Week 1

Foundations of Language and Society: A (Re)-Introduction

 ENG 3017 Y (5)

Linguistic Variation and

Change: Current Trends in
Sociolinguistic Theory
 Outline
• Introduction to this module

• Foundations of sociolinguistics

• Variationist paradigm

• Varro and Anomalia

• Microlinguistics

• Sociolinguistics of Performance

• Summary and Conclusion

 Introduction to this module
• First of all, welcome to this brand new linguistics module

• Yearly module- run over two semesters

• I will be your tutor for both semesters

• Moving forward from the linguistic issues put forward to

you last year
 This module
• Adopt an eclectic and mixed mode approach

• Focus on speech, communities, media and non-verbal

communication

• Split in two semesters

• Progression from the typical variationist paradigm to more

subtle and ‘individualistic’ modes of variation
 The practicalities
• Both semesters – divided into three broad themes

• Organisational framework replicated at the level of assessment

• Class tests and exams: one question set per theme.

• Each theme – a series of three lectures

• Class test – 3 questions, answer at least 2

• Exams – 6 questions, answer at least 1 from each section

 The practicalities
• Assignment: 1 each semester

• Attempt to keep both brief and focused

• Emphasis on depth rather than breadth

• Focus on one informant only per semester

• Semester 1 – lighter in terms of assessment load

 The practicalities
• Presentation in semester 1 will be used only to showcase
your findings

• Same write-up will be accepted as your assignment

• Semester 2 – a list of questions has already been provided

on the MIS

• Choose whichever one you want and work on it

 The practicalities
• Assignment submission

• Flexibility in semester 1

• However- tentatively, let’s pencil it in for Week 15

• We’ll cross the bridge when we come to it

 So what is this module about?
• Advanced course in sociolinguistics

• last year- exposure to the very basics of the variationist paradigm

• Sociology of language (e.g. the media and so on)

• This year- aim is to problematise all these concepts

• Taking variation to the sphere of the individual rather than viewing it

as a collective group performance
 So what is this module about?
• Focus on micro-linguistics

• Offbeat topics

• This semester – problematising key variables

• E.g. Gender, Age and ethnicity

• Gender- emphasis on the liminal categories, gender benders and so

on
 So what is this module about?
• Age – look at variation at every stage of life

• From toddlers and their attempt to carry out identity

marking

• To the elderly and the their use of humour and the ways in
which they use language as their brain power declines

• E.g. amongst patients of dementia or Alzheimer

 So what is this module about?
• Finally – ethnicity

• Focus on whiteness first of all

• Whites are rarely viewed as an ethnic group. Yet, if we look at the

world demographic, they’re hardly numerically dominant

• Ethnic dominance and appropriation

• Minority groups – e.g. Native Americans, Eskimo communities and

so on
 Second semester
• Start off with language contact related issues

• Globalisation from a metrolingual perspective

• What does it mean to be metrosexual and metrolingual?

• Valorisation of multilingualism

• Move on to conflict ridden areas

• E.g. Sudan, Syria and so on

 Second semester
• Is political conflict translated into language?

• What about conflict within the same language?

• Even sign language isn’t spared! Focus on Japanese sign language

• Finally: endangered languages

• How do they disappear? Why do they disappear?

• Modelling the eco-system and biological networks of languages

 Second semester
• Move on to mobility

• Major emphasis: isolation

• How does language change when you live in the most

remote corner of the planet?

• No harbour, no airport, no internet – community of only

about 200 people
 Second semester
• End the year with identity and interaction related features

• Look at sensitive issues such as language and religion

• Concluding lecture – applied sociolinguistics

• Drawing the bridge with the Sociolinguistics module on the Masters

programme

• Building up of skills from introductory year 1 lectures to more

complex postgraduate level ones
Any Questions?
 Foundations in sociolinguistics
• Also known as dialectology

• Study of dialects and its speakers

• Different perspectives adopted

• Let’s have a brief recap

Foundations in sociolinguistics

Dialectology

Geographical Social Perceptual

 Foundations in sociolinguistics
• Geographical: Regional dialectology

• Areal sociolinguistics

• Drawing of maps and isoglosses

• E.g. British regional accents and dialects

• Non-standard features such as multiple negation, double modals

and so on
 British regional accents
• North East-
Newcastle

• CN- Central
North

• CL- Central
Lancaster

• M- Merseyside

• SE- South East

 Activity 1
• Listen carefully to the two clips.

