Globalising Sociolinguistics

Challenging and Expanding Theory

Dick Smakman, Patrick Heinrich, Dick Smakman, Patrick Heinrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317451006
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book challenges the predominance of mainstream sociolinguistic theories by focusing on lesser known sociolinguistic systems, from regions of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, the European Mediterranean, and Slavic regions as well as specific speech communities such as those speaking Nivkh, Jamaican Creole, North Saami, and Central Yup'ik.

In nineteen chapters, the specialist authors look at key sociolinguistic aspects of each region or speech community, such as gender, politeness strategies, speech patterns and the effects of social hierarchy on language, concentrating on the differences from mainstream models. The volume, introduced by Miriam Meyerhoff, has been written by the leading expert of each specific region or community and includes contributions by Rajend Mesthrie, Marc Greenberg and Daming Xu. This publication draws together connections across regions/communities and considers how mainstream sociolinguistics is incomplete or lacking. It reveals how lesser-known cultures can play an important role in the building of theory in sociolinguistics.

Globalising Sociolinguistics is essential reading for any researcher in sociolinguistics and language variation and will be a key reference for advanced sociolinguistics courses.

1

“Tings Change, all Tings Change”

The changing face of sociolinguistics with a global perspective

Miriam Meyerhoff and James N. Stanford

1.1 Introduction

In an interview with a teenager from her community, an older woman on Bequia (an island in the Eastern Caribbean) summed up the varied nature of her life experiences: “Tings change, all tings change” (“Things change, everything changes”). Her love for Bequia and her community was in no way diminished by the changes she had experienced, but she was also a realist about the challenges that change presents – not only for her, but for the interviewer, her grandchildren and the community as a whole.

As we consider the face of sociolinguistics in the first decades of the twenty-first century, we are reminded of the philosophical musing of our Bequia speaker. Certainly, much has changed in sociolinguistics since the inception of the field. Some linguists have been concerned with the dynamics of language in society as long as there have been scholarly treatises on language, but as a well-defined discipline of the field of linguistics, sociolinguistics traces its origins to the middle of the twentieth century. Growing out of both the traditions of historical linguistics (Weinreich et al. 1968) and anthropology (Gumperz 1962, 1964), sociolinguistics has since its inception been a field of study that has challenged and changed individual researchers, the academy and the communities of speakers where its work has been undertaken. Periodically, sociolinguistics as a field has taken stock of its ability to challenge and change, and reframed its goals and methodologies in ways that will foreground or refresh our outlook on language attitudes, the documentation of different ways of talking and how these both interact with ways of being (Labov 1969a; Cameron et al.1992; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992; Rickford 1996).

This book represents the ongoing efforts within sociolinguistics to refresh and rechallenge the field. Recent decades have seen a quiet but nonetheless notable shift in the practice of sociolinguistics. In the early years of the field, major studies tended to be focused on urban or monolingual speech communities. But much has changed since then. Social changes have reshaped the demographics and linguistic profile of the traditional, urban locus of speech community studies. Our beliefs about the necessity or, indeed, the feasibility of isolating monolingual speakers in any speech community have changed. Disciplinary boundaries of the academy have softened and increasingly there is space for sociolinguists to define themselves in multiple ways (Sinologist, media studies, discourse analyst, dialectologist, to give one example of a colleague in Australia). We have seen increased engagement with reinvigorated sister fields in linguistics, such as endangered language documentation, where under major initiatives such as the Volkswagen Foundation’s Documentation of Endangered Languages programme, salvage work values the details of variation and the details of the social context as essential components of the ecology of any language. Finally, as linguistics itself has matured as a field and gained more prominence as a subject for advanced study, we are seeing an increasing number of sociolinguists who can draw on their previous personal or professional experience with smaller or more isolated communities come into the field.

Not all of these changes are independent. But what all of these changes have done is challenge how we understand sociolinguistics and what we understand the purpose of sociolinguistic research to be. Some of them challenge previous assumptions subtly – simply by participating as an active member of the academy, a speaker of a Chinese minority language may remind us that s/he represents tens of thousands of people whose language has been ignored by sociolinguistic studies up until now (Stanford and Pan 2013), a speaker of Ewe analysing variation in their language steps forward to represent millions of speakers who have previously been invisible (Noglo 2009). Some challenges have been more direct and on record. For example, when there was a general retreat from the logical positivism of the early twentieth century to the post-modernism of the late twentieth century, sociolinguists were among those blowing the trumpets that brought down the walls of what has now come to be known as “first wave” or “second wave” sociolinguistics (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992), or calling earlier sociolinguistics research on its paternalistic stance, and advocating for more genuinely co-operative models of research (Cameron et al. 1992).

