Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Linguistics in the World
Linguistics in the World is a textbook series on the study of language in the real world, enriching students’ understanding of how language works through a balance of theoretical insights and empirical findings. Presupposing no or only minimal background knowledge, each of these titles is intended to lay the foundation for students’ future work, whether in language sciences, applied linguistics, language teaching, or speech sciences.
What Is Sociolinguistics? by Gerard Van Herk
This edition first published 2012
© 2012 Gerard Van Herk
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Van Herk, Gerard.
What Is Sociolinguistics / Gerard Van Herk.
p. cm. – (Linguistics in the world)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-9319-1 – ISBN 978-1-4051-9318-4 (paperback) 1. Sociolinguistics. I. Title.
P40.V354 2011
306.44–dc23 2011034986
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
ISBN 978-1-4443-5695-3 (epdf)
ISBN 978-1-4443-5696-0 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-4443-5697-7 (mobi)
Boxes
Chapter 1
Personalizing sociolinguistics: Author’s introduction
Where to next?
How this book works
Chapter 2
Other naming issues: Dialect, slang, accent, variety …
Method: Variationist sociolinguistics
Where to next?
Chapter 3
As an aside: Dialect leveling
As an aside: The r-ful truth about American English
As an aside: Shibboleths
As an aside: Imaginary dialects
As an aside: The people in the neighborhood
Place features as social features: Talk like a pirate
Method: Dialect geography
Where to next?
Chapter 4
As an aside: Moving on up
As an aside: Spot the “error”
As an aside: Naming the poor
Where to next?
Chapter 5
As an aside: The Great Vowel Shift
As an aside: The Canadian Vowel Shift
Language change, media, and influences
Language change and age grading in Panama
As an aside: Rule Britennia – royal vowel changes over time
As an aside: Variation without change
As an aside: Those darn kids!
Where to next?
Chapter 6
As an aside: Ethnic hypercorrection – not sounding like your parents
Who’s ethnic?
As an aside: Calling people names
Noticing ethnicity
Where to next?
Chapter 7
As an aside: Gender vs. sex
As an aside: Ska pronouns
Why is this chapter so long?
Where to next?
Chapter 8
Different tasks, different attention to speech
Style shifting, authenticity, politics
Ahead of his time: Mikhail Bakhtin, style guru
Lots of jargon: Frequent flyers
As an aside: How well do we shift?
Where to next?
Chapter 9
As an aside: Communicative competence across languages
Method: Ethnography as a research practice
As an aside: You’re so negative!
Solidarity and childbirth
Where to next?
Chapter 10
As an aside: Multilingual enough
As an aside: Demonizing the demotic
As an aside: The linguistics of code-switching
Where to next?
Chapter 11
As an aside: When is something fully borrowed?
As an aside: Changing borrowings
As an aside: How much does contact actually change languages?
Acrolect, mesolect, basilect
Where to next?
Chapter 12
Method: Matched guise studies
As an aside: The power of noticing
As an aside: Princess vs. hyenas
As an aside: Ideologies of the non-standard
Where to next?
Chapter 13
As an aside: Death
Being careful with language shift data
As an aside: Diversity of languages and worldviews
As an aside: Let me elaborate
As an aside: English bitters
Where to next?
Chapter 14
As an aside: Talking and learning
As an aside: Code-switching in the classroom
As an aside: Elite trilingualism
Where to next?
Chapter 15
As an aside: “Back of the book”
As an aside: Ax me about history
Research in the Spotlight
Chapter 4
Who is this man and why can’t he find the fourth floor?
Labov, William. “The social stratification of (r) in NYC department stores.” In William Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York City (2nd edn.), 40–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 (1st pub. 1966).
Chapter 5
Ragin’ Cajuns
Dubois, Sylvie, and Barbara Horvath. “When the music changes, you change too: Gender and language change in Cajun English.” Language Variation and Change 11, no. 3 (1999): 287–313.
Chapter 6
Wigga figga
Cutler, Cecilia A. “Yorkville Crossing: White teens, hip hop and African American English.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 3/4 (1999): 428–42.
Chapter 7
Dude, where’s my solidarity?
