Basic Concepts in Sociolinguistics

Term Paper , 2023 , 110 Pages

Speech Science / Linguistics

The primary purpose of this e-book is to provide a resource for readers seeking an understanding of some basic notions in the field of sociolinguistics. Each notion draws on a variety of sources. The breadth of the published sources can be seen in the bibliographic information that is included by the end.

Contents

1. The Boundaries of Sociolinguistics

2. Social Correlates
2.1 Social class
2.2 Gender
2.3 Age
2.4 Ethnicity

3. Defining Groups
3.1 Speech communities
3.2 Social Networks

4. Languages and Communities
4.1 Languages, Dialects, and Varieties
4.2 Mutual intelligibility
4.3 Language Standardization
4.4 Regional and Social Dialects
4.5 Styles and registers
4.6 The Linguistic Repertoire

5. Contact Languages
5.1 Pidgins and Creoles
5.2 Lingua Franca

6. Languages in Contact
6.1 Diglossia
6.2 Bilingualism and Multilingualism
6.3 Code-switching
6.4 Borrowings
6.5 Language Maintenance
6.7 Endangered Languages
6.8 Language Death

References

Preface

The primary purpose of this e-book is to provide a resource for readers seeking an understanding of some basic notions in the field of sociolinguistics. Each notion draws on a variety of sources. The breadth of the published sources can be seen in the bibliographic information that is included by the end.

1. The Boundaries of Sociolinguistics

Some investigators have found it appropriate to try to introduce a distinction between sociolinguistics (or micro-sociolinguistics) and the sociology of language (or macro-sociolinguistics). In this distinction, (micro-) sociolinguistics is concerned with investigating the relationships between language and society with the goal being a better understanding of the structure of language and of how languages function in communication; the equivalent goal in the sociology of language is trying to discover how social structure can be better understood through the study of language, for example, how certain linguistic features serve to characterize particular social arrangements. Hudson (1996, p. 4) has described the difference as follows: “sociolinguistics is ‘the study of language in relation to society,’ whereas the sociology of language is ‘the study of society in relation to language’”.

In other words, in sociolinguistics, we study language and society in order to find out as much as we can about what kind of thing language is, and in the sociology of language we reverse the direction of our interest. Using the alternative terms given above, Coulmas (1997, p.2) says that ‘micro-sociolinguistics investigates how social structure influences the way people talk and how language varieties and patterns of use correlate with social attributes such as class, sex, and age. Sociolinguistics is a very broad field, and it can be used to describe many different ways of studying language. It is the study of language in relation to social factors, including differences in region, class, occupational dialect and gender. In other words, it studies how various social factors such as gender, ethnicity, age or social class affect language. It is the study of variation at the individual level (Variation in grammar, pronunciation associated with the speaker’s status which can include social class, education, gender, etc).

Language is variable and changing; thus, language is not homogeneous, neither for individual users nor among groups of speakers who use the same language. Sociolinguistics is based on the premise that language use symbolically represents fundamental aspects of social behaviour and human interaction. Thus, sociolinguists study how people speak differently in various social contexts, and how people use specific functions of language to convey aspects of our identity and social meaning. Sociolinguistics has various subfields and branches such as dialectology, discourse analysis, ethnography of speaking, geolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, language contact studies, etc.

Macro-sociolinguistics, on the other hand, is basically the study of the relationship between language and society. In other words, it studies society in relation to language; thus, society is the object of study in this field. This field studies the language of a particular community in order to discover and understand the use of the social structures and the way people of that community use them to communicate properly. The idea that language can reflect (automatically or deliberately) attitudes of the speakers are at the base of the sociology of language. Sociologists are interested in the attitudes of these speakers. The focus is on language use in society considering the whole variability in a community (language shift, bilingualism, language power, etc.).

Sociology of language studies what societies do with their languages, that is, attitudes and attachments that account for the functional distribution of speech forms in society, language shift, maintenance, and replacement, the delimitation and interaction of speech communities. The view we will take here is that both sociolinguistics and the sociology of language require a systematic study of language and society if they are to be successful. Moreover, a sociolinguistics that deliberately refrains from drawing conclusions about society seems to be unnecessarily restrictive, just as restrictive indeed as a sociology of language that deliberately ignores discoveries about language made in the course of sociological research.

It is also important to notice that there is a lot of overlap between both sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. In fact, sociology of language is also known by the term ‘macro-sociolinguistics’. Although both of these fields study the interaction between language and society, sociolinguistics focuses on language while sociology of language focuses on society. In general, sociolinguistics looks at how social factors affect language whereas the sociology of language looks at the relationship between society and language. Some of the s imilarities between Sociolinguistics and Sociology of Language are as under:

- Both fields deal with the interaction between society and language.
- The boundaries between these two fields are sometimes not clear.

Coulmas (1997, p.3) says in this respect:

There is no sharp dividing line between the two, but a large area of common concern. Although sociolinguistic research centers about a number of different key issues, any rigid micro–macro compartmentalization seems quite contrived and unnecessary in the present state of knowledge about the complex interrelationships between linguistic and social structures. Contributions to a better understanding of language as a necessary condition and product of social life will continue to come from both quarters.

Trudgill (1978) tries to differentiate those studies that he considers to be clearly sociolinguistic in nature from those that clearly are not, for, as he says, ‘while everybody would agree that sociolinguistics has something to do with language and society, it is clearly also not concerned with everything that could be considered “language and society”.’ The problem, therefore, lies in the drawing of the line between language and society and sociolinguistics.