Interestingly, a challenge that sociolinguists initially failed to recognise was the challenge to forge new partnerships across sub-disciplines. When the Volkswagen Foundation announced it would spend millions of euros on endangered language documentation at the turn of the century, it did so on the understanding that the documentation of verb paradigms must be accompanied by a broader social perspective that encompassed the role of a language in society, as a vehicle of different styles and a repository of cultural knowledge. This presented a very immediate and material challenge to sociolinguistics and yet few of the funded teams turned to sociolinguists for their expertise, generally instead seeking the advice of other social scientists.

Why might this have been? Why did sociolinguistics fail to seize the moment and become part of the VW schemes? The reasons are complex (and beyond the scope of this chapter to tease out), but one reason that we must entertain is that in responding to the intellectual and social challenges of the late twentieth century, the field of sociolinguistics failed to grasp the increasingly global nature of research. This book, with its global scope and its broad perspective, stands both as a reproach to the field, and as one of the latest challenges to it.

Our purpose in this chapter is to articulate some of the major issues that the challenge of globalising sociolinguistics presents to us as a field. Globalising sociolinguistics is a major enterprise – it involves getting away from the WEIRD subjects that dominate social science research and have had a disproportionately strong influence on sociolinguistics as well. WEIRD, meaning Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (Henrich et al. 2010), may not apply in entirety to sociolinguistics, but it is a reasonable generalisation about the cultural frame that has dominated sociolinguistics research for much of its history. We highlight some of the valuable new insights that a less WEIRD research perspective can provide, drawing from work in this volume as well as prior work. A wide-ranging volume like this raises many more issues than can be covered in one chapter, so we have chosen to focus on five themes that we believe are especially pertinent. Some of these we have already intimated, and none of them are entirely independent of the others. They are:

(1) the multilingual reality of most people’s experience;

(2) the notion of standard languages, and how these interact with local vernaculars;

(3) the native speaker;

(4) the application of third wave approaches to sociolinguistics with a global perspective; and

(5) cross-cultural collaboration.

1.2 The multilingual reality

Hard statistics are impossible to find, but general wisdom seems to hold that more people in the world are bilingual or multilingual than are monolingual. This presents challenges for sociolinguists, both those working in more exotic and thoroughly multilingual speech communities and those working on urban dialectology in countries where there is one normative language (e.g. English in New York, French in Paris). We see the main challenges here as being to do with (1) sampling and access to the people whose language practices we may be concerned with, and (2) how we theorise our speech community and analyse our results. Here, we deal first with challenges of access and sampling.

An increasing number of sociolinguistic studies are engaged with documenting the variation and patterns of language use in multiethnic and multilingual communities. Studies in European and North American cities have led the way here (Boyd et al. 2015; Cheshire, Gardner-Chloros and Gadet 2011; Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen 2011; Cornips 2014; Nagy 2014), and they have shown that, by and large, the methods of urban dialectology can be adapted for a focus on multilingual communities and ethnic minorities in modern cities. Issues of course do arise with making contacts and recording successfully in ethnic enclaves. Most professional sociolinguists are themselves exemplars of pretty WEIRD upbringings, and success on these projects has depended on using a team-based approach, which combines the expertise of the professional sociolinguists with insider fieldworkers or other social scientists working with the target communities. Ideally, the process involves training community insiders and moving towards the participatory research model advocated by Cameron et al. (1992).

The challenge of gaining access to parts of the speech community that the researcher is an outsider to is by no means new. Labov (1972a) showed that a research team that includes local fieldworkers can be effective in gaining the trust and co-operation of speakers of urban minorities, and anthropology has a long tradition of dealing with the problem through participant observation and lengthy fieldwork. We’ll come back to this point in Sections 1.5 and 1.6.

The sociolinguistic analysis of these communities has followed established routines – data on attitudes, linguistic security, domains of language use and the details of variation have all been analysed in the manner of the classic sociolinguistic field studies (Shuy, Wolfram and Riley 1967; Labov 1972b; Trudgill 1974; Cheshire 1987; Milroy 1987). But in addition to the challenges of sampling and access in such diverse communities, these projects have also raised questions about which language(s) it is appropriate to record people speaking, since many such communities are characterised by intense multilingualism, code-mixing and blended varieties (cf. Mesthrie 2008).

The rewards associated with engaging with these challenges are potentially substantial. Cheshire et al.’s (2011) work in London has shown us that findings from the multilingual and multicultural inner city may turn sociolinguistic truisms on their heads. Their work has found younger boys from migrant families (not teenagers, and not young women) leading changes that are spreading through the rest of the community.

