Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections
CARMEN FOUGHT, Editor
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Sociolinguistic Variation
OXFORD STUDIES IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS General Editors: Nikolas Coupland Adam Jaworski Cardiff University Recently Published in the Series: Talking About Treatment: Recommendations for Breast Cancer Adjuvant Treatment Felicia D. Roberts Language In Time: The Rhythm and Tempo of Spoken Interaction Peter Auer, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, Frank Müller Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English Discourse Maryann Overstreet A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar Julie Lindquist
Sociolinguistic Variation Critical Reflections
EDITED BY CARMEN FOUGHT
1 2004
3
Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sociolinguistic variation/critical reflections / edited by Carmen Fought. p. cm. “. . . this volume grew out of a conference held at the Claremont Colleges to honor Ronald Macaulay”—Preface. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-517039-3 1. Language and languages—Variation—Congresses. 2. Sociolinguistics—Congresses. I. Macaulay, Ronald K. S. II. Fought, Carmen, 1966– P120.V37S6 2004 306.44—dc22 2003058033 Chapter 11, “Spoken Soul” copyright © 2000 by John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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For Ronald Macaulay
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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
We are delighted to introduce Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections as the first volume to appear under our general editorship of Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics. Carmen Fought has assembled a set of important, original commentaries on the study of sociolinguistic variation that push the variationist enterprise forward. As we know, intellectual progress is not to be equated with generating more knowledge of familiar sorts. Progress often demands stocktaking and reflexive review. This book presents many of the field leaders in the study of language variation who are taking a dispassionate, critical look at several of the key assumptions and conventions of variationist research. How secure are our ways of generalizing from the data of language variation? How can we enrich our interpretations of interview talk and of narrative accounts? How should we theorize “place” as a correlate of variation, beyond the conventional but ultimately troublesome concept of speech community? How can we be more open to subjective factors in variation such as language attitudes and language ideologies, and where should we locate the traditional boundary between sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics? We take it as an index of the maturity of variationist sociolinguistics that this set of questions can now be posed and debated. The volume represents two sorts of critical reappraisal and challenge: how can we strengthen the middle ground of our own research practice, but also how can we engage more directly with topics and agenda of shared interest in other fields of research in the humanities and social sciences? The study of language variation and change has perhaps been the most contained and autonomous subfield of sociolinguistics up to now. But this volume shows its wide potential reach—in this case into theories of social identity, community, conflict, politics, cognition, and human development. Variationist sociolinguistics, and
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SERIES EDITORS ’ PREFACE
sociolinguistics generally (where it will become less relevant to differentiate between its component parts), will undoubtedly become more and more important as an intellectual space where multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary themes relevant to language and social life can be productively entertained. Under Ed Finegan’s expert guidance for more than a decade, Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics has played a leading international role in disseminating excellent interdisciplinary sociolinguistic research. The backlist is daunting for incoming editors. It is certainly one of our ambitions to maintain the series’s commitment to publishing excellent research of whatever methodological design and to extend its impressively broad reach into important empirical domains of language use. The phrase “language in society” has, nevertheless, tended to have a rather selective application in the discipline: it is almost a Whorfian cryptotype. The family, and especially childhood, peer groups, social class networks, gender, health and counseling, education, workplace, politics, and mass media have been uncontroversial fields for sociolinguistics. Fields like forensics, religion, sport, leisure, communication technologies, tourism, and the arts have been less so. Historical sociolinguistics still seems a minority concern. Taste, globalization, consumerism, and authenticity are some of the potent interdisciplinary themes that sociolinguistics has yet to contribute to substantially. “Older” sociolinguistic themes such as performance, style, mobility, reflexivity, ritual, ageing, sexuality and desire, and even sociolinguistics’s staple of social class are ripe for reinterpretation. Sociolinguistics needs to model and assess the implications of profound global shifts in the organization of social life and communicative interaction. Shifting patterns of work and leisure, the rise of the service sector, transnationalism, neonationalism and neocolonialism, the drive toward multimodal and multisensory communication, and the changing nature of the public sphere are some of them. With a consciously open agenda, we will seek to publish books on all aspects of sociolinguistics that offer new insights into older and newer social configurations and problems. We firmly expect to maintain sociolinguistics’s longstanding commitment to the study of social inequalities and conflicts, as well as to bridge the gap between social critique and policymaking. Books that help to reassess sociolinguistics itself and the nature of sociolinguistic theory will also be welcome. To reflect the widening readership for sociolinguistic research, it will also be a priority for us to ensure that books in the series are written as accessibly as possible. It should therefore be possible for books in the series to be used as higher-level textbooks or secondary readings in advanced courses. Authored monographs, edited anthologies, and indeed other formats can be considered. It is particularly appropriate that Carmen Fought has presented Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections in part as a tribute to Ronald Macaulay’s sociolinguistic career. Ronald’s research into language variation, style, and discourse has been genuinely pioneering. His voice has been among the most persuasive in arguing that sociolinguistics must respect the dignity and humanity of people we risk treating only as “informants” and must show no respect for the unnecessary boundaries that divide schools and theories. We warmly endorse the dedication of this volume to him. NC, AJ September 2003
PREFACE
The idea for this volume grew out of a conference held at the Claremont Colleges to honor, upon his retirement, Ronald Macaulay, the founder of the linguistics program there and a pioneer in the field of variationist sociolinguistics. We saw this event as a chance to bring together prominent researchers in the field of sociolinguistics, giving them the opportunity to highlight the directions they felt were central to current and future research. The conference began with the topic of sociolinguistic methods, and a number of chapters do address methodological issues, particularly those in the first part. But most of these chapters go beyond this theme, revisiting some traditional areas of sociolinguistic study in new ways or moving into areas that have received little attention in the past but reflect emerging trends in linguistic research. All established conferences have a kind of rhythm that develops over the years, shaping the types of work researchers choose to present. Perhaps because this conference was unique, many of the impressive roster of scholars who responded to our invitation brought research in areas that were new to them or simply new in general. Gillian Sankoff, for example, an expert on language contact and bilingualism, presented work on how dialect can change after puberty. John Rickford talked about AAVE (AfricanAmerican Vernacular English), his area of long-standing expertise, but included a very recent source of data: internet chat rooms and the attitudes expressed there. The papers overall had an intimate tone, different from those at the usual, established conferences, which this smaller, celebratory setting seemed to facilitate. This is not a tribute volume in the usual sense. The presenters were told that it was not necessary for their work to tie in specifically with Ronald Macaulay’s
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PREFACE
research, and most do not make this connection explicitly. An exception is William Labov’s chapter, which reanalyzes a narrative from Macaulay’s fieldwork in light of theories of the linguistic correlates of interest in narratives. However, many of the authors did mention in their introductory remarks the influence of Macaulay’s research on their own career paths and on the field in general. These personal expressions of gratitude have been edited out of this volume. However, I will reproduce here the preamble to the presentation given by John Rickford, which summarizes well the sense of what the various presenters had to say about Macaulay’s work and influence: [Ronald Macaulay] is, I think, an underheralded pioneer and leader in sociolinguistics, and I thank Carmen Fought, whom I taught as a Stanford undergraduate, for bringing us together to honor and celebrate him. I first discovered his (1976, 1977) work on language and social class in Glasgow when I was writing my 1979 dissertation. In a field where this central topic has still received far less critical consideration than it merits, I found his work on class-based variation extremely insightful, and it is certainly still very relevant and important. His several papers on attitudes to language and dialect, especially Scots English, and its conflicted evaluation as remarkable eloquence or tongue-tying badge of shame (e.g., 1975, 1995/1996) are inspirations to all of us who work on nonprestige varieties. They are similar to work that Elizabeth Traugott and I did some years ago on contradictory attitudes to pidgins and creoles (Rickford and Traugott 1985). And they relate directly to what my son Russell and I have written about America’s love/hate relationship with the African-American vernacular (Rickford and Rickford 2000), the subject of my paper today. Macaulay’s 1988 paper on the ambiguities of the term “vernacular” is one of the most valuable discussions of the topic in sociolinguistics; I have referred many students to it, and still pull it out for clarification when I find myself uncertain about its meaning. His work on narrative and discourse analysis (1987, 1991) is penetrating, and he has also made valuable contributions to the study of style (2001). Finally, there is an element of his research that I have always vaguely admired, but only clearly identified when I heard him presenting his paper at the 1999 NWAV conference in Toronto last month. This is the fact that he derives intense pleasure both from the content and the language of his Scots English speakers, as if a lifetime of recording, analyzing, and writing about them were not a burden or professional responsibility but a joyous privilege. Those of us who have our own groups of favorite speakers elsewhere can resonate with him (as Haj Ross would put it) on this point. But we sometimes forget it. Thank you for helping to remind us of this pleasure, Ronald, and for helping us to convey it to our students.
I, too, thank Ronald Macaulay for his contributions to the field and for bringing together the group of extraordinary linguists in this volume. In addition, he has played an important role in my life personally, as a colleague and a mentor; for this I am profoundly grateful. Finally, the completion of this volume would not have been possible without the patient assistance of Lea Harper (whose work was funded by a grant from Pitzer Research and Awards), Ken Olitt, and my husband, John Fought. A special thanks also to Peter Ohlin for standing by this project.
PREFACE
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References Macaulay, Ronald. 1975. Negative Prestige, Linguistic Insecurity, and Linguistic Self-hatred. Lingua, 36(2–3):147–161. ———. 1976. Social Class and Language in Glasgow. Language in Society 5(2):173–188. ———. 1977a. Language, Social Class, and Education: A Glasgow Study. R. K. S. Macaulay, assist. G. D. Trevelyan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 1987. Polyphonic Monologues: Quoted Direct Speech. In Oral Narratives IPrA Papers in Pragmatics 1(2):1–34. ———. 1988. The Rise and Fall of the Vernacular; Festschrift for Robert P. Stockwell from His Friends & Colleagues. In On Language: Rhetorica, Phonologica, Syntactica, ed. Caroline Duncan-Rose and Theo Vennemen, 106–115. London : Routledge. ———. 1991. Locating Dialect in Discourse: The Language of Honest Men and Bonnie Lasses in Ayr. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995/1996. Remarkably Common Eloquence: The Aesthetics of Urban Dialect. Scottish Language, 14–15, 66–80. ———. 2001. The question of genre. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Rickford, John, and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1985. Symbol of Powerlessness and Degeneracy, or Symbol of Solidarity and Truth? Paradoxical Attitudes towards Pidgins and Creoles. In The English Language Today, ed. S. Greenbaum, 252–261. Oxford: Pergamon. Rickford, John Russell and Russell John Rickford. 2000. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: Wiley.
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CONTENTS
Contributors
xv
Introduction, Carmen Fought
3
Part I: Sociolinguistic Methods 1.
Some Sources of Divergent Data in Sociolinguistics, Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery 11
2.
Ordinary Events, William Labov
3.
Exploring Intertextuality in the Sociolinguistic Interview, Natalie Schilling-Estes 44
31
Part II: The Exploration of “Place” 4.
Place, Globalization, and Linguistic Variation, Barbara Johnstone
5.
The Sociolinguistic Construction of Remnant Dialects, Walt Wolfram
6.
Variation and a Sense of Place, Penelope Eckert
107
65 84
xiv
CONTENTS
Part III: Influences on Adult Speech 7.
Adolescents, Young Adults, and the Critical Period: Two Case Studies from “Seven Up”, Gillian Sankoff 121
8.
Three Kinds of Sociolinguistics: A Psycholinguistic Perspective, Dennis R. Preston 140
Part IV: Attitudes and Ideologies 9.
Language Ideologies and Linguistic Change, Lesley Milroy
10, The Radical Conservatism of Scots, Ronald Macaulay
161
178
11, Spoken Soul: The Beloved, Belittled Language of Black America, John R. Rickford 198 Index
209
CONTRIBUTORS
Ronald Macaulay Department of Linguistics Pitzer College Claremont, CA 91711-6101
Guy Bailey Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs University of Texas, San Antonio San Antonio, TX 78249-0603
Lesley Milroy Department of Linguistics University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Penelope Eckert Department of Linguistics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2150 Carmen Fought Department of Linguistics Pitzer College Claremont, CA 91711-6101
Dennis R. Preston Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824-1027
Barbara Johnstone Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
John R. Rickford Department of Linguistics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2150
William Labov Department of Linguistics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
Gillian Sankoff Department of Linguistics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 xv
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CONTRIBUTORS
Natalie Schilling-Estes Department of Linguistics Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057-1051 Jan Tillery Department of English, Classics, and Philosophy University of Texas San Antonio San Antonio, TX 78249
Walt Wolfram Department of English North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC 27695-8105
Sociolinguistic Variation
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CARMEN FOUGHT
Introduction
The chapters in this volume bring together some of the most prominent researchers in the field of sociolinguistic variation, both established names and newer voices, for thoughtful reflections on the field. The chapters cover a wide range of core issues, but within this diversity is a common theme: the critique of conventional wisdom in the sociolinguistic study of variation and the extension of important concepts in variationist research to new areas. This volume is the kind of work that engages the reader in dialogue, challenges assumptions, and unveils new perspectives. Many of these chapters begin by attempting to define (or redefine) our common language, to explore the terms and concepts that unite us as sociolinguists. For instance, what characteristics are typical of (or necessary for) a remnant dialect? What exactly do we mean by language ideologies? When we propose to do ethnography, what might (or must) that encompass? Several chapters explore the concept of the speech community, directly or indirectly, in new and more dynamic ways. Presumably, there have been speech communities for as long as talking humans have banded together into social groups, but our understanding of how such communities work is continuously expanding. Some of the concepts explored here are relatively new to our field: intertextuality, for example, as it relates to the sociolinguistic interview, or postvernacular—a term for varieties acquired later in life, envisioned as part of a specific psycholinguistic model of variation. The field of sociolinguistics is in a process of rapid evolution, in the sense of both uncovering more information about previously documented linguistic patterns and studying new patterns that have only recently come into existence. In the former category is our evolving understanding of how social contexts and the processes of 3
4
INTRODUCTION
linguistic change interact. Johnstone’s and Milroy’s chapters, for example, revisit Labov’s classic Martha’s Vineyard study in this light, looking at it from the vantage point of current perspectives. In the category of completely new patterns are phenomena related to the Internet, which did not exist when many of the linguists in this book began their research careers. Rickford’s chapter, for example, shows us how the internet can reveal important information about language attitudes that might be hard to access in a less anonymous setting. One theme that runs through a majority of the chapters is the exploration of identity—how people conceptualize, construct, and perform who they are. In exploring it, the researchers touch on a variety of perspectives from linguistics and other fields. Schilling-Estes, for example, draws on the theoretical ideas of Bakhtin, whereas Milroy’s and Johnstone’s chapters refer to the acts of identity model of Le Page and Tabouret-Keller. Many disciplines encompass the study of identity: sociology, anthropology, psychology, women’s studies, and so forth. It enhances the work of sociolinguists to incorporate research from these other fields. The relatively new and growing field of sociolinguistics, however, makes a unique contribution to the scientific understanding of identity and its role in social organization, and these chapters illuminate the nature of that contribution. The four main parts of the book provide different perspectives from which particular topics in sociolinguistic research are reappraised and explored. The first part focuses on sociolinguistic methods. These chapters address diverse aspects of the sociolinguistic interview, the base from which variationist data have traditionally been collected. Techniques for the study of narratives feature in these chapters as well since, within the interview, narratives have often been seen as the primary locus for the revelation of the self. Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery emphasize the need to reexamine methods of collecting and classifying data, particularly as a way of improving the applicability of data from one small sample to a larger population. Challenging traditional sociolinguistic methods, they illustrate how elements such as the identity or even the degree of experience of the fieldworker can affect data collection. They stress the need for an in-depth understanding of the community before the representativeness or implications of particular data can be accurately assessed. William Labov presents a framework for analyzing oral narratives on death, sex, and moral indignation. Working with a narrative from Ronald Macaulay’s fieldwork in Scotland, he reveals how ordinary events within such narratives may highlight the extraordinary (or “reportable”) events, by building suspense, suggesting that at least in this respect, such narratives have more in common with film than with works of literature. In unpacking the linguistic and structural elements that accompany the assignment of praise and blame in the narrative, Labov provides a useful tool for narrative analysis. Natalie Schilling-Estes examines intertextuality in narratives and other highly involved sections of the interview, focusing particularly on the role of material remembered from other, earlier narratives, whether it was produced by the speaker or someone else. Her chapter calls attention to crucial issues about identity since, as she points out, a speaker’s voice is presumed to be his or her own but may contain pieces drawn from other people, written sources, and so forth. This intriguing ques-
INTRODUCTION
5
tion of the ownership of styles has crucial repercussions for our understanding of natural speech, the traditional target of sociolinguistic research, and for interpreting the results of quantitative analyses, where distinctions between such styles are often not made. All three of these chapters seek to improve our collection and analysis of data, so that it is informed by and in turn informs our understanding of the sociolinguistic context. The second part presents a number of perspectives on place—the communities in which people live and the different settings, physical and psychological, in which the events of their lives occur. The term community is commonly found throughout the sociolinguistic literature, but it is not often explicitly defined or studied in its own right. Taken together, these three chapters present a critical reappraisal of a crucial issue: the social context in which individual identities are created and against which they are evaluated. They present a view of both places and communities as dynamic rather than static, interwoven rather than isolable, constantly being reevaluated and reshaped by factors in the external world, as well as by the changing worldviews of their speakers. Barbara Johnstone analyzes the importance of both physical and psychological notions of place as significant factors in language variation, drawing on recent discussions of place in geography and social theory. Paralleling the chapter by SchillingEstes, she raises important questions about issues of the ownership and definition of styles and varieties, and she encourages variationists to see the analysis of discourse as a dialogue. Johnstone also stresses the important role of the identification of a form as local by speakers in influencing processes of sociolinguistic variation and change. Walt Wolfram sets out the characteristics of a particular kind of place: the remnant dialect community. Remnant dialect areas are interesting, among other reasons, because they allow us to look at a community where the relationship between individual identity and the social context is shifting and changing. Wolfram presents a comprehensive consideration of the social and linguistic features of remnant dialect areas, in relation to their origins and the changes that have occurred within them, including a rethinking of what terms like remnant and relic actually mean. He also provides variationist researchers with a clear articulation of testable claims about variation and change in such communities. Penelope Eckert demonstrates how local value is expressed in language that is embedded in the community by examining the behavior of adolescents in Detroit. Again, the focus is on both social setting (the local and wider communities and their values) and individual identity (the way the adolescents in her study present themselves to, and perceive, the world). She cites the need for studying not only the groups (regional, social, etc.) that can be delimited in some clear way but also the “borders” where groups come into contact and categories are more fluid. She challenges perspectives that emphasize homogeneity, and she argues strongly for a more integrative perspective on the sociolinguistic study of communities. The third part explores influences on adult speech, including variations in register and the acquisition of grammatical and other features after puberty. These chapters draw new connections between sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, looking at the cognitive and developmental side of social variation. Many of the other sections of the book focus outward, suggesting more fruitful ways of exploring the larger
6
INTRODUCTION
community connections that form the context for speech. The authors of these chapters direct their inquiries toward developments within individual speakers and explore how language variation in the individual emerges and changes against the social backdrop of community norms. Gillian Sankoff makes use of the longitudinal evidence contained in a series of British TV programs (the Seven Up film series) featuring a group of 7-year-olds (initially), who are reinterviewed at seven-year intervals. Using this real-time data on the development of speakers from very different backgrounds, she shows how the speech of individuals can change after the formative years, challenging to some degree the conventional assumption in the variationist tradition of uniformity over the lifespan. The relation of the life histories of the boys she studies to their use of locally relevant variables illuminates the value of focusing on the practices of individuals within the context of a particular community, and in some ways echoes the themes of Eckert’s chapter, in the second part of the volume. Dennis Preston outlines the basis for a psychologically plausible model of variationist grammar, providing evidence that separate grammars are more likely than a switching mechanism in a unified grammar. He emphasizes the parallels between a second language acquired as an adult and the later varieties acquired in one’s first language, through formal education or other means. In particular, his discussion of the acquisition of the postvernacular grammar dovetails with Sankoff’s work in highlighting the importance of looking at changes over the lifespan. Much work on sociolinguistic variation and identity has focused on adolescents, but this chapter demonstrates that following linguistic development farther into the age continuum improves our understanding of variation. The final part includes three chapters that focus on the crucial role of attitudes and ideologies in sociolinguistic research and theory. Though variationists have collected data on language attitudes from the beginning, these data have often been treated as secondary to the variation itself. The authors in this section give new weight to the attitudes and ideologies of communities, treating them as worthy of study in their own right and as intimately tied in with the processes of linguistic variation and change. Lesley Milroy emphasizes the need to integrate the study of attitudes toward language with the general investigation of variation. She discusses the particular role of the “standard” as a part of the linguistic repertoire of a community, as well as language ideology in general as an element of the social context. She begins with the perspective of ideology as a semiotic process, and she shows how different types of sociolinguistic variables reflect the effects of ideological construction. She also provides evidence that changes in a community’s ideologies may be directly reflected in linguistic variation. Ronald Macaulay examines the role of language in creating and maintaining a persistent sense of national identity in Scotland, particularly among working-class speakers. This chapter challenges the notion found in much previous work that working-class speakers of nonprestige varieties necessarily orient toward some idealized, “standard” way of speaking. Macaulay provides critical insights into some limitations of the traditional interviewing practices for collecting data on language variation, echoing the chapter by Bailey and Tillery. He also urges us to listen more
INTRODUCTION
7
carefully to the views on language variation of the speakers in the communities we study since their attitudes can be a crucial factor in the linguistic varieties they choose to use. Finally, John Rickford’s chapter examines changing views of the language of black America, from the positive attitudes found from the 1960s until the mid-1980s, to the very negative comments heard during the Ebonics controversy. He uses a wide variety of sources, from literature to online chat rooms, again emphasizing, as do many of the other chapters, the possibilities inherent in data collected from sources other than traditional interviews. From these data, he draws a picture of how schisms within and across communities have shaped our debates about language. All three of these chapters demonstrate the need for a better integration of research on attitudes into the variationist model. Taken together, the chapters in Sociolinguistic Variation are a kind of road map of the field: where we have been and where we hope to go. As mentioned in the preface, the conference from which these chapters emerged seemed to bring out the authors’ voices in an unusually intimate and direct way. They speak to issues in the field critically and contemplatively, looking back at the established practices of the variationist tradition and looking forward into how the future of this relatively young field may develop.
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PART I
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
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1 GUY BAILEY AND JAN TILLERY
Some Sources of Divergent Data in Sociolinguistics
1. Introduction Quantitative sociolinguistics emerged more than thirty years ago with a flurry of interest in methodology. In fact, the work of William Labov and of other firstgeneration variationists such as Walt Wolfram, Ralph Fasold, Peter Trudgill, and Ronald Macaulay is largely responsible for introducing the serious consideration of issues of reliability and validity to the study of dialect.1 During the first decade of its existence, ameliorating the observer’s paradox, choosing representative samples of informants, and developing analytical approaches that accounted for linguistic variability all became major foci of quantitative sociolinguistics. Over the last twenty years, however, the concern for methodological rigor has lessened considerably. Unfortunately, the diminished focus on methodological issues seems to have had a detrimental effect on the discipline. As Wolfram (this volume) points out, a basic goal of sociolinguists is to produce results that can be generalized to the behavior of a larger population. Generalizability implies both reliability (i.e., that the same results would be obtained in repeated observations of the same phenomenon) and intersubjectivity (i.e., that two different researchers observing the same phenomenon would have obtained the same results). Over the last two decades, however, it has become clear that both reliability and intersubjectivity (and hence generalizability) are sometimes problematic in quantitative sociolinguistics. In fact, researchers have reported some remarkably divergent data from observations of what is purported to be the same phenomenon. For example, figure 1.1 summarizes the distribution of zero third-person singular in ten studies of African-American 11
12
100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
87 77
86
83
83 73
73
73
77
M I
C A
M D
D C
N C
TX TX -U TX rba n -H ou st on
M S
52
G A
Percentage of Zero Third Singular
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
1.1. Zero Third-Person Singular in Ten Sources of African-American Vernacular English
Vernacular English (AAVE); table 1.1 provides information on each source. Although the results from nine of the ten studies are relatively close for the most part, ranging from 73% to 87%, the results from the North Carolina study are quite different. The 52% rate of occurrence for zero third singular in North Carolina is some 21 percentage points less than the next lowest rate. At least in regard to verbal –s, AAVE in North Carolina is either very different from AAVE in other parts of the country, including other parts of the South, or there is a problem with intersubjectivity. This chapter explores some of the reasons for this kind of divergent data in quantitative sociolinguistics and argues that methodological differences account for most of the divergent evidence. In particular, it examines the effects of different interview-
1.1 Sources for Figure 1 Location Georgia Mississippi Texas-Rural Texas-Urban TX-Houston North Carolina Maryland Washington, D.C. California Michigan
Author/PI Sommer (1986) Wolfram (1971) Bailey (1993) Bailey (1993) Cukor-Avila (1997) Butters & Nix (1986) Whiteman (1981) Fasold (1972) Rickford (1992) Wolfram (1969)
Community
Age
Atlanta Meadville Brazos Valley Bryan Houston Wilmington ? — East Palo Alto Detroit
Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Adolescents Teenagers Adolescents
Social Class Lower Lower working Lower Lower Working Lower Working Lower Working Lower Working Lower Working Lower Working
SOME SOURCES OF DIVERGENT DATA IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
13
ers, of differences in sample populations, and of differences in analytical strategies in creating divergent data. In addition, we argue that the generalizability of results is a direct function of the methods employed to generate them and that, without a body of research that examines the effects of methods on results, neither intersubjectivity nor reliability is possible in quantitative sociolinguistics; as a consequence, our results are probably not generalizable.
