it’s hard to do with so many intersecting features.

Regardless, you don’t have to have all features of a lect to have that lect, since no feature even “belongs” to a lect in the first place. But there are some features that aren’t even on the radars of any of these lects, and would be out of place in the idiolect of one of their speakers. For example, pronouncing “new” as “nyoo” would be weird anywhere on this map. The people who do that learned English on a different continent entirely.

If the language you’re speaking is your second language, your idiolect might be pretty unique, and contain features from your parent language, with the most apparent ones being phonological ones. There isn’t a good word for this as far as I know; I just hear it discussed as “foreign pronunciation of X” or “X as a second language”, which makes it sound like a collection of speech errors instead of an idiolect. It’s not. Your idiolect is always valid. It might cause problems, though, especially if you’re a second language speaker, when people can’t understand you. It might also cause problems if people stereotype you based on it (see below). Finally, it will cause problems if your idiolect contains slurs, and I have no sympathy for you in that case. But no matter how many problems your idiolect causes, it’s not worse than anyone else’s on some universal scale. It’s just different.

What your idiolect says about you (to laypeople)

People are better at identifying lects than they give themselves credit for. They might not be able to narrow it down to a single city and social group every time, but at the very least they can tell the country you come from, and can pick out major sociolects like African American English (AAE). They use your idiolect to infer a lot of things about you, based on how they feel about the groups that use those lects. They often go so far as to say that the language features they notice in these lects inherently produce these feelings. When people say that, they are almost always terribly wrong.

A common example of this is racism towards black people. If you speak a version of AAE, people are reminded that you come from a black community. They will then apply their assumptions about black communities to you. White people will imagine you growing up in a ghetto, and not having a good education. They imagine you dressing and acting a certain way. Their assumptions are built on the AAE speakers they’ve seen in the media, and in real life. Black people have gotten to the point in mainstream media where now there are multiple black person character archetypes. But most real people don’t fit those.

(Meanwhile, a black person who speaks a white sociolect will get called “articulate”, because people have better stereotypes about black people who speak that way.)

Another common example is the image of upper-class British people that Americans have. If you are a Received Pronunciation (RP) speaker, Americans will describe you as “posh”. They will imagine you having lots of money and strong opinions. They will, again, imagine you dressing and acting a certain way. This is again because of the contexts in which they’ve been exposed to RP in. In media, its speakers are educators, acclaimed writers, royalty, and historical figures. As an RP speaker, you might not be any of those, but you will still get the credit for it.

This effect intersects with sexism as well. Valley Girl English is a heavily-stereotyped sociolect. If you have features of Valley Girl English, people might call you “superficial”, and think that you are dumb and that you sleep with many people. They will imagine you dressing and acting a certain way. (I’m repeating myself for the third time because with all of these examples, you can probably imagine what way I’m talking about without me telling you. Everybody knows Valley Girl English speakers, for example, wear revealing clothing and have expressive body language.) They will imagine sexist things about you because the Valley Girl stereotype is in general a sexist stereotype.

One interesting example I don’t see brought up very often is features associated with bigots. One such feature is using the substantive for certain groups of people. People get offended if you say “blacks” and “Jews” instead of “black people” and “Jewish people”, because they know that that’s what bigots say. If you have this feature, people will imagine that you are dismissive towards the problems that minorities face.

What (lay)people say about your idiolect

People who think they know things about language will say that their stereotypes about your lects come directly from the language features themselves. They will say that the AAE sentence fragment “did’n do nofin” sounds “lazy” and “uneducated”, and when asked why, they will say that it’s lazy to not have a “t” in “did’n”, it’s lazy to have “f” and “n” instead of “th” and “ng” in “nofin”, and most of all, it’s bad grammar to have two negatives. They will say that Valley Girls use “like” as a filler word so much because they don’t actually have anything to say. And they will say that the reason that words like “blacks” are offensive is because it is dehumanizing to not include the word “people”.