Labov (1970, p. 30) has described the sociology of language as follows:

It deals with large-scale social factors, and their mutual interaction with languages and dialects. There are many open questions, and many practical problems associated with the decay and assimilation of minority languages, the development of stable bilingualism, the standardization of languages and the planning of language development in newly emerging nations. The linguistic input for such studies is primarily that a given person or group uses language X in a social context or domain Y.

2. Social Correlates

2.1 Social class

If we consider ‘social class’ to be a useful concept to apply in stratifying society – and few indeed would deny its relevance! – we need a way to determine the social class of particular speakers. This raises various difficulties, as in many societies there are not strict guidelines, and terms such as ‘middle class’ may have many different meanings for the speakers themselves. Further, we must be cautious in any claims we make about social-class structures in a particular society, particularly if we attempt regional or historical comparisons. The social class system of England in the 1950s was different from what it is today and, presumably, it will be different again in another half century, and all these class systems were and are different from those existing contemporaneously in New York, Brazil, Japan, and so on.

Sociologists use a number of different scales for classifying people when they attempt to place individuals somewhere within a social system. An occupational scale may divide people into a number of categories as follows: major professionals and executives of large businesses; lesser professionals and executives of medium sized businesses; semi-professionals; technicians and owners of small businesses; skilled workers; semi-skilled workers; and unskilled workers. An educational scale may employ the following categories: graduate or professional education; college or university degree; attendance at college or university but no degree; high school graduation; some high school education; and less than seven years of formal education.

Once again, however, some caution is necessary in making comparison across time: graduating from college or university in the 1950s indicated something quite different from what it does today. Income level and source of income are important factors in any classification system that focuses on how much money people have. Likewise, in considering where people live, investigators must concern themselves with both the type and cost of housing and its location.

Social class is a notion that has its intellectual basis in theories of social and political economies dating from the nineteenth century, and theories of social class are associated with figures like Karl Marx and Max Weber. There are a number of ways of theorising and, therefore, defining social class. Though we generally think of it now as being a function of a person’s occupation (and/ or their personal wealth), this is only one way of theorising it. Marx drew a fundamental distinction between those who produce capital or resources and those who control the production of capital which others produce. The former are the working class (Marx’s proletariat, derived from a word meaning ‘worker’) and the latter, the middle class (Marx’s capitalists).

At the core of sociolinguistics is the fact that human societies are internally differentiated, whether by gender, age or class. These differentiations (and there are others, including ethnicity) are all at a ‘macro’ level, that is, broad groups into which people can be categorized. Theories of class have evolved over the last 150 years, starting with that of Karl Marx (1818–83). Discussions of class place different emphases on economic factors and more broadly cultural factors. Marx relates social structure to the position of individuals in relation to the means of production.

He defines capitalists as those who own the means of production, while those who must sell their labour to the capitalists are the proletariat (Giddens 2001, p. 284). This theory is grounded in the circumstances of mid-Victorian industrial Britain, with its extremes of exploitation and control by many factory owners. Of direct relevance to sociolinguists today was the rise of ‘class-consciousness’, which led to class-specific ways of seeing the world, and talking about things. Class segregation in Britain led to a divergence in speech at the level of dialect and accent. The new urban vernaculars which emerged in places like Manchester and Leeds had powerful working-class connotations.

Alongside them, there was the increasingly uniform Received Pronunciation of the elite, which consisted not only of the capitalists, but also traditional landowners, senior managers and civil servants, and aristocracy. (Mugglestone, (2003) is an excellent account of this process) Nineteenth-century British English was therefore split up not only into regional dialects, but also into social dialects or sociolects.

-Social Status and Functionalism: Weber and Parsons

In Weber’s work, class is theorised in terms of social actions, and a great many more social divisions/classes are recognised than Marx’s pair. Individuals’ economic situation might be an important factor in defining what class they belong to, but the influence of economic factors is tempered by people’s life style and life chances. Weber argued that all three of these factors define a person’s status. The shift in definition from Marx to Weber is of particular interest to sociolinguists because Weber’s conceptualisation of class tries to capture the significance of an individual’s participation in a complex set of associated behaviours (including speech, his life style), and also the importance of aspirations and attitudes (life chances). Another well-known sociologist, Talcott Parsons (who played a large role in introducing Weber’s work to US sociology), also emphasised the importance of social action in how we make social divisions within a society

Like the notion of the speech community (see section 3.1), class can be seen as being inherently about division or it can be seen as a construct that emphasises consensuality. The divisions inherent in Marx’s theory of social class were fundamental to his ideas about class conflict. Weber’s theory, on the other hand, allowed for class identity to be shaped by perceived similarity as well as difference. The approach of Max Weber (1864–1920) allowed for this greater complexity of modern societies.

According to Giddens (2001), Weber agreed with Marx in seeing class as ‘founded on objectively given economic conditions’, though class divisions ‘derive not only from control or lack of control of the means of production, but from economic differences which have nothing directly to do with property’ (Giddens, 2001, p. 285). Weber saw people as having differing ‘life chances’ because of differences in skills, education and qualifications. In a capitalist society, ‘status’not directly derived from Marxian ‘class’ must be recognized, and this leads to differences in what Weber called ‘styles of life’, marked by such things as ‘housing, dress, manner of speech, and occupation’ (Giddens, 2001, p. 285). Thus, cultural factors are brought in.

