The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics

Allan Bell

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118593974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics presents a comprehensive introduction to the main concepts and terms of sociolinguistics, and of the goals, methods, and findings of sociolinguistic research.

• Introduces readers to the methodology and skills of doing hands-on research in this field
• Features chapter-by-chapter classic and contemporary case studies, exercises, and examples to enhance comprehension
• Offers wide-ranging coverage of topics across sociolinguistics. It begins with multilingualism, and moves on through language choice and variation to style and identity
• Takes students through the challenges involved in conducting their own research project
• Written by one of the leading figures in sociolinguistics

1

WHAT ARE SOCIOLINGUISTICS?

Sociolinguists are professional eavesdroppers – not on what people say, but on how they are saying it:

I am on a train heading out of London and I can overhear a young family of four sitting a few rows ahead. When I heard them boarding the train, I thought they were speaking French, but now I am sure I hear German, and then English.
It turns out the father is speaking mostly English to his partner and their two young boys. He is obviously a native English speaker, but occasionally he switches into – ­fluent – French, and he uses some German to the older boy. The mother is speaking mainly French to her partner and especially to the younger boy. But she is also using a good deal of German, and a little English, although with a non-native accent. The older boy talks to his father largely in English but with a lot of German, and rather less French. His English accent has audible traces from both his father and mother.
Then, to keep the children amused, the parents begin a song, the round Frère Jacques. But the next verse is Bruder Jakob, and finally Brother John. The ­trilingual switching is remarkable to me, the overhearer, partly because it seems utterly ordinary to the participants themselves.

This book is about the profusion of voices in society. It is about language as social fact and as identity bearer; language as interaction, as communication, as a bridge between self and other; language as expresser; language as delight. We are immersed in languages, dialects, varieties, genres, accents, jargons, styles, codes, speech acts. They eddy and swirl round us in an always-changing current of linguistic ­reproduction and creation. Each voice has its time and its place, its desire to be heard, its timbre. This is the linguistic profusion of Babel, that ancient story that I believe champions rather than condemns language diversity (see Chapter 12 for a re-reading).

Language is also implicated in the shape of society. As well as a truth-teller, ­language can be a deceiver. Social inequities produce linguistic inequities, and ­language ­reproduces inequity in many areas of society: structures, demographics, power, gender, ethnicity, interaction, globalization. Not all voices are equally or ­easily heard. The founding ­theorist of sociolinguistics, Dell Hymes (1974: 195), ­distinguished three ways in which sociolinguistics may view the relationship between the social and the linguistic:

1 the social as well as the linguistic: addressing social issues which have a ­language component

2 socially realistic linguistics: basing linguistic investigation on real-society data

3 socially constituted linguistics: affirming that language is inherently social and society is inherently linguistic.

In opting for a socially constituted linguistics Hymes emphasized a concern for equity and how that is evidenced and substantiated in the voices of society – who speaks, who is listened to, who is valued, who is disregarded. ‘One way to think of the society in which one would like to live is to think of the kinds of voices it would have’, he wrote (1996: 64). In such a Sociolinguistics of Voice, linguistic equity is something that is not a given but needs to be achieved in society. It invites engagement. These are the two core ideas which run through this book: the profusion that is language, and the drive to a sociolinguistics of equity. I will return particularly to the second of these issues in the book’s concluding chapter.

1.1 WHAT IS LANGUAGE?

Sociolinguists probably don’t spend enough time pondering this most basic ­question. Sociolinguistics began in a time and place when most linguists treated language as if it occurred in a vacuum. In American linguistics of the 1960s the transformational-generative theory of Noam Chomsky was in the ascendant. This reduced language competence to an abstract ability to judge whether sentences were grammatical, and sidelined all other aspects of language behaviour as mere ‘performance’. The focus on ‘an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community’ (Chomsky 1965: 3) was at odds with any kind of interest in examining how language was actually used when people talked.

In this intellectual climate that was inhospitable to bringing the social into ­linguistics, Hymes became the leading early advocate of sociolinguistics. He took over Chomsky’s narrow notion of linguistic competence and broadened it to ­encompass much of what Chomsky had treated as performance, coining the term communicative competence. Hymes’s focus on ‘the competence that enables ­members of a community to conduct and interpret speech’ (1972: 52) shifts the interest away from the purely grammatical and on to native speakers’ ability to use language in a range of social situations. Any learner of a second language knows that even if you can speak totally grammatically, unless you also know the right ways to use those grammatical sentences, you will sound nothing like a native speaker. Worse, you may offend or insult those who are native speakers. You have to know when and how to use the language as well as what language to ­produce. Communicative competence involves not just linguistic knowledge, but ­cultural ­knowledge and interactional skills. How speakers and hearers ­function linguistically with each other in social context is a central concern of sociolin­guistics.

