Linguistic Practice in Changing Conditions

Ben Rampton

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800410015
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistique

This book demonstrates the power and distinctiveness of the contribution that sociolinguistics can make to our understanding of everyday communicative practice under changing social conditions.It builds on the approaches developed by Gumperz and Hymes in the 1970s and 80s, and it not only affirms their continuing relevance in analyses of the micropolitics of everyday talk in urban settings, but also argues for their value in emergent efforts to chart the heavily securitised environments now developing around us. Drawing on 10 years of collaborative work and ranging across disciplinary, interdisciplinary and applied perspectives, the book begins with guiding principles and methodology, shifts to empirically driven arguments in urban sociolinguistics, and concludes with studies of (in)securitised communication addressed to challenges ahead.

1Introduction: Linguistic Practice in Changing Conditions

This book belongs to a tradition of research that examines social change through the prism of everyday communicative practice. It is anchored in the foundational work of John Gumperz and Dell Hymes in the 1970s and 1980s. It discusses the relevance of this tradition in a range of practical spheres (especially but not only education), and it elaborates the tradition in interdisciplinary encounters that focus both on well-established and on more recent issues: migration, race/ethnicity and social class, as well as citizenship, conviviality, surveillance and insecurity.

The discussion is carried forward in a collection of sociolinguistic papers that address:

(a)the development of theory and methodology in a space between linguistic anthropology and applied linguistics, combining frameworks from the former with the practical goals of the latter, holding to an ethnographic epistemology throughout (Part 1; Afterword);

(b)informal linguistic practices in multi-ethnic urban settings, reflecting on their significance and their development in Britain over nearly half a century (Part 2);

(c)growing fear and (in)securitisation in everyday life, exploring some of the implications for the theory and practice of sociolinguistics (Part 3).

Most of the book involves the interplay of theory, method and empirical data conventional in research studies. But universities are social institutions, and as well as doing research, academics teach students, collaborate with colleagues, organise activities and networks and interact with ordinary people. These experiences also shape their sense of the value, purpose and direction of the research they undertake, thinking beyond questions of coherence and rigour (essential though these remain). There are several ways in which this is reflected in what follows. Traditionally in research, the normative (‘should’) element is fairly muted in theories and findings themselves, and wider outcomes are often hard to observe. But especially in Part 1, there is discussion of policies, intervention strategies and training courses that seek to change or influence specific groups and institutions in particular ways. Indeed theories too can have potential consequences beyond the specialised university niches in which they are initially credentialed, directing attention to hitherto neglected processes, challenging the hegemony of particular styles of thought and action and arguing for others. And this is certainly true in the programme of research established by Gumperz and Hymes, with which the book aligns.

The principles, procedures and potentials of this programme are explored in Part 1: Sociolinguistic Frameworks Tuned to Social Change, and my discussion in this section gradually widens in scope, shifting in emphasis from the intra- to the interdisciplinary and then to the applied.

Chapter 2 discusses Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) and, after sketching Gumperz and Hymes’ early efforts to build a general theory of language and society, it describes how Gumperz developed methods of analysis that reveal ‘how linguistic signs interact with social knowledge in discourse’, leading from there to a ‘dynamic view of social environments where history, economic forces and interactive processes … combine to create or to eliminate social distinctions’ (Gumperz, 1982: 29). In the social sciences more generally, ‘practice theory’ has been hugely influential and has been characterised as a ‘broad and capacious … general theory of the production of social subjects through practice, and the production of the world itself through practice’ (Ortner, 2006: 16, emphasis added). But Gumperz stands out for developing a set of concepts and procedures that take us very close to the details of these production processes as they occur and, as well as discussing how Gumperz’s own work has been updated in, for example, studies of asylum procedures, the chapter points to surveillance and online/offline interaction as priorities for contemporary IS research.

The chapter on interactional sociolinguistics sets the key for the whole book, but it is mainly concerned with the positioning of IS in the heartlands of research on language and society. Chapter 3, on Linguistic Ethnography (co-authored with Janet Maybin & Celia Roberts), broadens the frame of reference, focuses more on Hymes, and locates the Hymes/Gumperz tradition in interdisciplinary space. It explores the ways in which this tradition has been taken up and reformulated in Europe since 2000, pointing to ways in which relatively recent historical changes have influenced the relationship between ethnography and linguistics, strengthening ethnography’s epistemological status and heightening the analytic relevance of linguistics. To illustrate the interdisciplinary resonance of their combination, it describes a training programme in linguistic ethnography designed for doctoral social scientists from a plurality of academic backgrounds, and then addresses the complexities that emerge in work with education and health professionals, designed to improve institutional practice.

Linguistic ethnography often has to negotiate its stance, shifting between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. In Chapter 4, on Sociolinguistic Citizenship (co-authored with Melanie Cooke & Sam Holmes), normative considerations move centre stage in a discussion of the politics and practices of language education. Here Hymes’ conception of ethnography as a ‘democratic science’ is integrated with the notion of linguistic citizenship (LC) developed by Christopher Stroud and colleagues. LC itself articulates a commitment to democratic participation, to voice, to the heterogeneity of linguistic resources and to the political value of sociolinguistic understanding. As well as addressing some of the criticisms of the LC idea (utopianism, self-declared marginality), the chapter considers the scope for promoting LC beyond Southern Africa, where it was conceived. The chapter looks at some recent not-for-profit initiatives aligned with the values of LC in England, identifies problems of sustainability and points to the ways in which universities can help to keep them going.

