Editing Indexicality (section)

====Hypercorrection as a social class index====
[[Hypercorrection]] is defined by Wolfram as "the use of speech form on the basis of false analogy."<ref>Wolfram, W. Phonological Variation and change in Trinidadian English-the evolution of the vowel system. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1969.</ref> DeCamp defines hypercorrection in a more precise fashion claiming that "hypercorrection is an incorrect analogy with a form in a [[prestige (sociolinguistics)|prestige]] dialect which the speaker has imperfectly mastered."<ref>DeCamp, D. 'Hypercorrection and Rule Generalization. 1972</ref> Many scholars argue that hypercorrection provides both an index of "social class" and an "Index of [[Linguistic insecurity]]". The latter index can be defined as a speaker's attempts at self-correction in areas of perceived linguistic insufficiencies which denote their lower social standing and minimal social mobility.<ref name=hyper>Winford, Donald. 'Hypercorrection in the Process of Decreolization: The Case of Trinidadian English. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978.</ref>

Donald Winford conducted a study that measured the phonological hypercorrection in creolization of English speakers in Trinidad. He claims that the ability to use prestigious norms goes "hand-in-hand" with knowledge of stigmatization afforded to use of "lesser" phonological variants.<ref name=hyper/> He concluded that sociologically "lesser" individuals would try to increase the frequency of certain vowels that were frequent in the high prestige [[dialect]], but they ended up using those vowels even more than their target dialect. This hypercorrection of vowels is an example of non-referential indexicality that indexes, by virtue of innate urges forcing lower class civilians to hypercorrect phonological variants, the actual social class of the speaker. As Silverstein claims, this also conveys an "Index of [[Linguistic insecurity]]" in which a speaker not only indexes their actual social class (via first-order indexicality) but also the insecurities about class constraints and subsequent linguistic effects that encourage hypercorrection in the first place (an incidence of second-order indexicality).<ref name=indexicalorder/>

William Labov and many others have also studied how hypercorrection in [[African American Vernacular English]] demonstrates similar social class non-referential indexicality.