2. Interviewer effects 2.1. The effect of interviewer characteristics In his pioneering work in New York City, Labov (1966) identified the observer’s paradox (i.e., the skewing of linguistic behavior toward norms of correctness as a result of the mere presence of a fieldworker) as a major impediment to research in sociolinguistics. The observer’s paradox, however, is simply one manifestation of a more general phenomenon—the effects that fieldworkers and interviewers have on the data they elicit. Although everyone who has been part of a large-scale survey is aware that some fieldworkers obtain better results than others, there is little research on the effects of interviewer characteristics or of different interviewers on linguistic data. Recent work by Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994), however, makes a promising beginning by exploring the effects of one interviewer characteristic, race of the interviewer, on data from sociolinguistic fieldwork. Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994) examine the effects of the interviewer’s race by having the same African-American informant (Foxy Boston) interviewed by an African-American and a white fieldworker. Both fieldworkers are women. Because the topics discussed in a linguistic interview can sometimes have an effect on the type of data that occurs (see Bell 1984), Rickford and McNair-Knox had the white fieldworker audit the interview conducted by the African American and structure her interview around the same topics. They then compared the occurrence of five well-known AAVE features (verbal –s, possessive –s, plural –s, copula is/are absence, and habitual be) in the two interviews and found that in every case the frequency of occurrence of these features was greater in the interview conducted by the African-American fieldworker; in three instances the differences are statistically significant (see table 1.2).2 These results, Rickford and McNair 1.2 The Effects of the Race of the Interviewer Feature Possessive –s absence Plural –s absence Third singular present absence Copula is/are absence Invariant habitual be a=
African-American Interviewer 67% (6/9) 01% (4/282) 73% (83/114) 70% (197/283) 385 (=241 per hour)
significant at <.001 by chi square test.
Source: Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994).
White Interviewer 50% (5/10) ns 00% (0/230) ns 36% (45/124)a 40% (70/176)a 97 (=78 per hour)a
14
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
Knox conclude, suggest that the race of the interviewer has a major effect on results in sociolinguistic interviews. In spite of the elegance of the study, Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994) were unable to control for all of the dependent variables in their research. For instance, the African-American interviewer knew the interviewee (the white fieldworker was a stranger) and also had her daughter, who served as a peer for the interviewee, present during the interview. The interview conducted by the white fieldworker was a oneon-one session. However, because both familiarity and the presence of additional peers can also affect results from interviews, it may be that some of the differences in the study are attributable to these factors rather than to the race of the interviewer.3 To try to sort out the effects of familiarity and the presence of additional peers from the effects of the race of the fieldworker, Cukor-Avila and Bailey (2001) attempted to replicate Rickford and McNair-Knox’s study—but with controls for these other variables. As part of the Springville Project, Cukor-Avila and Bailey designed two experiments to examine the effects of interviewer race.4 The first experiment included two sets of interviews, one in which a white fieldworker interviewed three AfricanAmerican teenage girls (Brandy, Samantha, and LaShonda) and a second in which one of the teenage girls (Brandy) interviewed the other two. The second experiment included two interviews with an elderly African-American woman (Aubrey), one done by a white male, the other by an African- American male who was a resident of the community. In both experiments, Cukor-Avila and Bailey tried to control for as many interviewer characteristics as possible in order to isolate the effects of race. Table 1.3 summarizes some of the interviewer characteristics both of the Cukor-Avila and Bailey experiments and also of the one done by Rickford and McNair-Knox. As figures 1.2–1.4 suggest, the results are quite different in the two studies.5 For each of the teenage interviewees in experiment 1 (see figures 1.2 and 1.3), the fre-
1.3 Comparison of Interviewer Characteristics in Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994) and Cukor-Avila and Bailey (2001)
Study
Rickford/McNair-Knox
Cukor-Avila/Bailey #1 Cukor-Avila/Bailey #2
A-A FW
Wh. FW
A-A FW
Wh. FW
AA-FW
Wh. FW
Community member
yes
no
yes
no*
yes
no a
Familiarity with interviewee
yes
no
yes
yes
yes
no b
Other interlocutors present
yes
no
yes
yes
yes
yes
Interviewers same sex
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
Control of topic
yes
yes
no
noc
yes
yes
Multiple interviews
yes?
no
yes
yes
no
no
aAlthough the fieldworkers in these experiments were not community members, they had spent more than 10 years doing fieldwork in the community. bAlthough the fieldworkers did not know the informant, they knew the peers who were present. cAlthough there are no explicit controls for topics, many of the same topics occur in both sets of interviews.
SOME SOURCES OF DIVERGENT DATA IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
90
83.9
Percentage of Occurrence
African-American FW White FW
77
80
15
70 53.655.5
60 50 50
42.3
40 30 20 6.5 6.6
10 0 0 possessive 0 3rd sing.
0 copula
habitual be
Feature 1.2. The Effects of the Race of the Fieldworker on Data from Samantha, an African-American Female Born in 1982 (Source: Cukor-Avila and Bailey 2001)
quency of vernacular forms is higher with the African-American fieldworker in two instances and with the white fieldworker in two instances. However, in only one instance, habitual be in the data from LaShonda, is the difference statistically significant, and here the effect is the opposite of what the evidence in Rickford and McNairKnox (1994) would lead us to expect. Even in this case, though, it would be a mistake to make too much of the difference since the occurrence of be is highly contextdependent, and as table 1.3 indicates, experiment 1 did not control for interviewer topic. In experiment 2, the frequency of vernacular forms is actually higher with the white interviewer more often than with the black one, although again no difference is statistically significant. None of these three informants, then, seems to shift away from vernacular norms in the presence of the white fieldworkers. Although it might be tempting to view these results as contradicting those of Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994), things are not quite so simple. As much as CukorAvila and Bailey (2001) tried to control for interviewer characteristics, there is one factor not controlled for: the experience of the fieldworkers. Both of the white interviewers were experienced sociolinguistic fieldworkers who had been working in Springville for more than a decade; the African-American fieldworkers were novices. It may be that the experience of the white fieldworkers, especially in the Springville community, enabled them to ameliorate any effects that their race might have had. The effects of experience and time spent in the community are unclear, but it stands to reason that they have some effect. Just as Rickford and McNair-Knox cannot
16
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
Percentage of Occurrence
90
African-American FW White FW
76.7 73.7
80
67.8
70
55.8
60 47.4
50
35.3
40 30 20 10
2.6
6.4
0 0 0 3rd sing. possessive
0 copula
habitual be
Feature
Percentage of Nonstandard Forms
1.3. The Effects of the Race of the Fieldworker on Data from LaShonda, an African-American Female Born in 1982 (Source: Cukor-Avila and Bailey 2001)
120
African-American FW White FW
100 90.3
100 80
66.7
70
73.3 66.7
64.7
73
60 40 20
20.5 17.1
9.1 0
0 strong pret.
strong p. p.
0 3rd sing.
3rd-plural was -s leveling
multiple neg.
Feature 1.4. The Effects of the Race of the Fieldworker on Data from Aubrey, an AfricanAmerican Female Born in 1909 (Source: Cukor-Avila and Bailey 2001)
SOME SOURCES OF DIVERGENT DATA IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
17
demonstrate conclusively that the race of the interviewer is a significant factor, Cukor-Avila and Bailey cannot conclude that it is not—only that if it is, it can be ameliorated. Whether the differences in Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994) represent the effects of the race of the fieldworker, of familiarity and the presence of peers, or of some combination of these, they are nevertheless significant and clearly related to interviewers and the interview situation. Understanding and accounting for such interviewer effects are necessary prerequisites to achieving reliability and intersubjectivity. The work of Bailey and Tillery (1999) provides a clear example of how these effects can skew both the results of a survey and their interpretation. 2.2. The Rutledge Effect Bailey and Tillery (1999) reexamined the results of Montgomery’s (1998) intriguing analysis of the distribution of the Southern American English double modal construction might could in data gathered for the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS). In his analysis of the data, Montgomery discovered that might could occurred almost twice as often when the fieldworker was a female (see figure 1.5) and
Percentage of Informants Using Form
25
23.76
20
15
13.31
10
5
0 Male FWs
Female FWs Sex of Interviewer
1.5. The Distribution of might could in LAGS by the Sex of the Interviewer (Source: Bailey and Tillery 1999)
18
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
Percentage of Informants Who Use might could
that this factor was the single most important constraint on the distribution of the form in LAGS. Montgomery argued that this peculiar distribution was a consequence of the tendency for informants to be more polite to women than to men. As a result of our previous work with LAGS data, however, we believed that there might be a better explanation for the peculiar distribution of might could. Because LAGS used worksheets (a set of target items to be elicited) rather than a questionnaire, fieldworkers had considerable discretion in eliciting target items.6 Many relied heavily on directed conversation, whereas others generally used direct elicitation of the items. Barbara Rutledge, the most prolific LAGS fieldworker (she conducted 200 of the 1,121 interviews), generally used direct elicitation of target items, but when she was unable to elicit an item, she frequently suggested a response to informants, unlike many other LAGS fieldworkers. Few LAGS target items were more difficult to elicit than might could, and it was uncommon in conversation as well. As a consequence, Rutledge often suggested the form. An analysis of the might could data in the interviews conducted by Rutledge indicates that her approach to fieldwork accounts for almost all of the effects of the sex of the interviewer that Montgomery (1998) uncovered. Figure 1.6 shows the distribution of might could in LAGS by the sex of the fieldworker, with the interviews conducted by Rutledge separated from those done by other women. That figure clearly shows that what at first appears to be the effect of the sex of the in-
40
38
35 30 25 20 16.36 13.31
15 10 5 0 Female fws.
Male fws.
Rutledge
1.6. The Rutledge Effect: The Occurrence of might could by the Sex of the Fieldworker, with Barbara Rutledge Separated from Other Female Fieldworkers (Bailey and Tillery 1999)
SOME SOURCES OF DIVERGENT DATA IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
19
Percentage of Occurrences of might could
terviewer on the occurrence of the form is actually the Rutledge Effect. Once the Rutledge data are separated from those of other females, the 10% male-female differential is reduced to 3% and is no longer significant. Although Rutledge conducted just under 18% of the LAGS interviews, those account for more than a third of the tokens of might could; and although might could occurs in 38% of the interviews conducted by Rutledge, it occurs in only 14.86% of the interviews done by other fieldworkers. Most of the differential between Rutledge and other LAGS fieldworkers is a consequence of the strategy of suggestion. Figure 1.7 correlates tokens of might could in the Rutledge interviews with the strategy used to elicit the form and includes data from the entire LAGS corpus for comparison. As this figure indicates, the strategy of suggestion was the most important factor in the occurrence of might could in LAGS. Since Rutledge used the strategy more than other fieldworkers, she obtained more tokens of the form; and because she is responsible for such a large proportion of the LAGS corpus, the form occurs most often with female interviewers. The effect of the sex of the interviewer, then, is really just the Rutledge Effect. More generally, the Rutledge Effect is the effect that individual fieldworkers have on the distribution of linguistic features in a corpus. What is particularly troubling about the Rutledge Effect is that it is often not discernable in sociolinguistics since most data are presented in aggregate form. The presentation of data in LAGS allows
80
Suggested Elicited Conversation
67.79
70 60 50.47 50 40 30
25.97
28.72 23.68 17.08
20 10 0 All fws.
Rutledge
Note: Percentages add up to more than 100% because might could occurs more than once in some interviews. 1.7. The Effects of Elicitation Techniques on the Occurrence of might could in LAGS (Source: Bailey and Tillery 1999)
20
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
researchers to link every occurrence of a form to a particular interview, to a particular fieldworker and transcriber, and to a particular mode of elicitation. Quantitative sociolinguistics, however, generally presents only aggregated data correlated with various factors. Because we cannot recover individual tokens, we have no way of knowing how much of the variation that we attribute to social and linguistic factors may be due to the Rutledge Effect. Nevertheless, both characteristics of interviewers and the strategies they use to obtain data have significant effects on linguistic data. If we are to obtain reliability and intersubjectivity, and hence generalizability, we must understand just what those effects are.
3. Sampling effects Quantitative sociolinguistics began with a strong emphasis on representative sampling and a clear preference for probability sampling (see Labov 1966, 2001; Shuy et al. 1967). Many recent sociolinguistic studies, though, provide few details about how their informants were selected or about the representativeness of their samples. This circumstance creates problems for intersubjectivity and reliability since even relatively small differences in samples can lead to significant differences in results. The work of Bailey et al. (1997b) with a Survey of Oklahoma Dialects (SOD) illustrates these effects. This work consists of two complementary tape-recorded surveys, one a telephone survey and the other a field survey.7 The former used a proportionate stratified random sample of all telephone households in the state to develop a probability sample of 632 respondents. The latter made use of a purposive sample, with the township and range divisions used in the original settlement of the state (by whites) providing a sampling grid of 33 units. Communities within each grid were selected randomly, but the randomly selected target communities all had populations of fewer than 25,000. Within each community, SOD fieldworkers interviewed 4 natives of Oklahoma—someone about 80 years old, about 60, about 40, and about 20—to construct the sample. The protocol for the field survey included all of the target items that were in the protocol for the telephone survey, although it also included a good many more. The primary differences between the two surveys, then, were in the mode of administration (telephone versus face to face) and in the sample populations (the field survey sampled only native-born residents of communities of under 25,000; the telephone survey sampled all Oklahoma residents). Our work suggests that the mode of administration had little effect on the data (see Bailey et al. 1997b); the differences in sample populations, however, had significant effects in almost every instance. Figure 1.8 provides data on the occurrence of six features of Oklahoma speech in the two SOD surveys. As that figure shows, the differences between the two surveys are not particularly large, but in every instance they are statistically significant (at the .05 level, using the chi square test). When similar populations within each survey are compared, however, the differences are reduced to the point that they are no longer statistically significant. Figure 1.9 includes the information pro-
SOME SOURCES OF DIVERGENT DATA IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Percentage of Respondents Using Each Form
Telephone Survey
21
Field Survey
120 100
97.2
93.9 87.4
90.3
88.9 82.6
77.8
80
79.2
67.6 55.9
60 40
32.7 28.9
20 0 yall
yall-sing.
fixin to
might could
pos. anymore
incept. got to
Features 1.8. The Occurrence of Six Features of Oklahoma Speech in the SOD Telephone and Field Surveys
vided in figure 1.8, but in this instance the data from the telephone survey include only those respondents who were native Oklahomans living in communities of fewer than 25,000. As figure 1.9 shows, when like populations are compared, no difference exceeds 6%, and no difference is statistically significant. Virtually all of the discrepancies between the SOD telephone and field surveys, then, reflect differences in the sample populations. What is most striking about these differences is that they come from one of the more homogeneous areas in the United States. In 1990 more than 88% of the population of Oklahoma was Anglo, and no metropolitan area in the state had as many as a million people. About half of the state lived in communities of 25,000 or fewer. The fact that sampling differences from a population as homogeneous as this can lead to significant differences in results suggests that (1) specifying exactly what the sample population in a study is and (2) specifying what procedures were used to survey that population are absolutely necessary for obtaining intersubjectivity and reliability. These differences also demonstrate the importance of not generalizing beyond the precise population that the sample represents.
22
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
Percentage of Respondents Using Each Feature
Telephone Survey
Field Survey
120
100
93.9
97.2 91.6
90.3 89.6
92
88.9 87.3
70.2
80
67.6 60
34.8
40
28.9
20
0 yall
yall-sing.
fixin to
might could
pos. incep. got anymore to
Features
1.9. The Occurrence of Six Features of Oklahoma Speech in the Field Survey and among Native Respondents in Communities under 25,000 in the Telephone Survey
4. The effects of analytical strategies In an important overview of methodological issues that have emerged in the study of zero copula in AAVE, Rickford et al. (1991) showed that studies of zero copula are difficult to compare because of the different analytical strategies researchers have used.8 For example, in analyzing the effects of the following environment, some researchers separate the adjective and locative categories, whereas others combine the two since they sometimes have fewer tokens than other categories do. Likewise, some researchers calculate zero as a percentage of only the contractible copula forms in a given environment, whereas others calculate it as a percentage of all copula forms. These kinds of differences in analytical strategies can lead to dramatic differences in results, as work on habitual be in AAVE demonstrates. In their work on the evolution of habitual be in AAVE, Bailey and Maynor (1987) point out that among African Americans born before World War II, invariant be occurs infrequently both as a copula (before predicate adjectives, locatives, and nouns) and as an auxiliary (before V + ing).9 Among African Americans born after World War II, be increases dramatically in its frequency of occurrence, but as figure 1.10 dem-
be as a Percentage of All Copula/Auxiliary Forms in the Environment
SOME SOURCES OF DIVERGENT DATA IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Former Slaves Adults, 50–100 Adults, 25–49
50 44
45
23
40
Children
35 30 25 20
19 13 10 88
15 10 5
01
0000
V+ing
gonna
2332
1122
0 adjective locative
noun phrase
Following Grammatical Environment 1.10. The Development of be+ing as a Marker of Habitual Aspect (Source: Bailey 1993)
onstrates, the increase is limited almost entirely to one environment—before V + ing (i.e., as an auxiliary). Furthermore, the increase is restricted to auxiliary tokens that carry habitual meaning. These facts, Bailey and Maynor argue, demonstrate that the habitual be, which is now a stereotype of AAVE, developed over the last 75 years as a result of the syntactic reanalysis of the invariant be that occurred infrequently in earlier AAVE. Viereck (1988) uses a unique source of data on earlier AAVE, the Hoodoo texts, to argue against this position.10 He bases his argument on his claim that be occurs far more often as an auxiliary in the Hoodoo texts than in Bailey and Maynor’s (1987) data from African Americans born before World War I. This apparent discrepancy, however, is largely a consequence of differences in how the data are analyzed. Bailey and Maynor analyze invariant be as a percentage of all forms of be (am, is, are, 0, be) in a given environment (e.g., before adjectives), whereas Viereck analyzes be + V + ing only as a percentage of all invariant be forms. Figures 1.10–1.12 show how the difference in categorization creates the discrepancy in the data.
24
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
be + ing as a Percentage of All Invariant be
70
65
60 50 40 30
27.42
20
15
13 9.8
10 0 Viereck
B&M children
B&M adults Ewers early Ewers late Study
1.11. The Occurrence of Habitual be+ing in Three Studies, with be+ing Calculated as a Percentage of All Invariant be Forms (Sources: Bailey and Maynor 1987; Viereck 1988; Ewers 1996)
As figure 1.10 shows, Bailey and Maynor (1987) find that invariant be comprises only 1% of all be tokens (i.e., am, is, are, 0, be) before V+ing among elderly adults but comprises 44% of the tokens among teenagers. When Viereck analyzes be+V+ing as a percentage of all invariant be tokens (see figure 1.11), he finds that it comprises more than a quarter of the invariant be tokens. However, as figure 1.11 shows, if the data from Bailey and Maynor are analyzed in the same way that Viereck analyzed his evidence, the rapid expansion of invariant be as an auxiliary is still apparent. In Bailey and Maynor’s data, be + V + ing comprises almost two-thirds of the invariant be tokens among children but only 13% of those tokens among elderly adults. Even after the recategorization of the data in Bailey and Maynor (1987) to achieve consistency with Viereck’s (1988) approach, though, there is still a discrepancy. Viereck’s data suggest that invariant be occurs about twice as often among the Hoodoo informants as among Bailey and Maynor’s elderly Texans (see figure 1.11). A more extensive analysis of the Hoodoo texts by Ewers (1996), however, resolves this discrepancy. Ewers reports results that are quite different from those that Viereck reports and quite similar to those in Bailey and Maynor. Figure 1.11 provides the results of Ewers’s analysis of the Hoodoo texts and highlights the sharp contrast between that study and Viereck’s. Although Ewers’ analysis eliminates the discrepancy be-
SOME SOURCES OF DIVERGENT DATA IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
25
be as a Percentage of All Copula Forms Before V + ing
2.5
2 2
1.5
1
1
1
0.5
0 Ewers early
Ewers late
B&M 50–100
Study 1.12. The Occurrence of Invariant be before V+ing in Two Studies (Sources: Bailey and Maynor 1987; Ewers 1996)
tween the Hoodoo texts and Bailey and Maynor’s data (see figure 1.12 also), it does lead to another discrepancy of course—with the Viereck study—and raises the question of how two studies of the same data, using the same analytical categories, could get such different results. Although we do not have sufficient data for arriving at a definitive answer, the discrepancy may again be the result of differences in analytical strategies. As Fasold (1972) has clearly demonstrated, there are two types of invariant be in AAVE. One occurs where other varieties of English have am, is, or are and takes do-support in negative constructions and in tag questions. The following examples from our Texas data illustrate this type of invariant be: (1) They chasin’ other people all the time; they got a four-wheel drive an’ sometimes they be jumpin’ in. (2) You know, when it be sunny like today. (3) When it clabbers, it don’ always be sour. The second type of invariant be derives from the deletion of an underlying will or would, as in examples four and five, and is negated with won’t or wouldn’t.
26
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
(4) Sometimes it be twelve an’ one o’clock before we go to bed. An’ then we would get up at five or six. (5) When you got them big backlogs, you couldn’ get close to it; people be all aroun’ in front of it. Work on invariant be in AAVE has typically focused on the first type, and researchers have been careful to exclude tokens derived from will/would deletion from their analyses. However, as the examples above suggest, the differences are sometimes not immediately obvious, and it may be that Viereck (1988) did not eliminate the tokens derived from will/would deletion from his analysis.11 The lack of consistency in analytical strategies would certainly account for the intersubjectivity between Viereck and Ewers (1996). Even when researchers agree on analytical strategies and categories, those strategies and categories, when used unreflectively, can sometimes lead to divergent data. Work on the relative effects of predicate adjectives and locatives on the occurrence of zero copula in AAVE illustrates this type of divergence. As the convenient summary in Rickford (1998) suggests, about half of the studies of the AAVE copula found that zero copula is more frequent before predicate adjectives, and half found zero more frequent before locatives. What makes this situation particularly troubling is that the adjective/locative environments are crucial in the debate about the origins of the AAVE copula. Cukor-Avila (1999) approaches the adjective/locative problem by rethinking the analytical categories typically used in studies of the AAVE copula. Rather than treat adjective as a single category, she separates adjectives into three subcategories (participial, nonstatives, and statives) to explore any differential effects that adjective subcategory might have on the occurrence of zero copula in data from African Americans in Springville, Texas. As figure 1.13 shows, those subcategories do have differential effects, effects that are dramatic and complex. Zero copula is much more frequent before participial than stative adjectives among informants born both before and after World War II. Nonstatives have an effect similar to that of statives among people born before World War II, but for those born after the war, nonstatives are more like participials. Thus although subcategories of adjectives do have differential effects on the occurrence of zero copula, those effects seem to be changing over time. The differential effects of subcategories of adjectives and their changing effects over time have significant consequences for the constraint ordering of the following grammatical category, as figure 1.14 suggests. Among informants born before World War II, zero copula occurs more often with participial adjectives than with locatives, but it occurs more frequently with locatives than with stative and nonstative adjectives. Among informants born after the war, zero copula occurs more often with both participial adjectives and nonstatives than with locatives. Thus whenever adjective subcategories are not separated in an analysis of zero copula (and except in CukorAvila’s work they never have been), the ordering of locatives and adjectives on the constraint hierarchy may be influenced by (1) the proportion of adjectives in each subcategory in the corpus and (2) the age of the informants. If a corpus contains a high proportion of stative adjectives, then zero is likely to occur more frequently with
Percentage of Zero in Each Environment
SOME SOURCES OF DIVERGENT DATA IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
90
Pre–World War II Post–World War II
27
77
80
69
70
72
60 50
41 42
42
40 30 20 10 0 statives
nonstatives
participial
Adjective Subcategory 1.13. The Effects of Stativity on the Occurrence of Zero Copula (Source: CukorAvila 1999)
locatives with adjectives; if a corpus contains a high proportion of participial adjectives, then zero will probably occur more frequently with adjectives than locatives. Depending upon the age of the informants, a high proportion of nonstatives may lead to either result. Thus even when researchers use the same analytical strategies and categories, the categories themselves may lead to divergent data. Even widely used schemes of analysis cannot be accepted uncritically.
5. Conclusion As the above examples suggest, the results in sociolinguistic research are sometimes as much a consequence of the methodology used as of the behavior of informants. Differences in interviewer characteristics and interview strategies, in sampling procedures and sample populations, and in analytical categories and strategies can all have significant effects on data. Of course, the fact that different methods lead to different results is no great revelation and is not in and of itself a problem. What makes
28
100 90 80
86
Pre–World War II Infs.
89
Post–World War II Infs.
82 69 72
70
64
60
77 58 60
50
42
41 42
40
30
30
21
20
ad st
at
iv
e
e tiv ta
no
ns
N P
j.
j ad
lo ca tiv e
+ V
pa
rt.
Ad
in g
j.