By the 1960s, Weber’s notion of ‘status’ would become central to sociolinguists like Labov, who are concerned with the social differentiation of phonetic and grammatical features in speech communities. However, Labov’s adoption of status actually came about through his reading of functionalist sociologists in the 1950s, particularly Parsons (1902–79). American functionalism developed out of Emile Durkheim’s notion that people’s occupations affect their social ties in such a way that their social experience is both moulded and restricted by them. From this, social groups with different interests and values emerge along occupational lines (Bedisti 2004 p. 29; see Morrison 1995, p.128–45).

Later on, functionalist theory asserted specifically that components of society are interrelated and that, together, they form a unified entity. Thus, ‘to understand any part of society, such as family or religion, the part must be seen in relation to society as a whole [. . .]. The functionalist will examine a part of society, such as the family, in terms of its contribution to the maintenance of the social system’ (Holborn and Haralambos 2000, p. 9).

Parsons is credited with being the main theorist behind ‘structural functionalism’ in the United States up to the 1960s (Scott 1996). Class for Parsons is a hierarchy of esteem or status – a doctor is higher on the scale than a nurse – and is not directly connected with any economic considerations, though of course income will be a factor in this esteem. It is easy to see the appeal of this approach for sociolinguists. From it, inventories of the relative social positions of occupations were developed, and it was a straightforward matter to adapt these for the purposes of getting a socially stratified sample of speakers.

-Measuring social class

Social class is a function of the intersection of a whole lot of different social (and sometimes even personal) attributes. Therefore, there are a number of different ways in which class can be measured, and sociolinguists have tried to use a number of different metrics in their studies of speech communities. Some of the more careful work on class has taken such factors as people’s accommodation into account, giving higher scores to people that own their own homes rather than rent, and even more points to people depending on how much their home is worth and whether they have made structural improvements on the property and carefully maintain its appearance. But perhaps the most frequently used measure is a person’s occupation and/or the occupation of the primary breadwinner in their family when they were growing up.

On the basis of factors like this, a speech community can be subdivided into different socioeconomic classes It is important to note that professions differ in their status in different communities. Most countries have research boards that rank professions according to their local status. This ranking is based partly on the earning power of a typical member of that profession, but it also factors in things like the results from attitude surveys that are regularly conducted by Census Boards or Economic Research Councils. These attitude surveys ask people to indicate how much they ‘respect’ different professions (you have probably come across the results of these in the media for instance, they regularly show that politicians rank near the bottom with used car sellers).

But how reliable is it to use occupation as the principal basis for assigning them to a particular socioeconomic class? If we adopt the more Weberian view that social status or class is derived from a range of social actions, then we would seriously question the validity of this. Perhaps a more sensitive and accurate measure of social class or social status would combine a number of objective factors (like personal wealth and value of home) with subjective factors (like people’s aspirations to social mobility, or their friendship networks).

By the 1960s, Weber’s notion of ‘status’ would become central to sociolinguists like William Labov, who are concerned with the social differentiation of phonetic and grammatical features in speech communities. However, Labov’s adoption of status actually came about through his reading of functionalist sociologists in the 1950s, particularly Talcott Parsons (1902–79). In his early work on linguistic variation in New York City, Labov (1966) used the three criteria of education, occupation, and income to set up ten social classes. His class 0, his lowest class, had grade school education or less, were laborers, and found it difficult to make ends meet. His classes 1 to 5, his working class, had had some high school education, were blue-collar workers, but earned enough to own such things as cars. His classes 6 to 8, his lower middle class, were high school graduates and semi-professional and white-collar workers who could send their children to college. His highest class, 9, his upper middle class, were well educated and professional or business-oriented.

In this classification system for people in the United States about 10 percent of the population are said to be lower class, about 40 percent working class, another 40 percent lower middle class, and the remaining 10 percent fall into the upper middle class or an upper class, the latter not included in Labov’s study. In his later study of variation in Philadelphia, Labov (2001) used a socioeconomic index based on occupation, education, and house value.

In Labov’s (2001) work on variation in Philadelphia, he systematically tried to work out whether social class is best represented by a bundle of features – occupation, level of education and house value – or if it can be reduced to occupation alone. He found that for some variables, occupation was just as good an indicator of the variability as all three factors combined, but for most the combined measure did a better job of accounting for the variation observed.

It would be useful to have Labov’s test replicated in superficially similar urban, industrialised centres. Recent studies have drawn attention to the increasing complexity of measures of social class in cities. For instance, work based on the 2001 UK Census concludes that neighbourhood is a better predictor of attitudes and behaviours than occupation alone, because the effects of occupation interact with a number of other factors, such as more complex family structures, whether or not a household has two incomes, the marital status of the heads of household, and whether there are any children in the household at all.

Neighbourhoods seem to focus similarities on a lot of these measures, so you have concentrations of dinky (double-income-no-kids) households in certain areas, or upwardly mobile families of second-generation immigrants, etc. These neighbourhood categorisations are used by marketers (they determine what leaflets arrive in your mail) and by teachers, police and other public sector planning groups. They have not yet been widely used in sociolinguistic research, but as social scientists employ greater finesse in identifying social classes we can expect to see benefits flowing on from this to the study of linguistic variation.

Shuy’s Detroit study (Shuy et al., 1967) attempted to sample the speech of that city using a sample of 702 informants. Eleven field workers collected the data by means of a questionnaire over a period of ten weeks. They assigned each of their informants to a social class using three sets of criteria: amount of education, occupation, and place of residence. Each informant was ranked on a six- or seven-point scale for each set, the rankings were weighted (multiplied by 5 for education, 9 for occupation, and 6 for residence), and each informant was given a social-class placement.

