Register: The Hidden Determinant in Language
It’s been a while since I did a Pirating College piece (I’ve only done the one, honestly,) and I’m not teaching at the moment, so there’s a bit of an itch. So, let me talk a bit today about a key concept I bring into my classes: Register.
We all know that we speak and write differently in different contexts – the way you speak to your friends is different from the way you speak to your family is different from the way that you speak at the DMV. There may be common threads, but the differences are the important part: it is through examining difference that we understand not only what is constant but can begin to understand why we behave differently in different places.
Perhaps the first time I heard this articulated was in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, in a sequence transposed into the television show fairly faithfully (though in the mouth of a different character.)
In different contexts different things are expected of us. This is simple enough, but not all differences occur on the same axis. Your role when speaking in a doctor-patient context is similar to that when you are speaking in a mechanic-customer or lawyer-customer context, but the vocabulary changes. The conversational roles are fundamentally the same: you are petitioning an expert for help. There are differences in the way that the conversation plays out, but the power relationship is identical.
The part that remains the same here is called register, while the part that differs is called lexis. Lexis refers to the specialized vocabulary. Register deals with the power relationships.
When I teach this to my students, I use the simplest schema with distinct levels. I tell them that there are five registers (this was formulated in the book The Five Clocks by Martin Joos in 1961.) From top to bottom, they are Frozen, Formal, Consultative, Casual, and Intimate. Some schemas further subdivide: the OED gives ten, and ISO standardization gives eleven – I know some systems go even further. I like the Joos system because they exist on a continuum, and that makes it easier for students to remember.
The Frozen Register is the one that power uses while speaking impersonally (and generally in passive voice): Our Father…, You’re fired…, Your claim has been denied… It does not allow anything but the most ritualized, formal responses, and it is so fixed that in the oldest examples you can see the language changing around the phrase instead of vice-versa. The best illustration I can think of in English is the comparison of the Modern English and Old English “Our Father” – the language looks completely unintelligible, but if you can heard it read aloud, you can hear analogous phrases: Fæder ure (Our Father), heofonum (heaven), nama (name), willa (will), eorðan (Earth), todæg (today), forgyf (forgive), so on and so forth.
When power speaks personally, it adopts the formal register – the register of powerpoint presentations and graduation ceremonies. There is the expectation that the listener might be able to have words with the speaker at some point, but power rests with the speaker during the event in question.
A recreation of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson with mechanics as the central character, as produced by Freddy Fabris. I want to emphasize mechanics in this relationship because of the class relation generally at work — the mechanic is a working-class figure, and often reverses the power dynamic that implies.
Just below that, in the consultative register, is the conversations with a doctor, mechanic, or lawyer. Empathy enters into the equation at this point – at least with good doctors, mechanics, and lawyers – but one side has authority and the other doesn’t.
Then you have the casual register – the style of speech adopted with friends in public, or with which you might address someone you don’t know but assume to be on the same level as you in some abstract hierarchy. There may be a measure of authority here, but it isn’t a permanent fixture: at different points, different people take the opportunity to speak with authority and be listened to, but this isn’t permanent, and it will shift as the conversation evolves.
Finally, the intimate register comes last. This is the style of speech you adopt with close friends, family members, and romantic partners. It assumes familiarity and fellowship on the part of the participants.
You can also see the difference in class relations in the difference between Pork and Pig, and cow and beef — the animal on the hoof is named in English, on the plate it’s named in French. These words are thousand-year-old class distinctions.
Now, beyond just “formality”, there are reasons to think of this as a continuum or spectrum. For one: the higher the register, the less interactive. For another, in English, high registers tend to evince more Latin- and Greek-rooted words, while lower registers tend to be more Germanic (if you think I’m wrong, consider the difference between defecate [Latin] and shit [Germanic], and draw your own conclusions from similar comparisons.)
Of course, the Joos scale of Register is simply a robust, low-fidelity model. It isn’t completely accurate, but it is a good first step to being aware of register. While there may be similarities between how you address your family and your romantic partner, there are also some extremely important differences there that cannot and should not be ignored. Likewise, while a Judge and a Priest might speak in similarly ritualized ways, they require a very different sort of attention from the addressee.
This connects to something very important, and it can be summed up by saying that this is all a matter of politeness and social deftness. One might think that higher registers almost always signal politeness, but this is misleading. Using the right register signals politeness. Improperly using a higher register signals coldness and a sense of superiority. This might not be as dangerous as using too low a register with an authority figure, but it’s certainly not a recipe for satisfying relationships.
