• Affinal Taboo Index

Dyirbal, a language of the Cairns rain forest in Northern Queensland, employs a system known as the affinal taboo index. Speakers of the language maintain two sets of lexical items:

1) an “everyday” or common interaction set of lexical items,

2) a “mother-in-law” set that is employed when the speaker is in the very distinct context of interaction with their mother-in-law.

In this particular system of deference indices, speakers have developed an entirely separate lexicon (there are roughly four “everyday” lexical entries for everyone “mother-in-law” lexical entry; 4:1) to index deference exigent of contexts inclusive of the mother-in-law.

Dyirbal (also Djirubal) is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in northeast Queensland by about 5 speakers of the Dyirbal tribe. It is a member of the small Dyirbalic branch of the Pama-Nyungan family. It possesses many outstanding features that have made it well-known among linguists.

There used to be in place a highly complex taboo system in Dyirbal culture. A speaker was completely forbidden from speaking with his/her mother-in-law, child-in-law, father's sister's child or mother's brother's child, and from approaching or looking directly at these people. In addition, when within hearing range of taboo relatives a person was required to use a specialized and complex form of the language with essentially the same phonemes and grammar, but with a lexicon that shared no words with the non-taboo language. This phenomenon, commonly called mother-in-law languages, was common in indigenous Australian languages. It existed until about 1930 when the taboo system fell out of use.

Avoidance speech, or "mother-in-law languages", is a feature of many Australian Aboriginal languages, some North American languages and Bantu languages (called ukuhlonipa in Zulu, for example) of Africa whereby in the presence of certain relatives it is taboo to use everyday speech style, and instead a special speech style must be used.

Avoidance speech styles tend to have the same phonology and grammar as the standard language they are a part of. The lexicon, however, tends to be smaller than is normal speech, since it only needs to be used when conversation with the taboo relatives is absolutely necessary.

For instance, in Dyirbal there is the regular speech style (called Guwal) and the avoidance style Dyalngui consisting of a special set of lexical items that are substituted for Guwal words in the presence of opposite-sex parents-in-law, opposite-sex children-in-law, and opposite-sex cross-cousins. These words are fewer, however, and their meanings tend to be much more generic, e.g. the Dyalngui verb bubaman does service for the Guwal verbs baygun "shake", dyindan "wave" and banyin "smash".

Hypercorrection as a Social Class Index

Hypercorrection is defined by Wolfram as “the use of speech form on the basis of false analogy” [11]. DeCamp defines hypercorrection in a more precise fashion claiming that “hypercorrection is an incorrect analogy with a form in a prestige dialect which the speaker has imperfectly mastered” [3]. Many scholars argue that hypercorrection provides both an index of “social class” and an “index of linguistic insecurity”. The latter index can be defined as a speaker’s attempts at self-correction in areas of perceived linguistic insufficiencies which denote their lower social standing and minimal social mobility [10].

Donald Winford conducted a study that measured the phonological hypercorrection in creolization of English speakers in Trinidad. He claims that the ability to use prestigious norms goes “hand-in-hand” with knowledge of stigmatization afforded to use of “lesser” phonological variants [10]. He concluded that sociologically “lesser” individuals would try to approximate frequencies of more prestige dialectical vowels; yet they did so incorrectly, thus producing the phenomenon known as hypercorrection. This hypercorrection of vowels is an example of non-referential indexicality that indexes, by virtue of innate urges forcing lower class civilians to hypercorrect phonological variants, the actual social class of the speaker. As Silverstein claims, this also conveys an “index of linguistic insecurity” in which a speaker not only indexes their actual social class (via first-order indexicality) but also the insecurities about class constraints and subsequent linguistic effects the encourage hypercorrection in the first place (an incidence of second-order indexicality) [8].