10 0
go nn a
Percentage Zero in Each Environment
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
Following Grammatical Environment
1.14. The Effects of the Following Grammatical Environment on Zero Copula in AAVE, with Subcategories of Adjectives Treated Separately (Source: Cukor-Avila 1999)
the situation problematic is that quantitative sociolinguistics has no body of research on methods, no literature (except for the articles cited in this chapter) that explores the effects of different interviewers, elicitation strategies, sampling procedures, or analytical strategies. Moreover, the concern with methods that in part motivated the first generation of sociolinguists has not been sustained in more recent research, and many recent studies say little about how the research was done. In the absence of work that clarifies the effects of methods on results, we have no way of knowing to what extent our results reflect the behavior of our sample population (or even the behavior of our informants) or to what extent they are a consequence of how the research was conducted. Disentangling the effects of our methods from the effects of social and linguistic factors with some certainty is perhaps the most important thing we can do to build upon the solid foundation laid by first-generation sociolinguists. Notes 1. See, for example, Labov (1966) Wolfram (1969), Fasold (1972) Trudgill (1974) and Macaulay (1977) all published between 1966 and 1977. 2. Rickford and McNair-Knox also find that topic has an effect as well, but the effects of the race of the interviewer are much greater. The short summary given here glosses over a number of nuances in their work; their article is a major contribution on several fronts and is worth reading in its entirety. 3. See Cukor-Avila and Bailey (2001) for a discussion of these factors. The use of peer groups, of course, is a well-known technique for trying to ameliorate the observer’s paradox.
SOME SOURCES OF DIVERGENT DATA IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
29
4. For a discussion of the Springville Project, see Cukor-Avila and Bailey (1995) and Cukor-Avila (1996). 5. Note that in experiment 1 Cukor-Avila and Bailey do not include data on plural –s since this feature is of such low frequency both in their data and those of Rickford and McNair. In experiment 2 they use a different set of variables since some of the features used by Rickford and McNair-Knox (e.g., habitual be) are recent innovations and others (e.g., zero copula) are infrequent in the corpus because most of both interviews are in the past tense. 6. See Bailey and Tillery (1999) for a discussion of LAGS elicitation strategies. 7. For a detailed account of SOD, see Bailey et al. (1997a). 8. See also Blake (1997). 9. Invariant be never occurs before gonna either in our data or in anyone else’s as far as we can determine. 10. For a detailed account of the Hoodoo texts and an analysis that differs significantly from that of Viereck (1988), see Ewers (1996). 11. Fasold (1972) has an excellent discussion of the two types of invariant be and of how to distinguish them.
References Bailey, Guy. 1993. A Perspective on African American English. In American Dialect Research, ed. D. Preston, 287–318. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bailey, Guy, and Natalie Maynor. 1987. Decreolization? Language in Society 16:449–473. Bailey, Guy, and Jan Tillery. 1999. The Rutledge Effect: The Impact of Interviewers on Survey Results in Linguistics. American Speech 74:389–402. Bailey, Guy, Jan Tillery, and Tom Wikle. 1997a. Methodology of a Survey of Oklahoma Dialects. The SECOL Review 21:1–30. Bailey, Guy, Tom Wikle, and Jan Tillery. 1997b. The Effects of Methods on Results in Dialectology. English World-Wide 18:35–63. Bell, Alan. 1984. Language Style as Audience Design. Language in Society 13:145–204. Blake, Renee. 1997. Defining the Envelope of Linguistic Variation: The Case of ‘Don’t Count’ Forms in the Copula Analysis of African American Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change 9:57–79. Butters, Ronald and Ruth Nix. 1986. The English of Blacks in Wilmington, North Carolina. In Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White, ed. M. Montgomery and G. Bailey, 254–263. University, AL: University of Alabama Press. Cukor-Avila, Patricia. 1996. The Evolution of AAVE in a Rural Texas Community: An Ethnolinguistic Study. Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. ———. 1997. Change and Stability in the Use of Verbal –S over Time in AAVE. In Englishes Around the World, Vol. 1: General Studies, British Isles, North America. Studies in Honour of Manfred Garlach, ed. E. Schneider, 295–306. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ———. 1999. Stativity and Copula Absence in AAVE: Grammatical Constraints at the SubCategorical Level. Journal of English Linguistics 27:341–355. Cukor-Avila, Patricia, and Guy Bailey. 1995. An Approach to Sociolinguistic Fieldwork: A Site Study of Rural AAVE in a Texas Community. English World-Wide 16:159–193. ———. 2001. The Effects of the Race of the Interviewer on Sociolinguistic Fieldwork. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5:254–270. Ewers, Traute. 1996. The Origins of American Black English: Be-Forms in the Hoodoo Texts. Berlin: Mouton. Fasold. Ralph W. 1972. Tense Marking in Black English. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
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Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. ———. 2001. Principles of Language Change, vol. 2. Oxford: Blackwell. Macaulay, Ronald K. S. 1977. Language, Social Class, and Education: A Glasgow Study. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Montgomery, Michael B. 1998. Multiple Modals in LAGS and LAMSAS. In From the Gulf States and Beyond: The Legacy of Lee Pederson and LAGS, ed. Michael B. Montgomery and Thomas E. Nunnally, 90–122. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Rickford, John. 1992. Grammatical Variation and Divergence in Vernacular Black English. In Internal and External Factors in Syntactic Change, ed. M. Gerritsen and D. Stein, 175–200. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rickford, John R. 1998. The Creole Origins of African American Vernacular English: Evidence from Copula Absence. In African-American English: Structure, History, and Us, ed. Salikoko Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh, 154–200. London: Routledge. Rickford, John R., and Faye McNair-Knox. 1994. Addressee- and Topic-Influenced Style Shift: A Quantitative Sociolinguistic Study. In Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register, ed. Douglas Biber and Edward Finnegan, 235–276. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rickford, John R., A. Ball, R. Blake, R. Jackson and N. Martin. 1991. Rappin on the Copula Coffin: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in the Analysis of Copula Variation in African American Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change 3:103–132. Shuy, Roger W., Walt Wolfram, and William C. Riley. 1967. Linguistic Correlates of Social Stratification in Detroit Speech. USOE Final Report No. 6–1347. Sommer, Elisabeth. 1986. Variation in Southern Urban English. In Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White, ed. M. Montgomery and G. Bailey, 180–201. University of Alabama Press. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Viereck, Wolfgang. 1988. Invariant be in an Unnoticed Source of American Early Black English. American Speech 63:291–303. Wolfram, Walter A. 1969. A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. Wolfram, Walt. 1971. Black-White Speech Differences Revisited. In Black-White Speech Relationships, ed. W. Wolfram and N. Clarke, 139–165. Washington, DC: Center for Applies Linguistics.
2 WILLIAM LABOV
Ordinary Events
In most sociolinguistic studies of the speech community, narratives of personal experience play a prominent role. In the sociolinguistic interview, narratives are one of the primary means of reducing the effects of observation and recording. In dissecting the stylistic shifts in the interview, narratives consistently show a shift toward the vernacular–that is, toward the first-learned style of speech that is used in everyday communication with friends and family (Labov 2001). Many of the results of this concentration on narrative are incorporated into the figures on style shifting of linguistic variables (Cedergren 1973; Trudgill 1974). Because the elicitation of narrative is such an important methodological step, attention has turned to narrative structure (Labov and Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972). The distribution of linguistic features in the construction of narrative has been the focus of a number of studies (e.g., SilvaCorvalan 1983; Schiffrin 1981). Several recent publications have focused on the narratives as a whole (Laforest 1996; Butters 2001). More than anyone else, Ronald Macaulay (1991) has brought to the forefront the emotional and social dimensions of personal narrative. In his exploration of the discourse features of the Ayrshire dialect, narratives play the most prominent part— not only in the discourse particles that are tied to narrative structure, but also in the way that linguistic constructions are used to convey the full emotional impact of the events being recounted. The impact of his work is considerably heightened by the quality of the many narratives that he cites in full. From the outset, Macaulay realized the importance of the central themes of human experience in his sociolinguistic interviews; as an interviewer, he was able to draw forth the full eloquence of the Scots speakers of Ayrshire and Glasgow. 31
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1. The narrative This chapter will deal with a single narrative recorded by Macaulay. It was originally reported in his article on “Polyphonic Monologues” (1987), dealing with the role of direct quotation in narrative, and then incorporated into his 1991 book in chapter 11, “The Use of Quoted Direct Speech.” I have been thinking about this narrative since I first read Macaulay’s article, retelling it to various audiences and reanalyzing it from several points of view. It is told by Ella Laidlaw, whose narratives are cited at many points in Macaulay’s work. Laidlaw was 69 when she was interviewed in 1978. She was from a solidly working-class background: the daughter of a coalman, she left school at 16 and was twice married to men who held manual jobs at a local factory. The narrative concerns her father’s death. Laidlaw’s mother had been taking care of him in his final sickness. Though it is a narrative of personal experience, the experience is her mother’s, as retold by the daughter. It was introduced by an abstract—“He just lay doon on the settee and turned over and that was him gone”—and then told in detail. The story is reproduced below in the transcriptional style that is most useful for the narrative analysis to follow. Each independent clause is lettered as a separate line, and all finite clauses dependent on it are indented below: (1) Ella Laidlaw: An account of her father’s death a b c d
e f g h i j k l m n o p q r
And it was an exceptionally good afternoon, and she put him out in a basket chair, sitting at the window ootside in the garden. She went in on the one bus and came back on the same bus, because the conductress says to her, “Thought you said you were going for messages [shopping],” she says. “So I was.” “Well,” she says, “I’m awful glad I’m no waiting on you,” she says. “You coudnae have got much because you’ve got the same bus back.” “Ach well,” she says, “I don’t like the idea of leaving him too long,” and she went up the road. She noticed his basket chair was there, but he wasnae there. She never thought anything aboot it, because it was too warm. She thought he’d naturally gone inside, and when she went in, he was lying on the settee. And she’s auld-fashioned, very tidy, very smart. Everything had to go in its place. She took off her coat, hung it up,
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33
s put away her shopping bag, t and she says, “It’s rather early for wer tea-wer dinner, so I’ll go and ask him if he wants a coffee.” u And she made the coffee, v and she went through w and shook him to ask him if he wanted tea. x And he dropped off the settee in front of her. y And she just—her mind just broke, z and she’s never known what it is since.
Macaulay points out that this extraordinary story must have been reconstructed from Laidlaw’s mother’s account, even if her mind had been disordered as a result of the events. We find several indirect quotations from her mother (j, l, m) but also direct quotations (e, h, t). The quoted exchanges with the conductress (d, e, f, g, h) might have been from her mother, but they also could have been from the conductress. It is this reconstructed conversation that is the focus of Macaulay’s analysis. The dialogue, particularly (h), provides a dramatic anticipation of the tragedy. “By the use of quoted direct speech Laidlaw has transformed what would otherwise have been a straightforward third-person account of her mother’s actions on the day that her father died into a dramatic narrative in which the perspective varies with different speakers. Macaulay (1991:192). In what follows, I would like to pursue Macaulay’s (1991) insights further by considering the relation of this dialogue to the central problem of polarization and integration of the participants. Though we begin with the assumption that the events reported did in fact occur, the account is indeed “constructed,” as Macaulay points out. Following the model of Labov (1997), I will attempt to show that this construction is best understood as built upon the skeleton of causally linked events that is required for the creation of any narrative structure. The “reportable” events form a selection of the events that we can infer did occur but also include a variety of events that are not in themselves reportable and are not part of the causal chain required for a coherent narrative. These “ordinary events” will be the main focus of this account: how they relate to the central narrative task of conveying the narrator’s experience to the listener.
2. Temporal organization and evaluation Following the method of Labov and Waletzky (1967), we can first examine the temporal organization of the narrative. The orientation is confined to a single clause (a), which establishes the time. The place and the participants are incorporated in the first narrative event of the complicating action, (b), which introduces her mother, her father, and the situation: a sick man left alone on the front porch of the house. The action continues to the final resolution (x), the negative evaluation of that resolution (y), and the coda (z), which brings us back to the present with the present-perfect clause modified by since (that happened). The analysis is not so simple, however, since the sequence of temporal junctures is broken by a series of clauses with extended temporal ranges, as shown in figure 2.1.
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2.1. Temporal Ranges of Clauses in “An Account of Her Father’s Death”
This series plainly forms an evaluation section. It deals with the perceptions, thoughts and character of the protagonist and is marked by irrealis predicates. Clause (j) reports the perception of a negative situation. Clauses (k–m) continue in an irrealis mode, reporting misperceptions that prevailed through (w) and terminated only with the tragic event (x). Clause (n) is another restricted clause, reporting the situation that continues again through (w)—her father’s location on the settee in the living room. There follow the two free clauses (o, p) that describe her mother’s general character—material that might have been placed in an orientation section. A glance at figure 2.1 makes it plain that this evaluation section delays the advancement of the action, a delay that would normally precede and evaluate the main point of the narrative.1
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35
However, there can be no doubt that clause (x) is the central point of the narrative, and the evaluation section is separated from it by a long series of less important events (q–v). What follows in the analysis will attempt to account for this displacement of the evaluation section.
3. The assignment of praise and blame Narratives that center on conflict, violence, sickness, and death are normally concerned with the assignment of responsibility for these events, and this narrative is not an exception. Many such narratives are constructed to polarize the participants, so that the protagonist conforms to all community norms and the antagonist violates them. But narratives told by a family member, like this one, are frequently organized as integrating narratives, told in a way that minimizes guilt and relieves participants of responsibility for the outcome. The issue in the Laidlaw narrative is evident: her mother left her father alone; if she had been present when he suffered whatever attack was responsible for his death, she might have been able to prevent it. It is not unlikely that this sense of guilt and dereliction of duty contributed to her mother’s mental decline. The narrative construction is plainly designed to mitigate this guilt on four counts: (a):
She brought him outside because it was an exceptionally pleasant afternoon. (b–h): She did her shopping as quickly as possible because she did not want to leave him alone. (j–m): When she saw his chair empty she thought that he had gone inside because it was too warm, and her conjecture was confirmed by seeing him (n) on the settee. (t–w): Her following actions were only concerned with his welfare. The dramatic dialogue (d–h) identified by Macaulay (1991) as anticipating the tragedy testifies most strongly to her mother’s concern, Her mother states plainly, “I don’t like the idea of leaving him too long,” but the strongest testimony comes from the third-party witness, the conductress, who volunteers the opinion that her mother had shopped so quickly that she “coudnae have got much.” This is further confirmed by the objective fact that she returned on the same bus that she had taken to town. This section of the narrative is thus integrating rather than polarizing, mitigating the assignment of blame for her father’s death. The actual quotations may have been provided by her mother, by the conductress, or by Laidlaw herself from more fragmentary indications.
4. Participant actions To understand the narrative construction as a whole, it is useful to consider the chart of participant actions (figure 2.2). This correlates the overt actions of the three participants as reported by Laidlaw (excluding reported internal thoughts). The capital
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Her
Her Mother
A
sat outside
put him out
B
[became ill]
went in on bus
C
[went inside]
[ shopped]
D
[lay on settee]
[got on bus]
E
[died]
“So I was”
The Conductress
“I thought you were going” “I'm awful glad I'm no waiting”
G
“You couldna have got much . . .”
H
“I don't like leaving him”
I
came back on bus
J
noticed he wasn't there
K
seen on settee
went in
L
took off coat
M
hung it up
O
says, “I'll go . . .”
P
made coffee
Q
went through
R S
dropped off
shook him mind broke
2.2. Chart of Participant Actions in the Laidlaw Narrative
letters on the left label the correlated time periods in which the participants’ actions are correlated. The actions in brackets are not reported by Laidlaw but are necessary additions that are inferred from the others and are not correlated exactly with the overtly reported events. Laidlaw’s mother is in contact with her father at three points in the narrative: when she first put him outside, when she saw him lying on the settee, and when she shook him. She is in contact with the conductress during the conversation on the returning bus. In almost all narratives of personal experience, we view the actions through the eyes of the narrator. In this narrative of vicarious experience, the animator (Laidlaw) allows us to view the action through the eyes of her mother. As in the more general case, no flashbacks are permitted, and we learn about events that took place outside of her mother’s view only as she gets evidence of them. As a result of this ironclad “no flashback” rule, we cannot place the critical actions of Laidlaw’s father in time. At some point between A and J, her father became ill, went inside, and lay down on the settee. The exact time of his death is not known: he may or may not have been alive when his wife saw him lying on the settee. He might actually have died at any time after she entered the house and during
ORDINARY EVENTS
37
the unmeasured length of time it took to put away the shopping, that is, between K and R. The assignment of guilt is therefore not fully resolved by the fact that the period of shopping B to I was as short as possible, as the conductress testified. The assignment of responsibility involves the concept of causation. It will be helpful to move to a more abstract form of analysis and examine the causal relationship between the events involved.
5. The causal skeleton To understand the narrative construction better, it is helpful to reconstruct the basis on which the narrative is built (Labov 1997, 2001). We begin with the concept of a reportable narrative and reportability. It is generally true that most turns at talk are occupied by short utterances, usually a single sentence or less, whereas narratives require much longer turns and the automatic reassignment of speakership to the narrator when other turns intervene (Sacks 1992). Events that are socially ratified as justifying such extended turns and reassignment are reportable, and narratives that include such events are reportable narratives (Labov 1997).2 Any given narrative is constructed about a most reportable event: that is, an event that is the least common and has the largest consequences for the welfare and wellbeing of the participants. Reportability is then the joint product of frequency and effect upon the welfare of the participants. Except under the most unusual circumstances, death is a most reportable event.3 Though there can be some disagreement about which of several competing events is the most reportable in some narratives, clause (x) is the most reportable event of the Laidlaw narrative. When a person decides to tell a narrative, it is usually a decision to describe the most reportable event. Laidlaw had made the decision to give an account of her father’s death. However, it is obvious that a narrative that simply replicates clause (x) would not be a narrative in the sense defined here. This is not simply because of the need for temporal junctures, implying more than one event. It is also a product of the inverse relationship of reportability and credibility. To the extent that an event is reportable, it is also uncommon and unlikely. The more unlikely it is, the less credible. This inverse relationship between credibility and reportability creates the major problem of narrative construction. For unless a narrative is one of the special genre of “tall tales,” rejection as a falsehood is equivalent to total failure for the narrator, with a consequent loss of social standing. The problem of establishing credibility for the most reportable event is equivalent to answering the question, “How did this [extraordinary thing] come about?” It is therefore necessary to provide an answer in the form of some preceding event that was the cause or motivation of the most reportable event. This is a recursive process: this preceding event must be explained in turn, and an answer must be provided to the question “And what brought that about?” A solution to the problem of narrative construction therefore requires the narrator to locate an event in the series that does not require such a motivating precursor, an event for which the question “Why did you [or he] do that?” is meaningless or silly. All narrators do in fact solve this problem,
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and they do locate such an event. It is the orientation of the narrative, which describes a setting or situation that is a common, expected, and ordinary event. The answer to the question “Why would you set your father out in the basket chair on a good afternoon?” is “That is what I would always do on a good afternoon!” and any person who would ask such a question would rightfully be covered with confusion. The basic narrative procedure for creating a narrative about a (most) reportable event can be summarized as a recursive rule of narrative construction: (2)
Given an event ri, which is unaccounted for, locate an event ri-1 for which the statement “rn happened because ri-1” is true.
This rule produces a narrative chain, a skeleton of events linked by their causal relations. It is terminated when the event is not “unaccounted for.” As we have seen, the events that are found in the orientation section are accounted for: they need no accounting since the behavior of the participants is expected, given the time, the place, and their character. When a most reportable event r0 is input to the rule, it produces a chain of n events: (3)
r0 r–1
r–2
. . . rn
The narrative chain is in effect a causal theory of the narrative. For any given person telling any given narrative, the rule of narrative construction provides the required answer to the initial question, “Where shall I begin?” which is the Orientation rn We sometimes hear this question in so many words, but an overt formulation is not required. No narrative can be told until the initial question is answered. There is, of course, no single answer to the initial question, any more than there would be a single solution to providing an event ri–1, to the rule of narrative construction. Different narrators will construct different causal chains and arrive at different orientations. On reflection, one can see that the orientation, which seemed at first glance to be the least interesting and least evaluated part of the narrative, is in fact the basis of the narrator’s causal theory, and the ordinary events that make up the orientation carry great significance in the ultimate assignment of praise or blame. What follows the most reportable event? The series of complicating actions that follow the most reportable event can be called the resolution of the narrative, but it is not yet clear to me if the end of the narrative can be characterized by an event with specific characteristics. In any case, a narrative is normally terminated by a coda, which brings the narration’s point of time back to the present and is not a part of the narrative chain. Following this logic, we can isolate the narrative chain of the Laidlaw narrative as six events drawn from the twenty-six narrative clauses as shown in (4). (4)
r0 x r–1 w r–2 t
He dropped off the settee [dead] in front of her because she shook him to ask him if he wanted coffee because she had made him coffee
ORDINARY EVENTS
r–3 n l, m r–4 c, d r–5 b r–6 a
39
because when she saw him lying on the settee she thought he was all right because she had gone in and returned in a hurry because she had left him in the basket chair because it was an exceptionally good afternoon.
In the story as told, the event r–3 is the crucial event that leads to the catastrophe r0: that Laidlaw’s mother thought her husband was alive and well. In the story as told, this conviction is first formed when she sees that the basket chair is empty (j, k) and persists when she sees him lying on the settee (n), and this is the motivation that leads to the causal chain r–2—r–1—r. In the narrative chain (4), the individual events of (l, m, n) are combined into a single event r–3. In a similar way, the various events of the shopping trip (d–i) appear as the single event r–4, that she went and returned in a hurry. The construction of the narrative chain then permits the telling of the story as the inverse narrative chain (5): (5)
r–6 r–5 r–4 r–3 r–2 r–1 r0
a b c, d l, m n t w x
Because it was an exceptionally good afternoon she left him in the basket chair and so she went and returned in a hurry so she thought he was all right when she saw him lying on the settee so she made him coffee so she shook him to ask if he wanted coffee and he dropped off the settee [dead] in front of her.
The inverse chain (5) would be an acceptable and coherent narrative from the point of view of causal structure. It is intelligible and coherent. But it does not include any evaluation of the events, and it omits many of the overt actions of the participant action chart (figure 2.2). In order to understand narrative construction, we must consider how these various elements are incorporated into the causal chain and what their contribution is to our understanding of the final catastrophe (x–y).
6. Elaborating the narrative chain The narrative chain (4) abbreviates the shopping trip to a single clause, omitting entirely the conversation with the conductress (d–h). The conversation embodies observations about her mother’s actions after the fact: they do not motivate these actions or influence the actions that followed. We have already seen the motivation for their inclusion as evaluative material: they provide a third-person confirmation that her mother made the shopping trip as short as possible. Furthermore, the conversation allows her mother to state her own position, that she “didn’t like the idea of leaving him too long.” The first half of the narrative is therefore dominated by this addition to the narrative chain, which shows Laidlaw’s mother as conforming to norms of appropriate behavior.
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The second such elaboration is the expansion of r-3 into the step-by-step series of j, k, l, m. In the initial chart of temporal ranges, this section forms part of the narrative’s evaluation section, and there is no doubt that this elaboration is evaluative. The negative l She never thought anything aboot it
contrasts the real event (that she thought he was alive and well) with an alternative reality in which she would have thought something was wrong and behaved differently. One can easily reconstruct a situation in which Laidlaw’s mother told the story to her and blamed herself at this very point: she should have thought that something was wrong. This elaboration gives the justification for her thinking that all was well (that since it was warm, he must have gone inside), and seeing him on the settee (n) only confirms her earlier formed opinion and motivates what follows. Whereas the first elaboration relieves her mother of guilt for having been away too long, the second shows her coming to a wrong conclusion, for which she might have been blamed and undoubtedly blamed herself. The third elaboration returns us to the anomaly first noted in this narrative: that the evaluation section is widely separated from the most reportable event by a series of narrative clauses: q r s t
She took off her coat, hung it up, put away her shopping bag, and she says, “It’s rather early for wer tea-wer dinner, so I’ll go and ask him if he wants a coffee.” u And she made the coffee, v and she went through
The events underlying these narrative clauses did not appear in the narrative chain because they are not causally linked to what follows them. None of the causal connections in (6) hold: (6)
w v u t s r q
she shook him to ask him if he wanted tea because she had gone through because she had made the coffee because she had said, “. . . I’ll go ask him” because she had put away her shopping bag because she had hung it up because she had taken off her coat
Rather, these events are implementations of what preceded them. (7)
p Everything had to go in its place So q she took off her coat r and she hung it up
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s and she put away her shopping bag t and then she says, “I’ll go and ask him if he wants a coffee” So u She made the coffee v and she went through w and she shook him
The actions indicated by (q, r, s) are sequential but are each connected in parallel as implementations of the general principle expressed in (p). The actions indicated by (u, v, w) form a second temporal sequence that are all implementations of the intention expressed as (t). These implementations are ordinary events. None of them is reportable in itself, nor are they required to explain why the event following them occurred. There are no limits to the number of such implementations that can be inserted between any two causally linked actions. For example, we might have had (8)
q q' q" q'" r
She unbuttoned her coat And pulled her arm out of the right sleeve and then the left sleeve Then she took it by the collar and hung it on the hook
The insertion of these ordinary events poses the same kinds of problems that were faced in the original analysis of the role of irrealis verbs (Labov and Waletzky 1967). If a narrative is an account of what actually happened, why do we find clauses dealing with what did not happen? The answer given was that these irrealis verbs evaluate the events that did occur by comparing them with an alternate reality in which other events take place. Here we are faced with events that are not reportable in themselves and are not required to complete the chain of causation on which the narrative is built. Why are they there? Or to put it more concretely, what is their effect? The insertion of these intermediary, implementing actions has the effect of slowing down the forward movement of the narrative, just as if it were in slow motion. It has the same evaluative force as any other linguistic device that suspends the action: parallel progressive verbs, negatives, or free clauses. Altogether, they represent the slow accomplishment of a narrative event whose completion triggers the one that follows. Attention to small and ordinary events is a common device used by the directors of films to heighten tension in anticipation of an attack or an imminent catastrophe. As the camera focuses on these ordinary events—unlocking a door, entering a room, preparing a meal—events that have no evident interest in themselves, the audience is alerted to the fact that something terrible is about to happen. In this respect, narratives of personal experience have more in common with film than with extended works of literature. In Laidlaw’s narrative, the sense of oncoming harm has already been signaled by the exchange with the conductress. The insertion of the sequence of ordinary events (q–v) intensifies further the effect of the extraordinary denouement (x, y).
