The title frames Macaulay's volume concisely. For British English speakers (but perhaps less so for Americans), the collocation “extremely common eloquence” plays on the negative stereotype that M is challenging: that of working-class people as taciturn and inarticulate. In the subtitle we find clues to the “language in use” orientation of the book, the British regional focus, and the primary data.
M begins by noting that this book doesn't fall into a recognizable category: It is about language, about language in society, and about cultural attitudes. Thus an important audience for the book would be typical readers of Language in Society. The series in which the book appears (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature) extends the possible audience to those whose primary interests are Scottish literature and cultural history.
Unlike his earlier work such as Locating dialect in discourse (1991), and current work such as Talk that counts (2005), this book does not include quantitative analyses of discourse features, but rather appears to be laying further groundwork for a more comprehensive, multifaceted, and integrated analysis of discourse by examining “the kinds of variation that can be found in more extended samples of talk-in-action, of which one of the richest sources lies in the stories that people tell about themselves and their lives” (p. 22). The data are interviews recorded by M and others in Scotland between 1973 and 1985.
M identifies three interrelated purposes explicitly. The first, arising out of his concern both that linguistic prejudice persists, and also that some of his own previous work may have contributed to the problem (Macaulay 1977), is to elaborate his documentation of the eloquence and expressiveness of some Scottish speakers (Macaulay 1997). The second aim is “to connect the examples of language to the lives the speakers live” (10–11), and to show how speakers use language to communicate important aspects of Scottish culture and identity. M wants the reader to come away from the book with an understanding of “a form of speech that remains distinct.” His third explicitly stated purpose, in the spirit of the project initiated by Labov in “The logic of nonstandard English,” is to show that eloquence does not depend on education.
Less explicitly stated, but implicit and clearly related to his three stated purposes, are several additional goals. M addresses faulty assumptions about language in some scholarship on Scottish history. He critiques current models of style in sociolinguistics. He chides current variationist sociolinguistics for not incorporating frameworks from theorists such as Bakhtin and Voloshinov, and for not addressing issues of social class, identity, and ideology more directly.
The book is composed of 12 chapters, three appendices of one longer narrative each, and a glossary of Scottish lexical items. In the first chapter, we learn that working-class speech in lowland Scotland will be the focus of the book, in its “double function: 1) to affirm Scottish identity and separateness from the English; and 2) to affirm working-class loyalty and distance from middle-class values” (21). We also learn that that the linguistic data will be analyzed not according to phonological or grammatical features, and not in terms of what M has previously studied as “discourse features,” but rather in a sense that is both more qualitative and more comprehensive as M seeks to explore variation discoverable in narratives.
The second chapter addresses the problem of transcription of dialect forms. M's solution is to provide some indication of pronunciation and grammar through spelling, to gloss some particularly obscure lexical items in the text, and to include an appended glossary of distinctive lexical items. The presentation of the narratives is achieved through a form of “line” that is a compromise drawing on several approaches (38).
In chapter 3, “A small soap opera,” which M tells us introduces his method of narrative analysis, we examine a simple account taken from a much larger interview. Drawing “loosely” on Labov & Waletzky 1967, M shows us, partly by bringing in information from the larger interview, that the brief narrative has a complex structure “that brings out the psychological significance of the event” (22).
Chapter 4, “The uses of dialogue,” is devoted to analysis of a number of examples of “direct speech,” found to be very common in the data. Whereas in chapter 3 the narrative analysis highlighted psychological significance, in this chapter we find analyses that focus on working-class values and attitudes about gender roles and about work. M follows Johnstone (1990:11) in exploring how stories reveal the “social and sociolinguistic norms for how to live and talk in the local world.”
Chapter 5, “The significance of stories,” shifts to the analysis of three long and complex narratives on the same topic. M's analyses carry forward the themes of the book laid out in earlier chapters by showing how well-crafted the apparently simple stories are, by demonstrating how cultural information is encoded in the narratives, and also by clarifying how “evaluation” works to implicitly present a personal identity.
