Definition of Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the study of our everyday lives – how language works in our casual conversations and the media we are exposed to, and the presence of societal norms, policies, and laws which address language.
- - Sociolinguistics is not a study of facts (e.g., men call each other nicknames) but the study of ideas about how societal norms are intertwined with our language use.
- - By society, we mean a group of people who are drawn together for a certain purpose or purposes.
We use the term language to mean a system of linguistic communication particular to a group; this includes spoken, written, and signed modes of communication.
Knowledge of language:
- When two or more people communicate with each other, we can call the system they use a
code. The system itself (or the grammar, to use a well-known technical erm) is something that
each speaker ‘knows,’ but two very important issues for linguists are
(1) just what that knowledge comprises
(2) how we may best characterize it.
- Anyone who knows a language knows much more about that language than is contained in any grammar book that attempts to describe the language.
One of the issues here is that grammar books tend to be written as prescriptive works; that is, they seek to outline the standard language and how it ‘should’ be spoken.
What sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropologists do is provide descriptive grammars of languages, which describe, analyze, and explain how people actually speak their languages.
Competence and performance:
- Chomsky distinguishes between what he has called:
Competence: what speakers know about their language
Performance: what they do with their language
- He claims that it is the linguist’s task to characterize their competence, and not their performance.
- ‘the linguistic behavior of individuals cannot be understood without knowledge of the communities that they belong to.
- Chomsky will often use grammatical judgments to get at competence, while sociolinguists tend to use recordings of language use
Variation:
- Different structures for expressing the same meaning are called variants; this term will be discussed in more detail in chapter 6. For sociolinguists, this linguistic variation is a central topic. The language we use in everyday living is remarkably varied. There is variation across speakers, that is, reflections of different ways that people speak in different regions or social groups, but also variation within the speech of a single speaker.
Speakers and their groups:
- The term identity has been used in a variety of ways in both the social sciences and lay speech.
- Social identity : ‘Identity is defined as the linguistic construction of membership in one or more social groups or categories’ (Kroskrity 2000, 111).
- Our identities are fluid and we do not have a single identity but multiple levels of identity, and shifting and sometimes even conflicting identities which emerge in different contexts.
- Likewise, group identity categories are constantly being negotiated. What it means to be the member of a particular social category (e.g., ‘gay,’ ‘educated,’ ‘Latino’) may vary over time, space, and situation, and how particular speakers identify with or are assigned to these categories may also vary.
- In all of the above we must recognize that power has a significant role to play ; it undoubtedly has a key role to play in how we choose to identify ourselves and how we form groups with others. Power is ‘the ability to control events in order to achieve one’s aims’ (Tollefson 2006, 46) and is also ‘the control someone has over the outcomes of others’ (Myers-Scotton 2006, 199).
- We cannot escape such issues of power in considering language, social relationships, and the construction of social identities.
- Solidarity refers to the motivations which cause individuals to act together and to feel a common bond which influences their social actions. Thus the concept of solidarity is intertwined with both identity formation and group formation.
Language and culture:
- Culture, therefore, is the ‘knowhow’ that a person must possess to get through the task of daily living; for language use, this is similar to the concept of communicative competence we introduced above.
Directions of influence:
- There are several possible relationships between language and culture. One is that social structure may either influence or determine linguistic structure and/or behavior. for -example age-grading: children speak differently than adults.
- A second possibility is directly opposed to the first: linguistic structure and/or behavior may either influence or determine social structure or worldview. This is the view that is behind the
Whorfian hypothesis.
- A third possible relationship is that the influence is bi-directional: language and society may influence each other.
- A fourth possibility is to assume that there is no relationship at all between linguistic structure and social structure and that each is independent of the other.
The Whorfian Hypothesis:
- Sapir Whorf acknowledged the close relationship between language and culture, maintaining that they were inextricably related so that you could not understand or appreciate the one without a knowledge of the other.
- Whorf ’s view the relationship between language and culture was a deterministic one; the social categories we create and how we perceive events and actions are constrained by the language we speak. Different speakers will therefore experience the world differently insofar as the languages they speak differ structurally.
- Language determines thought.
