Urban Sociolinguistics

The City as a Linguistic Process and Experience

Dick Smakman, Patrick Heinrich, Dick Smakman, Patrick Heinrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315514635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

From Los Angeles to Tokyo, Urban Sociolinguistics is a sociolinguistic study of twelve urban settings around the world. Building on William Labov's famous New York Study, the authors demonstrate how language use in these areas is changing based on belief systems, behavioural norms, day-to-day rituals and linguistic practices.

All chapters are written by key figures in sociolinguistics and presents the personal stories of individuals using linguistic means to go about their daily communications, in diverse sociolinguistic systems such as:

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• extremely large urban conurbations like Cairo, Tokyo, and Mexico City

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• smaller settings like Paris and Sydney

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• less urbanised places such as the Western Netherlands Randstad area and Kohima in India.
  
  

Providing new perspectives on crucial themes such as language choice and language contact, code-switching and mixing, language and identity, language policy and planning and social networks, this is key reading for students and researchers in the areas of multilingualism and super-diversity within sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and urban studies.

1
Introduction

Why cities matter for a globalising sociolinguistics

Dick Smakman and Patrick Heinrich

Just as with our first jointly edited book, Globalising Sociolinguistics: Challenging and Expanding Theory (Smakman and Heinrich 2015), the aim of this edited volume is to critically examine and readdress sociolinguistic theory. This time, we seek to achieve this by adapting sociolinguistic theory to the language life of individuals in large urban centers. In doing so, we endeavour to shed light on large urban areas as sociolinguistic systems in their own right, on the range and nature of transformations going on there, and on differences and congruencies among the “world cities” and the “megacities” studied in this book. Language in the city provides for ample opportunity to challenge and expand sociolinguistic theory, which has predominantly drawn from western cases and ethnic groups (Smakman 2015). The city is more diverse than mainstream sociolinguistic theories have portrayed it to be, and big cities feature a larger population than many states and most ethnic groups today. Hence the necessity for purposefully concentrating on the study of urban language life around the world.

From groups and correlations to roles and resources

Sociolinguistic research, of which William Labov is generally considered one of the influential instigators, has yielded highly useful explanations for the language use of groups of people who share certain characteristics. Research from communities across the world has, since the 1960s, been shaping our understanding of how people communicate and how characteristics of these speakers can be correlated with their linguistic behaviour. The method of grouping and correlating social and linguistic factors has certainly stood the test of time and will be the basis of future research in the field, with big-data approaches as a natural extension. However, some of the conclusions derived from such correlational research run the unfortunate risk of leading to simplifications. Such generalisations tend to be particularly persistent and are the point of departure of future research.

Let us briefly consider some examples before shifting attention to language in the city. A good example is research on the language behaviour of women and men. The notion that women are more likely than men to speak the standard language is one of the most persistent in the field. This idea has spread beyond the boundaries of sociolinguistics although women’s preference for progressive, i.e. not traditionally standard, forms has, for a while, been a recurring conclusion in research. Meyerhoff (2011: 231) explains some of the drawbacks of the Labovian approach by looking at gender variation studies. This approach has laid bare correlations but failed to explain them. Traditional, quantitative sociolinguistic research tends to treat gender as an established given and treatable as one of several categories, such as social class, that directly account for variation within a community. This categorical approach is increasingly treated as an oversimplification. As an illustration, Sadiqi (2003) considered it not helpful to look at the category of Moroccan women as one entity in view of diversity within Moroccan society. Bassiouney (2015: 126) extended this argument: “If it is an oversimplification to speak about ‘Moroccan women’, then it is also too simple to speak about ‘North African women’ without acknowledging the diversity in their situations and positions.” One might add that the importance of being a stereotypical woman or man is different for each individual, too.

In other words, traditional approaches tend to ignore the social sphere of individuals and the many roles they play in it – as well as their sensitivity to the roles. Some of these roles are constrained by biology or culture, while others are subject to an individual’s choice to abide by certain prescribed or proscribed roles and by that individual’s communicative actions towards making their life a better one. Categorical approaches wipe the motivations of individuals under the carpet together with moment-to-moment choices that they make, which lead to changes in the way they speak. Traditional approaches tend to make efforts to capture such motivations in group-oriented, shared motivations and reduce them to a collective characteristic while individualism in a globalising world is constantly making them more idiosyncratic and diverse and harder to capture as a group characteristic.

Critical questions have been asked, and these questions are not recent. As for the gender example mentioned above, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992, 1999) asked the question whether the women who lead the change are also the women who are more traditionally following the standard language. If these are different women, then there’s no contradiction, so Meyerhoff (2011: 232) explains. An extra categorisation would then be needed, as would insights into individuals’ motivations to actively or passively condone change or reject it. That approach would complement and sharpen the findings of more standard methodology and draw a broader picture of language variation of individuals in groups.

