Situating Experience in Social Meaning: Stance, Salience, and Enregisterment

This article uses mixed methods to establish how social meanings are situated in lived experiences. I test whether Greek listeners recognize features of Istanbul Greek (IG) and whether they associate the same social meanings with the variety as IG speakers. Results from a verbal guise experiment and metapragmatic stancetaking discourse suggest the confluence of IG features co‐present in multiple Greek varieties (a) hinders non‐IG‐listeners from placing speakers and (b) allows for other varieties’ social meanings to influence judgments. Although listeners attend to multiple structures, features involved with allophonic processes are most salient. Consequently, the salience of competing processes led listeners to (re)interpret features based on their awareness of them in other enregistered speech. These findings add nuance to how enregisterment occurs within (sub)communities, and how social meanings are unevenly distributed among individuals based on the exemplars that emerge via enregisterment. Results further complicate how personae circulate and contribute to social differentiation.