Stereotypes in Sociolinguistics

1. Stereotypes
Faiza Khalid
M.Phil.(Applied Linguistics)
Pakistan

2.  An oversimplified idea or
image about a certain
group of people that is
widely accepted by
others.
 Examples:
 All American have guns.
 Black people are the best
athletes.
 Chinese people always eat
rice.
 Pakistanis are peace
lovers.
“Thoughts or ideas
currently accepted by
a group or society and
that present a
immutable character.”

3. A “stereotype” is a generalization about a person or
group of persons. We develop stereotypes when we
are unable or unwilling to obtain all of the
information we would need to make fair judgments
about people or situations.
Television, books, comic strips, and movies are all
abundant sources of stereotyped characters.
Stereotypes also evolve out of fear of persons from
minority groups.

4. Why do Stereotypes occur?
Stereotypes arise as a way of explaining
or justifying differences between groups.
Lack of exposure to other groups,
cultures, etc.

5. Stereotype versus attitude and prejudice:
An attitude is an evaluative judgment of an object,
a person, or a social group. We can form an attitude
toward soccer players. We can have many different types
of attitudes toward soccer players that can either be
positive or negative.
A stereotype is the association of a person or a
social group with a consistent set of traits. This may
include both positive and negative traits, such as African
Americans are great at sports or African Americans are
more violent than any other race in the United States.

6. Prejudice is defined as unfair negative attitude
toward a social group or a member of that group.
Prejudices can stem from many of the things that
people observe in a different social group that
include, but are not limited to, gender, sex,
race/ethnicity, or religion.

7. Traditions of Stereotypes:
Nowadays, the notion of stereotype is widely used in
different areas, and even in linguistics, there are two major
traditions of understanding it.
• The first approach defines stereotype as ‘a fixed form,
fixed expression, or even fixed text.’
• According to the second approach, stereotype is seen
as ‘a fixed content, a fixed mental image of a person, an
object or an event.’

8. Stereotype vs. prototype
“Prototypically is basically a psychological notion,
Stereotypicality is a sociolinguistic notion”.

9. Use of Stereotypes:
Lakoff says that the use of stereotypes is
conscious: this is plausible.
He also says that stereotypes change, it can
persist in the face of change.
They are also typically associated with evaluative
features.

10. Ethnic Stereotypes:
Ethnic stereotypes are regarded as images of others
formed in people’s heads.
In practice, they consist in projections of certain
sets of traits, which are believed to be typical of a given
ethnic group.

11. Implicit Stereotypes vs. Explicit Stereotypes:
An implicit stereotype is the unconscious
attribution of particular qualities to a member
of a certain social group.
Explicit stereotypes are the result of
intentional, conscious, and controllable
thoughts and beliefs.

12. Gender stereotypes:
“Gender stereotype is belief about the personal attribute
of females and males.”
Types of Gender Stereotypes:
The stereotype begins since a baby.
Female Stereotype:
If baby was girl, their tendency are more to girlish thing
like wear pink clothes, toys like a Barbie doll.
Men stereotype:
From the beginning, since they were small boys are
taught to be tough, to be protective and to defend
themselves.

13. Positive aspects of stereotypes:
Stereotypes provide many positive functions as well.
 Stereotypes ease the burden of information processing.
 It also providing a functional aspect to social perseveres.
 Stereotypes can serve a data reduction function by providing
expectancies that filter experience, directing attention, and other
processing resources to expectancy- relevant information.
 Also they function by economizing cognition by enriching the
information available about a stereotyped target.
 Lastly they enable us to go beyond the information given in social
encounters and fill in any gaps in our extant knowledge base.

14. To sum up, it can be said,
Stereotype is the reflection on how
people see members of different groups’
actually behaving, stereotypes change should
occur when the relation between the groups is
changing and altered. Stereotypes offer a
shortcut for meaning as they convey a lot of
information quickly. They condense complex
information into character who is easy to
recognize and easy to deal with. They are often
minority groups.
The importance of conceptualizing and
examining stereotype formation, maintenance
and change at the level of social networks and
how this can add to our overall understanding of

15. In sum, the notion of stereotype came
into language studies not so long ago, but it
has already been applied to various branches
like lexicography, semantics and pragmatics,
and has good chances to be integrated in
modern linguistic theories