Ethnolect

6 Key excerpts on "Ethnolect"

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  eBook - ePub

  Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change

  Insights from the Global North and South

  • Paul Kerswill, Heike Wiese, Paul Kerswill, Heike Wiese(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...On the whole, however, a good deal of the earlier research on multiEthnolects compares the speech of the local (White) population with that of a bundle of non-local immigrant ethnicities (e.g. ‘Non-Anglo’ in the MLE research), rather than teasing ethnic identity apart. What the research presented in this volume and elsewhere shows is that ‘inter-ethnic’ fused dialects emerge when their speakers routinely interact, share strong, dense, close-knit social network ties and belong to the same communities of practice. Central to the emergence and focusing of the ‘multiEthnolect’ then is social network membership and not ethnicity per se. Some members of an ethnic group may not be part of that network (and so may adopt features from the multiEthnolect late or not at all). Some networks might form, which, because of neighbourhood demographics, housing policy, migration history and so on, bring people together with a varied but nevertheless restricted set of ethnic backgrounds. Important to tease apart, then, is the extent to which ethnicity is the central determinant of the emergence of the multiEthnolect, or actually the structure of social network ties in certain communities which happen to be multiethnic. 6 Are multiEthnolects special ? The sociolinguistics of ethnicity has been at the forefront of our empirical and theoretical attention in sociolinguistics over the past two decades. The 21st century has brought a range of studies of Ethnolects of different kinds as we have seen – of the fused multiEthnolects of Northern and Western European cities as well as of those of individual migrant communities in North America, Australasia and beyond. Much of the retheorisation of dialect as a repertoire of linguistic resources from which speakers draw in light of the particular indexical meanings attached to them stems from research with ethnicity as its focus (Benor 2010; Sharma 2011). It is ethnicity that has been at the centre of recent work on so-called superdiversity...

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  Language, Society and Power

  An Introduction

  • Annabelle Mooney, Betsy Evans(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...While an ‘Ethnolect’ might be thought to be used only by members of an immigrant community, this is not always the case. In fact, the linguistic features that distinguish an Ethnolect may have no connection to a heritage language at all (Labov, 2008). A person might claim membership in an ethnic group based on where their parents were born. But whether this will be accepted or acknowledged by other members of this group may depend on what kind of evidence of membership is provided. Identities based on ethnicity sometimes have to be ratified by other members of the group. Some of this evidence might be constituted by linguistic variables, for example, a certain proficiency in a language may be enough to have an ethnic identity accepted. However, there might be other identity markers that need to be addressed in different ways, or even shown with different signs, by wearing certain clothes, having bodily markings and so on. Crucially, groups don’t always assign value to the same things; thus, ideological differences may result in the positive evaluation of a language variety in one community but not in another. Labov’s concept of ‘covert prestige’ makes this clearer (1972a). The notion of ‘covert prestige’ acknowledges that some speech communities, usually ones that don’t have a great deal of power in relation to other dominant groups, value different kinds of speaking, often involving non-standard varieties (such as AAE). For those communities, these non-standard varieties are ‘covertly’ prestigious, or valued within the community but not outside it. ‘ Overt prestige ’ is awarded to varieties that are valued according to hegemonic norms. Thus, speaking the standard variety of a language confers prestige in wider society but may not within particular communities...

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  Language and the Lexicon

  An Introduction

  • David Singleton(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...Ethnicity is that aspect of culture which signifies ‘belongingness’ to a community in terms other than socio-economic terms; it is been recently defined as ‘the identificational dimension of culture’. Racial factors may or may not be present among the criteria by which an ethnic group defines itself and/or is defined by other groups. For example, the small Vietnamese community in Dublin has characteristics of both a cultural and a racial kind which distinguish it from the majority of the population, whereas most Scots residing in the same city would not be identifiable in racial terms but would nevertheless see themselves as culturally distinct from the Irish people among whom they live. Obviously, one component of a culture which very often plays an important role in identifying an ethnic group is language. For many members of particular communities there is an absolutely vital connection between their language and their ethnicity; thus, for instance, one of the slogans frequently heard in the context of the revival of the Irish language is ‘ Gan teanga, gan tir ‘ – ‘Without a language, without a country’ – and among Jews it has been claimed that Hebrew ‘emerges from the same fiery furnace from which the soul of the people emerges’. In some countries and regions there is a high degree of separation of ethnic groupings defined largely in linguistic terms. For example, in Belgium the longstanding linguistico-cultural conflict between the Dutch-speaking Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons has resolved itself into a division of the country – with the exception of the bilingual territory of Brussels – into two large unilingual regions, Dutch-speaking Flanders to the north, and French-speaking Wallonia to the south. There is in addition an officially recognized small German-speaking area in eastern Belgium (Eupen, St Vith)...

