Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages and social setting, The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World is the first single-volume collection surveying current and recent research trends in international sociolinguistics. With over 30 chapters written by leading authorities in the region concerned, all continents and their respective regions are covered. The book will serve as an important tool to help widen the perspective on sociolinguistics to readers of English.
Divided into sections covering: The Americas, Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Middle East, and Europe, the book provides readers with a solid, up-to-date appreciation of the interdisciplinary nature of the field of sociolinguistics in each area. It clearly explains the patterns and systematicity that underlie language variation in use, as well as the ways in which alternations between different language varieties mark personal style, social power and national identity.
The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics around the World is the ideal resource for all students on undergraduate sociolinguistics courses and researchers involved in the study of language, society and power.
English Language and Linguistics / Sociolinguistics
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Yes, you can access The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World by Martin J Ball in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Linguistics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
1 Sociolinguistics in the United States of America
Kirk Hazen
Introduction
In the US, sociolinguistics is not a single discipline guided by a coherent motivation towards aunified goal. Instead, it is a loose federation of fields examining the intersections of language and society. These fields are sampled in this chapter, drawing primarily from contemporary sociolinguistic journals. Some fields appear more prevalently in the US than perhaps in other countries. For example, variationist sociolinguistics, drawing from the influence of Labov (1963) and Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968), has a major presence in the US. However, the focus in this chapter remains broad as handbooks exist on such specialties within sociolinguistics: For example, Chambers, Trudgill, and Schilling-Estes (2002) and Bayley and Lucas (2007) are overviews of the field of variationist sociolinguistics.
Numerous studies in this chapter push forward sociolinguistics by rebuilding theoretical frameworks laid decades earlier. For example, Eckert (2003) focuses on the concept of the “authentic speaker,” the supposed “pure” vernacular speaker. Recognizing that sociolinguistics has been a fractured field since its inception, Bucholtz (2003) follows Eckert’s article with a view that authenticity is often designed with nostalgia as the theme; for a remedy, she argues for a more self-reflective sociolinguistics.
Beyond surveying the vast sociolinguistic work conducted in the US,1 the intent here is to provide some of Bucholtz’s suggested reflection on the enterprise of sociolinguistics in the US. Its goals and progress should be regularly reassessed to provide the best possible scholarship for the two main focus areas, the sociolinguistics of society and the sociolinguistics of language (following Fasold 1987; 1990). This chapter is divided into these two broad sections.
Sociolinguistics of society
Region and dialectology
The touchstone work in modern dialectology is Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006), as it provides a sketch of phonological differences for most of North America. Most other studies focus specifically on geographical locations. For example, Murray (2002) characterizes St. Louis as a Midwestern city containing both Southern and Northern features, although Murray does assert that it is developing a stronger Northern dialectological profile.
Most regional studies build from quality scholarship of past decades. In a reinvestigation of Labov’s germinal study of Martha’s Vineyard (1963), Blake and Josey (2003) provide a diachronic perspective on the /ay/ diphthong,2 a pivotal vowel in Labov’s argument for synchronic observation of diachronic processes. Labov (1963) correlated the raised variants of /ay/ and /aw/ with local identity3 on the island and illustrated that the different generations demonstrated language change in progress. Blake and Josey argue that orientation to local culture has diminished in the interim, hence removing the oppositional identity behind marking /ay/ raising in Labov (1963). Pope, Meyerhoff, and Ladd (2007) provide a differing report on the status of Martha’s Vineyard: They validate the inferencing of the apparent-time method and argue for the continuing robustness of social indexing for the (ay) and (aw) variables. Pope et al. find the social indexing of (ay) and (aw) on Martha’s Vineyard to be very similar to what it was in the early 1960s.
Some variables have become staples of modern research. One is the low-back merger. In a sociophonetic study, Majors (2005) examines the merger (e.g. caught~cot) in Missouri speech, finding that it is an active sound change spreading in the region, although residents of St. Louis appear to be resisting the merger. Irons (2007) conducted acoustic analysis of the low-back merger in English for 114 native, nonurban Kentuckians. He proposes a profile of the region where the merger is expanding because of the glide loss of /ò/ in Southern US phonology. The same explanation could be applied to adjacent West Virginia, where Southern West Virginia speakers demonstrate a higher rate of merger than Northern West Virginia speakers despite the merger being complete in western Pennsylvania (Hazen 2005).
Another widely studied set of features is the Northern Cities Shift (e.g. Labov 1994; Labov et al. 2006). Evans (2004) investigates how the Northern Cities Shift affects the transplanted Appalachian variety in Ypsilanti, MI. She acoustically analyzes /æ/ raising for 28 speakers. Social network and sex were significant social factors, with women leading in /æ/ raising, as were less tightly integrated speakers. Labov and Baranowski (2006) investigated a component of the Northern Cities Shift where two vowels are on a collision course to see how close vowels can be and maintain a phonemic distinction. The means of duration for 48 speakers in the inland North were examined for /è/ and merged /o/. Overall, a 50 millisecond difference was a result of the word class itself and not simply phonetic factors. Gender differences were clearly shown in the backing and lowering of /è/, with women leading the change.