Kiesling, Scott F. “Dude.” American Speech 79, no. 3 (2004): 281–305.
Chapter 8
The audience
Bell, Allan. “Language style as audience design.” Language in Society 13 (1984): 145–204.
Chapter 10
Phat comme un sumo
Sarkar, M., and L. Winer. “Multilingual codeswitching in Québec rap: Poetry, pragmatics and performativity.” International Journal of Multilingualism 3, no. 3 (2006): 173–200.
Chapter 11
English makes you do things you were going to do anyway
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. “The gradual loss of mood distinctions in Los Angeles Spanish.” Language Variation and Change 6 (1994): 255–72.
Chapter 13
Language policy and neo-colonialism
Ricento, Thomas. “Historical and theoretical perspectives in language policy and planning.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4, no. 2 (2000): 196–213.
Chapter 14
Talking nerdy
Bucholtz, Mary. “ ‘Why be normal?’ Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls.” Language in Society 28 (1999): 203–23.
Companion Website
This text has a comprehensive companion website which features a number of useful resources for instructors and students alike.
For instructors
For students
Visit to access these materials.
Acknowledgments
Funnily enough, a personalized book like this actually depends more than most textbooks on the work and judgments of other people. Somebody has to make it accessible, tell me when I’ve gone too far, and catch all the errors that are staring me in the face.
I’d like to thank:
And I’d like to thank and apologize to:
1
Introduction
In this Chapter:
I’m sitting here in Newfoundland, in Canada, writing a book about sociolinguistics, and you’re out there somewhere, starting to read it. If you were here and could hear me talk – especially if you were Canadian, especially if you had some training – you could tell a lot about me. For example, you’d know which I originally came from. When I speak English, most people can tell I’m North American (I pronounce schedule with a [sk] sound), Canadian (I rhyme shone with gone, not bone), and probably from Québec (I drink soft drinks and keep my socks in a bureau). When I speak French, it’s clear that I’m from Québec (I pronounce tu like tsu), from the southwest (I pronounce garage like garawge), and definitely English (I say so a lot, and I have a particular pronunciation of the letter r that English Québecers use to avoid sounding “too English”).
You could also tell where I fit into my speech community. I’m the child of immigrants – if you were really good, you’d know that one of them was from the north of England (I have an unusual r when I speak English, almost like a w). I’m probably under 80 (I pronounce whale and wail the same), but I’m definitely not young (I almost never end sentences with a question-like rising intonation). Once you knew I was middle-aged, you could tell I was male, and either straight or straight-sounding (I don’t use a lot of so to mean very, I pitch my voice fairly deep and don’t often have “swoopy” pitch patterns). Those are just some of the obvious things – there are more specific but hard-to-hear distinctions, like the exact way I pronounce my vowels, that could tell you even more. And if I was wherever you are, I could probably tell a lot about your speech community and where you fit into it. The fact that we can do this is one of the things that interest sociolinguists.
But there’s more. I’m writing a textbook, and you’re probably reading it because you have to (for a university course, most likely). So you have certain expectations, given your past experiences with higher education and previous textbooks that you’ve read, and I have certain obligations to you (and to my publisher). If I want to appear competent, I should use academic language, but if I don’t want to discourage you, I shouldn’t go overboard with linguistic terminology. Maybe I should work hard to make this book more accessible than other textbooks. At the same time, I have to get all this past your prof, who knows your school and its students far better than I do, and who at some point had to read this book and decide if it was suitable for your course, and who might not have much patience for my attempts at accessibility. The fact that we’re aware of what’s expected (linguistically) from this particular interaction is also the kind of thing that interests sociolinguists.
And all of this – the way we talk, the writing and reading of textbooks – happens in a broader social context, the result of decisions made by societies and those who govern them. I grew up going to an English-language school because earlier Canadian governments decided to protect English language rights in Québec (sometimes to a greater degree than French language rights elsewhere in Canada). Maybe I use my “not too English” r when I speak French because my generation doesn’t want to be associated with the English speakers before us, the ones who didn’t try too hard to speak French-sounding French. As for the textbook, somebody more powerful than either of us decided that you needed a particular kind of education for whatever it is you’re doing, and that it involved a course in sociolinguistics, and maybe that it would happen in English, whether that’s convenient for you or not. So here we are. And all that, too, is the kind of thing that interests sociolinguists.
