Sociolinguistics Seminar Series English Section Anne Fabricius

Structure of today’s seminar Discussion of the readings A sociolinguistic understanding of language in society: some principles to be aware of What does the field encompass? Who are the major authors Studying Varieties of English for the Language Project: how to do it at RUC?

Wolfram and Schilling-Estes paper A discussion of popular or folk notions of language, dialect, accent and deconstruction of them Presenting also how sociolinguists understand these terms Role of Language variation in identity construction: what we as members of a speech community understand on the basis of the sounds around us. In-group and out-group realisations

Some examples English ’no’ Danish ’meget’ This knowledge of our local speech variety and others we come into contact with is the result of membership of a community

(Quantitative) sociolinguistic method The structured sociolinguistic interview New York City , publ Labov 1966 *sample on CD Set new standards for ’Urban dialectology’ following the dialectology tradition ultimately going back to the Grimm Brothers and German Romanticism

Myth versus sociolinguistic reality See page 91 in compendium Look at it detail

The standard/non-standard continuum Standard/ non-standard a very salient folk category many English speaking countries Is in fact a continuum that is somewhat subjective in placing a dividing line between the two Certain grammar and pronunciation features can be particularly salient and therefore stand as sharp demarcators of language varieties Can think of langauges in the individual as statistical composites of features and aggregated styles

The distinctions Formal standard: written-language based and extensively codified and often conservative Informal standard: applied to spoken language and with multiple acceptable norms, avoids socially stigmatised structures Vernacular: spoken language, investigated by access to speakers usage patterns, non-codifed

Why study dialects/language variation? Language variation as an academic curiosity! Language is inherently variable according to context (use) and speaker (users), so it permeates language use constantly Language is an everyday social miracle that is worth understanding and respecting Social justice issues /education /discrimination Ultimately it can tell us things about how languages change around us; variation becomes change in progress as the social profile of its users change, community norms change Eg RP spoken in the 1930s....

Coupland’s Paper Argues that the performance of Welshness here is an example that takes us beyond Labov’s claim that style (language according to use) was related to ’how much attention was paid to speech’ in his original interviews, and that style could be one dimensional… Coupland emphasises style as performance, as a process of ’doing’ What do you think of this way of understanding how speakers make use of their linguistic repertiore (constantly in development up to age of adulthood..perhaps even longer)

Instead… Dialect can be used consciously in performance genres like light radio entertainment, to ’play around’ with what it means to be Welsh We can’t just assume that people performing different voices are being ’authentic’ spekaers, which is what classic sociolinguistics has done (set up interviews with subjects chosen to fit social characteristics and taken the speech at ’face value’) Two sides of the coin....

So… Coupland sees dialect as a semiotic ressource, for making meaning of linguistic and sociolinguistic types Stylisation is therefore a social practice that seen from the view of the actors themselves is done to say things about the speaker. Ultimately social-constructivist

As essential to late modernity… A practice becoming more and more widespread along with reflexivity in post modern culture Encompasses fundamental shifts in how we orient to social group identities and memberships Partly a result of globalisation and mobility on a hitherto unexperienced scale A late modern symbolic practice See GOAT and FACE examples

Some principles of empirical sociolinguistics Adopts social science methods of accountability to data Is empirical and deductive (is reliant on real data in the same way as CDA, and all the disciplines we talk about in this seminar series) Uses both qualitative and quantitative methods Uses ethnographic information and sociological paradigms (thus socio-) Employs (largely) structuralist tools of linguistics analysis

Some principles of empirical sociolinguistics Focusses on diversity and variation in language use for different social groups (subcultures, ethnicities, societies, nations, genders, ages, occupational groups, city locations) Since every speaker has a complex history and identity, the person’s history and social context must be taken into account Overall, sociolinguistics aims to explain and situate language variation through the linguistic and social context

Who are the major authors in quantitative sociolinguistics? US: William Labov, Gillian Sankoff, Shana Poplack, Peter Trudgill, Walt Wolfram, Jack Chambers, Barbara Horvath, Ron Macauley, Penny Eckert… UK: Paul Kerswill, Jenny Cheshire, Jane Stuart-Smith, Sali Tagliamonte, Dominic Watt, Paul Foulkes, Gerry Docherty, Miriam Meyerhoff… LANCHART centre, Cop. Uni

Who are the major authors in qualitative sociolinguistics? US and UK Ben Rampton, Celia Roberts, Nikolas Coupland, Adam Jaworski, Barbara Johnstone, Allan Bell, Bent Preisler Also milieus at Copenhagen University (J Normann Jørgensen) CALPIU

Major Journals Language and Society Journal of Sociolinguistics English World wide Language Variation and Change Language Awareness Journal of Pragmatics

Some books from AF’s collection Handbook of Language Variation and Change Sociolinguistics Urban Voices Wells’ Accents of English…

Challenges for doing projects in this area A knowledge of phonetics/morphology and interest in it interest in variation and variability Finding suitable data (tv, internet, film dvds) Finding sociolinguistically-informed descriptions of the relevant varieties Finding the meanings and attitudes determining variation Finding the mechanisms governing variation in performance

An Australian cult sensation…. Smack the Pony sequences on CD