Other research has highlighted the intense creativity of liminal speakers within an ethnically diverse city community. For example, Hmong American communities in some of the large cities they have migrated to in the US classify themselves into several subgroups, such as White Hmong and Green Hmong. In cases of intermarriage, wives are traditionally expected to learn the dialect of the husband’s family. Stanford’s (2010) research found, however, that some wives are agentively challenging this traditional sociolinguistic expectation, along with other gendered traditions. Using dialect choices as a proxy, these women are negotiating new social positions for themselves and their daughters within Hmong American urban society, taking advantage of a liminal period of immigration and acute cross-cultural contact in large US cities. In this way, investigations of culturally diverse minority communities can lead to new perspectives on sociolinguistic behaviour. There is an obvious challenge for sociolinguists if we want to try and capture this diversity of experience and to broaden our sense of what sociolinguistic knowledge can and should be.

Most of the essays in this volume deal with multiethnic and multilingual communities or else monolingual communities undergoing acute contact with other languages, so the volume provides a valuable opportunity to consider sociolinguistic research in these settings. As a starting point on this topic, we direct readers to fascinating discussions of complex multilingualism in South Asia (Satyanath), Eastern Africa (Barasa), Southern Africa (Mesthrie), West Africa (Anderson and Ansah), the Mediterranean (Cenni) and the Slavic world (Greenberg), among others in the volume.

1.3 Standards, norms and local vernaculars

The contact and relationship between regional and national standard languages and the common language of the home is an important consideration for sociolinguists. Ferguson’s (1959) distinction between the High and Low languages of diglossic speech communities drew a sharp line between standard languages and local vernaculars and initially characterised the tension between, say, classical and local varieties of Arabic as a relatively stable phenomenon. Subsequent research has found many analogues of a functional dynamic between a High and a Low language in communities around the world, but they have also shown that they vary in their temporal stability. A somewhat looser notion of functional diglossia (that is, a relatively stable alternation between varieties or codes on the basis of function or domain at the level of society and the individual), remains well suited for describing the sociolinguistic ecology of many communities across the globe. Several chapters in this volume grapple with the challenge of analysing diglossia in diverse sociolinguistic research settings, including Southeast Asia (Van Engelenhoven and Van Naerssen), East Africa (Barasa), West Africa (Anderson and Ansah), the Caribbean (Devonish; Devonish and Walters) and Scotland/Ireland (Smith-Christmas and Ó hIfearnáin).

Questions about what serves as a standard, and whether there is an identifiable standard within a speech community and who validates the standard are ones that sociolinguistics take seriously, and indeed there is a long tradition in sociolinguistics of combining social activism with descriptive work (e.g. Wolfram 1993; Rickford 1997; Wolfram et al. 1999), even of very subtle patterns of variation (Labov 1969b; Wolfram et al. 1997). As we try to reframe the sociolinguistic enterprise in more global terms, the role of language as a tool for power, prestige, status and gate-keeping becomes even more central. Many of the chapters in this volume highlight why language standards cannot be ignored; community ideologies about standards remain powerful means of oppressing or privileging sectors of society in many parts of the world. For example, Aikio, Arola and Kunnas (this volume) find very little dialect levelling in North Saami, and they attribute this lack of levelling to the lack of a single prestige variety. North Saami speakers value a notion of dialect “purity”, expressed in terms of “keeping to one’s own dialect”. In this way, each community maintains its traditional regional dialect.

One of the spectres that raises its head when we start to consider language standards is the role of language in education. This has been and remains a major issue in multilingual countries worldwide, because the choice of languages for education plays a crucial role in defining someone’s life opportunities, particularly the opportunities of those who are not lucky enough to speak the standard language of education at home or in their everyday life.¹

It is worth bearing in mind that the study of variation depends fundamentally on establishing some kind of “standard”, so the notion is not purely of significance for applied sociolinguists. This is because what any analysis of variation typically does is that it defines a baseline against which variation is measured. A researcher can define the baseline or norm as the form or structure that is associated with the educational or metropolitan standard of any particular language, but they can also define it as being the most frequently used form in the community. We can see how this operates by looking at work on Bequia English, which uses both approaches to define the baseline.

Walker and Meyerhoff (2006) analysed use of the copula in Bequia, and they explored different ways of modelling its presence or absence. One way to model the absence of the copula in Bequia English is to take Standard English norms as the baseline. Because Standard English requires an overt copula in most syntactic frames, we can take every place where Standard English would use a copula as the baseline, and treat any Bequia English utterance without an overt copula as reflecting the application of some rule for deletion. The problem with this kind of set-up for an analysis of variation is that it models Bequia English as a derived form of English. This may be historically correct, but one could ask why not treat it as a grammar in i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Map of places discussed
• 1. “Tings change, all tings change”: the changing face of sociolinguistics with a global perspective
• 2. The Westernising mechanisms in sociolinguistics
• Part I: Developing countries
• Part II: Less developed countries
• Part III: Developed countries
• Part IV: Unstable multilingual communities
• Concluding remarks
• Index