Types of Sociolinguistics
So, what is sociolinguistics? The usual answer is something like “The scientific study of the relationship(s) between language and society.” Which is true enough. A more useful answer for someone new to the field, though, might be “It depends who you ask.” As in any hyphenated or blended field, the umbrella term sociolinguistics covers researchers working all across the spectrum, from very linguistic to very socio. Sociolinguists can study how the language practices of one community differ from those of the next, as described in chapters 2 (communities), 3 (place), and 6 (ethnicity). We can study the relationship in a particular community between language use and like class and status (chapter 4), gender and sexuality (chapter 7), and ethnicity (chapter 6), whether we perceive those categories as relatively fixed or open to active performance and construction (chapter 7, identity). We can study the relationship between social and linguistic forces and language change (chapter 5, time). We can also choose to study how language can reveal , such as how each of us, as social beings, adapts our language to suit the situation and the audience (chapters 8, style, and 9, interaction). We can study the relationships between different languages within and across communities (chapters 10, multilingualism, and 11, language contact). We can study how people feel about language and language diversity (chapter 12, attitudes), and how their societies manifest those attitudes through language planning and policy (chapter 13), especially in the domain of education (chapter 14).
And, of course, we understand that all these forces interact, and that the distinct research traditions that we’ve developed to deal with them can all be brought to bear on a single sociolinguistic situation (as in chapter 15). You’ll see as we work our way through the book that those research traditions can be quite distinct. Sociolinguists looking at the status of different languages in a country might never mention the actual linguistic details of the languages in question. Sociolinguists working on change in the vowel system of a language might never mention the changing status of the language. Different subdisciplines have different ideas, not only about what’s worth studying, but also about what would count as valid evidence in that study. This, in turn, drives their choice of research methods. So in the chapters that follow, we’ll look at some of those research traditions and methods – where possible, under the chapter headings where they’re most relevant.
Background: the History of Sociolinguistics
Deciding exactly when sociolinguistics began is like arguing about when the first rock “n” roll record was made. It’s entertaining for the participants, but it gives you only a slight understanding of how things got to where they are today. For many people, the first systematic study of the relationship between language variation and social organization is described in a 1958 article by the sociologist John L. Fischer. Fischer was studying how New England schoolchildren used “g-dropping,” alternating between running and runnin’. He found statistically significant correlations between each linguistic form and a student’s sex and social class. In other words, rather than , in which the choice between forms is completely arbitrary and unpredictable, he found , in which the choice between forms is linked to other factors. In fact, it’s possible to push the birth of sociolinguistics back ever further – Louis Gauchat’s work on the French dialects of Charney, Switzerland (1905!), correlates language variation with the age and sex of the people he spoke to.
If you’re not committed to the idea that you need lots of numbers to do sociolinguistics, you can see that people have spent centuries observing the relationship between some linguistic forms and the kind of people who use them. For example, over 200 years ago, the grammarian James Beattie observed that extending where you could use an -s on the end of verbs (as in the birds pecks) was found “in the vernacular writings of Scotch men prior to the last century, and in the vulgar dialect of North Britain to this day: and, even in England, the common people frequently speak in this manner, without being misunderstood” (Beattie 1788/1968: 192–3). So here we see awareness of language variation (“people frequently speak in this manner”), as well as the regional and social correlates (the north, “common people”). Generally, though, earlier linguistic work assumes (that linguistic rules always apply), and assumes that all variation is free variation. Writing aimed at a broader public, like grammars and usage manuals, often just assumes that all variation is, well, wrong. Jackson (1830), for example, categorizes a variety of non-standard language features as “low,” “very low,” “exceedingly low,” “vilely low,” or “low cockney,” as well as “ungentlemanly,” “filthy,” “ridiculous,” “disrespectful,” “blackguard-like,” “very flippant,” or “abominable.” (More on this kind of thing in chapter 12 on language attitudes.)
