Sociolinguistics Notes

What Are Sociolinguistics?

• Sociolinguists study how people say things, focusing on language as a social fact and identity marker.
• Language serves as interaction, communication, and a bridge between individuals, expressing and delighting.
• We are surrounded by a multitude of linguistic elements such as languages, dialects, varieties, genres, accents, jargons, styles, codes, and speech acts.
• These elements are constantly changing through linguistic reproduction and creation.
• Each voice has its own time, place, and desire to be heard.
• This linguistic diversity is celebrated, rather than condemned, as seen in the re-reading of the story of Babel.

Language and Society

• Language is intertwined with the shape of society and can be both truthful and deceptive.
• Social inequities lead to linguistic inequities, and language perpetuates inequity in various aspects of society, including structures, demographics, power, gender, ethnicity, interaction, and globalization.
• Not all voices are equally heard.
• Dell Hymes identified three perspectives on the relationship between the social and the linguistic:
  1. The social as well as the linguistic, addressing social issues with a language component.
  2. Socially realistic linguistics, basing linguistic investigation on real-world data.
  3. Socially constituted linguistics, affirming that language is inherently social and society is inherently linguistic.
• Hymes advocated for a socially constituted linguistics, emphasizing equity and how it is evidenced in societal voices.
• Linguistic equity needs to be achieved and invites engagement.
• Two core ideas:
  • the profusion of language.
  • the drive to a sociolinguistics of equity.

What is language?

• Sociolinguists should spend more time considering this question.
• Sociolinguistics emerged when most linguists treated language in isolation.
• Noam Chomsky's transformational-generative theory focused on an abstract ability to judge grammaticality, sidelining other aspects of language behavior as mere 'performance'.
• Chomsky focused on ‘an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community’.
• Hymes broadened Chomsky's notion of linguistic competence to include what Chomsky treated as performance, terming it communicative competence.
• Hymes focused on ‘the competence that enables members of a community to conduct and interpret speech’.
• This shifts the interest from the purely grammatical to native speakers’ ability to use language in social situations.
• Communicative competence includes linguistic knowledge, cultural knowledge, and interactional skills.
• How speakers and hearers function linguistically with each other in a social context is a central concern of sociolinguistics.

Key characteristics of language for a sociolinguist:

1. Language is social:

   • Language is found in utterances, discourses, and conversations.
   • Language is situated, having a context with speakers, hearers, time, place, topic, and purpose.
   • Paul Ricoeur argued against the view that language was a disembodied matter.
   • $Ricoeur (1981: 133)$: Whereas structural linguistics simply places speech and use in parentheses, the theory of discourse removes the parentheses.

2. Language is dialogue:

   • Language happens between people and is shaped by them, involving listeners as well as speakers.
   • Verbal interaction includes interruptions, overlaps, and utterances completed by someone else.
   • Language is co-created and involves a reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener.
   • Word is a two-sided act, determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant.
   • A word expresses the ‘one’ in relation to the ‘other’
   • $Voloshinov (1973: 86)$: A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee. A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor.

3. Language is profusion:

   • Dialogue leads to heteroglossia, or linguistic variety.
   • Language cannot be tamed to an idealized standard.
   • It is always variegated.
   • $Bakhtin (1981: 291)$: At any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form.

4. Language is ideology:

   • Language is about social meaning.
   • Language use indexes social meanings and evokes places, periods, groups, classes, and genders.
   • It carries ideology and serves power.
   • Language ‘tastes’ of its former uses.
   • Hearers place speakers against their prior experiences of language.
   • Speaking gives oneself away socially, ethnically, and geographically.
   • The indexing of social meaning is deeply embedded in language and its use.

What is a language?

• Sociolinguistics classes reveal multilingualism, with students speaking various languages.
• New Zealand Sign Language is the native language of several thousand deaf New Zealanders, and it was legislated as an official language in 2006.
• Multilingualism offers a rich ground to examine and illustrate the social workings of language.

Naming Languages:

• Naming languages is more problematic than it appears.
• China considers Mandarin and Cantonese dialects of the same national language, despite linguistic differences.
• Romance languages are arguably less linguistically diverse than ‘Chinese’.
• The character system enables the fiction of a single Chinese language.
• Languages with different names can be linguistically similar (Hindi/Urdu, Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, Serbian/Croatian).
• Sets of codes can be linguistically diverse but bear a single name (Arabic or English).
• Definitions may be unidirectional (Bulgarians see Macedonian as a dialect of Bulgarian, but Macedonians do not regard Bulgarian as a dialect of Macedonian).
• Languages can be qualified by adjectives like ‘minor’ (Tamil with 70 million speakers) or ‘failed’ (Piedmontese due to lack of standardization).
• $Gal (2006: 14)$: Language was invented in Europe.
• European colonization imposed the notion of distinguishable and nameable languages on the rest of the world.
• Sociolinguists may use the term code or variety to avoid judgments of inadequacy and marginalization.

