“The English have no respect for their language”: The paradox of the English stereotype in G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion

• Main Author: Zsuzsanna Ajtony
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti 2010-01-01
• Series: Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics
• Subjects: ethnic stereotypes; intertextuality; middle-class morality; politeness strategies; social identity
• Online Access: http://bwpl.unibuc.ro/index.pl/the_english_have_no_respect_for_their_language_the_paradox_of_the_english_stereotype_in_g._b._shaws_pygmalion

The paper discusses several hypostases of the English stereotype as revealed in the verbal behaviour of different characters in G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion, concentrating especially on the interpersonal verbal encounters between Professor Higgins, Eliza Doolittle and Colonel Pickering and their environment. Starting from the theoretical premise that stereotypes are extendable forms of social cognition, the emergence of ethnic stereotypes is followed, as they unfold through conversational styles, forms of address and politeness strategies. The play is approached with the help of micro-sociolinguistic methods, focusing on face-to-face conversational interactions between characters. The conclusion of the article is that in Pygmalion some of the characters (the ‘conventional’ ones) are biased by their English ethnicity, the Englishness of others (of the ‘creative’ ones) is less foregrounded, it appears in several, paradoxically related forms, opening to the intertextual interpretation of the play, as acceptable.