But in the same way that there’s a difference between Jackie Brenston’s Rocket 88 and an actual genre that people called rock ‘n’ roll, there’s a difference between using sociolinguistic-like methods and the organized research tradition called sociolinguistics. Many of us would trace the birth of modern sociolinguistics as a subdiscipline to the work of William Labov, starting in the early 1960s. In several groundbreaking studies in Martha’s Vineyard (off the coast of Massachusetts) and in New York’s Lower East Side and Harlem, Labov (1963, 1966) used recordings of natural (or natural-like) speech, correlated with sociologically derived speaker characteristics, to examine in detail the relationship between how people spoke and how they fit into their sociolinguistic community.
This work was interesting enough that nearly 50 years later it’s still a model and an inspiration for researchers like me, who look at the correlations between language variation and social and linguistic characteristics. But it also benefited from being the right stuff in the right place at the right time. Technological advances like portable recording equipment and computers made this type of research feasible. Social activism raised interest in the language and status of cultural and class minority groups. And a modernist approach to social problems encouraged the application of findings from the social sciences to improving the school performance of children from marginalized groups.
Since that time, sociolinguistics has widened its geographic, methodological, and theoretical scope, in dialogue with such fields as linguistic anthropology, applied linguistics, gender and ethnic studies, dialectology, phonetics, and the sociology of language. At the boundaries, the dividing lines between these fields and sociolinguistics can be blurry. This is especially true of the relationship between sociolinguistics and the , most closely associated early on with the work of Joshua Fishman, which focuses on the role of language(s) in social organization. Rather than looking at how social forces can shape language, the sociology of language considers how society and language also interact at a strictly social level. In other words, society can treat language the same way it treats clothing, the arts, or business, as a thing to be debated and regulated. (Much more on this in chapter 13 on language as a social entity and chapter 14 on language and education.)
Personalizing Sociolinguistics: Author’s Introduction
Hi, my name’s Gerard.
I grew up in Québec, speaking English, just as that Canadian province’s French-speaking majority was finally gaining control of the tools of linguistic power. I later lived in Toronto, a city with a large immigrant population, before moving to Newfoundland, where almost everybody speaks English, but the local dialect is highly distinct and diverse.
In each of those places, the relationship between language and society is central to public discourse. In fact, we sometimes joke that Québec has seven million linguists, but only a hundred of them get paid. In each of the places I’ve lived, a person’s language variety is tightly linked to identity and ideology, to their perceived role in society, and to their access to education, work, and power. But in each place, those things play out differently, or involve different aspects of language and society.
Québec has in many ways been defined by the fluctuating relationship between French and English, going back to the conquest of New France by the British over 200 years ago. The dominant discourse there is about the perilous status of the French language. In Toronto, more than half the city’s inhabitants were born in another country, and most residents speak at least two languages. The dominant sociolinguistic discourses are about multiculturalism and multilingualism, and about access to English and the benefits it may bring. In Newfoundland, which didn’t join Canada until 1949, the dominant sociolinguistic discourse is about the relationship between standard (mainland) speech and local identity, played out in attitudes toward the local dialects and how people use them. I’ll draw examples from these and other sociolinguistic situations as we work through the book, and we should all keep in mind that a change in a social situation (for example, economic improvements in a region) will lead to changes in the sociolinguistic situation (for example, the status of the dialect of that region).
In terms of my academic background, I’ve studied and taught in university departments devoted to education, applied linguistics, and theoretical linguistics. So in the same way that multilingual people are often very conscious of what’s odd about each of their languages, I’m very aware of the specific strengths and interests of different approaches to language and society. That will probably reflect itself in how this book is written.
And, for what it’s worth, I still remember how stressful it was to switch from one subdiscipline to another as a student. So I’ll try to keep the jargon to a minimum. Linguists in particular will notice that I often simplify linguistic terminology (or mention it only briefly), in order to keep all the readers in the loop. I’ll also try to pick examples that don’t need a lot of terminology to start with. I don’t think this will affect our discussions – usually, it’s not the mechanics of (say) vowel height that we care about here. We’re more interested in a community’s interpretation of that vowel height.