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Thus the contrast of the ordinary and the extraordinary is a third evaluative device in this narrative construction. As in other effective narratives of personal experience, these are simple events and they revolve about basic objects. Laidlaw’s mother did not hang up a “light spring coat with a belt in the back”; she hung up her coat. She did not make a “steaming pot of good, strong java”; she made coffee. This is the warp and woof of experience, free of literary devices. Indeed, it is the very objectivity of these objects and events that adds to the credibility of the story and intensifies the emotional content. In this story, the ordinary events play a dual role. In addition to the sense of delay and expectation, they underline the terrible effect of the catastrophe upon Laidlaw’s mother. The critical unknown of the story is the time of her husband’s death. It might have taken place during the abbreviated shopping trip. In that case, her mother’s tidy, deliberate actions would have no effect upon anyone but herself. But it is also possible that her husband was alive when she came back to the house. In that case, if she had gone immediately to him she might have been able to help—giving him medicine, calling for an ambulance, or at the very least being on hand to comfort him in his last moments. One can imagine the heavy accusation that Laidlaw’s mother must have laid against herself: “If I had only. . . .” Though the first elaboration relieves her of any charge of careless neglect, and the second protects her from being seen as a foolish or thoughtless woman, the third brings home with force the burden of guilt that this terrible event laid upon her. It is with the style of a loving daughter that Laidlaw says, “she’s auldfashioned, very tidy, very smart.” Her narrative gives us a deeper understanding of why “her mind just broke, and she’s never known what it is since.” Notes 1. The displacement of the orientation clauses (o–p) downward in the narrative is a not uncommon device for evaluation, postponing information that interprets events to the place where they are most relevant. Whether or not this characterization of her mother continues to the very end of the narrative, beyond the death of her father, is not known. 2. Reportability is not, of course, an invariant feature of events but is relative to many features of the social situation: competition with other concerns, relation of the participants, and setting. Thus almost any event may be reportable at a family dinner, whereas only a small number are reportable to a committee of Congress. 3. This social fact is the basis of Macbeth’s response to the report of his wife’s death: “There would have been time for such a word.” The pressure of competing events was so great, that this death was not then reportable.
References Butters, Ronald R. 2001. Presidential Address: Literary Qualities in Sociolinguistic Narratives of Personal Experience. American Speech 76:227–235. Cedergren, Henrietta. 1973. The Interplay of Social and Linguistic Factors in Panama. Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1997. Some Further Steps in Narrative Analysis. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7:395–415.
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———. 2001. The Anatomy of Style. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. P. Eckert and J. Rickford, 85–108. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. 1967. Narrative Analysis. In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. J. Helm, 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Reprint Journal of Narrative and Life History 7:3–38. Laforest, Marty, ed. 1996. Autour de la Narration: Les Abords du recit conversationnel. Montreal: Nuit Blanche Editeur. Macaulay, Ronald K. 1987. Polyphonic Monologues: Quoted Direct Speech in Oral Narratives. IPRA Papers in Pragmatics 1:1–34. ———. 1991. Locating Dialect in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, vols. 1 and 2. Oxford: Blackwell. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1981. Tense Variation in Narrative. Language 57:45–62. Silva-Corvalan, Carmen. 1983. Tense and Aspect in Oral Spanish Narrative: Context and Meaning. Language 59(4):760–780. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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3 NATALIE SCHILLING -ESTES
Exploring Intertextuality in the Sociolinguistic Interview
1. Introduction Despite the pervasiveness of theories of language in which memorized lists of particular forms (i.e., the lexicon) play a small role compared to abstract rules for generating phonological and morphosyntactic structures (i.e., the grammar), a number of researchers maintain that memorized, and quite concrete, forms play a far greater role in language creation than typically assumed. For example, Chafe (1968, 1970), Fillmore et al. (1988), and Jackendoff (1997) demonstrate that idiomaticity is pervasive and that there are scores of sentence patterns (as well as particular sentences) whose meanings are derived, not from the individual components of the constructions and the relations that hold among them, but from the overall shape of the constructions themselves, whose meanings have been lexicalized. Other scholars take things even further, arguing that memorization is central to language production and that novel utterances are created not by fitting atomistic particles (e.g., words, phrases) into linguistic “blueprints” but rather by fusing together pieces of remembered utterances, as well as other linguistic materials such as written texts (e.g., Bolinger 1961; Bakhtin 1981, 1986; Becker 1984; Gasparov 1999). Crucially, the remembered linguistic materials that are called forth in the creation of new utterances are not stored in disembodied, “dictionary” form but rather as contextualized, concrete utterances. Hence, every new utterance is enriched with associations from prior utterances in addition to the new meanings created by combining prior materials in unique ways and introducing them into new contexts. To date, the interweaving of remembered utterances, or intertextuality, has been investigated primarily in written texts (e.g., Bakhtin 1986; Gasparov 1999) and in 44
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invented utterances (e.g., Fillmore et al. 1988; Jackendoff 1997). In recent years, phoneticians have used laboratory data to explore the role of memorized, contextualized bits of speech in speech processing and production (Goldinger 1997; Johnson 1997; Pisoni 1997). In addition, discourse analysts are increasingly turning to considerations of intertextuality in their examinations of naturally occurring conversational data (e.g., Tannen 1989). In this chapter, I extend the analysis to another type of spoken data: the sociolinguistic interview. I examine the extent and nature of intertextuality in a single interview drawn from a large-scale study of the rural, triethnic community of Robeson County, North Carolina. The interview takes place between a Lumbee Native American and an African American who happen to be good friends. The analysis demonstrates that, indeed, remembered bits of linguistic material are prevalent throughout the interview and that the intertextual material patterns in much the same way as in literary and other written sources. In addition, again as in written sources, intertextuality does not entail a lack of creativity but, in fact, its opposite since the remembered bits of language material are brought together in new ways and since each preexisting piece brings with it a host of associations from all its previous uses, which are blended together in new ways to create new meanings. The fact that so much of the sociolinguistic interview is drawn from sources outside the immediate conversational context has implications for the variationist investigation of language patterning, in which each speaker’s voice is typically assumed, at least tacitly, to be his or her “own.” The current study also has implications for linguistic science in general, in that it lends support to theories in which memorization and recapitulation play a far greater role in language creation than they are generally given credit for.
2. Linguistic explorations into intertextuality Before turning to the interview that forms the focus of this analysis, let us take a brief look at several of the linguistic explorations into intertextuality mentioned in the introduction. First, there are researchers such as Chafe and Jackendoff, who demonstrate through their investigations into idiomaticity, that the role of memorization in language may be larger than we think. For example, Chafe (1992, following Pawley 1985) demonstrates that in addition to idioms there are other types of word sequences that we call forth from memory rather than create anew each time we speak. He categorizes such lexicalized sequences into three types: (1) —that is, lexicalized sequences whose meaning is unpredictable from the meanings of the individual words (e.g., “blow the whistle”); (2) —that is, phrases whose constituent elements have retained their usual meanings, but the sequence has become frozen through frequent use so that one of the main words in the sequence is predictable, given the other, as in “stretch to the ______” or “______ to the limit”; and (3) , or word sequences in which all the content words are subject to replacement, as in “swamped/flooded/besieged with requests/inquiries/calls.”1 Similarly, Jackendoff, in his 1997 Language article, “Twistin’ the Night Away,” demonstrates that not only do speakers call forth memorized bits of text in the form of conventional , or set phrases whose meanings come from the structure as a whole
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rather than the individual components, but also what he and Goldberg (1995) have called . Like regular idioms, constructional idioms are phrases whose structure is stored in the lexicon and contributes semantic content above and beyond that contained in the constituent lexical items. However, whereas in regular idioms all verbs and arguments are fixed (as in “kick the bucket” or “bite the bullet”), constructional idioms may have open positions. For example, they may have open argument positions, as in “take NP to task” or “bring NPi to pro’si senses.” Alternatively, they may have a fixed argument but open verbs, as in the “way” construction: “V one’s way PP” (e.g., “make one’s way across the room” or “force one’s way through the crowd”). In addition, constructional idioms may have both open arguments and open verbs, with other fixed elements, as in “twistin’ the night away,” “drinking the morning away,” or “sleeping the afternoon away.” And there are even phrasal idioms in which the fixed elements are eliminated entirely, leaving an idiomatic skeleton, as with the resultative construction V + NP + AP/PP (e.g., “We walked the soles off our feet” or “Pat talked us into a stupor”). Crucially, in constructional idioms, it is the entire construction rather than the verb that determines the argument structure and hence licenses the various arguments. Hence, whereas sentences such as “Terry twisted the night away” and “We walked the soles off our feet” are perfectly acceptable, sentences such as “Terry twisted the night” and “We walked the soles” are incomprehensible. Jackendoff’s (1997) work springs in part from that of Fillmore et al. (1988), who point out in an extended discussion of the “let alone” construction (as in “Max won’t eat shrimp, let alone squid”) that not only do phrasal structures (e.g., the resultative V + NP + AP/PP construction) often have semantic meaning of their own, but they may carry pragmatic meaning as well. Hence, the “let alone” construction, no matter what arguments (appropriately) fill the syntactic slots on either side of the conjunction, carries with it a particular pragmatic force—that of emphasizing the speaker’s commitment to the second clause by juxtaposing it with a prior, more informative clause that supports the assertion made in the second clause. (For example, the assertion that Max won’t eat squid, a relatively uncommon seafood, comes across as stronger when juxtaposed with the information that he won’t even eat common seafood such as shrimp.) Fillmore et al.’s (1988) discussion is situated within the framework of construction grammar (e.g., Fillmore 1988; Fillmore and Kay 1993; Goldberg 1995, 1996), in which grammatical constructions are paired with meanings, just as lexical items represent form-meaning correspondences. Hence, the role of the lexicon in language production and comprehension is significantly larger than it is held to be in traditional generative grammar, and idioms in their various forms are no longer regarded as marginal but as rather central.2 Indeed, there are some researchers, whether working in this framework or another, who maintain that all or nearly all of language consists of putting together remembered bits of linguistic material rather than fitting decontextualized linguistic primitives into abstract syntactic slots.3 As Bolinger states: “Our language does not expect us to build everything starting with lumber, nails, and blueprint, but provides us with an incredibly large number of prefabs, which have the magical property of persisting, even when we knock some of them apart and put them together in unpredictable ways” (Bolinger 1961:1; quoted in Tannen 1997). Gasparov echoes this view in an extended discussion of the centrality of memorized bits of linguistic material in language production:
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Ready-made expressions stored in speakers’ memory play not only an important but absolutely fundamental role in how the speakers compose and interpret communications. According to this hypothesis, a speaker’s ability to use a language— her or his ‘competence’ in that language, if you wish—depends first and foremost on acquiring an adequate—which means, mind-boggling in its magnitude and diversity—repertoire of those prefabricated expressions. (1999:1)
Gasparov calls these prefabricated expressions , or CFs, defining them as the “concrete corpuscles of familiar language matter, constituting, in their totality, language memory of a speaker” (1999:3). These CFs may be as small as a word or partial word and as large as a sentence or string of sentences; in addition, they may be more or less fixed in form. They are fused into one another by a process that Gasparov calls . Central in this process is the notion that CFs are superimposed onto each other rather than being joined as separate entities: “The resulting communicative whole emerges out of the process of an incremental growth, rather than as being put together from elementary parts according to a blueprint” (1999:10). Gasparov further notes that, despite the absence of a syntactic blueprint, CFs are not grafted together haphazardly. Rather, they are fitted to a recognizable frame, which he calls a (CC) and defines thus: “What in my mind differs CCs from the notion of a syntactic blueprint is the fact that they arise in speakers’ consciousness from concrete precedents grounded in their previous experience. A CC serves as a rough draft of a newly created artifact rather than its blueprint; it is at the same time less definitive and more tangible and communicatively specific than an abstract scheme” (1999:14). Gasparov provides examples from written sources, ranging from newspaper articles to literary works, to illustrate how familiar bits are fused together to create new utterances. For example, he shows how a newswriter has grafted together the pieces in (1) to make the phrase “are considering highly risky measures” (1999:11–12): (1)
“are considering highly risky measures”: (a) are considering [drastic/radical/necessary/appropriate] [measures/steps] (b) risky [measures/steps] (c) high risk (d) highly [controversial/successful . . .]
He further notes that errors may provide evidence for how phrases are composed according to draft contours in speakers’ minds. For example, in (2) the newswriter has accidentally fused two frames together to make the sentence “Ms. MacLaren, is a former postal worker from Fort Worth, Tex., surrendered after an emotional appeal here from her two daughters” (1999:15). (2)
“Ms. MacLaren, is a formal postal worker from Fort Worth, Tex., surrendered after an emotional appeal here from her two daughters.” (a) [X] is a [. . .] from [. . .]; he/she -ed after [. . .]. (b) [X], a [. . .] from [. . .], -ed after [. . .].
Not only syntacticians but also researchers in other levels of language patterning, ranging from phonetics to discourse analysis, have noted that memorized forms
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may play a far greater role in speech perception and production than commonly assumed. For example, recent research on the effects of speaker variability on speech recognition (e.g., Goldinger 1997; Johnson 1997; Pisoni 1997) has given rise to exemplar-based models of processing, which hold that we store in our memories quite specific, detailed instances of speech, or , and that we make use of this information in processing new speech signals. Such models contrast with more traditional prototype-based models, which hold that the specifics of particular speech events are abstracted away upon input (i.e., they are “normalized”) and stored in memory as idealized representations of words made up of idealized phonemes. Pisoni (1997) notes that the exemplar-based approaches are compatible with current work on categorization, memory, and perception, whereas Johnson (1997) demonstrates the ability of automatic exemplar-based recognition systems to mimic certain aspects of human performance in speech perception. It is unclear whether exemplars need be word-sized, but there seems to be no reason why the storehouse of exemplars (i.e., the lexicon) could not also contain larger chunks of remembered speech, including phrases, sentences, and perhaps even conversational exchanges. At the other end of the spectrum, discourse analysts such as Johnstone (1994) and Tannen point out that people not only draw freely from remembered prior texts as they converse but also from words uttered in the ongoing conversation, both their own and each others’. Indeed, Tannen (1989:46) maintains that “repetition is at the heart of language.” Like Gasparov (1999), Tannen notes that remembered bits of linguistic material may be more or less fixed in form. For example, there are , that is, expressions of fixed form that are always uttered in certain situations (and if not, then appropriateness rules are violated). In addition, there are proverbs and sayings— utterances that are highly fixed in form but not necessarily associated with particular contexts. And finally, there are all sorts of idioms and other prepatterned expressions whose form is relatively but not absolutely fixed and which may be used in a wide range of contexts. These expressions may be quite small (e.g., “salt and pepper” or “thick and thin”) or very large, consisting of entire discourse sequences, or even, Tannen (1989:44) notes, of “what seems self-evidently appropriate to say.” And not only may prepatterned expressions be altered as talk is created but also they may be fused together, yielding such collocations as “up against the wire,” from “up against the wall” and “down to the wire” (1989:41–42). Because preexisting bits of language can be altered, combined in novel ways, and used in contexts where they have never appeared before, the pervasiveness of prepatterning in no way precludes linguistic creativity—indeed, it is what makes it possible. Tannen notes that “language is less freely generated, more prepatterned than most current linguistic theory acknowledges. This is not, however, to say that speakers are automatons, cranking out language by rote. Rather, prepatterning (or idiomaticity, or formulaicity) is a resource for creativity. It is the play between fixity and novelty that makes possible the creation of meaning” (1989:37).4
3. Intertextuality in the sociolinguistic interview We have seen, then, that linguists working in various areas and on a range of text types (e.g., invented utterances, written texts, and conversation) have increasingly
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been exploring the role of intertextuality in language processing and production. Here I extend this line of inquiry by considering the role of intertextuality in a text type that has been central to sociolinguistic study, particularly variation analysis, for decades—the sociolinguistic interview. I focus on one interview drawn from a largescale sociolinguistic study of the rural, triethnic community of Robeson County, in southeastern North Carolina. The interview takes place between a Lumbee Native American from Robeson County, North Carolina (the interviewee) and an AfricanAmerican fieldworker from the small city of Wilmington, on the North Carolina coast. The African American has African-American family connections in Robeson County and self-identifies as part Cherokee Indian. The two attend the same university, where they met a couple of years ago. They are now good friends and have many friends in common. The interview lasts approximately an hour and 15 minutes. The interview ranges over a number of different topics and subtopics. It begins with a discussion of race relations, which can be broken into several subsections: race relations in Robeson County in general (7 minutes, 8 seconds in duration), race relations in the county during the Civil War (3:15), and race-related issues in current politics (1:46). Following the discussion of race relations, the two move on to a relatively brief discussion of several of the Lumbee’s family members (4:21) and then turn to a lengthy discussion of mutual friends at the university (20:45). Twenty minutes later, they abruptly resume their discussion of race relations. This time, the discussion encompasses the following subtopics: race relations in Robeson County (2:55), race relations during the Civil War (2:57), race relations in the South in general (2:16), and race relations on a national and global level (11:31). The sections on race relations are sometimes underlain by a degree of tension. This stems in part from the general racial tensions that exist in American society and in part from localized tensions that pervade Robeson County. Tensions among the three area ethnic groups have always been high. The Lumbee, in particular, have long struggled to assert their identity as a unique Native-American tribe in the context of the biracial classification scheme that has long been entrenched in the American South. One of their biggest obstacles in this struggle is the fact that they do not have an ancestral language; instead they rely on their unique dialect of American English as a linguistic symbol of their ethnic identity. (See Wolfram and Dannenberg 1999 for more on the sociohistorical and sociolinguistic situation of the Lumbee.) The interview between the Lumbee Native American and the African American is rife with intertextual allusion. The two interlocutors draw their bits of “remembered prior texts,” as Becker (1984:435) calls them, from numerous different sources. For example, one frequent source of material for the current conversation is previous conversations with friends and family, as illustrated in example (3). Note that A is the African American and L is the Lumbee. Also note that when these bits of text are called up, they often include not only the words of others but also words previously uttered by the interlocutors themselves, as in (3a), (3c), and (3d).5 (3) (a) A: You know what Dan told me the other day? He said, “A—, I’m telling you, in a few years a black person gonna get elected to the Senate from North Carolina.” And I said,
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“Ain’t no way in the world. Too many racists here. Too many good old boys.” (Race Relations 1, current politics, Counter #127) (b) L: And I think Mama said what happened was he owned so much land, and he—and he couldn’t take care of it, and he was a schoolteacher, he didn’t have time, you know. Because if you don’t take care of it, farming . . . (L’s Family, #173) (c) A: He is a strong kid, though, and I told you—I told you the other day, I said, “Of all the people in this suite, he’s probably the strongest.” But it doesn’t seem like it. It don’t seem like it. (Common Friends, #229) (d) L: I talked to my uncle, my—my dad’s, my mom’s uncle. Asked him, you know, “What’d you think of Martin Luther King?” And uh . . . he said, “He’s a son of a bitch!” (Race Relations 2, national/global race relations, #591)
The interlocutors also frequently draw on the current conversation, often repeating each other’s or even their own words, as shown in (4). (4) A:
So what did he decide to study. Speech.
L:
Speech. Well . . . Well, I mean, he has found something that he does that I don’t think nobody else does better, and that’s the secret to life.
A:
Uh huh.
L:
I mean, and that’s the secret to a successful one.
A:
Find something that nobody else do?
L:
Nobody else do better.
A:
Uh huh.
L:
Well . . . I mean, not—well, in some—in this case though it works. I mean, nobody ever thought about doing this much work in linguistics and dialects.
A:
It ain’t all that exciting .
L:
I know it ain’t all that exciting, but nobody ever thought about doing it. (Friends [discussing A’s linguistics professor] , #213)
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The excerpts in (5) through (8) are examples of pieces of discourse drawn from wider sources. In (5), the Lumbee uses words and phrases drawn from AfricanAmerican youth culture; such as “trip me out” and “bad,” meaning “extremely cool.” In (6), the two draw words, phrases, and ideas from popular psychiatry or psychology, for example, the word “anal” and the notion that “low self-esteem” makes you “try to act real arrogant and stuff.” In (7), A draws from the mass media. He uses the phrase “Could it be Satan?” from the TV show “Saturday Night Live” in the first example; in the second, he gives his version of an exchange that took place on a radio call-in show. Finally, in (8), we see that they even draw from written texts like the Bible. (5)
African-American youth culture
(a) A: I always thought John Brown was a black guy. L: John Brown trip me out. (Race Relations 2, Civil War, #460) (b) L: But them boys was ba::d, ba::d. (colons indicate extended vowel length) (Race Relations 2, Civil War, #498) (6)
Popular culture in general (e.g., pop psychiatry or psychology) (a) A: I—I don’t miss him so much, uh . . . I think I don’t miss him because Jim was, uh, Jim was anal. L: [Anal.] A: [Now I’m] kind of anal too now, L—, but I ain’t nowhere near as bad as Jim. (Friends, #363) (b) A: Jim was like that, Jim has always been like that. I think he has real low selfesteem. And so whenever you have low self-esteem, sometimes you try to act real arrogant and stuff, you know. (Friends, #388)
(7)
Mass Media (a) A: What happened to Leroy? L: I don’t know. [laughter] A: [Could it be Satan?] (humorous saying from the TV show Saturday Night Live, 1980s) (L’s Family, #170) (b) A: And Rodney King? I was listening—I was listening to Rush Limbaugh (a radio personality) talking about Rodney King. This woman said, “How come every time you talk about Rodney King you always talk about he was breaking the law and all that kinda stuff?” He said, “Rodney King is not a role model.” Said, “He’s
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a drunk, he’s a wife beater, he’s a criminal,” you know? (Race Relations 2, national/global race relations, #633) (8)
Written texts (a) A: But that ain’t what the Bible [says.] L: [I mean, but] the Bible says, and the Bible says A: “Slaves, obey your masters.” (Race Relations 2, national/global race relations, #670) (b) A: Jesus said you have to love, and men should be treated equally. (Race Relations 2, national/global race relations, #657)
As with Gasparov’s (1999) , the bits of remembered text in this interview range in size from a word or two to sentences or pieces of sentences to chunks of discourse that encompass a number of sentences. For example, the two repeat words such as “speech” and partial sentences such as “nobody ever thought about doing [. . .],” in (4), whereas in (7b), A calls forth an entire short conversation, several sentences in length. In addition, the CFs in the interview show various degrees of fixity of form: some fragments are readily recognizable as wordfor-word repetitions of familiar utterances, whereas others have been obviously or most likely altered as they are taken up in conversation. For example, “Could it be Satan?” in (7a) is an exact repetition; “men should be treated equally” in (8b) is probably an altered form of “all men are created equal,” from the U.S. Declaration of Independence; and the conversation between Rush Limbaugh and his listener in (7b) has probably been quite radically altered in reconstruction. Further, and again like Gasparov’s (1999) CFs, the bits of remembered texts are not simply joined, with distinct boundaries between CFs preserved, but rather fused, so that the junctures between CFs are blurred. See example (9): (9) L: God said it. He deemed us that we should go from sea to shining sea. (Race Relations 2, national/global race relations, #676) God deemed that [. . .] <>God told us [. . .] } God deemed us that [. . .] God deemed us that<>we should go<>from sea to shining sea (from “America the Beautiful”)
To create this sentence, L has fused together, among other fragments, the fragment “God deemed that [. . .]” and “God told us [. . .]” to make the new phrase “He deemed us that [. . .].” Furthermore, he has also fused in some material from a patriotic song, the phrase “from sea to shining sea.” Example (9) also illustrates that intertextual allusions are not always drawn from one clear source but are often filtered through several sources and that the remem-
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brance of one source will trigger the remembrance of another. Given that (9) is embedded in a discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr., it is almost certain that the phrase from “America the Beautiful” has been called to mind because the two have been thinking about, and talking about, King’s speeches and writings, many of which include references to patriotic texts and songs. For example, the very well-known “I Have a Dream” speech draws heavily upon the song “My Country ’Tis of Thee” in its concluding moments, a few fragments of which are given in (10). (10) This is the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.” . . . “When we allow freedom to ring, from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up the day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty, We are free at last.” (Davis 1973)
The fact that L and A are clearly drawing upon King’s speeches in their discussion of him is illustrated in (11), where the allusions to (10) are clear. [Compare, e.g., lines 3 and 4 in (10) with lines 5 and 6 in (11)]: (11) L: A: L: A: L:
In his (King’s) speeches, um, he starts [out, you know—] [God knows he could speak.] He could speak. He could speak, now L—. What he say? “God.” He said something about, “One day God will hopefully look down and say—,”, you know, “white people and black children, and—. . .” (Race Relations 2, national and global race relations, #641)
Finally, in example (12), we see that as in the written texts Gasparov (1999) examines, speakers, too, hold certain preset frames, or communicative contours, in their minds as they work to fit CFs into ongoing talk. And again as with Gasparov’s examples, errors and false starts may provide clues to what these communicative contours are. In this example, L is trying to come up with the saying “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but he accidentally starts with “Fondness.” However, A is able to recognize the phrase that L intends and actually to complete the phrase for him. (12) L: But, you know, um, there’s a old saying that goes . . . Fondness—I mean, no not fondness, no, no. Separation? Being away from somebody? A: Makes the heart [grow fonder.] L: [grow fonder.] (Friends, #245)
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We see, then, that just as intertextuality is common in written texts of various sorts, ranging from newspaper articles to literary texts, as well as in conversational data, so, too, is it pervasive in the sociolinguistic interview. The intertextual material in the interview patterns in much the same way as in other types of texts: remembered bits of material may range in size from a word or several words (or even partial words) to sentences to utterances of several sentences’ length. In addition, they are drawn from a variety of sources, including current and past conversations with family and friends, popular culture, mass media, traditional sayings, and historic texts. Furthermore, the remembered materials are sometimes presented intact, but far more often they are altered as they are woven into the fabric of conversation. And finally, materials are not always neatly joined at clear boundaries but are fused into one another, again indicating parallelism with the patterning of intertextuality in written texts.
