Social Roles and Identities Determine Intelligibility and Voice One can only wonder how many times a person is misinterpreted, misunderstood, and misrepresented during their lifetime. Usually this has to do with a lack in verbal communication. However, in this essay, we will see how social roles and identities determine the intelligibility and voice of a speaker and thus directly affect whether the intended message is received accurately or not. Drawing from several academic sources, we will see how it is possible and even a common occurrence to be misrepresented due to one’s social role or identity as it biases people about the content of one’s speaking even before the speaking has begun. Before we see how intelligibility and voice are affected by social roles and identities, it is important to define them. Intelligibility is defined as simply the ability to be understood, and voice is simply the perceived content of a message that a person is communicating. These two terms, are very much related and have a lot to do with how the message of what is being communicated is received. If a message is conveyed with a high level of intelligibility and an unbiased, clear voice, then the content is understood according to how the speaker intended it. This however is not often the case as social roles and identities often manipulate and alter the intelligibility and voice of a message. Social roles, i.e., the set of norms that people are expected to follow given their place in a particular social setting, are very significant in all our lives and affect us in ways that often go unnoticed. An example of a social role is a student, where the set of behaviours expected of them is to attend school, participate in scholastic activities, complete homework, and complete evaluations of prescribed materials. When such a student expresses an opinion in a scholastic setting, it is not taken as concretely as if a professor in that same environment were to say the same thing. This difference in social roles, though not enough to validate the integrity of the content of either speaker’s opinion, manages to sway the minds of the audience in a particular way the vast majority of the time. Identity is broadly described as a set of characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known. In reference to society, identity helps to define people and provide as a map of a persons behaviours and expectations. The identity of a person is drawn from cultural, racial, sexual, and geographical orientations as well as many other factors that define the set of characteristics that is one’s identity. When society generalizes one’s identity or when someone behaves in a way that is representative of a particular identity, all the stereotypes of that identity fall upon that person and are thus communicated to that person’s audience even before the content of their message becomes verbalized. For example, if a person who dressed and acted like a hippy came up to me and started speaking to me about antidisestablishmentarianism or the lack of animal rights, their message would be received as muted and frivolous even before they said anything because of the stereotype and association of that identity. If that same message was said from a podium at a graduating ceremony of law students from Simon Fraser University, that message would immediately hold more value because of the identity of a graduate of law from Simon Fraser University. Identity goes further into detail in quantifying the character of a speaker than social roles as it deals with things like gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, etc. Identity is a key topic in the article, “Sounding Gender(ed): Vocal Performances in English University Teaching Spaces,” written by Tom Delph-Janiurek. In this article, Delph-Janiurek paints a clear picture regarding one’s voice as it relates to communication, social identities, representation, and recognition. Delph-Janiurek also speaks about how “the term ‘voice’ is usually used in social and cultural geography to refer to means of individual or collective socio-political self-representation,” (Delph-Janiurek 258). In his article Delph-Janiurek presents the idea that “the everyday reading of voices clearly seems to involve attributing them to recognisable performances of roles and gendered and sexualised identities,” (Delph-Janiurek 276). As well in his article, Delph-Janiurek quotes William Labov’s study of speakers in New York stating “how variations in features of voices and pronunciation are often closely bound up with interrelated notions of age, ‘class’ and ethnicity, as well as gender,” (Delph-Janiurek 259). Delph-Janiurek goes on to talk about how entire stories are told about the speaker determined solely by various characteristics of their voice. He says that “voices often tell stories in quite standard everyday ways about emotional states, and attitudes to others in interactions. Features of tone, pitch, volume, and rate of speech may indicate enthusiasm, boredom, or shyness or mark voices heard as empathetic or patronising,” (Delph-Janiurek 259). Delph-Janiurek also features a table in his article telling the differences elicited by a female voice versus a male voice. Therein, he mentions how a female voice is “associated with softer, lighter, and shriller voices of emotion and subordination,” (Delph-Janiurek 260) whereas a male voice is “associated with voices of logic, reason, authority, and power,” (Delph-Janiurek 260). All of this adds to define the identity of the speaker and this identity influences the intelligibility and voice of the speaker to their audience. For example, when answering a phone call, just by hearing the other persons voice, you can often immediately tell their gender, their nationality, their mood, and possibly even their intent of calling. Thus it is clear how an opinion or judgment can be laid upon someone even before their content of speech can be communicated. This is a clear example of how an identity influences the voice and intelligibility of a speaker. In the article, “To Watch the Faces of the Poor: Life Magazine and the Mythology of Rural Poverty in the Great Depression”, written by Charles Cunningham, both identity and social roles are described in detail, revealing how intensely it affects the intelligibility and the voice of the speaker. In this article, Cunningham describes how politicians, wealthy people, and powerful figures in society use their social role to leverage their thoughts and opinions so as to be more acceptable than if it were to come from a person