Contact across national borders is also recognized in the regional literature. Although contact with Canadians has supposedly transferred Canadian raising with /ai/ and /au/ to Vermont, Roberts (2007) finds the variability for these two vowels to suggest otherwise. In an acoustic analysis of 19 speakers, Roberts finds that /ai/ is influenced by both age and gender with the oldest males having the front central variants predominantly; younger speakers generally have a lowered variant. In addition, the /ai/ vowel does not follow the linguistic constraint of raising before only voiceless obstruents but instead is raised (not lowered) before all sounds.
Not all regional studies are phonetic in nature. Burkette (2007) investigates English in Ashe County, North Carolina, in the Appalachian mountains. She focuses on the use of conversational narrative to create community and display identity through the analysis of two grammatical variables: a-prefixing (they said he’s a-coming down) and nonstandard past tense (And they said he run till he dropped). At the Northern end of Appalachia, Johnstone, Andrus, and Danielson (2006) examine the sociolinguistic history of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, using an intersectional analysis of historical records, ethnography, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic interviews. They track the evolution of linguistic features from markers of social class to markers of “place.” Taking up what most researchers refer to as the Northern Subject Rule (e.g. Hazen 2000a), José (2007) investigates the variable use of verbal –s with third-person plural subjects analyzed in Indiana and compared with varieties in Appalachia. Migration of features appears to be the case in José’s data, as universalist explanations are rejected.
With the increasing recognition of diversity in African-American English, Charity (2007) investigates regional differences in low socioeconomic status of African-American children’s speech. Charity utilized sentences primed with standard English features, which are often variable for African-American speakers, such as the omission of final consonants (e.g. best
bes’) or the copula (e.g. She is pretty
she pretty). New Orleans children were found to have higher vernacular rates than those in either Cleveland or Washington, DC.
Ethnicity
The most studied dialects in the US are the varieties spoken by African Americans. Accordingly, articles dealing with these varieties are referred to throughout this chapter. Although theoretical concerns arise in articles on ethnicity, US scholars are also concerned with applied results of their work. For example, Rickford, Sweetland, and Rickford (2004) provide an exhaustive bibliography of scholarship on education and African-American English and other vernaculars. For an overview of sociolinguistic work in education, including many articles involving ethnicity, see Hazen (2007b).
The areas of ethnic sociolinguistic study are now mature enough to receive quality summary articles reassessing progress made in recent decades. Thomas (2007) provides both a summary and detailed description of the phonological and phonetic characteristics of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). He notes that the distribution of the scholarship is not evenly divided among the possible subfields of study and recommends areas where work is most critically needed.
The southeastern US is a frequently studied region for ethnic differences. Fridland (2003) examines /ai/ ungliding for African-American and European-American Southerners, specifically describing /ai/ ungliding in prevoiceless environments (e.g. bike). Most previous literature describes African-American communities avoiding ungliding in this environment. However, Fridland reveals that for her 30 speakers, glide weakening, rather than full monophthongization, is a regular feature regardless of ethnicity. She finds that African Americans have this feature in all phonetic environments.
In connection with the construction of identities, Sweetland (2002) investigates ethnic crossing through a case study of a 23-year-old white US female who consistently uses AAVE features. She argues for a reassessment of how academic linguists construe race, language, and crossing; Sweetland adopts a broader view of ideologies of the speaker (and other qualitative evidence) to assess whether crossing is viewed as authentic or not.
Over the past decade numerous investigations into the history of African-American English have been made (e.g. Kautzsch 2002). Mallinson and Wolfram (2002) investigate language variation patterns in an ethnically diverse Appalachian mountain enclave community. Their examination of diagnostic phonological and morphological variables from interviews with three African Americans reveals “that earlier African American English largely accommodated local dialects while maintaining a subtle, distinctive ethnolinguistic divide” (ibid.: 743).
Numerous studies have reexamined the development of AAVE in the US (e.g. Wolfram and Thomas 2002). Wolfram (2003) argues for the regional accommodation of earlier AAVEs which subsequently maintained a similar substrate of language variation patterns. He argues that the regional accommodation of AAVE has given way to younger generations moving towards more nationally generalized AAVE norms.
Dubois and Horvath (2003) study Creole African-American English in Louisiana. They focus on its maintenance of traditional language variation patterns in the face of massive sociocultural change: For example, the Creole African-American speakers have maintained glide reduction. Dubois and Horvath conclude that social intercourse has not changed significantly since the nineteenth century, and that only with speakers going off to college have social networks changed enough to alter language variation patterns.
Thomas and Carter (2006) examine prosodic rhythms of 20 African Americans and 20 Europea...