4. Implications for variation analysis The intertextual nature of the sociolinguistic interview has important implications for variation analysis, where such interviews have long served and continue to serve as the main source of data on language patterning. A number of variationists (e.g., Macaulay 1987, 1999) would probably concede that language is a dialogic rather than monologic phenomenon—that is, that language is a joint production of all conversational participants, as well as a host of previous speakers and writers. However, the basic methodology of variation analysis treats language as essentially monologic. Each speaker’s voice is presumed to be his or her “own,” and the phonological and morphosyntactic variants that each speaker utters are thus counted as their own and then grouped with the utterances of speakers with similar social characteristics. In this way, variationists obtain patterns of covariation between linguistic and social structures, with the hope that the patterns will reveal something meaningful about how people use language features to indicate group affiliation. But if, as we have seen, each person’s voice is really fraught with echoes of the voices of others, then the question arises as to whose phonological and morphosyntactic productions are really being counted. In other words, if a token is part of an utterance that is drawn from another source, should it count as the speaker’s own or as someone else’s? This question is of particular importance given that, in speaking the words of others, speakers sometimes use what seems to be their “own” voice—that is, the voice we expect them to use, given their demographic or other social characteristics—and sometimes use an altered voice. And when they do alter their voices, usually to approximate the voices of their various sources, speakers might modify anything from pitch, voice quality, and intonational contour to phonological and morphosyntactic features. For example, as with speakers of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) across the county, the African-American interlocutor in the current study typically regularizes past tense be to was, as in We was home or They wasn’t there. In contrast, the Lumbee shows a regularization pattern typical of the Lumbee Native Americans of Robeson County—he regularizes to was in positive utterances, as in They was home but to weren’t in negative, as in It weren’t me or She weren’t there. In fact, L never
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once uses wasn’t, whether in regularized or nonregularized contexts, even when repeating A’s words. The excerpt in (13) illustrates: (13) A: But were you—you wasn’t never close to John, was you? L: I weren’t never close to John, but I know. And I was getting close to him. I always get close to all my suite mates. (Friends, #324)
The African American also manages to preserve his “own” regularization system throughout most of the interview. However, there are a couple of occasions when he picks up on L’s system. The excerpts in (14) illustrate. [Note, though, that A’s use of L’s speech patterns in (14b) is quite short-lived since he immediately self-“corrects” from weren’t back to the wasn’t form that typically characterizes his own speech.] (14) (a) L: And then—they weren’t never the same after that. A: They weren’t? L: Not after you lose [a child. A: [They still—they’ve still changed? I mean, you can still, you still see they difference? L: Yeah. (L’s Family, #144) (b) A: Said H—was down there having sex with a girl on the couch in the study lounge. Anybody could walk in, [L—!] L: [laughter] A: In the study lounge but that—but you weren’t—you wadn’t here when, uh, J— and K—yeah you was. (Friends, #283)
Similarly, although L is usually adamant in maintaining his own present-tense subject-verb concord system, there are two cases in which he adopts the AAVE system, with its third-person singular –s absence, as in He go for He goes. The first time is in direct repetition of A, as seen in (4) above, repeated here as (15): (15) A: So what did he decide to study. Speech. L: Speech. Well. . . .Well, I mean, he has found something that he does that I don’t think nobody else does better, and that’s the secret to life. A: Uh huh. L: I mean, and that’s the secret to a successful one.
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A: Find something that nobody else do? L: Nobody else do better. (Friends, #213)
The second time, also seen above (in 5a), also involves uttering someone else’s words, this time those of African-American youth culture in general. It is repeated here as (16): (16) A: I always thought John Brown was a black guy. L: John Brown trip me out. (Race Relations 2, Civil War, #460)
Given that (15) and (16) are both drawn from others’ words and ways of speaking, we must question whether the tokens of third-person singular –s absence in these excerpts should be counted as L’s own and incorporated into a description of his subject-verb agreement system or whether they should be discarded and L should be labeled a categorical third-person singular –s user. Similarly, we must question whether or not to include A’s tokens of weren’t in (14) in a description of his agreement system for past be. If we do decide to count all tokens uttered by a given speaker as that speaker’s “own,” no matter from whom the utterances are drawn, then we risk smudging together different voices, obscuring the patterning of individual language systems (if individual systems can even be said to exist) and subsequently misinterpreting what these patterns might mean. Of course, we can attempt to get around the problem of intertextuality in the sociolinguistic interview by conceding, as variationists have done for decades, that each speaker actually has several different voices, or different speech styles, and that we should separate utterances spoken in one “voice” or style from those uttered in a different style (e.g., Labov 1972a, 1972b). Even in such an approach, though, it is typically assumed that, despite the multivoicing of the sociolinguistic interview, each speaker actually has only one true voice—that is, one single most vernacular, casual, “natural” style (Labov 1972b). Unfortunately, variationists have typically sought this style in precisely those portions of the interview that are likely to be the most rife with intertextual allusion. Narratives, for example, draw heavily on the voices of others, often in the form of direct quotes, as pointed out, for example, in Macaulay (1987, 1995). In addition, speakers rely heavily on direct quotes in other types of high-involvement sections in which they could be said to be paying more attention to their subject matter than their speech itself (e.g., heated discussions in which the interviewee expresses a deep-seated belief or argues passionately for a particular point of view). And again, in calling forth others’ voices, speakers will sometimes adopt the phonological and morphosyntactic characteristics of these voices and sometimes not. For example, (17) is an excerpt from a narrative in which A quotes a white friend. A seems to be drawing on his friend’s phonology, since he uses diphthongal /ay/ when quoting his friend, even though A typically has a high rate of monophthongal /ay/ (52.7% for the interview as a whole), especially before voiced sounds, as in [ga:z] for “guys” or [la:n] for “line.”
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(17) A: And one n—I’ll tell you what happened the first night [naIt]. We got here, my— the first night [naIt] we stayed here Frank came over to the room and he said, “Yeah, because we had some guys [gaIz] stay over here last year, and uh, what we’re gonna do is, uh, make a line [laIn], a congo [sic] line [laIn] from your room to my [ma:] room, you know, and, uh, we’re just gonna party all night [naIt].” And I looked—I looked him straight in the eye [a:], I said, “Not in my [maI] room, you won’t.” I said, “Now if you want to make a congo line [la:n] that’s fine [fa:n], but it’s gonna be out of here by ten o’clock.” And after that Frank wouldn’t never mess with me no more after that. He wouldn’t never mess with more no more after that. (Friends, #372)
Similarly, consider the excerpt in (18), repeated from (7b) above. This excerpt is situated in a heated discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr., and so we might expect it to be a prime spot for “natural” speech. However, it looks as though A is using Rush Limbaugh’s morphosyntactic features rather than those we think of as his “own” since A typically shows a fairly high rate of copula deletion, as in He nice for He’s nice (38% in the interview as a whole) but uses none when he quotes Limbaugh: (18) A: And Rodney King? I was listening—I was listening to Rush Limbaugh (a radio personality) talking about Rodney King. This woman said, “How come every time you talk about Rodney King you always talk about he was breaking the law and all that kinda stuff?” He said, “Rodney King is not a role model.” Said, “He’s a drunk, he’s a wife beater, he’s a criminal,” you know? (Race Relations 2, national/global race relations, #633)
Unfortunately, though, we cannot simply say that every time the interlocutors quote someone else, they alter the language systems that we expect would be “natural” to them. For example, in the excerpt in (19), A is quoting Hitler, yet he doesn’t alter his AAVE features in any way, even though we might expect him to move toward some form of standard English in speaking the words of an important historic figure. In fact, A’s AAVE features are more pronounced here than in a number of other places, including places where he is quoting no one but using his “authentic” voice. (19) A: Here this man [Hitler] is in jail, a life term, and he sat down and said, “This is what I’ma do: One, I’ma get out of prison. Two, I’ma tell all German people that they Ø po’. Three, I’ma tell ’em the only way they can get rich is if they stay with me. And four, I’ma tell ’em the Jews is the cause of all the problemØ.” (Race Relations 2, global race relations, #690)
5. Conclusion In conclusion, then, I have shown that just as intertextuality is pervasive in written texts and in spontaneous conversation, so, too, is it found throughout the socio-
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linguistic interview. Intertextuality in the sociolinguistic interview seems to pattern in much the same way as has been observed for written texts. Intertextual allusions may be drawn from a wide range of sources, and they may range in size from a single word to sentences to conversations, as for example, with A’s representation of the conversation between Rush Limbaugh and his call-in listener. Furthermore, the bits of text may be brought into the interview relatively intact, as, for example, in A’s exact quote from “Saturday Night Live” (“Could it be Satan?”), or they may be altered, as when L alters King’s words when he says, “One day God will hopefully look down and say, you know, white people and black children.” And finally, the bits of text are often fused into one another rather than neatly joined at the edges, as, for example, when A says, “Jesus said you have to love, and men should be treated equally” or when L says, “God deemed us that we should go from sea to shining sea.” I have also shown that the pervasive intertextuality of the sociolinguistic interview poses some problems for variation study. If people are continually uttering the words of others, then how are variationists to know which utterances they should count as a speaker’s own and which they should not, especially given that sometimes the bits of prior text are uttered in voices that have been obviously altered to reflect source voices and sometimes not? And furthermore, how should variationists deal with the fact that highly involved sections of the interview—those in which we would expect each speaker’s “natural” voice to prevail—are often more heavily laden with intertextuality than other parts of the interview? Unfortunately, I cannot as yet offer any answers. However, I hope that my having raised these questions will inspire others to seek answers and thereby enrich both variation study and linguistic study in general. Scholars of language who examine written texts, laboratory data, and their own intuitions have already pointed out that the pervasiveness of remembered chunks of language material may cause us to question accepted views of language structure in which grammatical operations take precedence over memorization or lexicalization. Surely, variation analysis, with its emphasis on examining speech as it is used in everyday life, has something to contribute to the intertextual unfolding of this line of thought as well. Notes I would like to thank Boris Gasparov of Columbia University for generously sharing his work with me. I bear sole responsibility for any misinterpretations. Thanks also to Edward Flemming of Stanford University for information on current research on speech perception and production, and to Ronald Macaulay for continued inspiration. 1. Some sequences of words are lexicalized phrases in some contexts but not others. For example, Chafe (1992) notes that phrases such as radio stations and wire services may be lexicalized in texts that focus on the media but not in texts centered on different topics. 2. Goldberg (1996) notes that not only construction grammarians but also those working in the framework of phrase structure grammar (in its various forms) place far more emphasis on the lexicon than does traditional generative grammar. 3. I do not wish to argue for or against this strong view here, merely to point out that memory and memorized bits of linguistic material do seem to be quite important in language production and comprehension. Much more research, including research into the neurologi-
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cal underpinnings of language, memory, and cognition in general, is certainly needed before the role of the lexicon vis-à-vis that of abstract structures or rules can be determined. As I note below, researchers in areas as diverse as phonetics and discourse analysis point to the pervasiveness of memorized forms in language production and processing. In addition, some recent research on language acquisition, compatible with connectionist or distributional models of cognition, indicates that children make extensive use of particularized utterances in figuring out the structure of their language. Such a view contrasts sharply with the traditional generativist notion of the “poverty of the stimulus”—that is, the belief that children cannot possibly piece together their language structure from the language data surrounding them since the data are not rich enough. Rather, the language input children receive serves only to “trigger” their innate knowledge of language structure, or Universal Grammar. Hence, the particulars surrounding concrete utterances are quickly abstracted away rather than utilized in acquisition, processing, and production. Redington and Chater (1998) provide evidence from a number of experiments with computer learning models that the distributional properties of concrete language data actually do yield quite valuable information about language structure, without recourse to “innate” structures or rules. Some of the more striking results are in the area of morphology (e.g., Plunkett and Marchman 1993; Nakisa and Hahn 1996), where it has been shown that distributional learning mechanisms can successfully acquire and apply both regular and irregular morphology, even in languages such as German, in which regular plurals (ending in –s) are outnumbered by irregulars. In fact, Nakisa and Hahn (1996) show that incorporating an “innate” rule for plural formation (i.e., a default “add –s” rule) actually causes their model’s performance in acquiring German plurals to decline. Again, however, it is beyond the scope of this paper to investigate in detail the exact contribution of the concrete (vs. the abstract rule) in language perception, production, and acquisition. 4. Cf. Bakhtin (1986:87, 276), who has inspired scores of researchers to pursue explorations of intertextuality in literary and conversational language: “When we select words in the process of constructing an utterance, we by no means always take them from the system of language in their neutral, dictionary form. We usually take them from other utterances” (quoted in Tannen 1997:139). And “any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist—or, on the contrary, by the ‘light’ of a line of words that have already been spoken about it” (quoted in Tannen 1989:43). 5. Square brackets in transcribed utterances indicate overlapping talk; parentheses indicate inserted explanatory material; dashes indicate false starts; colons indicate extended vowel length; a series of periods indicates a pause (pauses were not timed for the purposes of this investigation).
References Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1986. The Problem of Speech Genres. In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. Becker, A. L. 1984. The linguistics of particularity: Interpreting superordination in a Javanese text. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. Claudia Brugman, Monica Macaulay, Amy Dahlstrom, Michele Emanatian, Birch Moonwomon, and Catherine O’Connor, 425–436. Berkeley, Cal.: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Bolinger, Dwight. 1961. Syntactic Blends and Other Matters. Language 37:366–381.
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Chafe, Wallace. 1968. Idiomaticity as an Anomaly in the Chomskyan Paradigm. Foundations of Language 4:109–125. ———. 1970. Meaning and the Structure of Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. The Flow of Ideas in a Sample of Written Language. In Discourse Description: Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund-raising Text, ed. William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson, ix–x, 267–294. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Davis, Lenwood G. 1973. I Have a Dream: The Life and Times of Martin Luther King, Jr. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press. Fillmore, Charles J. 1988. The Mechanisms of ‘Construction Grammar.’ In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 35–55. Berkeley, Cal.: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Fillmore, Charles J., and Paul Kay. 1993. Construction Grammar Coursebook. Ms. University of California, Berkeley. Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay, and Mary Catherine O’Connor. 1988. Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone. Language 64:501– 538. Gasparov, Boris. 1999. A Coat of Many Colors: Speech as an Intertextual Collage. Paper presented at the Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium, Berkeley, Cal., April 12. Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. Jackendoff and Construction-based Grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 7:3–19. Goldinger, Stephen D. 1997. Words and Voices: Perception and Production in an Episodic Lexicon. In Talker Variability in Speech Processing, ed. Keith Johnson and John W. Mullennix, 33–66. San Diego: Academic Press. Jackendoff, Ray. 1997. Twistin’ the Night Away. Language 73:534–559. Johnson, Keith. 1997. Speech Perception without Speaker Normalization: An Exemplar Model. In Talker Variability in Speech Processing, ed. Keith Johnson and John W. Mullennix, 145–165. San Diego: Academic Press. Johnstone, Barbara, ed. 1994. Repetition in Discourse: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Labov, William. 1972a. The Isolation of Contextual Styles. In Sociolinguistic Patterns, 70– 109. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1972b. Some Principles of Linguistic Methodology. Language in Society 1:97–120. Macaulay, Ronald K. S. 1987. Polyphonic Monologues: Quoted Speech in Oral Narratives. IPRA Paper in Pragmatics 1(2):1–34. ———. 1995. The adverbs of authority. English World-Wide 16:37–60. ———. 1999. Is Sociolinguistics Lacking in Style? Cuadernos de Filologia Inglesa 9. Nakisa, Ramin Charles, and U. Hahn. 1996. Where Defaults Don’t Help: The Case of the German Plural System. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. Garrison W. Cottrell, 177–182. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum. Pawley, Andrew. 1985. Lexicalization. In Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Pisoni, David B. 1997. Some Thoughts on ‘Normalization’ in Speech Perception. In Talker Variability in Speech Processing, ed. Keith Johnson and John W. Mullennix, 9–32. San Diego: Academic Press. Plunkett, Kim, and Virginia Marchman. 1993. From Rote Learning to System Building: Acquiring Verb Morphology in Children and Connectionist Nets. Cognition 48:1–49. Redington, Martin, and Nick Chater. 1998. Connectionist and Statistical Approaches to Language Acquisition: A Distributional Perspective. In Language Acquisition and Connectionism, ed. Kim Plunkett, 129–191. East Sussex, Eng.: Psychology Press.
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Tannen, Deborah. 1989. Repetition in Conversation: Toward a Poetics of Talk. In Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, 36–97. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Involvement as Dialogue: Linguistic Theory and the Relation between Conversational and Literary Discourse. In Dialogue and Critical Discourse: Language, Culture, Critical Theory, ed. Michael Macovski, 137–157. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolfram, Walt, and Clare J. Dannenberg. 1999. Dialect Identity in a Tri-ethnic Context: The Case of Lumbee American Indian English. English World-Wide 20:179–172.
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PART II
THE EXPLORATION OF “PLACE”
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4 BARBARA JOHNSTONE
Place, Globalization, and Linguistic Variation
Place, in one form or another—nation, region, county, city, or neighborhood—is
one of the most frequently adduced correlates of linguistic variation.1 In most work in dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics, place has been implicitly conceived of in objective, physical terms. Part of the standard account of the origins of regional dialects in Europe, for example, is that physical boundaries such as rivers and mountain ranges gave rise to communicative isolation of one group of speakers from another, upon which once common ways of talking diverged. Fieldworkers in American dialects tried to construct, at least informally, an atlas with representative samples by seeking out informants who lived in a variety of counties in the region they were interested in. The predominant visual images in the Dictionary of American Regional English, maps of the United States that are divided into states, have the effect of suggesting that state boundaries have something far more important to do with lexical variation in the United States than they actually do. (There are many cases in which the Northern word for something is different from the Southern word, but relatively few cases in which, for example, the Pennsylvania word for something is different from the New York word.) Contemporary sociolinguistic survey techniques often group people according to their physical location: people who live (or in some cases answer the phone) in one county, state, or neighborhood are compared and contrasted with people who are physically located in others. Even survey techniques that take into account more particular facts about the mechanisms of interaction that give rise to variation, such as network analyses (L. Milroy 1987), often begin by identifying residents of one neighborhood or another. In general, we tend to assume that identifying where someone is, where someone is from, and who else is from there is 65
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unproblematic because the relevant criteria are objective and categorical. We have learned from colleagues such as Penelope Eckert (1988; 1989; 1990) and others that the social class categories that matter (e.g., “jock” vs. “burnout”) may not correlate in simple ways with demographic facts, and that “being a woman” or “being black” may be (at least in part) culturally defined, too. But we do not tend to think about the ways in which “being in Pennsylvania,” “being a Texan,” or “being from a small town” might also be emic, culturally defined categories. Work by geographers on the human aspects of place, as well as increased attention to the ways in which ideology and individual agency mediate between social facts and linguistic ones (Johnstone 1996; Schieffelin et al. 1998) and challenges to the “linguistics of community” from people who work in linguistic “contact zones” (Pratt 1987; Urciuoli 1995; Irvine 1996), all suggest the need to reexamine how we have been conceptualizing explanatory variables connected with place. This chapter sketches some of the new possibilities such a reexamination might yield. I begin by outlining some recent thinking about place from the view of geography and social theory. I then raise some questions that are being asked about the significance of place in the contemporary world and discuss how sociolinguistics has been and can continue to be useful in answering such questions. Finally, I sketch some of the methodological implications for sociolinguistics of supplementing a conception of place as a physical location with a phenomenological perspective. From this perspective, speakers are seen as constructing place as they experience physical and social space, and different speakers may orient to place, linguistically, in very different ways and for very different purposes.
1. Place as location, place as meaning For most of the twentieth century, geographers envisioned place as “the relative location of objects in the world” (Entrikin 1991:10). Place in this sense, represented in the lefthand column of figure 4.1, is physical, identifiable by a set of coordinates on a map; one place is different from another place because it is in a different location and has different physical characteristics. Places, in this sense of the word, can be seen objectively, on a map or out of an airplane window, for example. Place relates to human activity by virtue of being the natural, physical setting for it; place might affect human life via its physical characteristics, for example, by enabling a certain kind of agriculture or providing other natural resources or transportation arteries. This is the concept of place that most of us probably remember from school geography classes in which the world was presented as a set of clearly bounded places (each, often, with a capital city, which had to be memorized) with physical characteristics that were reflected in different economic systems and ways of living. For example, a physical concept of place might lead a geographer to describe the area around College Station, Texas, in terms of its climate, geology, and predominant flora, as “post-oak savanna”; East Texas might be defined as the area east of the Balcones Escarpment or the part of the state in which agriculture does not require irrigation. Geographers working in this framework might also delimit regions on the basis of historical or economic criteria. “The South” in the United States might, for example,
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Place as Location
Place as Meaning
Place is seen as “the relative location of objects in the world” (Entrikin 1991:10).
Place is seen as "the meaningful context of human action” (Entrikin 1991:10).
Place is the natural context of human life, setting in the physical sense.
Place is the symbolic context of human life, “locale” (Giddens 1984): aspects of context that are relevant for the current interaction.
Place is associated with physical attributes.
Place is socially constructed, “imagined” in Anderson’s (1983) sense. Places are associated with communities.
An example: the College Station, Texas, area as “post-oak savanna” or as a set of longitude and latitude coordinates.
An example: the College Station, Texas, area as “Aggieland.”
Places can be viewed objectively (e.g., out of an airplane window), from the outside.
Places can only be “viewed” subjectively. Humans are centered in places, which can only be seen from the inside outward.
The epistemological underpinnings of this way of working are modernist, positivist.
The epistemological underpinnings of this way of working are postmodernist, relativist, and phenomenological.
Places are value-neutral. (Somebody is someplace if he or she is physically located there; from someplace if he or she was born there.)
Places, because they are meaningful, are normative. (Being someplace means acting a corresponding way, believing a set of ideas about the place; e.g., it is from this perspective that people talk about “good” or “real” Texans.)
Regions can be delimited by geographers on the basis of physical, historical, or economic criteria. The focus is on “generic” regions, as in the traditional geography on which aereal classifications are based.
The focus of analysis is on “voluntary” or “vernacular” regions.
Discourses about place are expository.
Discourses about place are jointly “formulated” (Schegloff 1972), narrative.
Doing geography is like science: the focus is on the large-scale and the general. Appropriate methods are larger scale, quantitative.
Doing geography is like reading (Rose 1980); the analytical emphasis is on what is specific, what is unique, “the small scale, the taken-for-granted and the nonverbal” (Mondale 1989:14), so appropriate methods are discourse analysis and ethnography.
