I have a reason for only starting to write my reflection blog in week 3. Honestly, nothing has interested me so far. The field of sociolinguistics hasn’t exactly captured my attention from the start. It’s a new subject, and I have not exactly gotten back into the groove of schooling, which negates me picking up on sociolinguistics even more. However, something finally grasped my interest, which was the topic of Variation & Style.

During the 1^st week of school, I was looking through the syllabus to see what I can expect from this module, and variation caught my eye. This is because I always wondered why some people talked differently, and what influenced their way of talking, and the involvement of semantics and how it came into play. However, at that time I only thought it was an aspect related to variation, only learning that it IS variation.

As the lesson progressed, the concept of Style-Shifting intrigued me because I felt I did that a lot when I talked. Personally, I have a high self-monitor and thus watch what I do and say in public. I am very conscious of myself and what other people think of my actions and what I say. Like it even reaches the point of sometimes controlling my breathing because I feel my breaths are very loud in buses. Although I do sometimes accommodate myself to my audience (having to watch what I say); eg. When it comes to matters of race/religion, I find myself committing more of Bell’s Audience Design concept. Coupled with my high self-monitor, I often structure the things I say according to who is my audience. With close friends, I can be very crude, open and honest to the way I feel. My close friends know that I often can’t be bothered about certain things. Yet, this is an aspect I can’t show publicly to people who I just met, people would be thinking “What the hell this guy is just not interested, why should I even bother trying to build on this relationship”. While this may seem as feigning interest, I choose to see it as part of theory of communication accommodation (CAT). Instead of changing the way I am, I use the CAT to style and shift my language to new people, and eventually they find out my nature once we’re closer.

Personally, I feel myself style-shifting a lot, and the example above is just 1 scenario that I do almost on a daily basis.