My research interests and experiences are mostly in varieties of English – from the various places I’ve lived, as well as Caribbean creoles and early African American English. I’m also interested in how people use language to create identities, especially with respect to gender and local-ness. From a “meta” perspective, I’m interested in research methods, the educational implications of sociolinguistics, and making our work accessible to non-linguists. Luckily, lots of very talented people are interested in these topics, so the book will be full of examples, from my own work as well as that of students, colleagues, and friends. I hope my familiarity with the background to a piece of research will make it easier to discuss its strengths and weaknesses, as well as the methodological decisions that went into creating it.
Summing Up
Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and society, but that study can take very different forms depending on who’s doing it and what they’re interested in finding. Modern sociolinguistics has been shaped by technological advances in recording and handling language data, theoretical interest in bridging disciplines, and researchers’ interest in using our findings to address issues of social concern.
Where to Next?
We could argue that the label “sociolinguistics” makes more sense when applied to research closer to the socio (sociology) side. Some variationist work, such as that on changing vowel sounds, or my own work on earlier African American English, has very little social component, and even the people doing it are sometimes uncomfortable with the label. Variationists have suggested (only slightly facetiously) that their work would be better described simply as “linguistics.” Some sociolinguistics books (by Labov and Fasold) are even divided into multiple volumes – one for the socio end of things, one for the linguistic end.
A younger generation of sociolinguists seems to be moving toward the middle of the spectrum. Even researchers who focus very much on linguistic content are bringing in new ideas from sociology and anthropology.
How this Book Works
I assume that you, the reader, have limited experience with sociolinguistics. I mean, really, why else would you be reading a book called What Is Sociolinguistics? You might have a background in theoretical linguistics, or in applied linguistics, or in education; you might have a completely different background from other readers of the book. So I’m going to assume you’re a smart, well-educated person, but I’ll try to use examples that make sense even if you don’t know much about the fine linguistic details.
The chapter topics will try to cover the major sub-areas of sociolinguistics. These seem to be the breakdowns that people in the field are most comfortable with, but obviously, they overlap, and some material can be covered from more than one perspective. In fact, several studies are mentioned more than once. When the connections between topics and chapters seem particularly important, I’ll point them out. But you can safely assume that almost anything covered in one chapter has some connection to material from elsewhere. In fact, you might find it rewarding to frequently ask yourself, “How could my understanding of this topic (say, planning educational language policy) be enriched by considering some other topic (say, gender and identity)?” After we’ve made it through all these sub-areas, the final chapter will consider a single language variety, African American English, and discuss how people from different areas might approach doing research on it.
Each chapter will introduce some of the main theoretical positions and assumptions, research traditions, and findings in that area.
The book is also written in a very personal style (the text section of the book starts with the word “I” and ends with the word “Gerard”). I think you’ll get more out of it if you read it in a personal style. Ask yourself: How does this topic or idea work where you live? Who do you know who’s like this? Has something like this ever happened to you? Does the research coincide with your experiences? Are you going to have to re-think some of your beliefs? Do things work differently in your community? (If they do, let me know!)
Exercises
1. If you have access to online versions of scholarly journals, get an article or two (ideally about a similar topic or community) from the journals Language Variation and Change and either Language in Society or the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Search the articles (electronically, if possible) for the relative frequency of words from each of these groups:
(a) identity, culture, gender, performance, situate, problematize, social capital
(b) quantitative, variation, change, operationalize, results, correlation, statistical, significance, significant
Which journal included more of the words from (a)? From (b)? What does this suggest about the focus of each journal?
(For an easy and attractive version of this exercise, input each article into a software program that generates collages of the most frequently used words in a text, such as Wordle, . Think about how the two collages differ.)
2. Using a source such as scholarly journals, the internet, or talking to somebody from one of the communities involved, seek out descriptions of (or opinions about) the sociolinguistic situation in one of the places I mentioned in the author introduction (Québec, Toronto, Newfoundland). How does their description differ from mine?
