Defining groups:
Language is both an individual possession and a social possession. Certain individuals would behave linguistically like other individuals: they might be said to speak the same language or the same dialect or the same variety: employ the same code. -> speech community.
We are faced with the dilemma of wanting to study groups of speakers but lacking a clear definition of what comprises a group.
Speech communities:
- For our purposes, a group must have at least two members. People can group together for one or more reasons: social, religious, political, cultural etc. can be temporary, individuals may come and go or be a member of more groups.
- We must also be aware that the groups we refer to in various research studies are often groups we have created for the purposes of our research using this or that set of factors.
- We don’t want to stereotype: having certain characteristics or to essentialise: the idea that people can be placed into fixed social categories.
- Sociolinguists seek to discover patterns in data which link social factors with language use without ignoring variation within groups and the specific practices and experiences that make up individual identities.
Linguistic boundaries:
- Sociolinguistics generally study speech communities.
- For purely theoretical purposes , some linguists have hypothesized the existence of an ‘ideal’ speech community. Chomsky proposes, his ‘completely homogeneous speech-community’
- But we have to be aware that our speech communities, whatever they are, exist in a ‘real’ world. They exist of real people with individual identities.
- Lyons (1970, 326) offers a definition of what he calls a ‘real’ speech community: ‘all the people who use a given language (or dialect).’ However, that merely shifts the issue to making the definition of a language (or of a dialect) also the definition of a speech community. Which also isn’t clear and unambiguously defined.
- Our search must be for criteria other than, or at least in addition to, linguistic criteria if we are to gain a useful understanding of ‘speech community.
- Also notable: different speech communities can exist in on geographic area.
Defining a speech community:
- Norms: speakers in such a community share some kind of common feeling about linguistic behavior in that community. Labov: The speech community is not defined by any marked agreement in the use of language elements, so much as by participation in a set of shared norms; these norms may be observed in overt types of evaluative behavior, and by the uniformity of abstract patterns of variation which are invariant in respect to particular levels of usage.
- Milroy consequences: Thus it is not so much how one speaks as how one evaluates ways of speaking that forms a speech community according to this definition. For the purpose of research, however, this is not a practical definition; values of particular ways of speaking are even less immediately apparent than linguistic patterns. Thus while this idea about shared norms is an important one, it does not easily lead to clearly demarcated speech communities.
- We again are using the concept of communicative competence, that is, that speakers within a speech community share a sense of social norms in discourse, along with ideas about the social group identities indexed by various varieties or features of language.
- the relationship between language and social structure is paramount in the development of the concept of the speech community, and this includes the idea that there are different levels of speech communities which correspond to different types of social groups. Gumperz.
- It is also possible for speakers to share certain norms for language when they do not share linguistic systems. For example Sprachbund (‘speech area’), not quite a speech community,
- but still a community defined in some way by speech.
- A single speech community also need not contain only a single language or single variety. Gumperz uses the term linguistic community rather than speech community. a social group which may be either monolingual or multilingual, held together by frequency of social interaction patterns and set off from the surrounding areas by weaknesses in the lines of communication.
- Another aspect of our definition of speech communities: they are defined partly through their relationships with other communities.
Communities of practice:
- Sociolinguists try to get at this dynamic view of social groups is with the idea that speakers participate in various communities of practice.
- Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1998, 490) define a community of practice as ‘an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagements in some common endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of their joint activity around that endeavor.’ A community of practice is at the same time its members and what its members are doing to make them a community.
- Bucholtz (1999, 207) notes the following ways in which the concept of speech community is inadequate for research on language gender:
- Its tendency to take language as central.
- Its emphasis on consensus as the organizing principle of community.
- Its preference for studying central members of the community over those at the margins.
- Its focus on the group at the expense of individuals.
- Its view of identity as a set of static categories.
- Its valorization of researchers’ interpretations over participants’ own understandings of their practices.
- Bucholtz argues that within the community of practice framework, we can define a social group by all social practices, not just language.
- Davies (2005, 1) argues that the idea of legitimacy is central in community of practice analyses and power structures cannot be ignored: ‘While practices may define the community, the community determines who has access to that practice.’
Social networks:
- Another way of viewing how an individual relates to other individuals in society is to ask what social networks he or she participates in. Defined by the kinds, frequency, and constellation of social interactions.
- Milroy’s research is the best known:
Dense social network is if the people you know and interact with also know and interact with one another. If not then it is a loose one.
Multiplex social network if the people within it are tied together in more than one way, that is, not just through work but also through other social activities.
- The social networks of particular speakers are not fixed; they can change, just as the ways in which people speak can change over their lifetimes. People also belong to different networks of different strengths.
Social identities:
- A key concept in the study of identities is that identity is not something you have, it is something you do. Like a community of practice, it is something that finds its basis in interactions.
- Heller (2007) notes that the concepts of identity, along with those of community and language, are ‘heuristic devices which capture some elements of how we organize ourselves, but which have to be understood as social constructs’ .
- Speakers’ identities must be continually reconstructed and may be redefined through discourse; they do not exist outside of discourse.
- Identity is either a fundamental ‘sameness’ of group members or an abiding and foundational aspect of a person’s self. In the social constructionist sense, however, the term identity is used to invoke the interactively developed self that is multiple, fragmented, and fluctuating. It is also used to discuss the speakers’ identification with social categories of all types and interactional stances of similarity and difference.
- Issues of identity are particularly salient in work by Rampton on what he calls crossing: ‘Language crossing involves code alternation by people who are not accepted members of the group associated with the second language that they are using (code switching into varieties that are not generally thought to belong to them)’.
- Each individual therefore is a member of many different groups. How identities are constructed and manifested is a pervasive issue in sociolinguistics.
Beliefs about Language and Social Groups:
- A key aspect of the study of language and social groups is that how languages are evaluated usually has very little to do with their linguistic features, and much more to do with the social status of the groups associated with them. These beliefs about linguistic groups also influence how speakers use particular features and varieties of languages and are thus central to our understandings of social groups and language use.
- Many people hold strong beliefs on various issues having to do with language and are quite willing to offer their judgments on these issues
- Language beliefs are well entrenched, as are language attitudes and language behaviors.
- The connections we have discussed in the previous sections indicate that we use language to make ourselves part of particular social groups. We also use language to categorize other people, and judge them, at least partially, according to the social value of the categories to which we assign them.
Ideologies:
- Errington: the study of language ideologies is ‘a rubric for dealing with ideas about language structure and use relative to social contexts.’.
- While some individuals are sometimes considered to be ‘good speakers’ of one variety or another, this judgment is usually more about the variety itself.
- There are certain hegemonic ideologies about different ways of speaking that dominate in a society and are widely accepted, even by speakers of the varieties which are judged as deficient. These ideologies dictate that certain ways of speaking are indicative of undesirable social traits. ex. Poverty or lack of education.
Perceptual dialectology:
- The study of non-linguists’ ideas about the regions, features, and values of dialects.
- What emerges from such work is an understanding of the attitudes people have about the ways of speaking associated with particular regions. It also reveals stereotypes concerning people who live in these regions.
- Among various interesting findings in these studies we see that speakers may not rate their own dialect highly, and that many dialects (including the speakers’ own), are sometimes rated highly for pleasantness but as lacking in correctness, or vice versa.
- One of the interesting findings in some recent research in perceptual dialectology is that regional differences are often intertwined with ideas about other social groups.
- Studies in perceptual dialectology show us that people have far more nuanced beliefs about dialects than simply that they are either ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Further, most people have a more sophisticated understanding of social groups, incorporating information about region, social class, race/ethnicity, and many other levels of identity.