What is needed to expand sociolinguistic theory are, therefore, not descriptions of speech communities and other groups, but of the language choices that individuals make from one speech setting to the next. Language life in the city provides a good starting point to engage in such a direction of sociolinguistic research. In this book, all case studies are set to explore large urban areas as sociolinguistic systems in their own right, and these cases all carry equal theoretical relevance.

Language and the city

Sociolinguistically, cities have always been extraordinary places. City people come into daily contact with strangers having different belief systems, behavioral norms, day-to-day rituals and linguistic practices, and they must somehow learn “to get along” for the city to function. It is also no exaggeration to say that the language of the city crucially inspired the establishment of US sociolinguistics in the 1960s. Pre-1960s sociolinguistics tended not to focus on urban environments; 19th century research in particular was mainly regionally dialectological. Many dialects and other smaller languages were thoroughly documented, amongst others in China, England and France. These studies tended to aim at laying bare historical patterns and cases of disappearing languages. There were severe limits on how language in the city could be studied before sociolinguistics as a mainstream and globally more coherent field was established (Coulmas 2009), resulting in the practice of ignoring a wide range of language issues in the study of language in these cities. Despite mainstream sociolinguistics having its origin in cities, they were usually lumped together in a continuous system with the rural areas into the sociolinguistically less pertinent unity of the nation state. The urban/rural division within a state actually pertains to a more fundamental distinction, namely that between two worlds, and it is less of a continuum than is often claimed. The destination of national but also international migration, for example, is predominantly the city. Cities may act independently of all kinds of continua, and this necessitates a comparison to other, equivalent international cities. City speakers have often been ignored, or the fact that they live in the city has been considered less important than their original heritage. They have been brushed aside, treated as deviant or as less relevant for accounts of national sociolinguistic systems. This is due to the versatility and fluidity of the language lives of the metropolises, with their high levels of mobility in all kinds of ways, which at times cannot easily be captured in dominant (first and second wave) sociolinguistic theory (cf. Eckert 2012).

To add to the issue, sociolinguistic theories were predominantly developed on the basis of case studies conducted in the US, Britain and Western Europe. They thus incorporated influences of European-model nation building ideology in that they studied, for example, speech communities that were typically constituted of people with a shared ethnicity, identity and often locality. Thus, language ideological constructs were informed by the language-ethnicity-identity nexus of the post-Renaissance nation-building period. In hindsight, it is safe to state that such approaches were oversimplifying things even back in the 1960s, and even in Western Europe of today, diversity is no longer “what it used to be” (Vertovec 2007: 1024). The distinction between East, West and other mega-regions is based on the wrong premise that people stay in their corner of the world and should not be considered to partake in diversity when moving to another part of the world. The reality is that citizens from various parts of the world meet in various other parts of the world, especially urban ones, and they belong there. Ideas of ownership, belonging and nativeness relative to one’s native part of the world are changing. In other words, they go to another place but that new place is in a way also their own place, their home. The Dutch band “The Scene” articulated this more than a quarter of a century ago in the title of their song called “Iedereen is van de wereld en de wereld is van iedereen” (Everyone belongs to this world and the world belongs to everyone). This feeling of joint ownership was a new phenomenon in 1990, when the song was written. It is now a reality for many. Others are struggling with it and resisting it, but despite these efforts, it irrevocably leads to much (and continuous) intercultural movement of people and adds to the existing movement of people due to conflict. There is more to the resultant diversity than new levels of ethnicities thrown together in large urban spaces. Diversity is, in fact, more diverse than it has been assumed. As an effect, “classical sociolinguistic theory” not only ill-fits non-Western cases, but is also difficult to apply to large urban areas in the Western world today. There exists, in a word, a double bias in the study of language in the city; a “Western” one and a “monolingual national” one in which minorities and migrants “disturb” the dominant language-ethnicity-identity ideology.