- Language influences thought.
Regional Variation:
- The study of language variation tells us important things about languages and how they change. In fact, it is a well-established part of the study of how languages change over time, that is, of diachronic or historical linguistics. Traditionally, dialect geography, as this area of linguistic study is known, has employed assumptions and methods drawn from historical linguistics, and many of its results have been used to confirm findings drawn from other historical sources, for example, archeological findings, population studies, and written records.
- Over sufficient time, the resulting dialects might become new languages as speakers of the resulting varieties become unintelligible to one another. In this model of language change and dialect differentiation, it should always be possible to relate any variation found within a language to the two factors of time and distance alone; linguists working in this tradition try to explain any differences they find with models familiar to the historical linguist, models which incorporate such concepts as the ‘family tree’. English /f/ and /v/ are now distinctive phonemes whereas once they were phonetic variants, or allophones, of a single phoneme.
Mapping dialects:
- Dialect geographers have traditionally attempted to reproduce their findings on maps in what they call dialect atlases.
- They try to show the geographical boundaries of the distribution of a particular linguistic feature by drawing a line on a map. Such a line is called an isogloss: on one side of the line people say something one way, and on the other side they use some other pronunciation.
- When they are mapped, they often show a considerable amount of criss-crossing. On occasion, though, a number coincide; that is, there is a bundle of isoglosses. Such a bundle is often said to mark a dialect boundary. -> this is searched for.
- Isoglosses can also show that a particular set of linguistic features appears to be spreading from one location, a focal area, into neighbouring locations.
- Alternatively, a particular area, a relic area, may show characteristics of being unaffected by changes spreading out from one or more neighbouring areas.
- A remnant dialect, it does not only have older forms (relic area) but also new linguistic innovations.
- The best known isogloss in Europe is the Rhenish Fan: setting off Low German to the north from High German in the South.
- Very often the isoglosses for individual phonological features do not coincide with one another to give us clearly demarcated dialect areas. While the ideal is that isoglosses coincide as in (a), in reality isoglosses may cross-cross as in (b); some examples of how different features of dialects might pattern can be seen in (c). Such patterns are just about impossible to explain using the traditional family-tree account of language change.
- Isoglosses do cross and bundles of them are rare. It is consequently extremely difficult to determine boundaries between dialects in this way and dialectologists acknowledge this fact. The postulated dialect areas show considerable internal variation and the actual areas proposed are often based on only a few key items (or linguistic variables in our terminology).
Methods in dialectology:
There are methodological issues which have caused sociolinguists to question some dialect studies.
- The sample used for the research: sampling methods were based on assumptions about who ‘representative’ speakers of dialects were
- The informants chosen: for example in the Atlas, the analysis was partly intended to find out how speech related to social class, but speech was itself used as one of the criteria for assigning membership in a social class. Also it was the field worker who decided exactly where each informant fitted in the above scheme of things. The field worker alone judged whether a particular informant should be used in the study.
- ‘the axiom of categoricity’: the assumption that individual speakers do not have variation in their speech; for instance, if they use the word ‘pop’ to talk about carbonated beverages they never use the term ‘soda’ to refer to the same thing, often used in earlier data collection methodology. -> from here it is implied that linguistic variables are categorical in regional dialect. Not taking this variation into account
- Furthermore, since most of us realize that it is not only where you come from that affects your speech but also your social and cultural background, age, gender, race, occupation, and group loyalty, the traditional bias toward geographic origin alone now appears to be a serious weakness. Yhe varieties of a language spoken within large gatherings of people in towns and cities must influence what happens to other varieties of that language.
Dialect mixture and free variation;
- Dialect mixture: the existence in one locality of two or more dialects which allow a speaker or speakers to draw now on one dialect and then on the other.
- Free variation: variation of no social significance.
Linguistic atlases:
- Labov (et al. 2005) used a very simple sampling technique to survey the whole of North American English in order to produce the Atlas of North American English (ANAE). This study showed that ‘regional dialects are getting stronger and more diverse as language change is continuing and that the structural divisions between them are very sharp, with very tight bundling of the isoglosses.