Four social-class designations were used: upper middle class, those with scores of 20–48; lower middle class, those with scores of 49–77; upper working class, those with scores of 78–106; and lower working class, and those with scores of 107–134. There are some serious drawbacks to using social-class designations of this kind. Bainbridge (1994, p. 4023) says:

While sociolinguists without number have documented class-related variation in speech, hardly any of them asked themselves what social class was. They treated class as a key independent variable, with variations in speech dependent upon class variations, yet they never considered the meaning of the independent variable. In consequence, they seldom attempted anything like a theory of why class should have an impact, and even more rarely examined their measures of class to see if they were methodologically defensible.

Woolard (1985, p. 738) expresses a similar view: ‘sociolinguists have often borrowed sociological concepts in an ad hoc and unreflecting fashion, not usually considering critically the implicit theoretical frameworks that are imported.’ She adds, ‘However, to say that our underlying social theories are in need of examination, elaboration, or reconsideration is not to say that the work sociolinguists have done or the concepts we have employed are without merit.’

One of the problems in sociolinguistics, then, is the tension between the desire to accurately portray particular speakers and to make generalizations about groups of speakers. To the extent that the groups are real, that is, that the members actually feel that they do belong to a group, a description of a social dialect has validity; to the extent that they are not, it is just an artifact.

In the extremely complex societies in which most of us live, there must always be some question as to the reality of any kind of social grouping: each of us experiences society differently, multiple-group membership is normal, and both change and stability seem to be natural conditions of our existence. We must therefore exercise a certain caution about interpreting any claims made about ‘lower working-class speech,’ ‘upper middle-class speech,’ or the speech of any other social group designated with a class label – or any label for that matter.

Distinguishing among social classes in complex modern urban societies is probably becoming more and more difficult. The very usefulness of social class as a concept that should be employed in trying to explain the distribution of particular kinds of behavior, linguistic or otherwise, may need rethinking.

2.2 Gender

The field of language and gender is one of the most dynamic in sociolinguistics. It is characterised by a lot of discussion about the pros and cons associated with different ways of conceptualising the relationship between language and society. Early research on gender differences in language tended to focus on mixed talk, that is, talk involving both women and men. Researchers concentrated on what were seen as core features of language: pronunciation and grammar and might focus on glottal stops or on the vowel in hit; or they might count the incidence of multiple negation (sentences containing more than one negative word, such as ‘I ain’t said nothing’) or look at verb endings (e.g. she likes versus she like).

In the last twenty years, there has been an explosion of interest in the relationship between gender and language use. It is hard now to believe that early sociolinguistic work ignored gender as a social variable. The first British sociolinguist to make an impact with this quantitative sociolinguistic approach was Trudgill, in his work on his native city, Norwich. Trudgill (1974) showed that, whatever their social class, men in Norwich tended to choose pronunciations which were closer to the local vernacular and less close to Standard English. He argued on the basis of these findings that non-standard speech must have covert prestige, in competition with the overt prestige of Standard English.

In a smaller-scale study, Cheshire (1982) observed the linguistic behaviour of three groups of teenagers in adventure playgrounds in Reading, spending considerable time with them so that they came to take her for granted. Her data revealed that adolescent males were more likely to use nonstandard grammatical forms than adolescent females. This finding – that male speakers are more likely than female to use non-standard variants – has proved very robust and has been found in studies all over the world, including Belfast (Milroy 1980) and (Eisikovits 1998), for example.

During the last twenty years there has been an explosion of interest in relationship between gender and language use. The interest has increased so much that now it is hard to believe that early sociolinguistic work ignored gender as a social variable. Their androcentrism sprang from a sense that men and people were the same thing. A ‘Male-as-norm’ approach was taken; and women tended to be invisible in sociolinguistic research. This changed in the 1970s with the publication of an article – later a book – Language and Woman’s Place (1975) by Robin Lakoff, a female sociolinguist based at the University of California, Berkeley.

Lakoff (1975) drew attention to a wide range of gender differences in language use and argued that these differences were directly related to the relative social power of male speakers and relative powerless-ness of female speakers. Lakoff’s work now seems dated. In particular, her emphasis on the powerlessness of female speakers is out of tune with modern attitudes. But the book remains an important landmark in sociolinguistics.

Today, there is a shift in the concept. Sociolinguists now distinguish between sex – a biological term – and gender, the term used to describe socially constructed categories based on sex. The first British sociolinguist to make an impact with this quantitative sociolinguistic approach was Trudgill. His work on his native city, Norwich showed whatever their social class, men in Norwich tended to choose pronunciations which were closer to the local vernacular and less close to Standard English. He argued on the basis of these findings that non-standard speech must have covert prestige, in competition with the overt prestige of Standard English. Sociolinguists in the 1980s turned their attention to broader aspects of talk such as the conversational strategies characteristic of male and female speakers. Following are some strategies that were investigated:

- Minimal responses (e.g. yeah, mhm),
- Hedges (e.g., I mean, you know, maybe)
- Tag questions (e.g. isn’t it?
- Commands
- Directives
- Swearing
- Taboo language
- Compliments
- Turn-taking patterns

Today, some stereotype notions are challenged. For example, the generally prevalent notion that women as chatterboxes is challenged by research in different contexts.