City lives challenge us to find new theoretical approaches and new research methods to capture what is traditionally called “inter- and intra-speaker language variation” but what is really about individuals “applying” language as a commodity to achieve goals and doing so in different ways in different social and communicative situations, constantly adjusting in both conscious and less conscious ways. The city life of first-, second- and third-generation immigrants (often the majority of the population in a city) stir the individual’s relationship with the heritage language and culture, creating a heightened sensitivity to identity. Language is one of the main outlets of this sensitivity. Special ways of expressing, or reshaping, the old authentic culture and language may be patterned and not random. The ensuing creative language play is one of the triggers of urban youth languages, which should thus be treated as naturally embeddable in a larger sociolinguistic system rather than as new phenomena that infrequently spring from immigrant offspring. The interplay of the global and the local also deserves attention. Global phenomena do not “float” on some abstract global level but are locally anchored. The global is inevitably always also local, and in turn local habits could collectively change global developments (Robertson 1995). Such interplay of global trends and local habits and rules results in new forms and entities and new units of research. Speakers adjust to the new city, bringing with them features that are constantly in the process of being adjusted to the new culture. In return, the city’s existing norms also incorporate these individuals’ linguistic contributions to some extent. In another city, these very same features may change shape and norm formation may route differently. Cities are environments featuring multilingual and linguistically resilient speakers. For a number of individuals, a sense of belonging is first and foremost linked to the city, then to the rest of world, and only after that to the nation state. So-called “third culture individuals” (Useem and Useem 1967; Lyttle, Barker and Cornwell 2011) and “global nomads” (Richards and Wilson 2004; Päivi 2014) are growing in number and are less of an “odd exception” than they used to be. They are also in contact with and influencing other city people.

All in all, language life in the city today often looks different from what classical sociolinguistic theory would predict. Walking into a New York store and asking people the same question is no longer a safe bet for encountering predictable pronunciations by speakers with predictable backgrounds. Non-mobile speakers, staying their entire lives in their urban home society, are becoming increasingly atypical cases in an ever-growing number of cities. So are speakers who use a fixed and settled language repertoire throughout their lives. Instead, the multilingual speaker, who functionally “plays” with language and uses it as a commodity – most of the time neither as their first language nor in their original home environment – can now no longer be considered an exception. In large cities, in particular, it is increasingly difficult to find non-mobile native speakers of the original local dialect. In fact they are becoming increasingly less relevant and representative for sociolinguistic accounts of the language life in these cities. The traditional sociolinguistic approach of finding the Non-mobile Older Rural Male (Chambers and Trudgill 1980) – who holds the most authentic form of the language and who can then be taken to represent a larger group of speakers, as well as what language used to be like in the olden days – can be replaced by the approach of finding agreement amongst the functionalities of individuals’ languages in a constantly changing urban setting. This means focusing less on linguistic agreement amongst speakers who happen to speak the same language at moments in their daily lives. It also entails not distinguishing primarily on the basis of age, gender, status and other such essentialist labels.

Rural and urban settings should be distinguished in sociolinguistic theory, and, in particular, the urban settings need to be theorized in new ways in order to do justice to the fluidity and versatility of speakers, their repertoires and everyday language use. Cities are not filled with an anonymous and homogenous population as nation state ideology would claim, but with diverse and concrete actors struggling to achieve things they deem relevant, while seeking a self-identification they perceive to be rewarding. Language plays a very important role in these activities. Language in the city can be viewed as a set of concrete activities of concrete speakers and listeners, who have distinct repertoires and who relate to each other in various ways. All of this influences how city people communicate with each other – it affects language structures and repertoires.

Such a perspective on sociolinguistics is not new and has, in fact, been advocated in Japanese studies on language in society since the 1930s in an approach termed “language life” (gengo seikatsu). Kyōsuke Kindaichi (1933: 35), who coined the term, called for a study of language as part of everyday life: “Our life is a harmonious and comprehensive unity, and just as one can imagine that economic life, religious life, social life, intellectual life, esthetic life, sexual life, etc. can be studied holistically, there exists also the possibility to perceive ‘language life’ as such an abstract phenomenon.” The 12 case studies assembled in this book seek to study situated, everyday interaction in the city. It is not about “numbering” or “mapping” the languages spoken in the city, but about what people are doing with language in urban settings and with what effect. Language diversity is not just a large number of languages, but more crucially also the diversity within and amongst these languages.

World cities and megacities

We draw a distinction between “world cities” and “megacities” in this book – two concepts derived from urban geography. While cities have always been the source of social and linguistic innovation, not all large urban centres are alike. It remains a noteworthy fact that European states were controlling as much as 85% of the world’s territory and its natural resources and peoples in 1914 when World War I broke out. This still affects the economies and societies of the former colonizers and the colonized, and this situation has internationally instilled assumptions as to the linguistic workings of cities, states and of language use therein. In his discussion of city history, Archer (2013) departs from these colonial contexts in order to distinguish between what he calls the “global north” and the “global south”. Global north simply refers to affluent and increasingly post-industrial countries, whereas global south refers to relatively poor and often post-colonial countries. Note here that post-colonial does not necessarily imply being poor today, nor does former colonial power imply that the economy there is mainly post-industrial.

Urban geographers stress that the difference between the global north and global south has important ramification with regard to the large cities we find there. To start with, in ...