• By now, you should all have

developed an ear for accents!

• Which accent belongs south of the

isogloss?

• Which one is to the north of the

isogloss?
 Social dialectology
• Known as the Labovian or Variationist paradigm

• Key variables: Class, gender, age and ethnicity

• Postulates a series of sociolinguistic axioms

• Taken as the basic rule regarding variation worldwide

 Class
• The higher the social class, the posher the language

• Seminal studies by Labov in New York

• Trudgill in Norwich

• Classification of occupations
 New York

first and second utterances

100
90
80
70 fourth I
60 fourth 2
%

50
40 floor I
30 floor 2
20
10
0
Saks Macy's S Klein
store
 Norwich

Social class and gender variation

120

100
Index score

80

60 Male Female

40

20

0
LWC MWC UWC LMC MMC
Male 100 91 81 27 4
Female 97 81 68 3 0

Social class
 Classification
• UK Socio-economic classification
 ISCO

• ISCO or
International
Standards
Classification
of
Occupations
• Used in
Mauritius by
CSO
 Gender
• Powerful and Powerless Language
• The following ten features have been identified as "Women's Language" (based
on: Lakoff 1975):
• 1. Hedges, e.g. sort of; kind of, I guess;
• 2. (Super) polite forms e.g. would you please...I'd really appreciate it if:..,
• 3. Tag questions;
• 4. Speaking in italics, e.g. emphatic so and very, intonational language;
• 5. Empty adjectives, e.g. charming, sweet, adorable;
• 6. Hypercorrect grammar and pronunciation;
• 7. Lack of a sense of humour e.g. poor at telling jokes;
• 8. Direct quotations, e.g. "Hannah said that he said...";
• 9. Special vocabulary, e.g. specialised colour terms like 'Dove grey';
• 10. Question intonation in declarative contexts.
 Age
• Least examined and least understood

• Wolfram (1989)- variation found in children as young as 3

• According to Labov- acquisition of local dialect from 4-13 years

• Complete familiarity – ages 17-18

• Adolescents, the most interesting group

 Age
• Phenomenon of age
grading
• Non-standardness
highest during
adolescence
• Stabilizes during
adulthood
• May show inverse
pattern during old
age
 Ethnicity
• Ethnolect

• Depends on ideology, identity and sociolinguistic power

• Linked with demographics and history

• Political factors

• Case of AAVE

• Other minority groups (such as immigrants)

 Sociolinguistic cliché
• Above rules have given rise to the following rule

• Chambers and Trudgill (1998)

• Traditional dialectology: concept of NORMs

• Or, Non-mobile Older Rural Males

• Stereotype of the most vernacular speaker

• Actively sought after for dialect surveys

 Activity 2
• Have a look at the following two
video clips.

• They show the way in which

sociolinguistic clichés can be
challenged by everyday linguistic
performances

• Comments?

• How accurate is the Labovian

paradigm?
 Challenges
• Can the Labovian paradigm be problematised?

• Above clips seem to suggest that axioms do not present

the whole picture

• Answer to this question is provided to us by history

• Little known forefather of sociolinguistics

 Marcus Terentius Varro
• 116-27 BC

• One of the most prominent writers of

antiquity

• Multi-disciplinary

• Contributed to diverse fields such as

medicine, agriculture and so on

• Exact output cannot be accurately

predicted

• Ritschl (1848) estimated the number of

Varro’s work at 78

• Very little has survived as well

 Marcus Terentius Varro
• Has also theorised about
language

• Stated that declination can

be of two types

• Grammatical one (e.g. verb

declensions)

• And declinatio voluntaria

• Gives rise to variation

 Anomalia
• Termed variation as anomalia (anomaly)

• Went one step further and linked anomaly to consuetudo

• In other words- vernacular language use

• Interesting observation:
 Varro (IX, 17; Kent, 1938:453)
• “the usage of speech is always shifting its position:
this is why words of the better sort [i.e.
morphologically regular forms] are wont to
become worse, and worse words better; words
spoken wrongly by some of the old-timers are . . .
now spoken correctly, and some that were then
spoken according to logical theory are now spoken
wrongly”
 Motto
• consuetudo loquendi est in motu