Chapter 6, “Third person narratives,” examines three stories “of events in which the narrators were not present,” apparently in order to show how narrators use stories for their own situated purposes. The first is the story that has been treated by both M 1987, 1991 and by Labov 2003. The other stories are two very different versions of the same event told by a brother and sister to the same interviewer under equivalent conditions. M uses the comparison of the latter two narratives to begin to raise questions about the current treatment of “style” in quantitative sociolinguistics.
Chapter 7, “A stylistic anomaly,” continues the critique of current quantitative sociolinguistic treatments of style. Using an example of “a working-class speaker whose complex mixture of registers presents a challenge to current models of stylistic variation” in their latest versions in Eckert & Rickford 2001, M discusses Labov's “attention to speech,” Bell's “audience design,” and Finegan & Biber's “register variation.” He then tests each against the data of this narrator and finds all of them inadequate, preferring Bakhtin's notion of “hybrid construction” (1981:304–5) as a more useful analytical tool. M draws on Coupland's (2001) critique of the unidimensional nature of current quantitative sociolinguistic models of style, and concludes that his narrator's style is “a way of presenting himself to me” (126).
The “Family stories” that are the topic of chapter 8 emerged unexpectedly in the interview situation, and the chapter includes discussion of the inevitable vagaries of fieldwork. The comparison of family style that is the focus of the chapter is framed in terms of Brown & Levinson 1987. Whereas both families belong to the “working class,” their family interactional styles are very different. M's main point seems to be that attempts to generalize about a working-class family style would be inappropriate.
In chapter 9, “The auld Scotch tongue,” M explores how language could have been overlooked in research on Scottish identity, and provides evidence from his data that speakers are aware of regional and social class differences, and that they make situational modifications as needed. M emphasizes the strong degree of linguistic security that he found among the working-class speakers.
Although M never explains exactly what “The culture of Jock Tamson's bairns” means, chapter 10 is devoted to cultural understandings about equality, work, and money as revealed in the interviews. The analysis is framed in terms of ideology, with a link to a “typical working-class perspective” as represented in Goldthorpe et al. 1969. M also discusses a series of important caveats about generalizations from the data.
Chapter 11, “The poetry of talk,” extends Tannen 1989 through an extraordinary exemplification from the data of almost 20 different traditional rhetorical devices, such as chiasmus and homoioteleuton.
In the final chapter, “Discover the people,” M brings together perspectives on ideology, culture, and identity to explain why working-class Scottish voices have been undervalued, and why the distinctive speech of working-class Scots persists with great resilience in the face of pressures from education, employment, and the media.
In terms of M's stated purposes, I came away from the book with a keen sense of the eloquence of the interviewees, a characteristic that appeared not to be linked to education. A counterexample, such as Len in chapter 6, highlighted that eloquence by reminding us that there are also incompetent storytellers among the working class. On the other hand, I'm not sure that it became clear to me that this was a distinctive Scottish identity as expressed through language. As interviewer, M mentions his own Scottish regional origin in chapter 5 and discusses the implications of his own class persona in chapter 6. Thus, although we are told in chapter 9 that Scottish working-class speakers modify their speech situationally for purely instrumental purposes, I couldn't identify any examples of interaction that could be analyzed as a negotiation of identity between a Scottish speaker and a clear Other. Given M's focus on social class, I would have appreciated more discussion of class in Scotland by M, and more analysis in chapter 10 of the ideology of social class.
It is a tribute to M's powers of description and analysis that even though he was excluding phonological and grammatical analysis and presenting only a transcript, the voices came through to me as a reader. In future, I would hope that such a book would routinely include access to audiofiles of the data. In thinking back over the book, the metaphor that occurs to me is a gemstone that has been cut for us by M, with each chapter representing a facet of the jewel.
