Dialect Diversity in America

The Politics of Language Change

William Labov

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780813935881
• eBook ISBN: 9780813933276
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The sociolinguist William Labov has worked for decades on change in progress in American dialects and on African American Vernacular English (AAVE). In Dialect Diversity in America, Labov examines the diversity among American dialects and presents the counterintuitive finding that geographically localized dialects of North American English are increasingly diverging from one another over time.

Contrary to the general expectation that mass culture would diminish regional differences, the dialects of Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Birmingham, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and New York are now more different from each other than they were a hundred years ago. Equally significant is Labov's finding that AAVE does not map with the geography and timing of changes in other dialects. The home dialect of most African American speakers has developed a grammar that is more and more different from that of the white mainstream dialects in the major cities studied and yet highly homogeneous throughout the United States.

Labov describes the political forces that drive these ongoing changes, as well as the political consequences in public debate. The author also considers the recent geographical reversal of political parties in the Blue States and the Red States and the parallels between dialect differences and the results of recent presidential elections. Finally, in attempting to account for the history and geography of linguistic change among whites, Labov highlights fascinating correlations between patterns of linguistic divergence and the politics of race and slavery, going back to the antebellum United States. Complemented by an online collection of audio files that illustrate key dialectical nuances, Dialect Diversity in America offers an unparalleled sociolinguistic study from a preeminent scholar in the field.

1

ABOUT LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE CHANGE

This book is about language, about language change in particular, and especially about the changes that are now taking place in the dialects of North American English. It is also about the political causes and consequences of those changes. What is said here about language and linguistic change has a firm foundation in four decades of research on American English. On the other hand, I am not an expert in politics. For this area, I have drawn from the work of a wide range of historians, political scientists, and cultural geographers to make the necessary connections.

Some Commonsense Views of Language That Are Wrong

People tend to believe that dialect differences in American English are disappearing, especially given our exposure to a fairly uniform broadcast standard in the mass media. One can find this point of view in almost any discussion of American dialects, as for example in a recent exchange on Dr. Goodword's Language Blog.¹ A contributor, Bruce, wrote:

The accents I do hear from people from around the country seem to be disappearing. People from New Orleans interviewed on TV or Radio seem to sound like me, as do many of those I hear from New York and elsewhere. I used to hear distinctive accents from people from Minnesota for example and those also seem to be going.

Dr. Goodword responded:

Bruce is absolutely right. Regional accents are dying out…the original dialects in this country were the results of the accents of the various immigrants who came to this country looking for a better life. They all landed on the east coast, which is why all the accents are currently in the east. However, as they migrated to the west, all these accents merged into one, so there are no distinctive regional dialects west or north of southern Ohio (maybe southern Illinois and a bit in northern Minnesota).

This overwhelmingly common opinion is simply and jarringly wrong. The research reported here will demonstrate that the reverse is actually the case. New sound changes in progress are driving the regional dialects of English further and further apart, so that people from Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, and New York speak more differently from each other now than they did in the middle of the 20th century. I would not expect most readers of this book to accept this statement lightly, and I will do my best to put enough evidence before you to make it believable. We will be dealing with sounds that are not easy to describe in print, but I will try to direct your hearing so that you can begin to observe some of these new sound changes around you in everyday life.

This book is a product of sociolinguistic research, in which we interview people in communities across the country and record conversation that comes as close as possible to the speech of everyday life. This approach produces surprising results that often run counter to preconceived intuitions and opinions. The growing divergence of dialects is only one case where our findings are contrary to accepted opinion. It will also appear, in spite of public perception, that there is no such thing as “Brooklynese” (chap. 3). Chapter 4 will demonstrate that popular descriptions of “Ebonics” bear little relation to what African American people actually say.

What We All Know about Language and What We Don't Know

In the chapters to follow, I assume no knowledge of linguistics, though many readers will be quite at home in that field. Even without any knowledge of linguistics, your own knowledge of language will be an important resource in the discussion to come. Most linguists begin their introductory classes by saying, “You already know more about your language than any other subject you will ever study.” You may not know that you know this, since most linguistic knowledge is implicit, hidden from conscious view. Most of what linguists do is to make that knowledge explicit, asking direct questions such as “Can you say Service is bad around here anymore?,” or more commonly asking themselves, “Can I say Service is bad around here anymore?” This is a useful and productive procedure, and most progress in linguistic theory is built upon it. Yet other aspects of language are hidden from these introspective procedures, and can only be found by observation of what people say. This is the case for many kinds of linguistic variation.

