Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language use and the structure of society. It takes into account such factors as the social backgrounds of both the speaker and the addressee (i.e. their age, sex, social
class, ethnic background, degree of integration into their neighbourhood, etc.), the relationship between speaker and addressee (good friends, employer–employee, teacher–pupil, grandmother–grandchild, etc.) and the context and manner of the interaction (in bed, in the supermarket, in a TV studio, in church, loudly, whisper-
ing, over the phone, by fax, etc.), maintaining that they are crucial to an under-standing of both the structure and function of the language used in a situation. Because of the emphasis placed on language use, a sociolinguistically adequate analysis of language is typically based on (sound or video) recordings of everyday interactions (e.g. dinner-time conversations with friends, doctor–patient consulta-tions, TV discussion programmes, etc.).
Recordings of language use, as described above, can be analysed in a number of different ways depending on the aims of the research. For instance, the socio-linguist may be interested in producing an analysis of regional or social dialects in order to investigate whether different social groups speak differently and to discover whether language change is in progress. Rather different is research into
Introduction 15
the form and function of politeness in everyday interaction, an interest which will lead to a search for markers of politeness in conversations and how these are
related to social dimensions such as those enumerated above. Alternatively, the focus may be on so-called minimal responses (such as mmm, yeah and right) or discourse markers (such as well, you know and actually).
In addition to phenomena which arise in interactions between individuals or small groups, sociolinguistics is concerned with larger-scale interactions between language and society as a whole. One such interaction is language shift. Here, in a multilingual setting, one language becomes increasingly dominant over the other languages, taking over more and more of the domains in which these other languages were once used. Understanding the conditions which facilitate language shift and the dynamics of the process itself is properly viewed as a sociolinguistic task. It would, of course, be possible to raise many other research topics in the study of language which share a social focus, but because it will play a central role in much of our subsequent discussion, we shall close this introduction by going into a little more detail on the contemporary study of language variation and change.
The views of lay people about language are often quite simplistic. One illustration of this concerns the relationship between the so-called standard languages and the non-standard dialects associated with those languages. Standard French and Standard English, for example, are varieties of French and English that have written grammar books, pronunciation and spelling conventions, are promoted by the media and other public institutions such as the education system and are considered by a majority of people to be the ‘correct’ way to speak these two languages. Non-standard varieties (sometimes called ‘dialects’) are often consid-ered to be lazy, ungrammatical forms, which betray a lack of both educational training and discipline in learning. Linguists strongly disagree with this view. The study of language use has shown not only that non-standard varieties exhibit grammatical regularity and consistent pronunciation patterns in the same way that standard varieties do, but also that a vast majority of people will use non-standard features at least some of the time in their speech. Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that the speech of most people is, at least in some respects, variable, combining, for example, both standard and non-standard sounds, words or gram-matical structures. The study of language variation involves the search for con-sistent patterns in such variable linguistic behaviour.
Another area where language variation plays a crucial role is in the study of language change. It is the principal concern of historical linguistics to investigate how languages change over time, and until recently, historical linguists have studied language change by relying exclusively on diachronic methods. These involve analysing the structure of language from a succession of dates in the past and highlighting those structural features (phonological, morphological or syntactic) that appear to have changed over that period of time. For obvious reasons, if we are considering a form of a language from many years ago, we do not have access to native speakers of the language; as a consequence, historical linguists have had to rely largely on manuscripts from the past as evidence of how languages may once
16 linguistics
have been spoken, but such evidence is of variable quality, particularly when we take account of the fact that very few people were able to write in the pre-modern era. In these circumstances, it is difficult to judge just how representative surviving manuscripts are of the way ordinary people actually spoke.
As an alternative to diachronic methods and aided by the invention of the tape recorder allowing the collection of a permanent record of someone’s speech, William Labov has pioneered a synchronic approach to studying language change. Whereas diachronic techniques demand language data from different periods in time, Labov’s synchronic, so-called apparent-time, approach requires data to be collected at only one point in time. Crucially, the data collected within the same community are from people of different ages and social groups. Labov reasoned that if the speech of young people within a particular social group is different from that of old people in the same group, then it is very likely that language change is taking place. This technique has a number of advantages over the traditional historical method. Firstly, the recorded language data constitute a considerably more representative sample of the speech patterns of a community than do the manuscript data of traditional historical linguistics. Secondly, it allows the linguist to study language change as it is actually taking place – traditionally, historical linguists had believed this to be impossible. Finally, it allows the linguist to study how language changes spread through society, answering questions such
as, Which social groups tend to lead language changes? How do language changes spread from one social group to another? (exercises 9 and 10).
Labov’s apparent-time model assumes that a difference between young and old with respect to a certain linguistic feature may be due to linguistic change. Not all variable linguistic features that are sensitive to age variation are necessarily indica-tive of language changes in progress, however. Slang words, for example, are often adopted by youngsters, but then abandoned when middle age is reached. Similarly, some phonological and grammatical features, such as the use of multiple negation (e.g. I haven’t got none nowhere), seem to be stable yet age-graded, i.e. not under-going change, but associated with a particular age group, generation after generation.
This brief introduction to the methods and concerns of sociolinguistics may seem to suggest that these are far removed from those of other types of linguist. However, in studying variable patterns of language behaviour and the language change that this variation may reveal, the sociolinguist seeks to uncover universal properties of language, attempting to address questions such as, Do all languages change in the same way? We have already met this preoccupation with universals in our earlier discussion, so we can see that at this level, sociolinguistics exhibits important affinities with other approaches to the study of language. However, a fundamental difference remains: the sociolinguist’s questions about universals require answers in which the structure of society plays an integral part. In this regard, they differ from the questions with which we opened this introduction, but there is no conflict here. Taken together, the various emphases we pursue in this book present a comprehensive picture of the complex and many-faceted phenom-ena which the study of language engages.