What then are sociolinguistics?

• Figure 1.1 maps the components, traditions, and strands of sociolinguistics.
• Table 1.1 schematizes the main elements.
• The diagram is an idealization with fuzzy boundaries.

Three main approaches in sociolinguistics:

1. Multilingualism
2. Ethnographic–interactional
3. Variationist

• The sociolinguistics of multilingualism divides into sociology of language and critical–constructivist takes.

Sociology of Language:

• Originated in the 1950s/60s with an orientation to the large scale (macro-sociolinguistics).
• Concerns whole languages and their distribution and usage within society.
• Focuses on the use of languages by particular groups.
• Uses surveys to ask who speaks what language.
• Founded by Joshua Fishman.

Critical-Constructivist Sociolinguistics:

• Influenced by shifts in social theory.
• Sees language as a social practice.
• Focuses on macro issues of language in society, including globalization.
• Examines how minority languages are commodified.
• Reshapes how languages construct society.
• Illustrated in handbooks of bi- and multilingualism.

Ethnographic-Interactional Sociolinguistics:

• Focuses on how individuals and small groups behave and interact.
• Combines anthropological character with linguistic analysis.
• Founding figures: John Gumperz and Dell Hymes.
• Hymes researched Native American languages and cultures, and he advocated for the ‘ethnography of speaking’.
• Gumperz’s interactional sociolinguistics emphasizes research on language code choice in specific interactions.
• The turn to the critical-constructivist has come naturally to ethnographic-interactional sociolinguistics.

Variationist Sociolinguistics:

• Dominant paradigm in the United States.
• Focuses on linguistic issues.
• Researches how linguistic features vary with social factors such as age or gender.
• Works at the micro level linguistically.
• Founded by William Labov.
• Interested in language change.
• Critical-constructivist approaches have become increasingly influential.

Neighbouring and Overlapping Fields:

• These fields overlap with sociolinguistics to varying degrees.

1. Language policy and planning: grew out of the sociology of language. Focuses on language education, maintenance and standardization.
2. Applied linguistics: concerned with language teaching and learning. Explores language and the law.
3. Contact linguistics: focuses on pidgins and creoles, considering their social context.
4. Code switching: involves multilingual speakers mixing their languages, considering the social context.
5. Dialectology: traditional focus on rural dialects, revolutionized by Labov into urban areas.
6. Historical linguistics: studies how languages have changed in the past.
7. Language and gender: examines gender discrimination through language.
8. Pragmatics: examines language use in its immediate interactional context.
9. Linguistic anthropology: overlaps with sociolinguistics, involving particular methods.
10. Conversation Analysis (CA): Investigates verbal interaction. Not covered in book.
11. Discourse analysis: interest in the social and political significance of language.
12. The social psychology of language: studies language attitudes, the role of language in group behavior and relations, and language and ethnicity.

A Guide to the Guidebook:

• The book aims to attune readers to the sociolinguistic life around them.
• It provides a sense of the shape of sociolinguistics, its content, concepts, and terms.
• It offers an understanding of sociolinguistic research and its methods.
• It introduces the methods and skills of doing sociolinguistic research.
• It presents the opportunity to reflect on one's own sociolinguistic situation.
• It offers the chance to engage with how language affects and constitutes society.
• The book proceeds from the macro to the micro.

Core Chapters:

• Chapters 2–4: multilingualism and its issues.
• Chapters 5 and 6: ethnographic-interactional strand.
• Chapters 7–9: language variation, change and contact between dialects.
• Chapters 10 and 11: language ideology, style and identity.
• The critical-constructivist strand surfaces as a major trend in all chapters from 5 onwards.

Each chapter includes:

• Case study
• Research activity
• Summary
• Further reading

General Reading Recommendations:

• Handbooks: The Cambridge, Sage and Oxford Handbooks of Sociolinguistics.
• Readers: Coupland and Jaworski (2009b) and Meyerhoff and Schleef (2010).
• Collections: Routledge series of collections.
• Journals: Language in Society and the Journal of Sociolinguistics.

Doing Sociolinguistics:

• The best way to learn sociolinguistics is to do sociolinguistics.