The main topic of Chapter 2 is such a case of variation, taken as an example of the uniform way in which our language shifts and changes from one time to another. It is the alternation between Good morning and Good mornin’.”² Some features of this variation are open to introspection. As a native speaker of English, I know that I can say either Morning or mornin’. And if I ask myself, “Can I say Flushin’, Long Island?, the answer is accurately “No.” The results of observation confirm this: no one has been heard to say Flushin’, Long Island. On the other hand, introspection fails if I ask myself whether I am more likely to use the -in’ variant in Good morning or in I'm working on it. Here the answer would probably be, “It all depends; both are possible.” Yet all studies of what people actually say find that the -in’ form is much more likely in progressive verbs like workin’ than in nouns like morning and ceiling (Labov 1989; Houston 1991; Roberts 1993). And if I ask, “Is Sarah Palin more likely to say Good mornin’ than Barack Obama?,” most people will answer, “Yes.” But as we will see, that answer is incorrect. It turns out that most of our introspective judgments about language are right, but a small percentage are dead wrong. The problem is that we don't have a clue as to where those errors are located. The data that will be used throughout this book will therefore be drawn from sociolinguistic studies that don't have that kind of uncertainty. They draw upon recorded sociolinguistic interviews that last an hour or more. These interviews are not like survey questionnaires. Rather, they are shaped like conversation, often touch on personal topics of great importance, and approximate— but never quite reach—the style that people use in speaking to their friends and family in everyday life. Because actual behavior is variable in the items we are interested in, this requires the systematic study of variation—how individual speakers vary from one style to another, and how speakers’ language patterns vary from one social group to another.³

The Two Main Strategies of Linguistic Research

Among the paths that linguists follow in pursuit of a better understanding of human language, we can trace two main branches.

THE SEARCH FOR UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR. One way of understanding language follows a search for the features that are common to all languages, a “universal grammar.”⁴ This is the goal set for linguistics by Noam Chomsky (1968). However this common human language faculty may have originated, it must have remained constant during all of human history. We know this by the fact that children of any genetic subgroup can learn any language as their first language equally well. By definition, this universal grammar has a null footprint in time.

UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE CHANGE. The other route toward a greater understanding of language focuses on linguistic change. We ask how the great differentiation of language families, languages, and dialects came about. We would like to know how any given language or dialect came to be, and more generally, what are the root causes of language change and diversity? The subject matter of this study is quite large: every aspect of language that is changing or has changed in the past. Historical linguistics attacks the problem through the written record of past changes; in recent years, the study of linguistic change and variation has focused on changes taking place around us, changes still in progress.

 

The study of language change will tell us about ourselves, what kind of people are we, and how we have evolved. Darwin was well aware of this. In the Descent of Man (1871) he famously wrote that “the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.” He then laid out 15 such parallels having to do with the effects of long continued use, such as:

 

•    We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to communities of descent, and analogies due to a similar process of formation. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely

•    and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues.

•    We see variability in every tongue, and new words are continually cropping up;…

•    single words, like whole languages, gradually become extinct.

But when Darwin came to the crucial question of natural selection, he had to argue,

 

•    The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.

As much we admire and follow Darwin, no linguist supports this view. The general consensus is that there is no progress in linguistic evolution. Writing on “language and evolution,” Joseph Greenberg summed up the consensus:

Taking linguistic change as a whole, there seems to be no discernible movement toward greater efficiency such as might be expected if in fact there were a continuous struggle in which superior linguistic innovations won out as a general rule. (1959)

The parallels between linguistic and biological evolution seem so strong that it is indeed puzzling to find that the crucial link of natural selection should be missing. Language change across the centuries has turned a single group of Proto-Indo-European dialects into a family of mutually unintelligible languages, including Russian, Hindi, Greek, Albanian, French, German, English, and Icelandic. Linguistic change has not made it easier for speakers of those languages to communicate.

Before we begin a search for the causes of language change and diversity, it should be said that the mere fact of diversity is not a challenge to our understanding. When two groups of speakers become separated over time by migration to distant parts, and communication between them is drastically reduced, we expect their linguistic systems to diverge. The many sources of variation in vocabulary, grammar, and phonology will inevitably lead them to drift apart, and any degree of convergence requires an explanation.

On the other hand, we are not surprised when neighboring dialects converge. Many studies of European dialects show how the dialect contact leads to reduction of dialect diversity in the form of “dialect leveling” (Trudgill 1986). In fact, if these neighbors begin to speak more differently from one another, we are surprised and puzzled. It follows that when two speech communities are in continuous communication, linguistic convergence is expected and any degree of divergence requires an explanation.

Is Language a Property of the Individual or the Group?