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  Language, Culture, and Society

  An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

  • James Stanlaw, Nobuko Adachi, Zdenek Salzmann(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...Almost all speakers make use of several idiolects, depending on the circumstances of communication. For example, when family members talk to each other, their speech habits typically differ from those any one of them would use in, say, an interview with a prospective employer. The concept of idiolect therefore refers to a very specific phenomenon—the speech variety used by a particular individual. DIALECTS Often, people who live in the same geographic area, have similar occupations, or have the same education or economic status speak relatively similar idiolects compared to those from other groups. These shared characteristics may entail similarities in vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammatical features. When all the idiolects of a group of speakers have enough in common to appear at least superficially alike, we say they belong to the same dialect. The term dialect, then, is an abstraction: It refers to a form of language or speech used by members of a regional, ethnic, or social group. Dialects that are mutually intelligible belong to the same language. All languages spoken by more than one small homogeneous community are found to consist of two or more dialects. Mutual intelligibility, of course, can vary in degree. In the early 1950s, a number of men and women from eight reservations in New York and Ontario were tested in an experiment designed to determine which of their local dialects were mutually intelligible and therefore dialects of one language, and which were not and therefore could be classified as individual languages of the Iroquoian language family. Even though the investigators arrived at percentages of intelligibility between any two of the Iroquoian speech communities, the question of where the boundaries lay between intelligibility and unintelligibility remained unresolved...

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  Foundations in Sociolinguistics

  An ethnographic approach

  • Dell Hymes(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...Chapter 4 Social Anthropology, Sociolinguistics and the Ethnography of Speaking “Sociolinguistics” is the most recent and most common term for an area of research that links linguistics with anthropology. 16 “Ethnography of speaking” designates a particular approach. I shall sketch the context in which the two terms have emerged, then try to indicate the importance of the ethnography of speaking, not only to the area of research, but also to linguistics and social anthropology as disciplines. To argue the study of speech is likely to seem only a plea for linguistics. To avoid that impression, I shall treat linguistics first, and at greater length, arguing the need for ethnography there, before broaching the complementary need for linguistics in social anthropology. Behind both arguments stands a common conception of the study of speech. I Mixed terms linking linguistics with the social sciences, especially anthropology, are an old story. One can trace the use of “ethnographic philology,” “philological ethnology,” “linguistic anthropology,” and the like from at least the middle of the nineteenth century. Until the second world war such terms were usually phrases—coordinate (“linguistics and ethnology”), genitive (“sociology of language”), adjectival (“sociological linguistics”). Only since World War II have one-word terms come to prominence. Their form, their relative chronology, and their prevalence, are revealing. The form of these terms—ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics—shows that it is linguistics, its concepts, methods, and prestige, that has become central...

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  Linguistic Ethnography

  Interdisciplinary Explorations

  • Fiona Copland, Sara Shaw, Julia Snell, Fiona Copland, Sara Shaw, Julia Snell(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  ...Nevertheless, the group of researchers aligning to linguistic ethnography has grown rapidly since the Linguistic Ethnography Forum was first set up. At the time of writing, it has over 600 members from more than 30 countries, many of whom attend LEF’s biennial conference on Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Communication. A search of Google Scholar also indicates a growth in research and referencing of linguistic ethnography work, with citations growing steadily since the inception of LEF (Table 1.1). Despite increasing interest, there remains a question about whether linguistic ethnography is a new interdisciplinary field or, whether, as Martin Hammersley has suggested, such growth reflects a wider ‘obsession with re-branding and relaunching’ (2007, p. 690) that is characteristic of the social sciences in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This collection showcases a current of work which has appropriated linguistics, ethnography and linguistic anthropology in interesting ways and which share a number of commonalities (see below). Taken together, they suggest that linguistic ethnography should be considered as more than a simple rebranding exercise. Table 1.1 Citations of ‘linguistic ethnography’ on Google Scholar Year Citations 2013 171 2012 147 2011 128 2010 121 2009 104 2008 67 2007 58 2006 32 2005 28 2004 16 2003 27 2002 24 2001 7 2000 2 Editorial process We came to linguistic ethnography in 2007 via a five-day course on Key Concepts and Methods in Ethnography, Language and Communication. The course introduced us to a range of perspectives and resources used to study language and communication ethnographically, drawn from the ethnography of communication, theories of social interaction, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis and social semiotics (see Chapter 2 for a detailed description)...

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