Differing approaches to language and gender:

- Deficit approach
- Dominance approach
-Difference approach
-Social constructionist approach

The deficit approach was characteristic of the earliest work in the field. Bestknown is Lakoff ’s Language and Woman’s Place, which claims to establish something called ‘women’s language’ (WL), which is characterized by linguistic forms such as hedges, ‘empty’ adjectives like charming, divine, nice, and ‘talking in italics’ (exaggerated intonation contours). WL is described as weak and unassertive, in other words, as deficient. Implicitly, WL is deficient by comparison with the norm of male language. This approach was challenged because of the implication that there was something intrinsically wrong with women’s language, and that women should learn to speak like men if they wanted to be taken seriously.

The second approach – the dominance approach – sees women as an oppressed group and interprets linguistic differences in women’s and men’s speech in terms of men’s dominance and women’s subordination. Researchers using this model are concerned to show how male dominance is enacted through linguistic practice. The third approach – the difference approach – emphasizes the idea that women and men belong to different subcultures. The ‘discovery’ of distinct male and female subcultures in the 1980s seems to have been a direct result of women’s growing resistance to being treated as a subordinate group. The advantage of the difference model is that it allows women’s talk to be examined outside a framework of oppression or powerlessness.

The fourth and most recent approach is known as the social constructionist approach. Gender identity is seen as a social construct rather than as a ‘given’ social category. As West and Zimmerman (1987) eloquently put it, speakers should be seen as ‘doing gender’ rather than statically ‘being’ a particular gender. The observant reader will notice that the phrase ‘doing gender’ was also used in the paragraph above in discussion of the dominance approach. This is because the four approaches do not have rigid boundaries: researchers may be influenced by more than one theoretical perspective. What has changed is linguists’ sense that gender is not a static, add-on characteristic of speakers, but is something that is accomplished in talk every time we speak.

The deficit approach is now seen as outdated by researchers (but not by the general public, whose acceptance of, for example, assertiveness training for women suggests a world view where women should learn to be more like men). The other three approaches have all yielded valuable insights into the nature of gender differences in language, but it is probably true to say that social constructionism is now the prevailing paradigm.

Recent developments in the area include that gender is now conceptualized as something that is ‘done’. It is now believed to be never too static; and is produced actively; and is in interaction with others every day of our lives. In the past, researchers aimed to show how gender correlated with the use of particular linguistic features. Now, the aim is to show how speakers use the linguistic resources available to them to accomplish gender. Every time we speak, we have to bring off being a woman or being a man.

More recently, researchers have begun to look at single-sex interaction, focusing on informal talk, especially talk among friends. This was an important shift of focus, because it allowed researchers to get away from comparing male and female speech patterns, and instead allowed women’s and men’s talk to be analysed in their own terms. In particular, women’s talk was seen as part of female subculture and celebrated, rather than being labelled as powerless.

There is now a growing body of research investigating women’s conversational practices in a range of communities – white, African American, British Asian, deaf, hearing, straight, adult, teenage. Men remained unresearched for longer, but in the last decade, the whole issue of men and masculinity has been problematized. So we are now beginning to build up a picture of men’s talk in all-male groups, though what we know is skewed to young men and adolescents and to non-domestic contexts such as the street, the pub, the sports changing room.

This research has coincided with growing awareness of the role played by language in the construction of gender. It is apparent that when friends talk to each other in single-sex groups, one of the things that is being ‘done’ is gender. In other words, the fact that female speakers mirror each other’s contributions to talk, collaborate in the co-narration of stories and in general use language for mutual support needs to be considered in terms of the construction of femininity. For many men, by contrast, connection with others is accomplished in part through playful antagonisms, and this ties in with men’s need to position themselves in relation to dominant models of masculinity.

The answer to questions like do women and men speak differently? Do children speak differently from adults? is almost certainly ‘yes’ for all speech communities, and the reasons in both cases are mainly social and cultural. The linguistic forms used by women and men contrast – to different degrees – in all speech Communities. There are other ways too in which the linguistic behaviour of women and men differs. It is claimed women are more linguistically polite than men, for instance, and that women and men emphasise different speech functions.

A brief comment on the meaning of the terms sex and gender in sociolinguistics is needed. Sometimes, the term gender is used rather than sex because sex has come to refer to categories distinguished by biological characteristics, while gender is more appropriate for distinguishing people on the basis of their socio-cultural behaviour, including speech. The discussion of gender, here, focuses largely on contrasts between empirically observed features of women’s and men’s speech. The concept of gender allows, however, for describing masculine and feminine behaviours in terms of scales or continua rather than absolute categories. So we can also think of the features associated with women and men’s speech as linguistic resources for constructing ourselves as relatively feminine or relatively masculine.

Gender differences in language are often just one aspect of more pervasive linguistic differences in the society reflecting social status or power differences. If a community is very hierarchical, for instance, and within each level of the hierarchy men are more powerful than women, then linguistic differences between the speech of women and men may be just one dimension of more extensive differences reflecting the social hierarchy as a whole. In Bengali society, for instance, a younger person should not address a superior by first name. Similarly, a wife, being subordinate to her husband, is not permitted to use his name. She addresses him with a term such as suncho ‘do you hear?’ When she refers to him, she uses a circumlocution. One nice example of this practice is provided by the Bengali wife whose husband’s name was tara, which also means ‘star’. Since she could not call him tara , his wife used the term nokkhotro or ‘heavenly body’ to refer to him.