I offer four characteristics of what language is to a sociolinguist. They follow one from the other:

1 Language is social

The stuff – the matter – of language is to be found not in mental judgements on sentences but in the utterance – the minimal unit in which speakers say things. And beyond that, in the discourses and conversations in which utterances gather. Language is situated, it has a context. There are speakers and hearers, a time and a place, a topic and a purpose.

Some of the best statements about this sociolinguistic view of language come from non-sociolinguists, although the terms they use may be different such as ‘speech’, ­‘discourse’, ‘­message’ or even ‘the word’. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur argued against the view that language was a disembodied, de-social matter. The social life of speech and discourse does not bracket out the profusion of language in order to get at the formality of the code:

Whereas structural linguistics simply places speech and use in parentheses, the theory of discourse removes the parentheses. (Ricoeur 1981: 133)

2 Language is dialogue

Language happens between people and is shaped by them. It involves listeners as well as speakers, with all the consequent messiness of verbal interaction, where turn follows turn with interruptions, overlaps, utterances completed by someone else. Such ­real-world complexity is both the delight and the challenge of the sociolinguist. We are interested in hearers, in the audience. We should no more conceive of ­language without hearers than of a language that has no speakers. Language is ­co-created, in the words of another ­non-sociolinguist:

Word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses the ‘one’ in ­relation to the ‘other’ … A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee. A word is ­territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor. (Voloshinov 1973: 86)

3 Language is profusion

The fruit of dialogue is heteroglossia – linguistic variety. Language cannot be tamed to an idealized standard. It is always and everywhere variegated, according to a ­collaborator of Voloshinov:

At any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. (Bakhtin 1981: 291)

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Exercise 1.1 Language myths

The book Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (1998), deals with 21 ­frequently expressed folk ideologies about language. Here are some of the chapter titles:

French is a logical language
Some languages have no grammar
Italian is beautiful, German is ugly
They speak really bad English down south and in New York City
Aborigines speak a primitive language
Black children are verbally deprived

1 These are language ideologies. Examine one or more of them. What sort of ­linguistic arguments can be advanced as evidence for it? How much do these justify the myth?

2 Are there linguistic counter-arguments to the myth? Specify them.

3 What are the social foundations of the myth? For example, what are the perceived characteristics of the people with whom a named language or variety is associated? How have these perceptions come about?

4 Where did the myth come from? Is there any truth in it?

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4 Language is ideology

Language is not only – perhaps not even primarily – about communication of ­content. Rather it is about social meaning. That is, all language use ‘indexes’ social meanings, evokes places, periods, groups, classes, genders. It carries ideology, it serves power. Language ‘tastes’ of its former uses. Our hearers place us against the backdrop of all their prior experience of language. We cannot talk without giving ourselves away socially, ethnically, geographically. The indexing of social meaning is deeply embedded in language and its use. As George Bernard Shaw wrote in the preface to Pygmalion, words later paraphrased into one of the songs of My Fair Lady:

An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him,
The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.

Exercise 1.1 debates some other language myths.

1.2 WHAT IS A LANGUAGE?

When I begin teaching a class in sociolinguistics, during the first session I will ask the members of the class what languages they speak. A typical list – for a New Zealand university graduate-level class – will include English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese. Often also German, French, Bahasa Malaysia, Afrikaans or Korean. Sometimes there is Khmer, Samoan, Māori, Italian, Spanish or Russian. Most students in the class will be speakers of two languages, several speak three or four. Occasionally someone claims to speak five or more languages – and usually there are one or two monolingual English speakers, from various dialect backgrounds. One student claims a language that is not spoken. New Zealand Sign Language is the native language of several thousand deaf New Zealanders. It was legislated as an official language in 2006. Sign languages have been recognized as full languages in a number of countries, but still struggle for ­recognition in many parts of the world.

This multilingualism offers a rich ground to examine and illustrate the social workings of language. A class with a dozen languages is a gift, because many of the topics and issues in the course are manifested in the experiences of the class itself.

Naming languages

But these acts of language naming are more problematic than they look. China re...

Table of contents

• COVER
• PRAISE FOR THE GUIDEBOOK TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• 1 WHAT ARE SOCIOLINGUISTICS?
• 2 A PROFUSION OF LANGUAGES
• 3 LANGUAGE SHIFT AND MAINTENANCE
• 4 LANGUAGE BIRTH AND DEATH
• 5 CODES AND CHOICES
• 6 SITUATED LANGUAGE
• 7 VARIATION IN LANGUAGE
• 8 LANGUAGE IN TIME
• 9 LANGUAGE IN SPACE
• 10 VALUING LANGUAGE
• 11 STYLING LANGUAGE AND IDENTITIES
• 12 THEORY AND ENGAGEMENT
• REFERENCES
• INDEX