While Tamminga (2017) observed the perception of social meaning to be robust to speech style, the extent to which social meanings are stable across modalities remains unclear. We investigate the extent to which socio-indexical perceptions are (un)stable between spoken stimuli and equivalents rendered orthographically using ‘eye-dialect’ spellings, e.g. fank you for thank you. 

We employed the matched-guise technique (N=100 native speakers of British English) to investigate the socio-indexical meaning of four sociophonetic variables: (ing), TH-fronting, DH-stopping, and H-dropping. Participants were exposed to written and spoken guises, framed as written and audio tweets. We explored the way in which standard and non-standard variants of the investigated variables were perceived according to status-type and solidarity-type characteristics. We hypothesise that non-standard variants are more heavily penalised for status-type characteristics in written, relative to spoken, form.

For solidarity-type effects we observed limited effects (e.g. h-dropping was perceived higher in solidarity relative to h-retention) with these effects being slightly stronger in the written guises. For status-type characteristics, as per our hypothesis, the written guises exhibited much stronger effects whereby non-standard realisations were evaluated as being much less statusful in relation to i) the standard realisation in the written guise and ii) the non-standard realisation in the spoken guise. 

While the precise indexicalities between the four variables differ, the results consistently showed greater indexical salience in the written modality. Thus, while social meanings are robust to style (Tamminga 2017), the extent to which they are robust to mode is limited. These results speak to the instability of social meaning across modalities and the variable salience of non-standard forms. Specifically, they highlight a distinction between phonetic and social salience (Levon & Fox 2014). Practically, the results have implications for developing our understanding of the perception of eye-dialect spellings and sociolinguistic variation in written form more broadly.