Sociolinguistics Chapter 3

Minimal Groups Paradigm

- To investigate intergroup discrimination (Henri Tajfel)
- Participants told they will receive resources
allocated to them by other participants
- Fairness in allocation, but also significant in-group
advantages (i.e. intergroup discrimination)
- Occurs in the absence of any previously existing
hostility or dislike toward the outgroup
- Groups matter to people

Essentialism

- the idea that people can be placed
into fixed social categories and that all members we assign
to a category share certain traits which we see as the
essence of this category
- assumes that social categories
reflect an essential underlying identity

Stereotype

a generalisation about members of a group
based on the idea that all members of the group will share
certain personal characteristics

Anti-Essentialism

proposes that there is no
essential underlying identity to particular
social groups and that identity is something
that changes according to time, place, and
context

Speech Community

- a group of people with
shared norms or common evaluations about
language forms
- Members of a speech community don't
necessarily speak the same way, but they
attribute the same (or very similar) social
meanings to particular ways of speaking
- broad unit of
analysis

Criteria for a speech community

◼ Shared language use
◼ Frequency of interaction by a group of people
◼ Shared rules of speaking and interpretations of speech
performance
◼ Shared attitudes and values regarding language forms
and language use
◼ Shared sociocultural understandings and assumptions
regarding speech events

Shared Norms

- a common feeling about linguistic
behaviour in a particular community; giving the
same (or very similar) social meanings to
particular ways of speaking
- can be hard to understand for outsiders

Language Crossing

shifting into a dialect or
language that doesn’t necessarily ‘belong’ to the
speaker; speakers “are not accepted members
of the group associated with the second
language [or variety] that they are using”

CoP (Community of practice)

- a group of people who engage on an
ongoing basis in some common activity or
endeavour
- Differences also at linguistic level (phonology and
grammar)

Mutual Engagement

the relationships that members
of the community forge with each other, their
investment in time and resources

Joint Enterprise

the goal that they pursue together

Shared Repertoire

the set of behaviours (linguistic and
non-linguistic) that members of the community share

Social Network

-the social connections that
inform how and when people interact with each
other
- The degree to which a person is integrated in a
social network (the strength of their network)
can be measured on two dimensions:
◼ Network density
◼ Network multiplicity
- to reveal
how particular linguistic usages can be related
to the frequency and density of certain kinds of
contacts among speakers

Network Density

- the number of connections in a
network
- high-density; dense network (if people you know interact with one another)
- low-density; loose network

Network Multiplexity

- how people are tied together
in the network
- linked through multiple capacities; mulitplex
- linked through one capacity; uniplex/simplex
- Dense and multiplex networks often act as
norm-enforcement mechanisms

Perceptual dialectology/folk linguistics

- the
study of non-linguists’ ideas about the
regions, features and values of dialects
- Methodology: give people a map and ask
them to draw dialect regions, label them and
describe them

matched-guise paradigm

- The same speaker is recorded reading a passage in
two or more language varieties. People listen to these
recordings and evaluate the speaker on his or her
intelligence, kindness, ambition, leadership, sincerity,
sense of humour, etc.
- Criticisms:
◼ Artificial setting
◼ There is a danger of resorting to stereotypes which may,
in turn, evoke stereotyped reactions