This bears on our most general view of what the language faculty is and how it varies. Many linguists believe that language is a property of the individual mind, and it is only natural for each individual to have constructed a different language of their own. The sociolinguistic view, which guides my own thinking, is that we are programmed to learn to speak in ways that fit the general pattern of our community. What I, as a language learner, want to learn is not “my English” or even “your English” but the English language in general. In this sense, the language learning faculty is outward bound, searching for a community consensus rather than an individual model.

We can easily imagine a different scenario of linguistic evolution. If the language learner was fixed on the first linguistic pattern encountered, the language of the parent, we would expect that when families move into a new area, children would grow up using their parents’ dialect. Yet we have massive evidence that children do not do this: if they are brought into a new community before the age of nine, children will have the dialect system of that community, not of their parents. It appears that linguistic evolution has developed a system that searches for the general pattern of the speech community and, up to a certain age, continually rewrites the rules as it encounters new data.

If this search for what is “out there” is the driving force in language acquisition, we have to ask, what happens when the language learner finds no single pattern but variation in the way that people speak? To answer this question, the chapters to follow will consider a number of such “linguistic variables,” and speakers’ ways of dealing with them.

The Argument to Follow

Chapter 2 begins with the most general patterns—what we all know but don't know we know about linguistic variation. We will see that the linguistic variation of big cities like New York is surprisingly regular across social groups and social situations. We will find a strong social consensus in how we change our way of speaking from one situation to another, and consider experimental evidence on how powerful that hidden consensus is. Chapter 3 will turn to the disruption of that consensus and describe the sound changes that drive dialects apart—in particular, the Northern Cities Shift, which rotates the short vowels of cities in the Great Lakes region. It will appear that such regional changes interfere with our ability to understand one another, not only when we travel, but within the very community in which we were born and raised.

Chapter 4 pursues even larger language differences, confronting the growing gulf between white and black forms of English. We will look into the origins of this division and find that African American Vernacular English is not a direct descendant of the English spoken by slaves on southern plantations, as we used to think. Its present form is rather a new development fostered by residential segregation in the great cities of the North, and spread in complex and mysterious ways throughout the country as a whole.

Chapter 5 deals with the consequences of the growing divergence in Black and White English. The immediate cause of this widening gap is the residential segregation characteristic of all the major cities of the United States. In addition to fostering dialect differences between black and white Americans, residential segregation also has severe effects on African American literacy. The history of reactions to the use of different dialects of English in the classroom is a violent one, and the chapter ends by outlining some methods developed for teaching reading that take these linguistic and political factors into account.

Chapter 6 returns to the general study of dialect divergence and examines dialect as an emblem of local identity. The strengths and weaknesses of this account will be brought forward as the focus moves from neighborhoods to cities to metropolitan regions. It will appear that, in ways not yet understood, the mainstream dialect of the metropolis is geographically uniform. The widely used term “Brooklynese” turns out to be a label for working-class New York City speech, no matter where in the five boroughs the speakers may be living.

Chapter 7 examines the history of the Northern Cities Shift and the relation between linguistic change and political ideology over vast territories and several centuries. We will not leave race behind, for it will appear that attitudes toward race and racial inequality are deeply embedded in that history. The inquiry will carry us back to the construction of the Erie Canal in 1817, the great religious awakening of the 1820s and ‘30s, the formation of the Republican Party and the Civil War, and then carry us forward to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the geographic reversal of Democratic and Republican territories, and the striking coincidence of the Northern dialect and the so-called Blue States of 2004 and 2008. The parallels between political and linguistic change show how intimately connected are these two forms of social behavior.

2

A HIDDEN CONSENSUS

Chapter 1 looked briefly at the difference between -ing and -in’ in unstressed syllables at the ends of words; the difference between He is working and He is workin’, or between Good morning and Good mornin’. Speakers of English have alternated between these two forms for over a thousand years. The -in’ form is the regular descendant of the Old English participle ending in -inde, and the -ing form is inherited from the Old English verbal noun ending in -inge. This alternation is a classic example of a linguistic variable, labeled (ING).

The (ING) Variable

This linguistic feature was first examined quantitatively by the anthropologist John Fischer in a 1958 study of 15 child...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. About Language and Language Change
• 2. A Hidden Consensus
• 3. Hidden Diversity
• 4. The Growing Divergence of Black and White English
• 5. The Politics of African American English
• 6. Language Change as Local Politics
• 7. The Political Ideology of the Northern Cities Shift
• 8. Putting It All Together
• Appendix: Summary Statement on African American Vernacular English
• Notes
• References
• Index