The linguistic variable:
- The investigation of social dialects has required the development of an array of techniques quite different from those used in dialect geography. -> important is Labov. Attempted to describe how language varies in any community and to draw conclusions from that variation not only for linguistic theory but also sometimes for the conduct of everyday life
- Possibly the greatest contribution has been in the development of the use of the linguistic variable, the basic conceptual tool necessary to do this kind of work.
Variants:
- A linguistic variable is a linguistic item which has identifiable variants, which are the different forms which can be used in an environment. For example, words like singing and fishing are sometimes pronounced as singin’ and fishin’. The final sound in these words may be called the linguistic variable (ng) with its two variants [ŋ] insinging and [n] in singin’.
- An important principle in the analysis of variants is the principle of accountability, which holds that if it is possible to define a variable as a closed set of variants, all of the variants must be counted.
- There are a lot of linguistic variables not just confined to phonological matters. Labov (1972) has also distinguished among what he calls indicators, markers, and stereotypes:
- An indicator is a linguistic variable to which little or no social import is attached. Only a linguistically trained observer is aware of indicators.
- A marker can be quite noticeable and potent carriers of social information. You do not always have to drop every g, that is, always say singing as singin’. People are aware of markers, and the distribution of markers is clearly related to social groupings and to styles of speaking.
- A stereotype is a popular and, therefore, conscious characterization of the speech of a particular group. A stereotype need not conform to reality; rather, it offers people a rough and ready categorization with all the attendant problems of such categorizations. Studies of variation tend therefore to focus on describing the distributions of linguistic variables which are markers.
Social variation:
- Once we have identified the linguistic variable as our basic working tool, the next question is how linguistic variation relates to social variation.
- In order to address this question, the next task becomes one of collecting data concerning the variants of a linguistic variable in such a way that we can draw certain conclusions about the social distribution of these variants.
Social class membership:
- There are different ways of determining social class, which vary from society to society.
- One factor which has been prominent in sociolinguistic studies of variation is social class membership. If we consider ‘social class’ to be a useful concept to apply in stratifying society we need a way to determine the social class of particular speakers.
- Different scales:
- An occupational scale
- An educational scale: cautious with the time, graduating just to mean something different.
- Income level and source of income
- Considering where people live: type and cost of housing.
- In assigning individuals to social classes, investigators may use any or all of the above criteria (and others too) and assign different weights to them. -> differs in study’s.
- The concept of lifestyle has been introduced into classifying people in sociolinguistics, so obviously patterns of consumption of goods and appearance are important for a number of people in arriving at some kind of social classification.
Data collection and analysis:
- - The observers paradox
- - The sociolinguistic interview
- - Sampling
- - Correlations: dependant and independent variables
- Quantitive sociolinguistics: validity and reliability.
- Some scholars argue that the meaning of social class is shifting because speakers can make choices that straddle stereotypical class associations. This reduces the value of class as an explanation for variation in language. (social-class)
- Some other independent variables that can be hard to assess: People may internally feel different than what they are grouped in:
- Age, gender, ethnicity etc. People’s own self-determination (whether someone identifies as Black or White, man, woman, or another sexual orientation) can be more relevant to the social significance of linguistic variables (what they are indexing by using a particular variant) than the formal demographic characteristics of who uses which variant.
Limitations of using macro-social categories as independent variables
- Based on external/objective attributes: they don’t allow for speaker agency
- Category membership is all or nothing: they don’t allow for graded membership/variation within categories
- Correlation vs. causation: Correlational studies show a relationship between social variables like age, gender, or social class and linguistic variables. A correlation between particular linguistic and social variables does not mean we can say anything about whether an independent variable causes the occurrence of the dependent one. Because of these difficulties with using macro-social categories as independent variables in sociolinguistics, more recent research has moved on to frameworks which try to account for language variation by taking into account subjective aspects of speakers’ language use.
- These frameworks include social networks and communities of practice, which
- allow for some degree of speaker agency (speaker self-determination) and
- attempt to capture gradation within social categories and individual motivations for variation.
- However, because they are based on subjective attributes, the findings of these studies do not necessarily generalize to other populations beyond the group studied. These explanations are highly context-dependent.