4.1. Place as Location and Place as Meaning (Based Mainly on Entrikin 1991, Who Advocates a Stance between these two)
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be defined historically, as the area of the former Confederacy, or economically, as an area that was once characterized by plantation agriculture and slave labor. Doing geography, in this framework of ideas, is like doing science. The focus is on the largescale and the general, and appropriate research methods are of a larger scale, often quantitative. Discourses about place, when place is seen as location, are expository: because they exist independently of peoples’ interpretations, places can be objectively described and explained. Places are, in other words, value-neutral; a person is in a place if he or she is physically located there, from a place if he or she was born there. The epistemological underpinnings of this way of thinking about place and the relationships of humans and places are positivistic and modernist. Beginning in the 1970s, some geographers started to suggest another way of thinking about place that provides a better account of the roles place plays in human life. (This approach is represented on the righthand side of figure 4.1.) “Humanistic geography,” as it is known, is the branch of human geography2 that is concerned with respects in which space and place are socially constructed. In some ways, humanistic geography represents a return to the holistic conception of place that characterized nineteenth-century geography (Entrikin 1991:10–12), although current humanistic geography, like other branches of postmodern social theory, is deeply influenced by phenomenology. Humanistic geographers investigate place as “the meaningful context of human action.” Seeing human experience as fundamentally “emplaced,” these geographers are interested in such things as “sense of place,” in the difference between being in a place and “dwelling” there, in the meaning of “home,” and in the meanings and uses of ideas about region. According to Yi-Fu Tuan (1974:213), one of the founders of humanistic geography,3 “place is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning.” Humanistic geographers in the Marxist and neo-Marxist tradition ask about how discourses about spatiality are produced and circulated and whose interests such discourses serve (Soja 1989). The most radically relativistic, phenomenological version of the idea is that place can only be imagined as a social construction. Tuan and Entrikin, among others, argue for a concept of place that incorporates its material, as well as its experiential aspects. A sense of place, for humanistic geographers, is the result of people’s participation in the shaping of their world (Seamon 1979). That is, a space becomes a place through humans’ interaction with it, both through physical manipulation, via such activities as agriculture, architecture, and landscaping, and symbolically, via such activities as remembering, “formulating” (Schegloff 1972), depicting, and narrating. Places are thus known both sensually and intellectually. People experience places both as repeated, immediate everyday experiences, as “distinctive odors, textural and visual qualities in the environment, seasonal changes . . . how they look as they are approached from the highway,” and in more abstract, articulated ways, as “their location in the school atlas or road map . . . population or number and kind of industries” (Tuan 1975:152, 153). As Tuan points out (1975:161–164), art, education, and politics systematize and focus our sense of place by articulating inchoate experience for the eye and the mind, making the place “visible” in the same way to all members of the group. Stories told about places can have this function (Johnstone 1990; Finnegan 1998), as can such things as exhibitions in historical museums, tourist bro-
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chures, and advertisements (Guerin 1999) or public debate about community development (Modan 2002).4 Popular labels for places often reflect the ways in which places are constituted through shared experiences and shared orientations. The semiofficial designation of “Aggieland” for the College Station, Texas, area, for example, reflects the social aspect of place. Because places are meaningful, place is normative. Being “from” Aggieland requires people to orient in one way or another to Texas A&M University (e.g., to root for the Texas A&M teams or to make a point of not doing so)5; similarly, being a “real” or “good” Texan can mean acting in certain ways and believing certain things. Being born in Texas can be less diagnostic of Texanness, in this normative sense, than displaying a bumper sticker that says, “Texan by Choice.” (Displaying a bumper sticker that says “Native Texan” is making a claim to authenticity in both the demographic and the social senses.) Studying the phenomenology of place is, as Rose (1980:124), points out, more like reading than like traditional scientific work: “doing human geography consists of interpreting texts.” We return to Rose’s observation about methodology later on. Not surprisingly, the debate over place in general has been felt in the study of geographical region. Regional geography has its roots in military planning and nationalism. It once consisted of the study of what Zelinsky (1973:110) calls “traditional region.” Traditional regions are relatively self-contained, endogamous, stable, and long lasting: The individual is born into the region and remains with it, physically and mentally, since there is little in- or out-migration by isolated persons and families; and the accidents of birth would automatically assign a person to a specific caste, class, occupation, and social role. An intimate symbiotic relationship between man and land develops over many centuries, one that creates indigenous modes of thought and action, a distinctive visible landscape, and a form of human ecology specific to the locality.
This is the idealized region on which nineteenth- and much twentieth-century dialectology was focused, the sort of region around which isoglosses could be drawn and which could be identified with a single, labeled dialect such as “North Midland.” In geography, this way of imagining the prototypical region lost favor in the 1950s and 1960s because it encouraged regional exceptionalism (the idea that different regions are fundamentally different) and environmental determinism (the idea that physical characteristics of the environment are responsible for human behaviors). Regional geography has been reconstituted beginning in the 1980s by interest in the phenomenological approach to place that we have been exploring. Regions have come to be seen as meaningful places, which individuals construct, as well as select, as reference points. Identification with a region is identification with one kind of “imagined community” (Anderson 1983). Contemporary regional geography pays attention not just to description but also to “ways of seeing.” It highlights the historical contingency of traditional regional theory, which is based on an ideology about place and its relationship to humans that arose from and served nineteenth-century nationalistic politics. It pays attention to the cultural effects of (post-)modernity and
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to new modes of spatial experience such as hyperspace. Rather than assuming that there are regions in the world to be discovered, regional historians and geographers now ask, “Where do regions come from, and what makes them seem so real?” (Ayers and Onuf 1996:vii). In this framework, borders and boundaries are seen as cultural constructs; regions are subjectively real but objectively hard to define (Meining 1978). The “traditional region” is replaced by the idea that regions are “voluntary,” the results of peoples’ choices about how to divide up the world they experience. Because studying voluntary regions means listening to how nongeographers talk about the world, socially defined regions are also “vernacular” regions. The process by which individuals ground their identities in socially constructed regions is seen as analogous to, or the same as, the process by which people construct, claim, and use ethnic identities (Reed 1982). Language is seen (though not often studied) as part of the process: languages, dialects, and ways of speaking create and reflect “at-homeness” in a region (Mugerauer 1985).
2. Local places in the postmodern world It has been argued that economic and cultural developments have diminished the relevance of place in human lives. As Entrikin (1991:66–78) points out, a sense of loss of local community has been felt at least since the Enlightenment and is partly responsible for the nineteenth-century Romantic nostalgia for the local that gave rise to social and political movements such as (in the United States) utopian communitarianism (as represented, e.g., by Alcott), provincialism (associated with Josiah Royce), Jeffersonian republicanism, and Southern agrarianism. We might also note the direct historical connection of nineteenth-century dialectology with the Romantics’ search for lost “local color.” According to Bellah et al. (1985), contemporary Americans inhabit “lifestyle enclaves” rather than communities centered around the common experience of place. The instability of meaning in general and the threat to meaningful places in the modern world are often said to be the result of rapid change and mobility (Ogilvy 1977).6 Said (1979:18), for example, speaks of the “generalized sense of homelessness” experienced by the globally mobile. According to Anthony Giddens (1991:14–21, 146, 147), the dynamism of modern life has the effect of separating place from space, removing social relations from local contexts via “abstract systems” such as currency, therapy, and technology. Once social life becomes “disembedded” in this way, “place becomes phantasmagoric” and “much less significant than it used to be as an external referent for the lifespan of the individual.” An individual’s phenomenal world (the world one experiences) is no longer the physical world in which he or she moves. What replaces the local as an explanatory concept for Giddens is the “locale.” A locale could be defined as the meaningful elements of the temporal and spatial context of interaction: locale is setting, but as seen from the perspective of human actors. A locale could be a physical place, but it could be a “place” constituted in other ways instead: a “cyber place” such as an online chat “room,” for example, or a “place” like the stock market. “Locales,” says Giddens (1984:118), “provide for a good deal of the ‘fixity’ underlying institutions.”7
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The electronic media are often associated with a sort of liberation from place. Meyrowitz (1985) claims, for example, that the electronic media make place obsolete since people no longer have to be in the same (physical) place to interact.8 Some of the ways in which experiential places can be decoupled from physical places are suggested in contemporary uses of such words as space, mapping, and the -scape of landscape: cyberspace, mediaspace, machinescape, or dreamscape. Critical anthropologists have pointed out that the discourse of place encouraged by nationalism— one’s place is one’s nation, clearly bounded and clearly distinct from every other nation—is responsible for the mistaken idea that humans can be categorized into separate, autonomous “cultures” in separate, bounded places (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). New attention to what happens on the borders and at the boundaries and to heterogeneity and adaptiveness calls into question the idea that “cultures” in this sense ever existed (Bhabha 1994; Urciuoli 1995). But is also claimed that local, place-based community still has a role to play, albeit a changing one. Giddens (1991:147), points out the ways in which people attempt to “re-embed the lifespan within a local milieu,” say, by attempts to cultivate community pride. He is skeptical, however, that this can succeed: “Only when it is possible to gear regular practices to specifics of place can re-embedding occur in a significant way; but in conditions of high modernity this is difficult to achieve.” Cultural geographers who have continued to focus on traditional cultures and traditional aspects of culture have recognized the continued persistence and importance of traditional sources of meaning such as localness (Entrikin 1991:41). That localness can still be valued can be seen in activities aimed at perpetuating or even creating it. For example, localness can become a commodity, which gives rise to competitions over the control of its meanings and uses. What it means to be “here” or “from here” can be the focus of arguments about how local economic development should proceed (Cox and Mair 1988), and advertising can make strategic use of nostalgia for neighborhood, local community, or region (Sack 1988). Local contexts of life may still be tied to human identity in more immediate ways, too. As Stuart Hall (1991:33–36) points out, globalization is not, after all, a new phenomenon, and “the return to the local is often a response to globalization. . . . It is a respect for local roots which is brought to bear against the anonymous, impersonal world of the globalized forces which we do not understand.” Face-to-face community is knowable in a way more abstract communities are not: one “knows what the voices are. One knows what the faces are” (1991:35).9 In the same vein, anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (1996:26–27) proposes that the local may still be an important source of continuity for four reasons: 1. “Everyday life” is local. Repetitive, redundant activities, occurring in a consistent physical setting, provide the basis for the development of habitual ways of dealing with practical exigencies. 2. Local encounters tend to be face to face and long term. In this context, groups of people are likely to be able to develop more shared understandings and ways of acting because there is more constant opportunity for surveillance, for checks on deviance, and for positive
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reactions to “normal” behavior. Furthermore, long-term, face-to-face encounters are often emotional ones, so they tend to seem significant. 3. People’s earliest experiences usually take place in a local context, and “whatever materials are put in place early will presumably have some influence on what can be assimilated later on.” 4. The local is sensually real. It is experienced bodily; it is immediate, immersive. Thus, says Hannerz, the principal vehicles for the production and transmission of culture may still be local ones, although interactive media could quickly become more efficient in at least some of these ways, and this set of features of experience could, of course, occur over several physical localities. Hannerz points out that some people may be more global, some more local, in orientation. In some settings, for example, women are more attuned to the local than are men, and local norms, relationships, and experiences may have more bearing on their sense of place than on men’s. In other settings, the situation may be reversed. It is increasingly difficult to predict exactly how the local will articulate within an individual’s life.
3. Sociolinguistics, place, and the local There are many ways in which work in dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics, both recent and not so recent, interacts with these ideas about place, region, and the role of the local in the context of globalization. Figure 4.2 sketches some of them. Work on “mixed” varieties (Heller 1995) and on code switching calls into question “the discreteness of linguistic systems” (Gardner-Chloros 1995) and provides sociolinguistic corroboration for the idea that human life does not take place (and never has) in separate, autonomous “cultures” in discrete, clearly bounded places. Like anthropologists (Urciuoli 1995), sociolinguists have been paying increasing note to what happens on the borderlines and focusing on heterogeneity and adaptiveness in addition to commonality and predictability. For example, James Milroy (1992:chap. 6) shows that people on the edges of social networks—people with relatively few and weak social ties—are responsible for key processes in language change, such as the introduction of new forms into the network. In general, if we focus, as we increasingly are, on what is creative about discourse rather than on what is predictable, we find that in some ways the most “normal” speakers (those whose behavior is statistically most like others’) may not be the most prototypical speakers or theoretically the most interesting (Johnstone 1996). The general point about region that is made in humanistic geography is that regions are meaningful, constructed, as well as selected, as reference points by individuals. The process by which individuals ground their identities in socially constructed regions is analogous to, or the same as, the process by which people construct, claim, and use ethnicity and other aspects of their identities (Reed 1982). Dennis Preston’s (1989, 1997) work on “folk dialectology” uses mapping and mimicking tasks to explore how different people construct different meaningful regions and relate to them differently. Work in Texas (Bean 1993; Johnstone 1995, 1998, 1999; Johnstone and
PLACE , GLOBALIZATION , AND LINGUISTIC VARIATION
Claims and Suggestions Made in Contemporary Studies of Place, Region
Research in Dialectology and Sociolinguistics Bearing on Those Claims
Americans (and presumably others) now inhabit “lifestyle enclaves” rather than communities centered around common experience of place. Physical place is “much less significant than it used to be as an external referent for the lifespan of the individual” (Giddens 1991:147).
New uses of dialect atlas data (e.g., Johnson 1996) show that cultural and psychological factors, not just region of origin or habitation, affect how regional variants pattern Ethnolinguistic . studies of variation show how other aspects of identity interact with place (Johnstone and Bean 1997).
The idea that humans can be categorized into separate, autonomous “cultures” in separate, bounded places is mistaken.
Work on “mixed” varieties (e.g., Heller 1995) and on code switching calls into question “the discreteness of linguistic systems” (Gar dner-Chloros 1995).
New attention needs to be paid to what happens on the borders and the boundaries, to heterogeneity and adaptiveness.
Marginal people with weak social ties are responsible for key processes in language change (Milroy 1992:Chap. 6); the most central, most group-bounded people may not be the most prototypical speakers (Johnstone 1996 ).
But people attempt to “re-embed the lifespan within a local milieu” (Giddens 1991:147), e.g., through attempts to cultivate community pride. Languages, dialects, and “ways of speaking” create and reflect “at-homeness” in a region (Mugerauer 1985).
Bailey (Bailey et al. 1993), in Texas and Oklahoma, and Montgomery (1993), for Southern speech, have found that certain features can become symbols of local identity and then be preserved and even spread in the face of in-migration from elsewhere.
Localness can become a commodity, which gives rise to competitions over the control of what localness means or over its uses.
Bell (1999) describes the use of a Maori song in advertisements for the New Zealand airline. Bean (1993) shows how “professional Texan” Molly Ivins positions herself via linguistic choices as a Westerner but rejects Southern ways of acting and talking. See also Macaulay (1997) and Schilling-Estes (1998).
The local may still be an important source of continuity (Hannerz 1996:26–27) because “everyday life” is local; local encounters tend to be face to face and long term; earliest experiences usually take place in a local context; the local is sensually real.
Ash (1988), Macaulay (1991), Labov (1994:98-112), and others show that aspects of language that are acquired early, such as phonology, are relatively (though not entirely) resistant to change. Features that are local in this sense may actually be less available as symbolic markers of localness.
In a given situation or setting, some people may be more global in orientation, some more local.
Some of the well-known findings about variation and gender, such as Trudgill’s (1972) work on “cover prestige,” support this claim.
Regions are meaningful places that are constructed, as well as selected, as reference points by individuals. The process by which individuals ground their identities in socially constructed regions is analogous to, or the same as, the process by which people construct, claim and use ethnic identities (Reed 1982).
Preston’s (1989, 1997) work on “folk dialectology” shows that different people construct different meaningful regions and relate to them differently. Johnstone and Bean’s work in Texas (Johnstone 1995; Johnstone and Bean 1997; Johnstone 1999 ) shows how different women create and orient to different senses of what it means to be a Texan, a woman, an African American, a professional, and so on.
The best way to study region and place is through text analysis (Rose 1980).
Uses of discourse analysis and ethnography in dialectology are increasing.
4.2. Sociolinguistics, Globalization, and the Local
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Bean 1997) shows how different women create and orient to different senses of what it means to be a Texan, as well as different senses of what it means to be a woman, an African American, a professional, and so on. Giddens (1991:147) and others claim, however, that people increasingly inhabit “lifestyle enclaves” rather than communities centered around a common experience of place. Physical place is claimed to be less significant as a source of individuals’ identities than it used to be. This theoretical claim is borne out, for example, in new uses of dialect atlas data like those of Ellen Johnson (1996), which shows that cultural and psychological factors are replacing the region of origin or habitation as the best ways of accounting for the patterning of certain lexical variants in the American South. In my ethnolinguistic work with Judith Bean about what “Texas speech” is and does for people, we explored the idea that being from Texas, or from the South, affects how people sound only indirectly, via particular choices (sometimes quite consciously strategic, sometimes not) about what local or regional-sounding speech forms can mean and accomplish. Some well-known findings about patterns of variation bear directly on Stuart Hall’s (1991) claim that in a given situation or setting, some people may be more global in orientation, some more local. For example, Trudgill’s (1972) finding that Norwich men think of themselves as speaking in a less standard way than they do and that Norwich women think of themselves as speaking in a more standard way than they do could be interpreted as reflecting more local orientation on the men’s part and more global orientation on the women’s.10 Penelope Eckert’s work (this volume) shows that phonological features of Detroit high school students’ speech reflect the ways in which some groups orient to local extracurricular life and others to the more standardized, less locally marked institutional life of school and other school-sanctioned activities. Eckert’s study echoes in certain ways Labov’s (1963) findings in Martha’s Vineyard, where people with different orientations to the island centralized the onset of /aw/ at different rates. In certain ways, however, says Giddens (1991:147), people are attempting to “re-embed the lifespan within a local milieu.” People’s sense of “at-homeness” in an area, according to regional geographer Robert Mugerauer (1985), results in part from the existence of common languages, dialects, and ways of speaking, which create and reflect a common experience of place. Recent sociolinguistic work suggests several ways in which speech forms can come to index “here,” “being from here,” or “belonging here,” and several ways in which such indexes of localness can function. Guy Bailey (1991; Bailey et al. 1993), in Texas and Oklahoma, and Michael Montgomery (1993), for Southern speech, have shown that certain features can become symbols of local identity and then can be preserved and even spread in the face of in-migration from elsewhere. Localness and local-sounding speech can become a commodity, and this, as we have seen, can create competition over the control of what localness means or over its uses. Among the many recent sociolinguistic studies of this process are studies of “performed” or otherwise highly strategic and stylized uses of local-sounding speech. For example, Natalie Schilling-Estes (1998) examines performances of the Okracoke island “brogue” in the context of the switch from a fishing to a tourist economy, and Ronald K. S. Macaulay (1997) looks at uses of Glasgow dialect in humor and in expressions of political resistance by poet Tom
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Leonard. Alan Bell (1999) describes the use of a Maori song in TV advertisements for Air New Zealand. Judith Bean (1993) shows how “professional Texan” Molly Ivins positions herself in her writing through linguistic choices as a Westerner but rejects Southern ways of acting and talking; other Texas women, on the other hand, make various strategic uses of stylized Southern forms (Johnstone 1999). Shared images of and orientations to place are sometimes framed in terms of shared images of and orientations to local dialect (Beal 1999; Johnstone and Baumgardt 2003). But there are more immediate ways in which the local can still be connected to people’s identity. As we saw, the local may still be an important source of continuity (Hannerz 1996:26–27) because “everyday life” is local; because local encounters tend to be face to face and long term, because one’s earliest experiences usually take place in a local context; and because the local is sensually real. Sociolinguistic work bearing on this claim includes that of Ash (1988), Macaulay (1991), Labov (1994:98– 112), and others, who show that aspects of language that are acquired early, such as phonology, are relatively (though not entirely) resistant to change. Features that are local in this sense may actually be less available as symbolic markers of localness in the sense mentioned above. This is a particularly important point, and one that gets blurred in some studies of “crossing” (Rampton 1995; 1999) and “passing” (Livia and Hall 1997). People may be freer to choose how to sound than sociolinguistic theory once allowed us to see, but their freedom is by no means complete (Hill 1999).
4. Local meanings of local talk: Methodological implications As mentioned above, humanistic geographers point to the need for new methods for studying place in a new paradigm. Those who are interested in what physical environment and political boundaries mean to people need ways of finding out about particular people and particular meanings, not just about physical space and largescale regional politics. If sociolinguists wish to refine our explanatory apparatus by trying to understand how variables associated with place are relevant, and in what ways, to the speakers we study, we also have to supplement large-scale correlational studies of linguistic facts and externally defined “social facts,”11 such as politically delimited region, city of birth, or neighborhood of residence, with studies of “local knowledge” (Geertz 1983). As Rose (1980) points out, doing humanistic geography is like reading. Two ways of working that can get at local meanings through reading (or, less metaphorically, interpretation) are ethnography and discourse analysis. The suggestion that ethnography and discourse analysis could be useful tools in variationist sociolinguistics is hardly new. Variationist sociolinguists have drawn on techniques from ethnography and discourse analysis for some time, in various ways. Participant observation is the hallmark field method of ethnography, and good sociolinguistic fieldwork always requires good participant observers, people with an understanding of what is going on in the situations in which they conduct interviews, what matters to the people they are talking to.12 Clarence Robins, who did fieldwork for Labov (1966) in Harlem, was apparently a participant observer of this sort. Data collected by good participant observers for the initial purposes of
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variationist analyses can be the basis for micro-sociolinguistic studies that are explicitly interpretive. Deborah Schiffrin’s (1987) conversations with “Henry,” “Irene,” and “Zelda,” carried out in the context of a large-scale variationist project, could be used in her microanalysis of what utterances meant to the speakers involved because of her emic, insider’s understanding of the speakers and their ways of speaking. Participant observation is often not explicitly part of the methodology in variationist work, but ethnography often enters in implicitly when variationists try to find ways of explaining their findings. For example, it was surely a hunch based on years of teaching and talking with Texans that led Guy Bailey (1991) to test the correlation of the [a] variant of /ay/ with poll respondents’ answers to a question about whether they thought Texas was a good place to live. But ethnography can enter into variationist work in a more fundamental way. We sometimes use the term ethnography as if it meant roughly the same as “participant observation.” But ethnography is not simply a field technique (nor is participant observation the only field technique ethnographers employ). Rather, ethnography is a perspective on the entire process of studying human behavior. It presupposes the theory that the best explanations of human behavior are particular and culturally relative. In looking systematically for the local knowledge that motivates and explains the behavior of a particular group, ethnographers are thus doing a different kind of work than are social scientists who look for general or even universal explanations of human behavior. Variationists who are interested in the local meanings of variation have to be willing to start with ethnography, using ethnographic research methods to decide what the possible explanatory variables might be in the first place, rather than starting with predefined (and presumably universally relevant) variables and bringing in ethnography only to explain surprising findings or statistical outliers. This requires not just adding participant observation to our repertoire of field techniques but also rethinking—in some ways, fundamentally—how we do our work. For example, a study of regional dialect that is open to the possibility that vernacular conceptions of place and localness may help explain patterns of variation has to be attuned from the start to how the region in question is locally understood and talked about. Thus, one of the first things we have had to consider in planning a study of the English of southwestern Pennsylvania (Johnstone and Kiesling 2001) was how the area and its linguistic characteristics are locally imagined. It turns out that, for various topographic, historical, and economic reasons, many people in the (externally defined) southwestern Pennsylvania region identify much more strongly with the city of Pittsburgh than with any larger U.S. region or with the state of Pennsylvania. The local dialect is, accordingly, also identified with the city rather than with the region: it is invariably called “Pittsburghese.” Pittsburghese is, in fact, very visible as a symbol of localness, commodified in folk dictionaries and on souvenir T-shirts and refrigerator magnets and alluded to and performed in talk about what authentic localness means (Johnstone 2000; Johnstone and Baumgardt 2003). This vernacular understanding of local dialect has potential implications for how particular linguistic forms are sociolinguistically deployed. For example, preliminary work about who uses a monophthongal variant of /aw/ and why in Pittsburgh suggests that the form is not disappearing, at least among working-class men (Johnstone
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et al. 2002). One possible reason is that the form has become a marker of local identity; this is suggested by the fact that it is alluded to and played on far more frequently than any other local feature in various kinds of humorous discourse about localness. To explore this possibility, we are going to need to find out how the people who may be using local-sounding forms like this as a way of orienting to Pittsburgh themselves delimit “Pittsburgh” and who counts, in what ways, as a “Pittsburgher.” We will need, in other words, to ask questions that would not arise if we were to define Pittsburgh in terms of political or geographical boundaries or to operationalize “Pittsburgher” as someone born in Pittsburgh. If we do not ask these ethnographic questions, we will have delimited our research territory and our research population in such a way that our results may not be valid. Discourse analysis has also entered into variationist sociolinguistics in several ways.13 Dines (1980), Ferrara (1997), and others have carried out variationist studies of discourse-level phenomena such as discourse markers. Others have studied extended transcripts of talk (rather than data sets of lexical or phonological tokens extracted from notes, tapes, or transcripts) to find patterns of variation, which are then correlated with predefined social “facts.” A great deal of the early work on language and gender, in which gender was treated as more or less equivalent to biological sex, and biological sex was defined dichotomously, falls, for example, in this category. Furthermore, discourse analysis, at least of an informal sort, is sometimes used to gather evidence about possible explanations for patterns of variation. It is much less common, however, for variationists to see discourse analysis as a way to find out how variation comes to happen in any particular case and to see analyses of particular cases as crucial. We are used to thinking of discourse as evidence about the entities we are really interested in—linguistic varieties or patterns of variation. We also, I suggest, need to be able to think of discourse as a process, and this process as an object of sociolinguistic inquiry. From this perspective, for example, newspaper articles that express people’s attitudes about language are not just evidence of linguistic ideologies but also part of the process by which ideology is created and disseminated (Johnstone and Danielson 2001). It is in part this process that results in individuals’ sounding particular ways in particular situations and which makes “proper English,” “the way people talk around here,” or “being from Texas” mean what it does to people. Likewise, discourse is not just evidence of patterns of variation that exist in “a language” or “a dialect.” Rather, discourse is the process by which languages and dialects become (sometimes) the focused (LePage and TabouretKeller 1985), apparently “shared” systems that sociolinguists talk about. To give a speculative example, if it should turn out that monophthongal /aw/ is not decreasing in use in Pittsburgh, as might be expected on some grounds, part of the explanation for this may be similar to the explanations Bailey (1991) and Montgomery (1993) propose for the persistence of Southern features that might be expected to recede, namely, that its use orients people to the local in the face of increased contact with outsiders and pressure to adapt to more abstract national norms. If this is the case, what is the mechanism by which this occurs? What makes “dahntahn” sound local? The answer is more complex than that it is local in the sense that you hear it in Pittsburgh. Not every regional feature that can be heard in Pittsburgh comes to have local meaning in the same way. Similarly, some features that are in fact quite
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widespread in the United States do sound local in Pittsburgh: some Pittsburghers insist that Pittsburghers are the only people who use [yinz] as a second-person plural pronoun,14 for example, and a “yinzer” is a person with a strong local identity and accent. It is probably unlikely that vocalized /l/ would function to index the local the way monophthongal /aw/ might, even though it is also characteristic of Pittsburgh (McElhinny 1999), because it is much less often associated with “Pittsburghese”: Pittsburgh speech as it is represented and imagined locally. “Pittsburghese” is a set of linguistic features that overlaps with but is not the same as the set a sociolinguist might choose on the basis of observation. It is also a set of ideas about what those features mean, a local folk discourse about variation, and to understand our hypothetical findings we would have to analyze this discourse, listening to and looking at local representations of local speech as they are created and drawn upon in various genres of metalinguistic talk. To summarize, sociolinguists may have not always been sufficiently attuned to the social theory implicit in our uses of terms such as region, rurality, local, and place, but this is changing. We are beginning to call into question how we have been imagining the meanings of these and others of the concepts we use in generating hypotheses and explaining our findings. As we do this, it is useful to look at how neighboring fields have been talking about these concepts. It is also important to give some fresh thought to research methodology. I have tried to sketch how these new ways of working might suggest more nuanced, ecologically valid answers to the questions we ask about variation and change. Notes This chapter would not have been possible without Carmen Fought and her colleagues, who organized the workshop at which it was first presented, and Ronald Macaulay, whose (partial) retirement provided the occasion for the workshop. I am especially grateful to Carmen for seeing the book through to publication. I have learned a lot from all of the other workshop participants, both at the workshop and elsewhere. I would like to thank Walt Wolfram and Susan Berk-Seligson for useful comments on a draft of this chapter. 1. In casual formulations, place is sometimes talked about as if it were in fact the cause of linguistic variation, as when the claim is made that one reason for which different people talk differently is because they are from different regions, cities, or neighborhoods. 2. Human geography has to do with the connections between space and human activity in general and has involved work in various theoretical and methodological frameworks (see Johnston et al. 1986). 3. See also Tuan (1975). Other influential humanistic geographers include Entrikin (1976, 1991), Relph (1976, 1981, 1985), and Buttimer (1979, 1993). 4. A particularly clear example has to do with the commercial uses of the shape of Texas (Francaviglia 1995). The outline of the state is a recurrent feature of advertisements directed at Texans, helping to shape (quite literally) their sense of the state as a place separate and different from others. 5. Travelers arriving in College Station by air were for a time greeted by a set of instructions about the proper way to feel about the place, in the form of a sign on the airport door: “Welcome to Aggieland, the Greatest Place on Earth.” 6. Entrikin (1991:58) points out that the rhetoric of nostalgia for place is also associated with conservationists and preservationists. For them, places will become meaningless if
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things are not kept as they are or were. Another side of the argument would, of course, be that the meanings of places change. 7. Among the geographers particularly associated with articulating Giddens’s structuration theory with geography are Pred (1984; 1989; 1990) and Thrift (1991). 8. On new senses of space and place encouraged by hypertext, see Bolter (1991) and Johnson-Eilola (1997). 9. See also Mondale (1989:13-14) on the parallel development of regional studies in the American Studies context: “As part of the post-modern complex of thought now emerging, there is taking place a reassertion of the centrality of habitat to the definition of self and culture, on terms quite distinct from the conventional emphasis upon the traditions of rural life. This drift of thought shares with Michel Foucault the conviction that [social] thought has been unduly abstract, that it has failed to acknowledge the crucial role of ‘low-ranking, particular, regional knowledge.’” This article updates the bibliography on American regional studies in Steiner and Mondale (1989). 10. Trudgill does not interpret “covert prestige” in this way in his article, of course. 11. For a critique of the idea of “social facts,” see Johnstone (1997). 12. Labov (1984: 46, 50) describes the role of participant observation in some of the earliest large-scale studies of sociolinguistic variation and change. 13. Part of the reason for this is that discourse analysis is defined and delimited differently by different people who write about it. For the authors of some overviews, such as Brown and Yule (1983) and van Dijk (1997), discourse analysis is a set of research topics. For others, such as Schiffrin (1994), it is a research method. I take the latter view (Johnstone 2002). 14. A variant of “you’uns,” this form is found throughout the Scotch-Irish settlement area of the United States. But its morphological representation appears to have changed in Pittsburgh so that it is understood as monomorphemic. This in turn seems to have encouraged a shift in pronunciation from [ynz] toward [yinz] and a shift in spelling from forms like “youns” toward forms like “yinz.”