outside of that social role. Thus the intelligibility and voice of the content of their communication was inflated to something far greater than what it truly was; thus, they were able to accomplish saying many things that otherwise would not have been tolerated. Cunningham reveals how this was done by including excerpts of life magazine, a magazine that had its own social role due to the social role of its authors, in his article portraying how articles and statements that were very inaccurate, misleading and “apparent fallacies,” (Cunningham 203) were accepted because of the social role from whose mouth it was spoken and then printed. Cunningham then mentions that “African-Americans appeared in the magazine frequently, but were rarely taken seriously as citizens. Articles and photographs tended to focus a white gaze on African-American cultural actives…,” (Cunningham 204). Cunningham goes on to describe a Life article where an elite white woman is stripped of her title and authority because of her affiliation with African-Americans. He states how “Nancy Cunard is effectively belittled when she is described as a ‘Negrophile,’ rather than as someone who is concerned with justice. If she is merely a ‘Negrophile,’ then she can have no real interest in justice either way; if her first principle is race love, then she can not be taken seriously as an advocate for justice,” (Cunningham 205). This is a clear example of house a social role has more influence than reality. It shows how quickly a fact or an intended message can get diluted and even reversed through the power of social roles on intelligibility and voice. Here Nancy Cunard is stripped of much of her intelligibility and voice by virtue of her change in social role, being that of an affiliate of an African-American. Another example of a social role that drastically deters intelligibility and voice that both authors concur on is that of homosexuality. In one of Delph-Janiurek’s controlled environments, he noted that “voice, embodiment and bodily gesture are taken together by Eve as evidence of her tutor’s ‘gay’ sexual identity, a reading that she indicates is shared with other students,” (Delph-Janiurek 273). Delph-Janiurek then continues to show how these students came to their seemingly logical yet incorrect conclusion of the sexual identity of a particular person. Cunningham shares the same view in his writing where he mentions an article in the Life magazine that wrongly assumes the sexuality of certain men based on the very same items that Delph-Janiurek mentions were accurate measures of sexual identity. Cunningham states how one “Willie Roberson was cryptically said to have been ‘cured of a disease since he went to jail’” (Cunningham 205), and that another man was “noted as the dandy of the outfit because he plasters his hair with strong-perfumed grease,” (Cunningham 205). In both examples the intelligibility and voice of the subject was negatively associated and discredited to an extent. This of course was due to fitting them into a particular social role that was, in that context, looked upon with disdain. In her article, “The Waltz of Sociability: Intimacy, Dislocation, and Friendship in a Quebec High School,” Vered Amit-Talai made a compelling argument about how the sociability of adolescents is systemically flawed and fated to deteriorate due to the lack of importance than their social role as a student put on it. As a high school student, their social role was one of committing to studies at school, participating in after school activities, completing homework, and also managing to fit in some family time whenever possible. Friendships came last. In fact, it is interesting to note that the way the education system was designed naught but aided in the disassociation of each student from those of the grades outside their own. “Courses were organized by grade. Students therefore moved from one class to another in cohorts of one-year age spans. This institutional age grading [caused them to] …congregate with peers from the same grade. Grade and age differences were regarded as glaringly obvious,” (Amit-Talai 239). This clearly shows that the social role of the grade of the student was enough to influence their intelligibility and voice to be heard only by their own grade. This was so much so the case that later, Amit-Talai described how Matt, a student who had to stay back a grade to finish some courses that he required, “felt out of place and distanced from this new cohort,” (Amit-Talai 239). Thus, he had to focus his “efforts on maintaining extra school contacts with his previous… companions,” (Amit-Talai 239) whereas his current fellow students “only tried to socialize with each other,” (Amit-Talai 239). So yet again it is clear to see that the social role was a major deciding factor in the intelligibility and voice of an individual. This corresponds with exactly what both of the previously mentioned authors have been saying. In all, it is unmistakable that social roles and identities determine intelligibility and voice. Cunningham, Delph-Janiurek, and Amit-Talai all agree that regardless of what the content or message of the person might be, if the social role or identity of the speaker is off, the message can be entirely misunderstood, misinterpreted or misrepresented. It is thus necessary to heretofore verify that the validity of an opinion or statement is not the position or characteristics of the speaker but rather the content of the message alone. By continuing to strive to understand social roles and identities, we are better able to understand ourselves and the world we live in, thus enabling ourselves to be understood and to be heard. Without this understanding, the accuracy of communication and thus the reason for communication in and of itself is lost.
Works Cited

Amit-Talai, Vered. “The Waltz of Sociability: Intimacy, Dislocation, and Friendship in a Quebec High School.” Academic Reading; Reading and Writing in the Disciplines. Ed. Janet Giltrow. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002. 233-252.
Cunningham, Charles. “To Watch the Faces of the Poor: Life Magazine and the Mythology of Rural Poverty in the Great Depression” Academic Reading; Reading and Writing in the Disciplines. Ed. Janet Giltrow. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002. 200-212.
Delph-Janiurek, Tom. “Sounding Gender(ed): Vocal Performances in English University Teaching Spaces.” Academic Reading; Reading and Writing in the Disciplines. Ed. Janet Giltrow. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002. 258-280.