• The vernacular is always in motion

• Let’s link all these concepts

• The vernacular is always subject to change

• Change is anomalous and challenges any systematicity

 Importance of Anomalia
• In other words – if you can predict the direction/ nature of linguistic
change

• Or cage it within axiomatic boundaries

• Can no longer be considered as being anomalia

• Goes against the very basic principles of consuetudo

• The Variationist paradigm seems to be slightly misled and

misleading!
 Food for thought…
• One very famous quotation by Chomsky

• Gave rise to the whole field of sociolinguistics

• Reaction against systematicity

• Let’s have a look…

 Food for thought…
• Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an
ideal speaker-listener, in a completely
homogeneous speech community, who knows its
language perfectly and is unaffected by such
grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory
limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and
interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in
applying his knowledge of the language in actual
performance.
 Food for thought…
• So- sociolinguistics is a reaction against prescriptivism

• However, the variationist paradigm ends up being as rigid as

formalism!

• No room for anomalia

• Aim of this module – focus on anomalia

• Peek within the cracks and fissures of these axioms

 Performance
• Famously associated with sociolinguistics

• Dichotomy – competence/ performance

• Current development in the field of sociolinguistics

• Early 2000s onwards, special issue 2011

• Move towards performed language

 Micro-linguistics
• Bell and Gibson (2011: 553):

“Performed language provides a window on the

world of the creative and the self-conscious, the
kind of language excluded from sociolinguistic
work which targets ‘natural unselfconscious
speech’”
 Performance
• Highlighting the quality of virtuosity in interaction

• Questioning the validity of the most important sociolinguistic maxim

• That of the vernacular or minimum attention paid to speech

• Or spontaneous speech

• Also acceptable for linguistic analysis

 Questions….
• According to Labov (1966: 100):

• “refers to a pattern used in excited, emotionally charged

speech when the constraints [i.e. the self-consciousness]
of a formal situation are over-ridden.”

• Yet, Labov himself has always adopted a methodology

which is contradictory
 Activity 3
• Let’s see if you can guess what went wrong.

• The following diagram presents the picture

of a normal network of conversational
modules to be used during the
sociolinguistic interview

• Provided by Labov himself

• Which module, according to you,

generates, true, unadulterated
spontaneous/ casual speech?
Activity 3
 What Spontaneity?
• Think of module 2 –Games

• Children’s play such as jump-rope rhymes and counting out rhymes

• Hardly spontaneous

• Classic danger of death question

• Always a performance!
 What Spontaneity?
• Consider Labov’s own description of Mrs. Rose B.

• “one of the most gifted story tellers and naturally

expressive speakers in the sample” (1966: 108)

• “The many examples of spontaneous narrations which she

provided show a remarkable command of pitch, volume
and tempo for expressive purposes.”
 What Spontaneity?
• Histrionics!

• ‘Command’ implies nothing less than attention to language (poetics)

• Rose is ‘gifted’ i.e. aware that she is performing for the recorder

• Can this be considered as unselfconscious speech?

• Bauman (2011) therefore calls for an acknowledgement to the true value of

performance!

• Anomalia needs to be celebrated (our aim!)

 The Fens
• Let’s start exploring the fissures within traditional
dialectology

• Concept of regional variation and isoglosses

• Focus on one of the major ones – dividing the North and

South of the UK

• Isogloss cuts across a region known as the Fens or Fenland

The Fens
 The Fens
• Found that isogloss was hardly a neat division

• Isogloss passes through various areas

• Variation along the isogloss as well

• Unpredictable and chaotic

• Some features from more northern dialectal areas while some

belonged to southern ones
The Fens
 So?
• Think of all the dialect maps that have been created

• Some of the oldest ones e.g. the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI)

• Or the Survey of German dialects

• How accurate are they?

• Think of the urban/ rural distinction in Mauritius

• Where would you draw the line?

• Urban, peri-urban, rural?