References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Ash, Sharon. 1988. Speaker Identification in Sociolinguistics and Criminal Law. In Linguistic Change and Contact: Proceedings of NWAV XVI, ed. Kathleen Ferrara, Becky Brown, Keith Walters, and John Baugh, 25–33. Austin: Department of Linguistics, University of Texas. Ayers, E. L., and Peter S. Onuf. 1996. Preface. In All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions, ed. E. L. Ayers, P. Limerick, S. Nissenbaum, and P. Onuf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bailey, Guy. 1991. Directions of Change in Texas English. Journal of American Culture 14:125–134. Bailey, Guy, Tom Wikle, Jan Tillery, and Lori Sand. 1993. Some Patterns of Linguistic Diffusion. Language Variation and Change 3:359–390. Beal, Joan C. 1999. “Geordie Nation”: Language and Regional Identity in the North-East of England. Presented at the Methods X (Tenth Conference on Methods in Dialectology), July, Memorial University, Newfoundland. Bean, Judith Mattson. 1993. “True Grit and All the Rest”: Expression of Regional and Individual Identities in Molly Ivins’ Discourse. Journal of Southwestern American Literature 19:35–46.
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Bell, Alan. 1999. Using the Other to Define the Self: A Study in New Zealand Identity Marking. Journal of Sociolinguistics, Special Issue on Styling the Other 3:523–541. Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bolter, Jay David. 1991. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Brown, Gillian, and George Yule. 1983. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buttimer, Anne. 1979. Reason, Rationality and Human Creativity. Geografiska Annaler 61B:43–49. ———. 1993. Geography and the Human Spirit. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cox, Kevin R., and Andrew Mair. 1988. Locality and Community in the Politics of Local Economic Development. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78:307– 325. Dines, Elizabeth. 1980. Variation in Discourse—“and Stuff Like That.” Language in Society 9:13–31. Eckert, Penelope. 1988. Adolescent Social Structure and the Spread of Linguistic Change. Language in Society 17:183–207. ———. 1989. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in High School. New York and London: Teachers College Press. ———. 1990. The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in Variation. Language Variation and Change 1:245–267. Entrikin, J. Nicholas. 1976. Contemporary Humanism in Geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66:615–632. ———. 1991. The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ferrara, Kathleen. 1997. Form and Function of the Discourse Marker anyway: Implications for Discourse Analysis. Linguistics 35(2). Finnegan, Ruth. 1998. Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Francaviglia, Richard V. 1995. The Shape of Texas: Maps as Metaphors. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Gardner-Chloros, Penelope. 1995. Code-switching in Community, Regional, and National Repertoires: The Myth of the Discreteness of Linguistic Systems. In One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Code-switching, ed. Lesley Milroy and Pieter Muysken, 68–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity. Guerin, Joan. 1999. Constructing Place. Master of Design Thesis, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1992. Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7:6–23. Hall, Stuart. 1991. The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity. In Culture, Globalization, and the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King, 19–39. Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan. Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge.
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Heller, Monica. 1995. Code-switching and the Politics of Language. In One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Code-switching, ed. Lesley Milroy and Peiter Muysken, 158–174. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, Jane H. 1999. Styling Locally, Styling Globally: What Does It Mean? Journal of Sociolinguistics 3/4:542–556. Irvine, Judith, ed. 1996. Language and Community. Special Issue of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6(2). Johnson, Ellen. 1996. Lexical Change and Variation in the Southeastern United States, 1930– 1990. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. 1997. Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Johnston, R. J., D. Gregory, and D. M. Smith, eds. 1986. The Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnstone, Barbara. 1990. Stories, Community, and Place: Narratives from Middle America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1995. Sociolinguistic Resources, Individual Identities and the Public Speech Styles of Texas Women. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 5:1–20. ———. 1996. The Linguistic Individual: Self-expression in Language and Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. Social Characteristics and Self-expression in Narrative. Journal of Narrative and Life History. Special Issue on “Oral Versions of Personal Experience: Three Decades of Narrative Analysis” 7:315–320. ———. 1998. “Sounding Country” in Urbanizing Texas: Private Speech in Public Discourse. Michigan Discussions in Anthropology 13:153–164. ———. 1999. Uses of Southern Speech by Contemporary Texas Women. Journal of Sociolinguistics. Special Issue on Styling the Other 3:505–522. ———. 2000. How to Speak Like a Pittsburgher: Representations of Speech and the Study of Linguistic Variation. Plenary address presented at the Sociedad Argentina de Lingüística, Mar del Plata, Argentina, September. ______. 2002. Discourse Analysis. Oxford and Malden, Mass: Blackwell. Johnstone, Barbara, and Dan Baumgardt. 2003. Yinzburgh Online: Vernacular Norming in a Conversation About Dialect, Place, and Identity. Presented at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, Washington, D.C., April. Johnstone, Barbara, and Judith Mattson Bean. 1997. Self-Expression and Linguistic Variation. Language in Society 26:221–246. Johnstone, Barbara, Neeta Bhasin, and Denise Wittkofski. 2002. “Dahntahn Pittsburgh”: Monopthongal /Aw/ and Representations of Localness in Southwestern Pennsylvania. American Speech 77:148–166. Johnstone, Barbara, and Andrew Danielson. 2001. “Pittsburghese” in the Daily Papers, 1910– 2001: Historical Sources of Ideology about Variation. Presented at NWAV 30, Raleigh, N.C., October. Johnstone, Barbara, and Scott Kiesling. 2001. Steel City Speak. Language Magazine, December, 26–28. Labov, William. 1963. The Social Motivation of a Sound Change. Word 19:237–309. ———. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. ———. 1984. Field Methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation. In Language in Use: Readings in Sociolinguistics, ed. John Baugh and Joel Sherzer, 28–66. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall. ———. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. New York: Blackwell.
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LePage, R. B., and Andrée Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambrige University Press. Livia, Anna, and Kira Hall, eds. 1997. Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Macaulay, Ronald K. S. 1991. Locating Dialect in Discourse: The Language of Honest Men and Bonnie Lassies in Ayr. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. Standards and Variation in Urban Speech: Examples from Lowland Scots. Amsterdam: Benjamins. McElhinny, Bonnie. 1999. More on the Third Dialect of English: Linguistic Constraints on the Use of Three Phonological Variables in Pittsburgh. Language Variation and Change 11:171–195. Meining, Donald. 1978. The Continuous Shaping of America: A Prospectus for Geographers and Historians. American Historical Review 83:1186–1205. Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1985. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell. Milroy, Lesley. 1987. Language and Social Networks, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Modan, Gabriella. 2002. “Public Toilets for a Diverse Neighborhood”: Spatial Purification Practices in Community Development Discourse. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6:487–513. Mondale, Clarence. 1989. Concepts and Trends in Regional Studies. American Studies International 27:13–37. Montgomery, Michael. 1993. The Southern Accent—Alive and Well. Southern Cultures (inaugural issue) 47–64. Mugerauer, Robert. 1985. Language and Environment. In Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, ed. David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Ogilvy, James. 1977. Many Dimensional Man: Decentralizing Self, Society, and the Sacred. New York: Oxford University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1987. Linguistic Utopias. In The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe, 48–66. New York: Methuen. Pred, Alan. 1984. Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the TimeGeography of Becoming Places. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74:279–297. ———. 1989. The Locally Spoken Word and Local Struggles. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 7:211–233. ———. 1990. Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Modernity and the Language of Everyday Life in Late Nineteenth Century Stockholm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Preston, Dennis R. 1989. Perceptual Dialectology. Dordrecht: Foris. ———. 1997. The South: The Touchstone. In Language Variety in the South Revisited, ed. Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino, 311–351. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Rampton, Ben. 1995. Language Crossing and the Problematisation of Ethnicity and Socialization. Pragmatics 5:485–513. ———, ed. 1999. Styling the “Other.” Special issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics 421– 556. Reed, John Shelton. 1982. One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Relph, Edward. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.
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———. 1981. Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography. London: Croon Helm. ———. 1985. Geographical Experiences and Being-in-the-World: The Phenomenological Origins of Geography. In Dwelling, Place, and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, ed. David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer, 15–31. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Rose, Courtice. 1980. Human Geography as Text Interpretation. In The Human Experience of Space and Place, ed. Anne Buttimer and David Seamons, 123–134. New York: St. Martins. Sack, Robert D. 1988. The Consumer’s World: Place as Context. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78:642–664. Said, Edward. 1979. Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims. Social Text 1:7–58. Schegloff, Emmanuel A. 1972. Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place. In Studies in Social Interaction, ed. David Sudnow, 75–119. New York: Free Press. Schieffelin, Bambi B., Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. 1998. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. Approaches to Discourse. Oxford and Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell. Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1998. Investigating “Self-Conscious” Speech: The Performance Register in Ocracoke English. Language in Society 27:53–83. Seamon, David. 1979. A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest, and Encounter. New York: St. Martin. Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New York: Verso. Steiner, Michael, and Clarence Mondale. 1989. Region and Regionalism in the United States. New York: Garland. Thrift, N. J. 1991. For a New Regional Geography. Progress in Human Geography 15:456– 465. Trudgill, Peter. 1972. Sex and Covert Prestige: Linguistic Change in the Urban Dialect of Norwich. Language in Society 1:179–195. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective. Progress in Geography 6:213– 252. ———. 1975. Place: An Experiential Perspective. Geographical Review 65:151–165. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 1995. Language and Borders. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:525–546. van Dijk, Teun. 1997. (ed. and preface). Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. London: Sage. Zelinsky, Wilbur. 1973. The Cultural Geography of the United States. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
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5 WALT WOLFRAM
The Sociolinguistic Construction of Remnant Dialects
1. Introduction Recent studies of historically isolated speech communities have underscored the significance of so-called remnant dialects for sociolinguistic inquiry. A remnant dialect is defined here as a variety of a language that retains vestiges of earlier language varieties that have receded among speakers in the more widespread population. In most cases, remnant dialects are spoken by groups of speakers that have been physically or culturally separated from surrounding populations for extended periods of time, thus constituting peripheral as opposed to core dialect areas (Andersen 1988). Descriptively, the study of remnant dialect situations in English has provided key evidence for reconstructing earlier stages of general American English (Montgomery 1996), as well as particular language varieties such as Earlier African-American English (Poplack and Sankoff 1987; Poplack and Tagliamonte 1989, 1991, 2000; Poplack 1999) or Appalachian English (Wolfram and Christian 1976; Montgomery 1989). On a theoretical level, these situations have provided a unique window into language change and variation, particularly with respect to the moribund stages of a language variety (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999). Although studies of peripheral dialects have provided essential data for dialect reconstruction, there has been little critical examination of the construct “remnant dialect community” and its sociohistorical corollary, “historical isolation” (Montgomery 2000). Most dialectologists and sociolinguists are content to set forth the sociohistorical circumstances for the particular community under investigation and assume that this description satisfies a tacit set of sociological and historical condi84
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tions for classifying the community as historically isolated and the associated dialect as a remnant variety. As more studies of such situations emerge, however, it seems apparent that there is a need to consider the general sociohistorical and sociocultural circumstances that give rise to isolated speech communities. There is a corresponding need to examine more closely the type and extent of language variation in these circumstances to determine uniformity and variance across different situations. Are there particular linguistic traits that characterize isolated speech communities? How does language change take place under these circumstances? Are there underlying sociolinguistic principles that characterize dialect change and maintenance in these situations? In the following sections, we address these questions. We first consider the kinds of sociohistorical and sociocultural conditions that lead to the establishment of historically isolated speech communities. Next, we examine issues of dialect donorship, language change, and language contact as they relate to these isolated dialect situations. Finally, we propose some general sociolinguistic principles that might account for the sociolinguistic configuration of peripheral dialects as they compare with other language varieties found among more widespread, socially dominant population groups.
2. Historically isolated speech communities What are the social and historical circumstances that give rise to isolated speech communities? Whereas almost all sociolinguistic studies of such situations provide particular details of historical migration and settlement that led to the disconnection of the particular community from more widespread, dominant populations, none has attempted to propose a general set of physical, historical, demographic, sociocultural, and sociolinguistic conditions associated with such communities. On the one hand, it might be assumed that the circumstances for historical isolation are self-evident and that there is no need to engage in a general account of historical isolation. However, as we shall see, these conditions are often far from obvious, even in the most transparent cases, in which a substantive community is transplanted from one physical and cultural setting to another, remote geographical location. On the other hand, it might be assumed that each situation is so particularized that, in fact, there are no common principles that unite situations. Both of these assumptions seem unjustified. As we shall see, there appear to be some unifying conditions that characterize different historically isolated speech communities. At the same time, these conditions are also quite fluid and may exist in different permutations. Perhaps the most obvious physical trait associated with these isolated situations is a set of ecological constraints that result in geographic remoteness. Geographical factors typically play a significant role in cases of historical isolation, not because of topography per se, but because bodies of water, mountains, and other features of the terrain often serve to foster separation and hence create sociocultural and communication discontinuities that lead to linguistic divergence. Although isolated speech communities are typically characterized by geographical separation from other groups, the speech community may be concentrated in a
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particular locale within a more expansive region or dispersed throughout a region. For example, although the island of Ocracoke, located on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, is 14 miles long, the entire residential population lives within a square mile at the southern end of the island. By the same token, across the Pamlico Sound in mainland Hyde County, another historically isolated community displays a different residential distribution pattern in which clusters of 3 to 10 houses are often separated from other clusters of houses by several miles. With the residential concentration of the local population, we might expect that high-density, multiplex social networks (Milroy 1987) are more likely to be found in isolated dialect communities than they would be in larger, more metropolitan areas. However, such networks apparently are not essential to the definition of such speech communities and do not, in fact, even typify all of the situations that we have examined in our recent studies of remnant dialect communities along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995, 1997; Schilling-Estes 1997; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999; Wolfram et al. 1999; Wolfram and Dannenberg 1999; Wolfram, Thomas, and Green 2000; Schilling-Estes 2002; Wolfram and Thomas 2002; Dannenberg 2003). A survey of isolated speech communities highlighted in recent sociolinguistic studies (e.g., Dorian 1981, 1994; Poplack and Sankoff 1987; Poplack and Tagliamonte 1989, 1991; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995; Poplack 1999; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999; Shores 2000; Wolfram and Thomas 2002) suggests that geographical factors have played a prominent role in their formation, though the type and extent of the topographic constraints vary. Islands such as Smith Island (Schilling-Estes 1997; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999) and Tangier Island (Shores 2000), located in the Chesapeake Bay off of the Maryland and Virginia coastline, and Ocracoke Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, are not accessible by land, and mainland Hyde County is 85% marshland so that boats were used for primary travel at earlier stages in its history. Other areas in which remnant dialects have existed, such as the Appalachian communities of West Virginia and the western Carolinas (Wolfram and Christian 1976; Montgomery 1989) were at one point difficult to access because of mountainous terrain. Still others were located in remote areas where outsiders had little economic or social incentive to visit, such as the African-American communities of Nova Scotia (Poplack and Tagliamonte 1991, 2000). Although physical boundaries play a role in the delimitation of historical isolation and the associated peripheral dialect community, the notion of “place” obviously is not limited to an objective, physical entity (Johnstone, this volume). Topography may play a role in the formative status of a historically isolated situation, but it is hardly a sufficient condition. Islands, mountains, and rivers are implicated in many other speech communities, including Manhattan Island in New York City, but these objective physical factors have hardly created the kinds of cultural and linguistic discontinuities analogous to those associated with peripheral dialects. Obviously, community size is a factor in historical isolation, and most of the remnant dialects examined in the recent sociolinguistic literature are relatively small communities, sometimes consisting of just a couple of hundred people. Thus, the permanent populations of communities like Smith Island and Ocracoke are only in the hundreds. But here again, size is not a necessary defining condition. In fact, the
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Lumbee Indian community in Robeson County, North Carolina, which has a number of traits characteristic of remnant dialects, has a population of well over 40,000 people (Wolfram et al. 2002). One of the factors that enters into the maintenance of isolated communities is the potential for economic autonomy. In fact, one of the reasons that fishing communities are implicated so often in historically isolated situations is because of the combination of geographic location and their potential for economic self-sufficiency (Dorian 1981, 1994). By the same token, economic conditions tend to play a prominent role in shifts in insularity and the eventual emergence of a community from insularity (e.g., Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995; Schilling-Estes 1997). Communities are vulnerable to wider influences without the ability to maintain an independent livelihood, and economic constraints are often cited as the most essential reason for the endangerment and ultimate death of the language varieties associated with historically isolated groups (Grenoble and Whaley 1998). A critical component of remnant dialect situations is time depth, as communities endure extended periods of time when they do not sustain regular contact with more widespread, dominant populations. However, the time dimension may be quite relative. There must at least be enough time for the establishment of linguistic separation from mainstream population groups, but the time frame can actually be quite compressed. As we shall see, linguistic change that leads to divergence or convergence needs only a couple of generations to take effect. In our recent examination of mid-Atlantic and Southern coastal remnant dialect communities (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2003b), we could project time depths extending at least a couple of centuries, in most cases dating from the late 1600s and 1700s. Subsequent to the settlement of the areas by English speakers in these coastal communities, there were periods of separation from more widely dispersed and socially dominant populations in the region. Each of the communities we examined has gone through extended periods—in some cases a century or more—in which a substantial number of community members did not have regular, sustained contact with outside groups. At the same time, it must be recognized that isolation is a relative notion and that groups do not necessarily follow a direct path from greater to lesser insularity. Because of various economic and social factors, communities may become more or less isolated throughout their history. In fact, all of the communities we studied have gone through periods in which they were less isolated than they were at other times. For example, at one point early in its history, Ocracoke was a busy inlet for shipping boats that later fell into disuse. Similarly, the coastal area of mainland Hyde County, located by the Pamlico Sound, became a major logging area and doubled its population for a couple of decades near the turn of the century, only to recede to its earlier population levels in the twentieth century (Wolfram and Thomas 2002). Cases of transplant communities, such as the African-American communities of Samaná (Poplack and Sankoff 1987) and Nova Scotia (Poplack and Tagliamonte 1991, 2000) and the enclave of white loyalists from the Carolinas who settled in a remote area of Abaco on the Bahamas (Wolfram and Sellers 1999) tended to take place somewhat later, in the early 1800s. Even then, however, we cannot assume an uninterrupted path of insularity. For example, the white community of loyalists now
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located on a remote peninsula of Abaco apparently went through several different moves before their location in Cherokee Sound, including moves that brought them into greater and lesser contact with black Bahamians. Historical continuity seems to be an important feature of remnant speech communities. In the mid-Atlantic remnant dialect communities of the United States that we have studied, there are always residents who can trace their genealogies back to the earliest English-speaking inhabitants. Although different historical events may have brought other people to the region and there may have been significant outmigration over the years, there is a recognized core of members that has been a part of the community for generations. In fact, continuous family residency is often a fundamental defining trait of community membership, and a number of families in the communities we have studied firsthand have kept detailed genealogies, tracing their local family lineage. On the island of Ocracoke, the label for an authentic native of the region, O’cocker [ókàk], is reserved exclusively for those whose family lineage is traceable to residency on the island for at least several generations. Genealogy supercedes all other considerations in delimiting an authentic O’cocker, including active participation in community life and dialect use. The factor of historical continuity has obvious implications for patterns of in- and out-migration. In most instances of historical isolation, there is limited inmigration, though there may be considerable out-migration by residents for various economic and social reasons. Some of the communities we examined, ranging from the Appalachian communities in West Virginia that we studied in the 1970s (Wolfram and Christian 1976) to the coastal enclaves of African Americans in North Carolina that we studied at the turn of the millennium (Wolfram and Thomas 2002), have undergone considerable out-migration at various periods in their histories, even while maintaining their isolated, remnant status. In fact, one of the reasons that a community such as Hyde County could maintain a stable population level over two centuries (e.g., the 1790 census reports 4,120 residents, and the 2000 census reports 5,826) is because of the continuing flow of some of the residents out of the county. At the same time, communities may also be subjected to periods of in-migration, as noted above. Sustained in-migration might eventually end the insular status of the community, but communities can obviously endure periodic in-migration, as well as out-migration, as they sustain their isolated status. We may point to physical and historical conditions in defining isolation, but separation is more than a physical condition or the lack of communicative interaction with other groups. Social relations and sociocultural definition are also integral to the delimitation of historically isolated speech communities. One of the recurrent trends of the remnant communities examined in the sociolinguistic literature is their social subordination in relation to widely dispersed, so-called mainstream regional and national groups. Even when such groups have control of local governing institutions and enjoy some measure of economic prosperity, they may remain vulnerable to more powerful regional, state, and national institutions that have ascribed them “non-mainstream” status. Indeed, the dichotomy between mainstream and nonmainstream groups is socially constructed in such a way as to ensure an asymmetrical social hierarchy. Thus, although Lumbee Indians in Robeson County, North
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Carolina, hold major local political offices (e.g., mayor of the city of Pembroke and sheriff of Robeson County) and constitute the majority population in relation to European Americans and African Americans, they are still viewed as a marginal group and therefore socially subordinate to North Carolinians elsewhere. This is underscored by the fact that the federal government has denied their request for recognition and entitlements as an Indian tribe for over a century now. Accordingly, the dialect differences associated with these non-mainstream communities are socially stigmatized and considered to be inferior to those associated with other groups. This differential status is consonant with the principle of linguistic subordination (Lippi-Green 1997), in which the speech of a socially subordinate group is interpreted as inadequate by comparison with socially dominant groups (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998:6). The traditional speech of remnant communities is viewed as “backward” and unsophisticated by comparison with other varieties, as are the cultural lifestyles of the people in these communities. Though such communities are sometimes romantically viewed as preserving a “purer” form of English, such as “Shakespearean” or “Elizabethan” English (Montgomery 1998), this is ultimately attributed to the community’s backward, nonprogressive ways. Therefore, such lifestyles and their associated dialects are negatively valued in North American society—even if they are “purer.” Certainly, the cultural centers that ascribe social status are never located in such regions. We have yet to encounter a remnant dialect situation in which the dialect is not socially stigmatized on some level, even in cases in which the variety might have some idealized aesthetic appeal. At the same time, isolated communities often develop a strong, positive sense of group identity related to the phenomenological notion of “place.” As Johnstone (this volume) notes: Regions have come to be seen as meaningful places, which individuals construct, as well as select, as reference points. Identification with a region is identification with one kind of “imaged community.” . . . The process by which individuals ground their identities in socially constructed regions is seen as analogous to, or the same as, the process by which people construct, claim, and use ethnic communities.