3. A discursively written textbook like this one can be intimidating for some students, as it’s hard to tell which material is more important, and what might end up on a test. Read over the chapter and try to write test questions that could be answered by – and interesting to – an undergraduate student (with a C average, a B average, an A average, or an A+ average), or a graduate student in either linguistics, education, or language policy and planning. (You might find this to be a useful study tool for each chapter, especially if a bunch of you get together on it.)
4. Using the author’s introduction above as a rough model, write your own sociolinguistic autobiography. How does the way you speak differ from other people you know? What might account for this? What are your research interests? What social forces might influence them? Don’t worry about technical terms. To spark some ideas, ask people around you about the way you speak; or, if necessary, define yourself negatively (e.g., “In my speech community, upper-class people do X and recent immigrants do Y. I don’t do either.”).
5. Get two (or more) of the sociolinguistics textbooks mentioned in “Other resources.” Look over their tables of contents and compare the chapter titles in each book. Which topics deserve a chapter in one book, but not another? What do you think accounts for the differences? Can you see where particular material might be covered in different chapters in different books?
6. As you read through this book and any other assigned readings, keep track of places where sociolinguists’ claims are different from what you think about how language and society work. Consider how you feel about each mismatch: is it “Wow, I never thought of it like that!” or is it “These people are clearly deluded, because they disagree with me”?
Discussion
1. Where you live, are there language features (pronunciation, grammatical constructions, particular words or word meanings) that people associate with particular groups (women, young people, people from a particular neighborhood, non-native speakers)? What are they? (And when you read the previous sentence, did you think, “Hey! Why is he asking about language associated with women or young people, rather than men, or old people?” What does that tell you about who we tend to see as the default setting, or group?)
2. What would you expect a course (and a textbook) about sociolinguistics to cover? You might find it useful to write notes about this, put them away, and consult them at the end of your course or reading.
3. Early in the chapter, I refer to the fact that I’m writing this book and you’re reading it as an “interaction.” How is this like other interactions? How is it different?
4. Have a look at the table of contents for this book. Which of the chapters do you expect to find the most (or least) interesting? Why?
Other Resources
There are many existing sociolinguistic textbooks out there, many of them very good. Almost all treat particular studies (e.g., Labov in Martha’s Vineyard) in greater detail than I do here. Most of them require some knowledge of linguistic terminology, but if you can get past your understandable anxiety over reading something where you don’t understand every word, you should be fine.
I’ve tried to list some from roughly the most linguistic to the most social:
Chambers, J. K., Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes, eds. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (2002).
Milroy, Lesley, and Matthew Gordon. Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation (2003).
Chambers, J. K. Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and its Social Significance (1995, 2009).
Meyerhoff, Miriam. Introducing Sociolinguistics (2006).
Holmes, Janet. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (1992).
Mesthrie, Rajend, Joan Swann, Ana Deumert, and William Leap. Introducing Sociolinguistics (2009).
Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society (1983).
Coulmas, Florian. Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers’ Choices (2005).
Romaine, Suzanne. Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (2000).
Wardhaugh, Ronald. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (2006).
Coulmas, Florian, ed. The Handbook of Sociolinguistics (1997).
There are also some collections of major readings in sociolinguistics:
Coupland, Nikolas, and Adam Jaworski, eds. The New Sociolinguistics Reader (2009).
Meyerhoff, Miriam, and Eric Schleef, eds. The Routledge Sociolinguistics Reader (2010).
Paulston, Christina Bratt, and G. Richard Tucker, eds. Sociolinguistics: The Essential Readings (2003).
Trudgill, Peter, and Jenny Cheshire, eds. The Sociolinguistics Reader. Vol. 1: Multilingualism and Variation (1998).
Scholarly journals include:
Language Variation and Change, (accessed August 30, 2011).
Journal of Sociolinguistics, (accessed August 30, 2011).
Language in Society, (accessed August 30, 2011).
For an accessible (autobiographical!) introduction to Bill Labov and his work, try “How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it,” (accessed August 16, 2011).
E. F. K. Koerner’s Toward a History of American Linguistics (2002) includes a chapter on the theoretical roots of modern sociolinguistics.
Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats’ Rocket 88 (1951) is available in re-issue.