The fact that there are clearly identifiable differences between women’s and men’s speech in the communities discussed in this section reflects the clearly demarcated gender roles in these communities. Gender-exclusive speech forms (i.e. some forms are used only by women and others are used only by men) reflect gender-exclusive social roles. The responsibilities of women and men are different in such communities, and everyone knows that, and knows what they are. There are no arguments over who prepares the dinner and who puts the children to bed.

Starting in the 1980s, sociolinguists working in Arabic-speaking communities began to draw attention to equally robust exceptions to this. Over and over, studies of synchronic variation in Arabic seemed to be showing men using more of the overtly prestigious variants associated with Classical Arabic, and women using more of the variants associated with the local colloquial variety of Arabic.

This is shown very clearly in the results of a social dialect survey by Bakir (1986) looking at the distribution of Classical Arabic variants and local Iraqi Arabic variants. Bakir (1986) makes it clear that Iraqi women use more of the local variants, and Iraqi men use the Classical Arabic variants more. Similar results were found in studies done in Cairo, Damascus, and Hama (Syria). Since it is clear that Classical Arabic has higher overt prestige than local varieties of Arabic, and the diglossic relationship between Classical Arabic and local varieties is relatively stable.

In order to understand what is happening in the Arabic speech communities it is helpful to consider the social role of women and men. One of the characteristics of a High variety in a diglossic community is that the High code is learnt through formal education; it is not the language children naturally acquire at home.

Even where women have been relatively well educated, there continues to be a tendency for men to use more of the Classical Arabic variants than women do (this was the case, for example, with the study in Cairo, in which only middle- or upper-class speakers were interviewed). But even if a Cairene woman is quite well educated in Classical Arabic, her opportunities for participating fully in public life are nonetheless considerably more restricted than a man’s. Many of the jobs which involve active use of Classical Arabic are dominated by men (this is very clear in Haeri’s (2003) ethnography of the relationship between Classical and Cairene Arabic).

2.3 Age

Of all global categories employed in investigations of language variation, age is perhaps the least examined and the least understood in sociolinguistic terms. Unlike gender, ethnicity or social class, age is often approached uncritically and treated as a biological fact with which to categorize speakers, and against which other facets of our identity are played out. Age is a fundamental dimension of our social and personal identities. Legislatively speaking, it is our age that will influence what we should and should not do. Our age determines if we can vote, drive, marry and go to school or work.

It can influence what types of clothes we wear, places we go, and ways we speak. Our age is clearly more than a number – it marks our position in and our movement through the trajectory of life, which is seen in relation to societal norms of behaviour, obligation and responsibility. A close estimate at someone’s age from their voice quality and their linguistic behaviour is quite possible. It suggests that we are responsive to cues from phonetic/ phonological features, grammatical structures and lexical items, and we use such cues to locate speakers in the span of ages.

Life span is commonly divided into four stages:

- infancy/childhood,
- adolescence
- adulthood
- old age

The acquisition of language and of communicative competence during infancy and childhood is a vast area of enquiry. The acquisition of sociolinguistic competence is less well understood and is a fairly recent field of study. Studies show that age can affect acquisition of certain patterns of variation. Payne’s (1980) work in King of Prussia, Philadelphia, revealed: children moving into the area before the age of 8 or 9 were able to acquire certain local vowel shifts. In terms of language development in children, Labov (1972) suggests that acquisition of the local dialect takes place from the ages of 4 to 13, when speech patterns are dominated by the pre-adolescent group.

Adolescence is perhaps the most researched life stage. According to Eckert (1998), adolescents lead the entire age spectrum in sound change and in the general use of vernacular variables, and this lead is attributed to adolescents’ engagement in constructing identities in opposition to or at least independently of – their elders. Adulthood covers the gulf between adolescence and old age, and it is perhaps the least explored life stage. The movement through adulthood, which can be shaped by stages in career development and parenthood, is largely unexamined. As far as old age is concerned, in terms of language, old age is often approached from a clinical perspective: studies on the effects of loss of hearing or Aphasia etc. Little sociolinguistic work has been undertaken on old age as a life stage. The speaker’s age-related place in society is complex, and the linguistic life course that he or she moves through is experienced both as an individual speaker and as part of an age cohort.

When the speech of the ‘young’ is compared with the speech of ‘older’ speakers, age-correlated differences can reflect language change in progress (change in the speech community as it progresses through time), or age grading (change in the individual speaker as s/he progresses through life). However, whether age correlated linguistic difference is actually evidence of change in progress or of age grading is not always, if ever, beyond doubt. Age-correlated variation which is suggestive of change in progress can be detected by making a series of observations of similar populations over time.

Issue is that unlike some facets of our identity, our age is never static. It is constantly moving onward. Furthermore, the socio-psychological process of ageing is not fixed. The possibly because of the dynamic, elusive, ever-changing nature of age and the ageing process, the complex relationship between movement through life and changing linguistic behaviour is not well understood in sociolinguistics.

2.4 Ethnicity

It is often difficult to separate ethnicity from other social factors such as historical background, region, social class, and other sociocultural variables. For example, the variety labelled Irish English may have a strong association with cultural background, region, and politics in the British Isles, and African American English in the United States is strongly linked to demographic racial categories, social status, and region. Invariably, ethnicity interacts with a wide array of other social, historical, and socio-psychological factors and is embedded within an intricate set of sociocultural relationships, processes, and identities. The notion of ethnicity is further complicated by the increasing number of ‘mixed-ethnic’ individuals and the social categories into which they may or may not fit as determined by the social hierarchies of society. Notwithstanding this array of social factors, communities in which local tradition acknowledges more than one ethnic group may expect ethnicity to be one of the factors that correlates with linguistic variation (Laferriere,1979).