All of these things are wrong. The truth is that these features occur more or less randomly regardless of social attitudes. Sound changes occur all the time to every language and every lect; the “posh” RP is just as much of a pile of sound changes as the “lazy” AAE. There are many languages and lects where flipping all the negatives in a sentence negates it, like in AAE, instead of just flipping one negative. My first language, Hungarian, is one of them. AAE isn’t any worse for having it. It’s just a way that it’s different from most other English lects. “Like” isn’t used more than any other filler word, and filler words are in every language. There is nothing empty-headed about using filler words. Everybody does it. Saying “<adjective>s” instead of “<adjective> people” is far more common than not, over all languages. In many languages it’s the only way to do it. Even in English, it’s the preferred way to do it for nationalities, e.g. “Americans” instead of “American people”, or things that sound like nationalities, e.g. “lesbians” instead of “lesbian women” (although you do hear the two-word forms in some narrow contexts).

The best way to figure out whether your feeling about a feature is an inherent thing about it or just a bias of yours is to ask, “Does this feature also occur somewhere where I don’t feel about it this way?” The answer is almost always yes. It’s a big world out there.

Rigging the system

Getting stereotyped isn’t fun. Nobody can opt out of stereotypes. People will take every little facet of you, from your clothes to your height to your gender to your skin color and infer a whole bunch of things about you no matter what you do. But you can stop people from including your idiolect in the information they use to construct their stereotypes. Or at least, you can discourage them. Or instead of opting out of stereotypes altogether, you can try to control them instead, and use them to express things about yourself. You can do this by being aware of which language features form which lects, and which lects invoke which stereotypes. After that it’s just a matter of adopting the language features you want, which is still easier said than done.

One way to use this power is to adopt an idiolect that runs counter to the stereotypes that people might construct about you for other reasons. You can often do this just by changing register, without retraining yourself to a different lect. For example, as a child, I got stereotyped as “smart” and “gifted”. I did not feel very smart or gifted, but I did know that I wanted to erase stereotypes. So I tried to speak very informally all the time. My hope was that my actions would speak louder than my words, and people would think I’m smart for real reasons, and feel less like the register I was using was only for dumb people. It’s hard to estimate the amount of success I had, but I never stopped wanting to speak in ways that people don’t stereotype as “technical” and “too complicated for normal folk". People still think of me as “technical”, so I guess I’m a failure.

Another way to use this power is to adopt a non-lectal idiolect. This is the main point of the post. “Non-lectal” is a term I made up to refer to something that has a collection of features that make it impossible to classify into a lect. Having a non-lectal idiolect will make it difficult, but not impossible, for people to form stereotypes about you based on your idiolect. It might also give you more freedom of self-expression, because each language feature can say something different, instead of all of them together saying that you belong to a stereotype.

Non-lectal idiolects

Having a non-lectal idiolect is harder than it sounds. You can’t just make a grocery list of language features you want, because that list is endless and you will always forget something. Maybe one day, somebody will write a complete guide to all English language features, telling you who uses them, and how people feel about that. Then, in a year or two, that guide will be useless, because attitudes towards certain language features have changed, and new, interesting language features have sprung up that should really be in your guide. But then, that’s the almanac model. If people cared about that sort of thing, you could make a lot of money re-releasing an updated version of your book every year.

A good way to make a non-lectal idiolect is slowly. Think of yourself as a language feature collector, like somewhere between a postcard collector and a Pokémon trainer. Whenever you notice a cool language feature you would like, think about what groups it would associate you with. If you’re comfortable with that, add it to your idiolect. Maybe read up on how it works, if you’re lucky enough to have literature on that. If not, do your best to figure it out on your own, or come up with your own version of it.

There’s a couple of pragmatic considerations to keep in mind:

Borrowing features from lects that are closely associated with minority groups you aren’t part of is not a good idea. People will think that you are pretending to be a member of this minority. The people who will be the most offended are the minority members themselves.