 Performing gender
• Similarly- our aim is to focus on the sociolinguistics of
performance

• Coupland (2011): Acoustemology of place, gender and

identity

• Bell (2011) – focus on the Hollywood legend Marlene

Dietrich

• Androgynous figure
 Dietrich
• Born Maria Magadalene Dietrich
in 1901 in Berlin

• Had a husky singing voice for

which she was noted

• Adopted a garconne style and

kept it

• Kosta (2009: 91): “The girl who

looked like a man who looked
like a girl”

• First recording was of a lesbian

number
 Activity 4
• The following song taken from the film The
Blue Angel is considered one of her
signature ones

• Listen to it carefully

• A handout is provided with the transcript

and the original German version

• Think about the role of voice quality,

pronunciation, pitch and so on within it.
Transcript
 Falling in love again
• Voice quality – Low, husky quality (esp. in the ‘Men cluster
to me’ strophe)

• High register in other portions, dips lower only in that

stanza

• Pronunciation – sounds very much non-native (out of 26

tokens, only 6 sound relatively American)

• Indexing her core identity

Non-nativeness
 Falling in love again
• Self-consciously stylised

• Dietrich holds pauses, lengthens notes and varies her pace between
fast and slow

• Refer back to powerful and powerless speech

• She is an odd mixture of both!

• In fact – the term ‘vamp’ was termed specifically for her

• Anomalia of performance
 Boundaries of Sociolinguistics
• Questioning the variationist paradigm has resulted in multiple
advantages

• Emergence of a true sociolinguistics of performance

• Ethnopoeics

• Focus on off-beat themes such as the theatre, DJ-ing, world of

acting (method acting and so on)

• How is language used to confound others?

 Enregisterment
• Using dialectal features to index some other identity

• Layering of personae – more commonly seen in dramatic

performances

• But often adopted by all of us

• Creating a new register with a new set of indexicalities

(connotations)
 Enregisterment
• “[P]erformance as a mode of spoken verbal communication consists
in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of
communicative competence…From the point of view of the
audience, the act of expression on the part of the performer is this
marked as subject to evaluation for the way it is done…Additionally,
it is marked as available for the enhancement of experience, through
the present enjoyment of the intrinsic qualities of the act of
expression itself. Performance thus…gives license to the audience to
regard the act of expression and the performer with special
intensity.”
 Enregisterment
• We all use these mechanisms in our daily life

• Cannot be simplistically reduced to class, gender or ethnicity related

issues

• Awareness of language as a performance

• Slight variation of the Shakespearean classic

• I am not what I am – I am what I choose to be!

 Activity 5
• Have a look at the following clip by a
popular Bollywood singer

• What can you say about this

particular act of enregisterment?

• What sorts of identities does it index?

• Comments?
 Enregisterment at work
• Throughout this module – we will consider language as a
conscious performance

• Put forward by different categories of people

• The focus will not be on what they are but rather on what
they choose to be

• Also – how language allows them to enregister that choice

 The field
• A quick glance at this field

• Groundbreaking work within sociolinguistics being carried out right

now

• Looking at musical and cinematic performance as forms of

enregisterment

• What does it mean to sound local? Why are such choices made by
speakers? Why do speakers opt for a conscious layering of masks?
 Johnstone (2011)
• Offers an age-based and ethnic rather than a class or
gender-based perspective (as seen previously)

• Studies an area known as Pittsburgh in the US

• Labels the style as Pittsburguese

• Show how DJs and even ordinary citizens consciously try

to sound working class, local and sometimes middle-aged
(the age at which being local seems to matter the most)
 Johnstone (2011)
• Skit from the WDVE radio’s Morning Show

• Channel normally geared towards young and middle-aged

men

• Radio broadcaster for the local Pittsburgh sttelers

(American football) games

• Commuting time slot (6-9 am) – Randy Baumann as singer

and Cris Winter as mother
 Enregisterment at work
• Listen carefully to the clip ‘Mother’

• The transcript is being provided to

you

• Think of the degree of

enregisterment taking place here

• Is it comparable to the previous clip

that we watched?
 Summary and Conclusion
• Overall- an initiation into sociolinguistics

• Questioning the tenets that were provided to you last year

• Moving firmly towards anomalia and enregisterment

• Perspective adopted during the whole academic year

Any Questions?