Why am I bringing this up? Largely, because it’s a useful thing to be aware of, especially for writers. A lot of humor – at least humor that isn’t typified as “slapstick” or “screwball” – has to do with mismatches in register. Consider, first, this tumblr post that was reblogged by author Seanan Mcguire. Consider also this scene, which I use in my class, taken from an early pilot of the sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
As you can see from these examples, a mismatch in register – either between the speakers, or between the chosen register and the subject matter – is generally very funny. It leads to cognitive dissonance, which can be very funny.
When will Britain pay for its crimes?
Of course, it can also be offputting: remember, the difference between horror and comedy is generally just that comedy features a punchline. It gives the relief of settling back into something like a baseline. Encountering a police officer that only spoke in baby talk would be funny after the fact. Being arrested by such a law enforcement officer, and then being taken down to a station for booking where all of the police only spoke in baby talk would be a surrealist nightmare (this is, of course, part of what makes Great Britain such a cursed island. I was informed on Twitter that they refer to “whipped cream” as “squirty cream” and shortly unfollowed the individual who informed me of this fact.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that this is an interpretive framework: while it can be useful to read registers as being in a spectrum or continuum with formal and informal poles to it, this is not exactly how it works. This is partially made up for when I introduce my students to the concept of lexis, which I mentioned above.
The way I tend to explain lexis is by pointing out that – despite what you might think – English doesn’t actually have synonyms. Not in any absolute sense. We have words that might share a denotation, but the connotations are completely different. The “cottage in the forest” is a nice get away and the “cabin in the woods” is sinister, but they might share an address. The words have a different emotional timbre. I tend to explain this by saying that denotation is the “meaning of the word” (noting that “de” is “of” in most romance languages,) while connotation is the “meaning the word brings with it.”
The more I try to understand the human condition, the more I happen across James Baldwin. That seems like an important observation.
Languages develop a massive number of words for things to describe particular conditions. The Inuit, for example, are said to have dozens of words for snow, as if they would waste time with fifty or a hundred words with the same meaning – these are not just “snow”, they refer to particular kinds of snow because differentiating between fresh-fallen snow and hard-packed snow and snow falling in a dusting and snow falling in great wet clumps can be a matter of life and death in the environments that these people live in. As James Baldwin says “A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.”
In lower registers, precision is not always as necessary, hence why we talk about the existence of synonyms — you trade precision for ease and speed. Low register is also, generally, low fidelity. In higher registers, precision is more valued, hence why legalese and academic jargon exists. This is no doubt part of why the use of academic register comes across as elitist, while the use of specialized terminology used by mechanics and construction workers doesn’t. When people object to the use of polysyllabic theoretical terminology, the request isn’t to “dumb down” the academic jargon – it’s to speak casually about specialized topics. But no parallel trope occurs in relation to mechanics and builders; their knowledge isn’t the object of scorn, it’s simply dismissed. There are valid points on both sides of the discussion on academic terminology, though: language arises from necessity, and specialized vocabulary is needed to draw fine distinctions (as an Iñupiat traveler on foot might need to note that loose-packed snow on the lee side of the drift versus hard packed snow that has been tromped down by a passing animal.) however, specialized vocabulary also exists as a mode of exclusion.
This brings me to a discussion of language’s non-informative function: language also helps define and police the borders of in-group versus out-group. In my profession, the term I tend to use for this is “discourse community” (I learned this sociolinguistic schema in New Mexico, but it ultimately came from Australia, where it was used in the education of aboriginal students – I like it because it can communicate the utility of what I’m teaching while acknowledging the importance of pre-existent knowledge on the part of the student. You don’t toss aside your old way of speaking and writing, you learn the new way of speaking and you practice switching between the two, because both are valuable.) Different discourse communities have different rules and best practices, and we are all part of a huge number of these communities, which occasionally overlap.
In his book, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, author Douglas Coupland called this “clique maintenance.”
A big part of how human beings use language is about maintaining the boundaries between groups, and between the group and the population-at-large. This isn’t always a matter of purposeful exclusion: oftentimes it’s a matter of inclusion. Groups are constituted by their members and its impossible for two people to be in a group when either refuses to consent to being part of the same group – this consent isn’t always freely given, but it must always be present for the group to exist. However – and this is something I don’t really cover in my class – this is the function of language that is often served and emphasized by identity politics as it’s currently practiced.