The definition of an ethnic group usually involves the following kinds of parameters: (1) origins that precede or are external to the state; (2) group membership that is involuntary; (3) ancestral tradition rooted in a shared sense of peoplehood; (4) distinctive value orientations and behavioural patterns; (5) influence of the group on the lives of its members; and (6) group membership influenced by how members define themselves and how they are defined by others (National Council of Social Studies, Task Force on Ethnic Studies 1976). Though these criteria seem expansive, they still cannot ensure clearly defined ethnic categorization.

In most cases, self-selection is as significant as any other criteria, thus leading Giles (1979, p. 253) to reduce the definition of an ethnic group to ‘those who perceive themselves to belong to the same ethnic category’. At the same time, it is also important to recognize that ethnicity is defined by social practice rather than personal attributes. As Fought (2002, p. 445) puts it, it is ‘not about what one is but about what one does ’ that is the primary basis for establishing ethnicity. The practice of ethnicity distinguishes this construct from demographic, institutionalized racial categories based on personal attributes, though some behavioural traits may be related to the segregation of groups based on these attributes.

When people belong to the same group, they often speak similarly. But there are many different groups in a community, and so any individual may share linguistic features with a range of other speakers. Some features index a person’s social status; others may vary in frequency in the speech of women and men or identify a person as a teenager rather than a middle-aged citizen. There are also linguistic clues to a person’s ethnicity, and closely related to all these are linguistic features which are responsive to social pressure from those we interact with most frequently, our social networks. Individuals draw on all these resources when they construct their social identities.

Example 1

When I was in France I found a small restaurant in the old French quarter where the menu looked affordable and attractive. I was greeted in French by the waiter and I responded in French, though my accent clearly signalled that I was a native Algerian speaker. At this point, the waiter, who was bilingual, had a choice. He chose to continue in French and, though I cannot be sure of his reasons, I interpreted this choice as expressing his wish to be identified as a French person. In any case, I was very happy that my French had not been so awful that he felt he had to switch to Arabic.

Many ethnic groups use a distinctive language associated with their ethnic identity, as demonstrated in example 1 above. Where a choice of language is available for communication, it is often possible for an individual to signal their ethnicity by the language they choose to use. Even when a complete conversation in an ethnic language is not possible, people may use short phrases, verbal fillers or linguistic tags, which signal ethnicity. So interactions which appear to be in English, for example, may incorporate linguistic signals of the speakers’ ethnic identity.

In Britain, the way different ethnic minorities speak English is often equally distinctive. The English of those who speak minority languages such as Gujerati, Panjabi and Turkish generally signals their ethnic background. And people of West Indian or African Caribbean origin use a range of varieties, depending on where they live in England, and how long their families have lived in Britain. Those born in Britain are usually described as members of the British Black community and some speak a variety of Jamaican Creole as well as a variety of English. Others speak a range of varieties of English with different frequencies of creole features depending on the social context and who they are talking to. The variety of Jamaican Creole still used by some British Blacks is known as Patois or British Jamaican Creole. London Jamaican, for instance, is the London variety of Patois. It derives from Jamaican Creole, but it has a number of features which distinguish it from the Jamaican variety.

Example 2 (excerpt from Holmes, 2013).

Polly is a young British Black teenager who lives in the West Midlands. Her parents came to Britain from Jamaica in 1963 looking for jobs. Though Polly’s mother had a good education in Jamaica, the only work she was able to find in Dudley was cleaning offices at night. Polly’s father used to work in a factory, but he was laid off and has been unemployed for nearly two years now. They live in a predominantly Black neighbourhood and almost all Polly’s friends are young Black people. She and her parents attend the local Pentecostal church. Her older brother used to attend too, but he has stopped since he left school.

Polly’s verbal repertoire includes standard English spoken with a West Midlands accent, an informal variety of English with some Patois features, which could be described as Midlands Black English, and Patois, the variety of Jamaican Creole used by Black people in Dudley in the 1980s.

Polly’s patterns of language use are not simple. While her parents use Patois or British Jamaican Creole to her and her brother, she is expected to use English in response. At home she uses Midlands Black English, but she uses a more standard variety to her teachers at the college where she is doing a hairdressing course. With some friends she uses a variety called ‘chatting Patois’ which has a small number of creole features. With other friends who like her can speak Patois, she uses full-blown Patois. In most shops, she uses standard English with the local accent, unless she knows the young Black person behind the counter, in which case she might use Midlands Black English.

Polly’s ethnicity is signalled not so much by her knowledge of any particular variety, but by the way she uses the varieties in her linguistic repertoire. Some young British Blacks use Patois for in-group talk as a symbol of their ethnicity, but not all are proficient users. In contexts where Patois is appropriate, those who do not know much Patois use a variety of English which is clearly marked as Black by the fact that it incorporates some Patois or creole features. The use of Patois, as well as the use of Patois features in informal varieties of English, obviously has an important symbolic function. These varieties signal a person’s ethnicity as British Black. Between Polly and her Black friends, Patois signals friendship or solidarity. It indicates that they belong together as a group of young Black British people. Someone who used standard English in this group when they were talking in the cafeteria between lessons, for example, would be labelled ‘prissy’ or ‘snobby’.

