Precarious speech: Navigating precarious livelihoods and speech register management among disadvantaged youth in Great Yarmouth.

This research combines the pioneering insights into the anthropology of precarity and the role of speech in everyday life to explore how precarity is navigated through constructing speech "register repertoires". Successfully navigating conditions of precarity - of uncertainty about the future, socio-economic insecurity in the present, and portfolio livelihoods - requires the management of multiple identities in diverse workplaces. However, despite their importance in performing identities, anthropological studies of precarity focus less on the role of speech interactions in how multiple identities are managed. Speech registers, specifically, are variations of speaking associated with specific cultural practices, contexts, or the people who engage in them. They draw upon, and thus reflect, wider cultural images of people and practices. In this way, the repertoire of speech registers one uses becomes a performance of their identity. Further, the evaluation of these speech registers by listeners also contributes to organising social inequality. Listeners typify perceived cultural differences they have of groups, and their place in social hierarchies, by the speech registers they use and speech registers typically used by disadvantaged groups are devalued, and their access to acquiring valued registers constrained.
Application of this theory to contexts of precarity is rare. This research thus proposes a 12-month-long ethnographic study of a group of disadvantaged youth attending the Map Youth Centre in Great Yarmouth, where the precarity of uncertain futures coincides with the localised precarity of being a seaside town, and their peers. Asking the central question: "how are speech registers implicated in the experience and management of precarity?", it is suggested that managing multiple identities is achieved foremost by constructing an effective repertoire of recognisable speech registers, and that the ability of disadvantaged youth to do so has implications for their capacity to negotiate the social inequalities they face.
Experiences of precarity cannot be understood in merely representational terms and require a degree of participation or "attunement" from the researcher. Therefore, research will adopt a precarious lifestyle of its own by directly participating in the multiple registers under observation, and through a reflexive understanding of the precarity of the researcher's own register switching. Similarly, accounts of speech registers will involve qualitative, thick descriptions of linguistic qualities at a level identifiable by participants and those they interact with, as well as of how they are situated in cultural context. These methods will create a more in-depth and emic understanding of navigating precarity through speech registers, their meanings to speakers and their audiences, and how they inform social inequality.