Sociolinguistic terrain well suited to the notion of LC becomes the central focus in Part 2 of the book: Ethnicity, Race and Class in Micro-practices of Differentiation and Alignment. This follows Gumperz in the quest for a ‘dynamic view of social environments where history, economic forces and interactive processes … combine to create or to eliminate social distinctions’ (Gumperz, 1982: 29), and it draws together a series of empirical studies of urban speech in and around London spanning approximately 25 years. It gravitates towards the fine grain of talk and interaction, but in doing so it always attends to the formative role played by longer, wider processes and structures (sometimes supplementing the analysis with quantitative methods from variationist sociolinguistics). Throughout, it repeatedly returns to the question: What does this kind of micro-analysis actually add to our understanding?

It is this question that opens the first paper in Part 2 – Chapter 5, Ethnicities without Guarantees, co-authored with Roxy Harris. This chapter involves a careful examination of the ways in which race and ethnicity are noted or evoked in ordinary encounters, and it points to a nuanced and potentially very consequential dynamics of differentiation that is easy to miss in broad-brush discussions of racism, subordination and exclusion framed in terms of clearly demarcated groups. Major commentators like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy have emphasised the wider significance of the hybrid cultures emerging in multi-ethnic urban environments, but sociolinguistics helps us to explore the complexities of this empirically.

This is taken further in Chapter 6, Style Contrasts, Migration and Social Class, which focuses more fully on vernacular speech practices themselves (rather than comparing them with established ideological discourses). It reviews two earlier studies of crossing and stylisation, practices that involve the relatively self-conscious use of languages and speech styles that lie outside the speaker’s normal repertoire (Rampton, 1995/2018, 2006). In doing so, the chapter highlights the grounded creativity with which adolescent peer groups use different voices to problematise and interpret particular aspects of their sociohistorical environment, materialising different sociopolitical concerns and strategic responses. In one case, exaggerated performances of posh and Cockney denaturalise the pervasive cultural hierarchy associated with social class. In the other, Creole and Asian English are used to make ethnic difference familiar, orderly and enjoyable despite the racism elsewhere.

The fact that sociohistorical structures and processes like class and migration show up in the performance of different voices produced spontaneously in the quick of daily activity shows how a sensitivity to large-scale processes reaches deep into the practical consciousness of individuals. Chapter 7, From ‘Youth Language’ to Contemporary Urban Vernaculars, takes this further. It argues that the kind of low-key verbal art evidenced in Chapter 6 is integrally linked to the more unselfconscious styles identified in many studies of contemporary speech in multi-ethnic Western European cities. And as well as being attested in research dating from the 1980s to the late 2000s, the durability of this type of vernacular sensibility is evidenced in the case study of a successful middle-aged businessman, who still shifts into this style when talking to his oldest friends from school.

Located in exactly the same time and place as Chapter 7, the case study in Chapter 8, Styling in a Language Learnt Later in Life, brings in another very significant figure of the urban linguascape, the migrant adult second (or additional) language learner. As before, two axes of social differentiation stand out in the English speech styles of the focal research participant: first, a local versus immigrant distinction, produced by migration and movement between Britain and the Indian subcontinent and, second, the high/low binary associated with British social class. So even though the focal participant only started to speak the language relatively recently, he displayed a practical sensitivity to key dimensions of local English sociolinguistic structure. To produce this account, the analysis combines the Gumperzian framework (elaborated by Silverstein and others) with quantitative findings generated by Devyani Sharma and Lavanyi Sankaran, and it tries to steer a path between, on the one hand, the romantic celebration of difference traditionally found in sociolinguistics and, on the other, the attention to deficiency and remedial need characteristic of second language research. Instead, the chapter aims for a description of first-generation migrants that takes us closer to their embedded complexity as parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, friends and workmates, who also make an agentive contribution to local sociolinguistic processes.

Much of the unity of the four studies in Part 2 lies in the layered analytical framework they employ, in their focus on stylistic practice, and in the processes of empirical comparison developed within and across these chapters (established and explicit ideologies versus emergent and enacted ones in Chapter 5; stylisations of class versus ethnicity in Chapter 6; adolescents in the 1980s versus adults in the 2000s in Chapter 7; L2 versus L1 speakers of English in Chapter 8). In addition, of course, these papers share much the same geohistorical backdrop – urban England, reflected in data collected between 1985 and 2009. So, in combination, they present a series of urban English scenes in which linguistic practice projects liveable worlds at the intersection of class, migration and diaspora. Tensions and difficulties certainly also play a constitutive role, but overall, these four chapters spotlight complex practices of conviviality which are also an important element in contemporary urban life in other places.

At the same time, Part 2 is clearly selective in its focus, and it makes no claim to being a comprehensive survey or chronicle of urban sociolinguistic practice since the 1980s. In fact, since the start of the millennium, people and environments like those studied in Part 2 have become the target of government suspicion, positioned within growing political emphasis on existential threats to the nation-state. These processes of (in)securitisation also call for closer sociolinguistic scrutiny, and Part 3 of the book, Everyday (In)securitisation, draws on an interdisciplinary dialogue with critical security studies (CSS), exploring the challenges and the contributions, both theoretical and empirical, that emerge in this encounter.

Chapter 9, Sociolinguistics and Everyday (In)securitisation (co-written with Constadina Charalambous, Panayiota Charalambous and Kamran Khan), describes how CSS reconceptualises traditional concepts like ‘the state’, ‘security’ and ‘borders’ as ongoing practices. So instead of seeing it as the condition of being safe from e...