A classic case of this is that it’s not a good idea to borrow distinctive features from AAE if you are white. I have personally wanted to do so many times, as a sign of respect and as a way of normalizing a sociolect that people look down on. But I’ve ended up borrowing only innocuous things where I have the plausible deniability of having taken it from somewhere else. I feel justified in using multiple negatives, for example, because my first language also does it. But really, I do it because of AAE.

Trying to use language that people consider offensive in a way where you feel like you’re removing the offensiveness is not a good idea. You will never make anything but enemies if you try to bleach or reclaim a slur, for example, especially if you’re not part of the group that the slur applies to. You have to get an army of people to do the same thing with you before you can do that and not be taken for a bigot.

Trying to use the substantive, which, as noted above, is associated with bigotry but isn’t inherently insulting the way slurs are, is a project that maybe has more merit, but consider this. You will, eventually, use the substantive around a minority member and make them feel unsafe. This is a somewhat different dynamic than when, say, a white person feels unsafe around an AAE speaker because they associate AAE with crime. In the first scenario, the minority member is guaranteed to have already experienced bigotry, and has every right to be wary of bigots. In the second scenario, the white person is just racist, precisely because they haven’t interacted with AAE speakers enough. Is it a positive thing to give a minority member experiences where a substantive user turned out not to be a bigot? Well, sure, but in the meantime you’re making their life worse. I would err on the side of not making people’s lives worse.

Is a non-lectal idiolect right for me?

Think about what you want your idiolect to mean. It matters more what your idiolect’s features mean to you than what they mean to other people. You’re the one who has to listen to it all the time, after all.

Sometimes what a feature expresses to you can be so different from what it expresses to other people that you start to feel bad about it. And sometimes this is a feature you’ve acquired naturally, not by planning your idiolect. For example, the thing that affects the way I speak and write the most is that I have central auditory processing disorder. I absorb language and information through text far better than through speech. It about balances out; it’s like the text and speech capabilities of a neurotypical person got switched. I hardly ever remember things from lectures, but once I read something in a textbook, I’ll remember it for a long time. In my dreams, I can read text, but I can’t understand speech. And, most importantly, I naturally acquire language through text, not through speech. This means that, while most people end up writing the way they talk until they are trained to use a unique register for writing, I would end up talking the way I write if I didn’t put every ounce of my effort into not doing that.

I would love to naturally express to people through my idiolect that I have more of a connection to written things than spoken things. And in theory just letting the acquisition take its natural course would be a good way to do that. But the problem is that the most common written register of English is basically an anachronistic pastiche of formal English sociolects from the 20th century. People don’t just think that I sound like a book. People think that I sound “smart” and “educated” and “technical”. This is what I’ve wanted to avoid all of my life.

I would like to express other things than just my connection to text. There are many lovely dialects that I have respect for and a personal connection to that I would like to give a shout-out to in my idiolect. For example, in the Hungarian lect my family speaks, the word for “New York” is Nyujork instead of Nujork, because it was borrowed from British English and not American English. I think this is really cool and cute, so as a way of paying tribute to it, I pronounce words like “new” and “nude” as “nyoo” and “nyood”. I could have just changed how I pronounce “New York”, but I already have other features competing for New York-related real estate, and having the sound change be universal is easier anyway.

The biggest reason to worry about which language features to have is that you ultimately know yourself better than your language acquisition engine does. Your language acquisition engine will take features from your environment and dump them into your lap. Your job is to vet these features and see if you like what they tell people. If you just let it do its thing, your idiolect will probably tell people where you lived, and maybe what communities you’ve been part of. But probably not as well as if you’d put some thought into it.

Putting thought into your idiolect doesn’t have to mean making it non-lectal. Making it non-lectal is the nuclear option where you don’t want people to immediately associate you with certain places and cultures. If you are okay with being associated with a place and/or a culture, consider its distinctive lect something to build around. There is no hard boundary on being a non-lectal speaker. You can have a lot of features that point towards one thing and several other features that point towards other things. Experiment.

Conclusion