-Ethnic Group Affiliation

It may appear that the association of language with ethnic group affiliation is one of the more obvious relationships between language and culture. Practically all of the approximately 6,000 languages of the world, for example, are strongly associated with an ethno-cultural group of some type. However, this initial transparency is betrayed by the fact that language is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for ethnic group membership (Fishman, 1999). Like sociocultural borders, linguistic boundaries are negotiated constructs typically defined more on the basis of socio-political and ideological considerations than on the basis of structural linguistic parameters. Even the dichotomy between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ is based more on cultural and political issues= than on mutual intelligibility or structural linguistic properties.

Example: Sino-Tibetan language varieties such as Cantonese and Mandarin = dialects of Chinese = though not mutually intelligible. However, Norwegian and Swedish are different languages though speakers understand each other. In the former case, there is an overarching cultural unity that transcends linguistic typology whereas, in the latter case, there is a national political border that reifies minimal structural diversity in linguistic varieties. There are various examples of sociopolitical struggles about language such as Afrikaans in South Africa, French and English in Canada, African American English (so-called ‘Ebonics’) in the United States etc. All these are not about language only, but about ideology, identity, and socio-political power. It is often difficult to separate ethnicity from other social factors such as historical background, region, social class, and other sociocultural variables.

Examples:

1. The variety labelled Irish English may have a strong association with cultural background, region, and politics in the British Isles.
2. African American English in the United States is strongly linked to demographic racial categories, social status, and region.
3. Invariably, ethnicity interacts with a wide array of other social, historical, and socio-psychological factors and is embedded within an intricate set of sociocultural relationships, processes, and identities.

The definition of an ethnic group is very difficult but it can be recognized through following parameters:

1. Origins that precede or are external to the state
2. Group membership that is involuntary
3. Ancestral tradition rooted in a shared sense of peoplehood
4. Distinctive value orientations and behavioural patterns
5. Influence of the group on the lives of its members
6. Group membership influenced by how members define themselves and are defined by others. (National Council of Social Studies, Task Force on Ethnic Studies, 1976).

In addition, ethnicity is defined by social practice rather than personal attributes. According to Fought (2002), it is ‘not about what one is but about what one does’ that is the primary basis for establishing ethnicity. In the United States, from the end of the nineteenth century, citizens of German and Irish origin were sometimes disparaged as ‘hyphenated Americans’. It was alleged that they hesitated to become ‘100 per cent’ Americans because they still clung to other ‘loyalties’. ‘Ethnic group’ seems to have come into popular use as a more acceptable name for ‘hyphenated Americans’.

In The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups, written by W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole and published in 1945, the expression ‘ethnic group’ was used to designate eight cultural minorities of white ‘race’, resident in Massachusetts, who were on their way to becoming ‘one hundred per cent Americans’.

1. The authors made no mention of ‘ethnicity’; the first recorded use of that word is dated from 1953, when the sociologist David Riesman referred to ‘the groups who, by reason of rural or small-town location, ethnicity, or other parochialism, feel threatened by the better educated upper-middle-class people’.
2. Whether or not he intended this, Riesman’s change from the adjective ‘ethnic’ to the noun ‘ethnicity’ implied that there was some distinctive quality in the sharing of a common ethnic origin that explained why people such as those he referred to might feel threatened by upper-middle-class people, who, apparently, did not attach the same significance to their own ethnic origins. They did not count as ‘ethnics’.

On another front, ethnic dialects do not arise because members of particular ethnic groups are somehow destined to speak in certain ways; like all other social dialects, ethnic dialects are learned by exposure and anyone, regardless of their ethnic identification or racial categorization, might speak in ways identified as ‘African American Vernacular English’ or‘Chicano English. The connection between race/ethnicity/ nationality and linguistic variety is one that is entirely socially constructed, it is in no way linked to any inherent attributes of a particular group. The processes that create ethnic dialects are poorly understood, and much research remains to be done into how and why they develop.

However, we do know that ethnic dialects are not simply foreign accents of the majority language, as many of their speakers may well be monolingual speakers of the majority language. Chicano English, for example, is not English with a Spanish accent and grammatical transfer, as many of its speakers are not Spanish speakers but English monolinguals. Ethnic dialects are in group ways of speaking the majority language.

One study which gives us insights into the motivations for the development of an ethnic dialect was done by Kopp (1999) on Pennsylvania German English, that is, the English spoken among speakers of what is commonly called ‘Pennsylvania Dutch,’ which is a German dialect which developed in certain regions of Pennsylvania. Kopp analyzes a variety of features associated with speakers of Pennsylvania German in both sectarian (i.e., Amish and Mennonite) and nonsectarian communities. He discovers what at first seems to be a paradoxical pattern: although the sectarians are more isolated from mainstream society, and they continue to speak Pennsylvania German, their English has fewer phonological features that identify them as Pennsylvania German speakers than the nonsectarians, who are integrated into the English mainstream and less likely to be speakers of Pennsylvania German.

Therefore, the nonsectarians, who are in many cases English monolinguals, exhibit more phonological features reminiscent of a Pennsylvania German accent in their spoken English than the sectarians! As Kopp explains, this makes perfect sense when we think of language as providing a way to construct identity. The sectarians speak Pennsylvania German, and thus can use that language to create group boundaries; the nonsectarians, who increasingly do not speak Pennsylvania German, have only their variety of English to use to construct themselves as members of a particular ethnic group.

[...]

• Author: Chahrazed Hamzaoui (Author)
• Publication Year: 2023
• Pages: 110
• Catalog Number: V1350795
• ISBN (PDF): 9783346862235
• ISBN (Book): 9783346862242
• Language: English
• Tags: basic, concepts, sociolinguistics