It would be easy enough to bring in the discourse around the word “queer” here — about all of the faultlines and divisions one finds in the LGBTQ+ community and discuss the tendency of groups within that community to seemingly hyperspecialize and attempt to break away into different, mutually-unrelated clades — but I think it might be more enlightening to talk about leftist infighting. Outside of pressures from radically different groups there tends to be fighting between anarchists and communists (I’m talking about real leftists, Democrats can sit this one out.) Within that group, you have lines of division between (on the communist side) Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and Hoxhaists (I’m leaving out Dengists — see prior note.) On the Anarchist side, you have divisions between Syndicalists, Egoists, Platformists, Mutualists, Green, Queer, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Existentialist anarchists (anarcho-capitalists can also sit this one out.) A large part of the division here is based on the theory and jargon that they make use of, and I find it notable that any ecumenical left movement first makes an attempt to establish a shared jargon. Of course, usually these attempts simply lead to further fragmentation.
This very fitting XKCD strip (credit: Randall Munroe) used to illustrate the problem.
Discourse Communities make use of all of the registers, but they make use of them in their own idiosyncratic way. An old-school punk might roll their eyes at the Catholic liturgy and compare the congregants to sheep, but might be offended after their own fashion by someone mangling a Crass or Propaghandi song (and would, of course, get very upset if you describe their emotional response as “offended.”) I’m not making a value judgment here – I’m pointing out that it’s the same drive.
This, of course, is not an example of human nature – had to get anti-essentialism in here somehow – but it is an example of a set of strategies that have worked well enough in large groups of humans (so perhaps there’s something essential deep down in there, but I’m not going digging for it right now.) It allows us to navigate interactions with unfamiliar human beings in a relatively standardized fashion – there are protocols for this sort of thing, and they’re widespread enough for us to follow them.
However, to an extent, this is also a matter of interpretive labor.
To explain, David Graeber, in The Utopia of Rules, suggested that there was something called interpretive labor. His original definition, connected to the constellation of violence and bureaucracy together was that:
Violence’s capacity to allow arbitrary decisions, and thus to avoid the kind of debate, clarification, and renegotiation typical of more egalitarian social relations, is obviously what allows its victims to see procedures created on the basis of violence as stupid or unreasonable. Most of us are capable of getting a superficial sense of what others are thinking or feeling just by observing their tone of voice, or body language—it’s usually not hard to get a sense of people’s immediate intentions and motives, but going beyond that superficial often takes a great deal of work. Much of the everyday business of social life, in fact, consists in trying to decipher others’ motives and perceptions. Let us call this “interpretive labor.” One might say, those relying on the fear of force are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretative labor, and thus, generally speaking, they do not.
This also connects to the Frozen Register, which I suggested was power speaking impersonally. In this register, the audience is no entitled to respond beyond the most formulaic and unidirectional fashion – there is one way to respond, and failing to respond will not change the outcome of the interaction beyond, possibly, making thing worse.
The whole “pick a register and stick with it” thing is generally the province of monarchs and those who can employ violence with impunity.
As interaction increases – as the register goes down – interpretation of the other party’s mental state becomes more and more important. For some people – often called introverts – this type of labor is especially taxing, especially when it’s something that has to be done in a multitasked fashion (such as when you have to go about interacting with people.) There are, of course, situations where people simply refuse to engage in interpretive labor, because they either have enough power that they don’t have to or because they assume they already know what the interpretation is. So they just pick a register and stick with it.
But a large part of this interpretive labor is trying to avoid the register mismatch that leads to comedy or horror, allowing us to mirror one another and get on with the business of actually communicating.
A big part of my job is convincing 18- and 19-year-old Americans that they have to engage in interpretive labor. More than anything else, understanding your audience, or constructing a reasonable mental simulacrum of an audience, is a big part of becoming a skilled writer. When I teach writing, I have to not only convince them of this but to present myself as a simplified audience they can learn to tailor their writing to. If you are attempting to do the same thing, I would strongly suggest that you take this approach, because it has worked very well for me in the past.
However, I’m not simply writing this for teachers, or for aspiring writers, or for those most unfortunate individuals, the writing teachers. I’m writing this for you. The purpose here is so you can understand, a little better, how we use language and how we communicate with one another, because a lot of people fail to understand registers, and so they fail to use them in anything but the most basic fashion.
If you can understand registers, and lexes, and think of the world in terms of a vast archipelago of overlapping communities that have their own internal protocols of politeness and communication, you will have an easier time navigating that world and functioning within it. The uses are literally limitless, because it’s not simply about communicating with an audience, it’s about communicating with any audience in any combination.
You just have to think it through.
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