Sociolinguistics Seminar SeriesEnglish SectionAnne Fabricius

Structure of today’s seminarDiscussion of the readingsA sociolinguistic understanding of language

in society: some principles to be aware ofWhat does the field encompass?Who are the major authorsStudying Varieties of English for the

Language Project: how to do it at RUC?

Wolfram and Schilling-Estes paperA discussion of popular or folk notions of

language, dialect, accent and deconstruction of them

Presenting also how sociolinguists understand these terms

Role of Language variation in identity construction: what we as members of a speech community understand on the basis of the sounds around us.

In-group and out-group realisations

Some examplesEnglish ’no’Danish ’meget’This knowledge of our local speech variety

and others we come into contact with is the result of membership of a community

(Quantitative) sociolinguistic methodThe structured sociolinguistic interviewNew York City 1961-2, publ Labov 1966

*sample on CD

Set new standards for ’Urban dialectology’ following the dialectology tradition ultimately going back to the Grimm Brothers and German Romanticism

Myth versus sociolinguistic realitySee page 91 in compendiumLook at it detail

The standard/non-standard continuumStandard/ non-standard a very salient folk

category many English speaking countriesIs in fact a continuum that is somewhat

subjective in placing a dividing line between the two

Certain grammar and pronunciation features can be particularly salient and therefore stand as sharp demarcators of language varieties

Can think of langauges in the individual as statistical composites of features and aggregated styles

The distinctionsFormal standard: written-language based

and extensively codified and often conservative

Informal standard: applied to spoken language and with multiple acceptable norms, avoids socially stigmatised structures

Vernacular: spoken language, investigated by access to speakers usage patterns, non-codifed

Why study dialects/language variation?Language variation as an academic curiosity!Language is inherently variable according to

context (use) and speaker (users), so it permeates language use constantly

Language is an everyday social miracle that is worth understanding and respecting

Social justice issues /education /discriminationUltimately it can tell us things about how

languages change around us; variation becomes change in progress as the social profile of its users change, community norms change

Eg RP spoken in the 1930s....

Coupland’s PaperArgues that the performance of Welshness

here is an example that takes us beyond Labov’s claim that style (language according to use) was related to ’how much attention was paid to speech’ in his original interviews, and that style could be one dimensional…

Coupland emphasises style as performance, as a process of ’doing’

What do you think of this way of understanding how speakers make use of their linguistic repertiore (constantly in development up to age of adulthood..perhaps even longer)

Instead…Dialect can be used consciously in

performance genres like light radio entertainment, to ’play around’ with what it means to be Welsh

We can’t just assume that people performing different voices are being ’authentic’ spekaers, which is what classic sociolinguistics has done (set up interviews with subjects chosen to fit social characteristics and taken the speech at ’face value’)

Two sides of the coin ....

So…Coupland sees dialect as a semiotic

ressource, for making meaning of linguistic and sociolinguistic types

Stylisation is therefore a social practice that seen from the view of the actors themselves is done to say things about the speaker.

Ultimately social-constructivist

As essential to late modernity…A practice becoming more and more

widespread along with reflexivity in post modern culture

Encompasses fundamental shifts in how we orient to social group identities and memberships

Partly a result of globalisation and mobility on a hitherto unexperienced scale

A late modern symbolic practiceSee GOAT and FACE examples

Some principles of empirical sociolinguisticsAdopts social science methods of

accountability to dataIs empirical and deductive(is reliant on real data in the same way as

CDA, and all the disciplines we talk about in this seminar series)

Uses both qualitative and quantitative methodsUses ethnographic information and

sociological paradigms (thus socio-)Employs (largely) structuralist tools of

linguistics analysis

Some principles of empirical sociolinguisticsFocusses on diversity and variation in

language use for different social groups (subcultures, ethnicities, societies, nations, genders, ages, occupational groups, city locations)

Since every speaker has a complex history and identity, the person’s history and social context must be taken into account

Overall, sociolinguistics aims to explain and situate language variation through the linguistic and social context

Who are the major authors in quantitative sociolinguistics?US: William Labov, Gillian Sankoff, Shana

Poplack, Peter Trudgill, Walt Wolfram, Jack Chambers, Barbara Horvath, Ron Macauley, Penny Eckert…

UK: Paul Kerswill, Jenny Cheshire, Jane Stuart-Smith, Sali Tagliamonte, Dominic Watt, Paul Foulkes, Gerry Docherty, Miriam Meyerhoff…

LANCHART centre, Cop. Uni

Who are the major authors in qualitative sociolinguistics?US and UK Ben Rampton, Celia Roberts,

Nikolas Coupland, Adam Jaworski, Barbara Johnstone, Allan Bell, Bent Preisler

Also milieus at Copenhagen University (J Normann Jørgensen)

CALPIU

Major JournalsLanguage and SocietyJournal of SociolinguisticsEnglish World wideLanguage Variation and ChangeLanguage AwarenessJournal of Pragmatics

Some books from AF’s collectionHandbook of Language Variation and ChangeSociolinguisticsUrban VoicesWells’ Accents of English…

Challenges for doing projects in this areaA knowledge of phonetics/morphology and

interest in itinterest in variation and variabilityFinding suitable data (tv, internet, film

dvds)Finding sociolinguistically-informed

descriptions of the relevant varietiesFinding the meanings and attitudes

determining variationFinding the mechanisms governing

variation in performance

An Australian cult sensation….http://www.kathandkim.com/default.htm

Smack the Pony sequences on CD

http://www.norfolkdialect.com/http://www.scots-online.org/