In this connection, we observe that there is a strong sense of “at-homeness” associated with the sense of localized place as discussed in Johnstone, and the notion of home may be symbolically associated with the local dialect. In our studies of isolated dialect communities we have collected numerous anecdotes from community residents who strongly associate regional locale with a sense of home community. As one of our Lumbee participants from Robeson County, North Carolina, put it, “When you hear that dialect, no matter where you are, you know it’s somebody from home.” The sense of localized identity often codifies the distinction between “insiders” and “outsiders” as a primary social boundary. Thus, the common meaning of the term foreigner as “someone from another country” is metaphorically extended in many small rural communities of Appalachia and the Southeast to include any person who
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is not from the community, regardless of their place of origin. On the Outer Banks Island of Ocracoke, the term dingbatter has been adopted from the TV sitcom “All in the Family” to refer to anyone who can not trace his or her genealogy to several generations of island residency, whereas O’cocker is reserved for ancestral islanders. This distinction is one of the most fundamental social boundaries and may transcend traditional social divisions such as social position and ethnicity. Such labels denote important distinctions that obviously extend beyond physical, social, and historical location per se. Furthermore, the local construction of “us” versus “them” may be perpetuated in the postinsular state of the community as well and therefore help maintain some dialect distinctions when the physical barriers promoting isolation are reduced or eliminated. All of the communities examined by the staff of the North Carolina Language and Life Project in the last decade now exist in varying postinsular stages, yet there is evidence that they are not simply accommodating the regional varieties of the groups of people with whom they now have sustained contact. It must be kept in mind that increasing levels of contact do not necessarily entail increasing assimilation (whether linguistic or cultural) among groups. Andersen (1988) points out that it is not uncommon for communities that are becoming more open in terms of increasing contacts with the outside world to remain attitudinally (and linguistically) closed; nor is it unusual for relatively closed communities to be attitudinally open, wholeheartedly embracing the cultural and linguistic innovations that happen to come their way. Thus, Andersen (1988:74–75) maintains that a distinction be drawn between open versus closed communities and endocentric versus exocentric ones, with the former distinction referring to levels of contact with the outside world and the latter to the degree to which a community is focused on its own internal norms versus outside norms. In addition, increasing levels of contact may actually serve to sharpen dividing lines among groups, as residents of formerly closed communities set up psychological (and, often, linguistic) barriers against the encroachment of the outside world. As indicated by Schilling-Estes and Wolfram (1999), dialect intensification is taking place in Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay even under conditions of increased contact with outsiders. In fact, Andersen states (1988:74–75), “It may be primarily an attitudinal shift from endocentric to exocentric which changes the course of development of a local dialect when it becomes part of a wider socio-spatial grouping [i.e., when it becomes more open] and not just the opening up of new avenues of interdialectal communication.” Thus, changes in the use of dialect variants over time and across different remnant dialect communities have to do not only with interactional considerations but with identity factors as well. Although settlement history and demographic, geographic, economic, sociocultural, and sociopolitical factors may all be part of the mix, it seems obvious that the notion of historical isolation and remnant speech community is socially constructed. Furthermore, locally constructed identity plays an important role in the development and maintenance of peripheral dialects, as witnessed by the fact that these communities may reshape and perpetuate dialect distinctiveness during less insular periods, just as they maintain dialect distinctiveness during periods of greater isolation.
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3. On the linguistic development of peripheral dialects How are isolated dialect communities formed and how do they evolve over time? What are the linguistic consequences of historical isolation? As set forth in Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (2003b), there are three issues to consider in the establishment and maintenance of these dialect communities: (1) the donorship issue; (2) the development issue; and (3) the contact issue. In the following sections we consider each of these issues, based on the empirical investigation of a number of different remnant dialect situations in the coastal region of the mid-Atlantic and Southern United States. These include a sample of island communities populated primarily by European Americans on the Outer Banks of North Carolina (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995, 1997; Wolfram et al. 1999) and in the Chesapeake Bay (Schilling-Estes 1997; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999), as well as communities involved in long-standing interethnic contact situations. In mainland Hyde County, adjacent to the Outer Banks of North Carolina (Wolfram, Thomas, and Green 2000; Wolfram and Thomas 2002), there has been long-term, isolated contact between African Americans and European Americans; and in Robeson County, in the coastal plain region of North Carolina (Wolfram 1996; Dannenberg and Wolfram 1998; Schilling-Estes 1998, 2003; Wolfram and Dannenberg 1999; Dannenberg 2003), there is triethnic contact among African Americans, Lumbee Native Americans, and European Americans. All of these communities qualify as remnant dialect communities because their dialects show some vestiges of earlier English and the communities have been through extended periods of social and/or geographic isolation from dominant population groups. At the same time, they are also quite varied in their current and historical contact situations as well as in their internal community developments. These situations, along with the comparison of other historically isolated dialect communities, involving other English-speaking groups (e.g., Poplack and Sankoff 1987; Poplack and Tagliamonte 1989, 1991, 2000; Poplack 1999; Schreier 2003), raise a number of questions about dialect formation, language change, and language variation. Do the language varieties of the original English-speaking groups still play a prominent role in the patterning of the language variety, and if so, how? To what extent have these varieties been molded by their original and subsequent contact situations? Is there evidence for autonomous, parallel linguistic development across different communities? In the following sections we consider these questions.
4. The issue of donorship Most dialectologists rely on a version of the so-called founder principle combined with a relic assumption in describing historically isolated dialect situations. In the founder principle (Mufwene 1996, 2001), it is maintained that the distinctive structural traits of a given dialect are predetermined by the varieties spoken by the population that first brought the language to the region. For example, we assume that the primary dialect group that brought English to Southern Appalachia (Montgomery
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1989), the Scotch Irish, was responsible for its formative dialect traits, and that the variety of English spoken by the original group of expatriate blacks from Philadelphia left an indelible imprint on the English dialect established in the transplant community of Samaná in the Dominican Republic (Poplack and Sankoff 1987). In the relic assumption, it is presumed that dialect forms in historically isolated varieties will be quite conservative with respect to language change and thus will remain relatively intact after the formative period. It is not difficult to find support for both the founder principle and the relic assumption in remnant dialects. For example, the existence of the Southern Appalachian verbal concord pattern, which attaches –s to verbs with plural noun phrase subjects (e.g., The dogs barks), has been attributed to the Scots-Irish immigrants who brought this form with them when they settled the region. The form was a characteristic dialect trait in the Ulster region of Ireland at the time of the emigration (Montgomery 1989), and therefore it is assumed that the primary population group in the area simply imparted this linguistic trait in the formative stage of the dialect (Fischer 1989). In a similar way, it seems reasonable to assume that the absence of copula in the speech in black expatriates in Samaná and Nova Scotia (Hannah 1997; Walker 1999) was brought to the locale by the original speakers when they migrated there. There is certainly empirical evidence for the conclusion that peripheral dialects can be conservative in linguistic change in comparison with linguistic change among wider sociospatial groupings of the population. For example, the use of a-prefixing (e.g., She’s a-huntin’ and a-fishin’) has been documented in virtually all of the isolated dialect communities surveyed in Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (2003a), as well as rural dialect areas in New England (Kurath 1939–1943), in the midwestern United States (Allen 1973–1976) and in the American South (Pederson et al. 1986–1992). Furthermore, this structure has been amply documented in earlier English throughout the British Isles (Trudgill 1990:80). In the meantime, this form has virtually vanished in dialects found in the contemporary cultural centers of the Unites States, the large metropolitan areas. It thus appears that the maintenance of a-prefixing is legitimately attributable to a type of linguistic conservatism. Similarly, the use of initial h in hain’t for ain’t and hit for it has been found across a sample of peripheral communities (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2003b), as well as in a wide range of other rural varieties, even as it has disappeared in other major dialects of contemporary North America. Like a-prefixing, the syllable-onset h in these forms is well documented in earlier varieties in the British Isles and in an array of rural dialects in the United States. Furthermore, as a marked linguistic feature, it would be unlikely for it to emerge independently in a number of different dialect settings. Thus, cases such as a-prefixing and initial h in (h)it and (h)ain’t appear to qualify as genuine instances of conservatism in the founder dialects of American English. Although we recognize conservatism in some linguistic forms, however, it is necessary to recognize also several important qualifications on the application of both the founder principle and the relic assumption—on a local level, as it relates to particular remnant dialect communities, and on a more general level, in terms of the dynamics of language maintenance and change. On a practical level, the application of the founder principle assumes that we know the structural traits of the original donor varieties and that these may be distinguished reliably from features that de-
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rive from other sources, including parallel, independent development and diffusion. It assumes further that we have a clear understanding of dialect lineage during earlier time periods. For isolated dialect communities whose dialect histories sometimes go back almost three centuries, ascertaining genuine founder effects can be an elusive methodological challenge. On a descriptive-theoretic level, we cannot simply assume that so-called relic forms will remain static in their linguistic composition. Our empirical investigation of isolated dialect communities (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2003b) shows that some of them may indicate both selective retention and differential rates of change. This development is readily illustrated by the case of perfective be in remnant dialects. The history of English indicates that the semantic territory for be once overlapped with that now covered by perfect forms, and that well into the seventeenth century there was widespread use of both auxiliary have and auxiliary be for intransitive forms and motion verbs (Rydén and Brorström 1987). However, although the use of perfective be is amply documented in representative remnant dialects (Sabban 1984; Wolfram 1996; Tagliamonte 1997; Dannenberg 2003), it cannot simply be assumed that it has remained intact in its structural and functional form. For example, in Lumbee English, unlike a number of other remnant dialects on the coastal United States (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2003b), the use of perfective be is still a robust, productive form, even among younger Lumbee speakers. At the same time, the form has undergone some independent development that now distinguishes its use in Lumbee English from other varieties where it is still productive (Sabban 1984; Kallen 1989; Tagliamonte 1997). For one, there is an important constraint related to the form of the co-occurring subject, so that perfective be is now strongly favored with firstperson singular forms. Thus, a construction such as I’m been there is much more likely to occur than You’re been there (Dannenberg 2003), even though both may occur. It has also become more structurally restricted in Lumbee English, so it is now largely restricted to contracted finite forms such as I’m been here versus I am been here. Meanwhile, it has expanded its tense and aspect parameters so that it now applies to some simple past constructions (e.g., I’m forgot the food yesterday), as well as perfect constructions. Thus, there are changes in the structural and functional parameters of the form that distinguish its use in Lumbee English, not only from dialects where its use has receded, but also from other varieties where it is still in use. Though the perfective use of be might qualify as a “relic” form, given the traditional definition of such items, it must be understood that these items are hardly static structurally or functionally. Indeed, these forms may undergo independent developments within a particular dialect community that set the community dialect apart from other remnant dialects in subtle but important ways. In fact, we have to ask whether the term relic is even a useful designation. If we assume that this label refers to earlier forms selectively preserved intact, then there are few forms that qualify. If, on the other hand, we admit that these forms are subject to change just like nonrelic features, then we are hard put to show how change in relic forms differs from other types of language change, apart from the fact that relic forms involve changes in forms that have receded in “mainstream” varieties of the language. Ultimately, the label “relic form” thus seems to be a sociolinguistic construction that necessarily takes into account social relations and social valuation as opposed to language change per se.
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Finally, it must be observed that remnant dialects are not, in fact, uniformly and invariably conservative with respect to linguistic change. Both Andersen, based on data from peripheral dialects in European languages, and Schilling-Estes and Wolfram (1999), based on a moribund dialect in the Chesapeake Bay of Maryland, provide evidence that peripheral varieties that exist in closed, concentrated communities may not only show rapid change but also actually show the “ability to sustain exorbitant phonetic developments” (Andersen 1988:70). Thus, it is quite possible for a peripheral dialect to be at once both conservative and innovative in language change. We see that the unqualified application of the founder principle and relic assumption is empirically unwarranted. The real methodological and descriptive challenge for the study of remnant dialects is, in fact, sorting out the layers of founder effects and distinguishing instances of conservatism from innovation. No simple set of assumptions about a unilateral founder effect and conservatism will suffice for isolated dialects. Instead, the question of attribution in remnant dialects must be grounded in an in-depth understanding of the particular structures of the founder dialect as they have been subjected to or resisted language change.
5. Language change in peripheral dialects Like any other language variety, isolated dialect communities change from within. Some changes may take place slowly, but it is possible for internally based language changes to occur rapidly even when a variety is in a moribund state. Consider, for example, the case of the /ai/ and /au/ diphthongs in Ocracoke and Smith Island, two moribund dialects in the mid-Atlantic. Both of these varieties are characterized by the raising and/or backing of the nucleus of /ai/, as in [təIm] or [t>Im] for “time,” and the fronting of the glide (and possibly also the nucleus) of /au/, as in [sInd] for “sound.” However the processes appear to be moving in quite different directions in the two communities. When we compare the direction and rate of change for different age groups from these two island communities, based on the assumption of apparent time (Bailey et al. 1991), we find the patterns displayed in figures 5.1 and 5.2 (from Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999:494, 506). For /ai/ nucleus raising and backing in figure 5.1, percentages are given for prevoiced (e.g., tide, time) and prevoiceless (e.g., light, nice) environments since the voicing or voicelessness of a following obstruent is an important constraint on /ai/ raising and backing in a number of varieties, including the ones under scrutiny here. We see in figure 5.1 that the incidence of nucleus raising is changing rapidly and in opposite directions in the two communities, so that /ai/ backing and raising is receding in Ocracoke and accelerating in Smith Island (Schilling-Estes 1997; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999). In figure 5.2, we see that glide fronting for /au/ is relatively limited among older speakers in both communities. Middle-aged speakers in Ocracoke show an increase in glide-fronted /au/; however, younger speakers have moved away completely from this change. On the other hand, Smith Island speakers show an abrupt increase in the use of glide-fronted /au/ within a single generation, as the middle-aged group shows approximately five times as much use of the fronted glide as the preceding genera-
Percentage
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100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
95
Smith Island, Voiceless Smith Island, Voiced Ocracoke, Voiceless Ocracoke, Voiced
Older
Middle-aged
Younger
5.1. Comparison of Nucleus Backing and Raising of /aI/ for Smith Island and Ocracoke
tion of speakers. Most dialectologists would probably assume that raised and backed /ai/ and glide-fronted /au/ represent retentions of older vowel productions that have resisted change. However, given the low levels of usage of glide-fronted /au/ by older speakers in both communities and the extensive use of this variant by middle-aged and younger Smith Islanders, glide-fronted /au/ actually appears to be an innovation on Smith Island (and a fairly recent one at that), rather than a relic form. Most likely, the change to glide-fronted /au/ was an internal change in the island community since there are few external dialects from which the feature could have been adopted. This does not mean, however, that this form was not present at all among older speakers. It certainly could have been present as an embryonic variant that was simply developed into a full-fledged systemic form at a later point (Trudgill 1999).
100
Percentage
90 80 70 60
Smith Island Ocracoke
50 40 30 20 10 0 Older
Middle-aged
Younger
5.2. Comparison of Glide-Fronted /au/ for Smith Island and Ocracoke (from Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999)
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The diphthongal shifts found in Smith Island in particular demonstrate that changes can indeed take place within a relatively compressed time frame in peripheral dialects. The rapid rate of change in less than a half century suggests that we cannot simply assume that dialect innovation is necessarily slow or that it takes a unilateral course. Rather, there may be periods of rapid change, as well as conservatism, over the course of isolation. The changes in Smith Island vowels seem to involve phonetically natural phonetic shifts (Labov 1994) in terms of rotational trajectories within subsystems of vowels. For example, nucleus raising with /ai/, often referred to as Canadian raising because of its popular association with Canadian English (Chambers 1973), has been documented as an independent dialect innovation in a number of different regions of the United States that have no regular contact with one another (Thomas 2001). Although it might be tempting to maintain that rapid linguistic change in peripheral dialects is restricted to natural phonetic shifts, there is also evidence that change can take place on other structural levels as well. For example, Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (2003b) show that leveling to weren’t, as in I weren’t there, has apparently taken place fairly rapidly over three generations in a number of mid-Atlantic coastal varieties. In most U.S. vernacular varieties, past be is regularized to was, as in We was home or You wasn’t there. However, in these coastal remnant communities, we find an alternative pattern in which past be is leveled to was in positive contexts [e.g., I/you/(s)he/we/they was there] but to weren’t in negative constructions [e.g., I/you/(s)he/we/they weren’t home]. This pattern represents a remorphologization of the two past be stems, so the stem were is now used for negativity rather than plurality. Again, available evidence suggests that leveling to weren’t may have existed among older speakers as an embryonic variant and that it has been systemically integrated into the community only in middle-aged and younger speakers. Thus, rapid change is not limited to natural phonetic shifts in the phonological system but can occur with at least morphosyntactic phenomena as well. Some changes in remnant dialects also involve parallel, independent development, or “drift” (Sapir 1921), because of the operation of general processes of analogy and a universal tendency to move toward unmarked forms. For example, a survey of various remnant dialects along the mid-Atlantic and Southern coast of the United States in Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (2003b) shows the uniform tendency to expand the regularization of once irregular plurals (e.g., two sheeps), the regularization of past-tense forms (e.g., They growed up), and the adoption of negative concord (e.g., They didn’t do nothing), along with the stopping of syllable-onset, interdental fricatives (e.g., [dIs] ‘this’). These general traits are shared not only by these isolated communities but also by a host of other vernacular communities of English in the United States and elsewhere. Chambers (1995:242) points out that “certain variables appear to be primitives of vernacular dialects in that they recur ubiquitously all over the world.” These developments are simply part of the natural processes that guide changes quite independently of diffusion or language contact. More than anything, analogical pressures to regularize and generalize linguistic processes distinguish socially subordinate remnant communities from the prescribed standard English norm, which is, according to Chambers (1995:246), “more strictly tightly constrained in its grammar and phonology” because of the social pressures to resist some natural
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linguistic changes. The essential unifying dimension of such changes seems to be an alignment with varieties less loosely constrained by prescriptive social norms than those of the dominant social classes. Finally, there are independent language changes in peripheral dialects that manifest themselves in systematic variability. As variation studies over the past three decades have demonstrated, fluctuation between forms is not random but highly structured, and linguistic and extralinguistic constraints on variability can be hierarchically ordered in terms of the degree to which they affect the fluctuation of variants (Labov 1969; Cedergren and Sankoff 1974; Guy 1993). Variable constraints, like other dimensions of structural development, may show independent development over time. Thus, isolated varieties that stem from a common source may end up with different hierarchies of constraint effects. Consider, for example, two dialects in the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States that show leveling to weren’t, Lumbee English (Wolfram and Sellers 1999) and Ocracoke English (Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1994). Although these varieties both have leveling to weren’t, their independent linguistic constraints on variability show important differences. One of the important constraint effects on regularization to weren’t is subject type. Figure 5.3 shows the results of a VARBRUL analysis that compares the effects of different subject types on leveling to weren’t in the two communities. The types of subjects relevant in this comparison are first singular (e.g., I weren’t there), third-singular noun phrase (e.g., The dog weren’t there), third-singular pronoun (e.g., She weren’t there), and existential there/it/they (e.g., There/it/they weren’t a garden left after the flood). Figure 5.3 shows a significant contrast in the subject type constraint for the two dialect communities. For Lumbee English, leveling to weren’t is clearly favored for first-singular subjects and disfavored with existentials, whereas in Outer Banks English, leveling to weren’t is favored with existentials but disfavored with third-singular NPs. We see, then, that the constraint effects have apparently developed in quite different ways in these varieties. Language change in isolated dialects clearly takes place in ways that are no different from language change in other varieties of a language, and this must be factored into their description. Whereas some of these changes clearly lead to divergence, there are also ways in which these dialects change in uniform ways, given their isolation from varieties spoken by the wider, dominant population and their socially subordinate position in relation to socially dominant dialects.
6. Language contact Despite the romantic notion that remnant dialects develop in consummate insularity, no dialect of English stands completely apart from contact with other dialects. In all cases involving English, there is always some type of interaction with other groups, though there are, of course, vast differences in the regularity and intensity of the contacts (e.g. Schreier 2003). Therefore, intra- and extra-community contact must be factored into an understanding of isolated dialects, not only in their formative stage, but also as they reconfigure themselves at various points over time, including their development into postremnant varieties.
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1 0.85
Probability
0.85
0.5
0.51
0.48
Lumbee Outer Banks
0.52 0.4
0.29
0.29
0 1st sing.
3rd-sing. NP
3rd-sing. Existential Pro
5.3. Comparison of VARBRUL Probability Values for Leveling to Weren’t: Lumbee English and Ocracoke
One of the most intriguing cases of interethnic contact in a peripheral dialect is found in the English of African Americans in mainland Hyde County (Wolfram, Thomas, and Green 2000; Wolfram and Thomas 2002). This region was first inhabited by English-speaking Europeans in the first decade of the 1700s, making it one of the oldest European-American settlement communities in North Carolina. Shortly thereafter, African Americans were brought to the area (Kay and Cary 1995), and the groups have lived together in relative isolation from the early 1700s until the midtwentieth century. This region, which has now maintained a stable African-American population of between a quarter and a third of its residents for almost three centuries, thus provides a convenient setting for examining several critical issues regarding the historical development of African-American speech (Wolfram and Thomas 2002), as well as more general issues about language contact in long-term, isolated biethnic situations. On the one hand, evidence suggests that some earlier dialect features of the English spoken by African Americans in Hyde County were quite congruent with the localized varieties of English spoken by their European-American cohorts. For example, earlier African Americans and European Americans shared a uniform vowel system and many localized morphosyntactic features such as leveling to weren’t (Wolfram and Thomas 2002). But there is also evidence for some long-standing structural differences between European-American and African-American varieties, as well as interdialectal structures (Trudgill 1986). Although both groups shared a common, localized vowel system and phonological traits such as postvocalic rhoticity, the African-American community remained distinct in some of its phonotactic patterns. For example, Childs (2000) shows
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that the propensity for syllable-coda, prevocalic consonant cluster reduction (e.g., wes’ area for “west area”) has apparently differentiated African Americans from their European-American cohorts for as long as the two communities have coexisted in this area. We have attributed this trait to the retention of a transfer effect derived from the original contact situation in the African diaspora in light of the general typological absence of syllable-coda consonant clusters in the heritage West African languages. It is probable that the African Americans of Hyde County already exhibited this trait when they were brought to the area and simply maintained it despite generations of isolation with European Americans (Wolfram, Childs, and Torbert 2000). The fact that this distinctive phonotactic trait has persisted while the vowel systems of Hyde County African Americans accommodated to those of the local European-American population suggests that the level of structural organization may be a factor in explaining why some traits persist from earlier contacts but others are accommodated. It also demonstrates that some small, isolated communities with important social and ethnic boundaries may retain selected, long-standing dialect differences across social and ethnic subgroups even though some features (and sometimes even entire subsystems) are shared by speakers across social divisions. Thus, Wolfram et al. (1997) show that a single AfricanAmerican family living on the island of Ocracoke maintained some distinctive dialect features that set them apart from their European-American cohorts even after 130 years of continuous residency on Ocracoke as the lone African-American family. In this connection, it must be noted that community isolation and/or the smallness of the community does not, in and of itself, lead to linguistic homogeneity (Dorian 1994; Wolfram and Beckett 2000). Even when a small community is relatively homogeneous, considerable “patterned individual variation” can exist (Dorian 1994). In describing the results of intra- and intercommunity contact, it is essential to understand that linguistic accommodation is not a matter of categorical acceptance or rejection. In fact, the situation with respect to –s verbal marking in the Hyde County African-American community demonstrates the ways in which dialect patterns brought by two different groups can be accommodated in ways that result in interdialectal forms—that is, “forms that actually originally occurred in neither dialect” (Trudgill 1986:62). The European-American community of Hyde County uses the so-called Northern Verbal Concord Rule (Montgomery 1999), in which –s is attached to verbs with plural subjects (e.g., The dogs barks). This rule is strongly constrained by the type of subject, as well as subject-verb proximity, so that it is strongly favored with NP over pronoun subjects (e.g. The dogs barks > They barks) and favored with nonadjacent subjects over adjacent ones (e.g., The dogs in the field barks a lot > The dogs barks). Earlier African-American English, as represented in the oldest group of Hyde County speakers (born between 1896 and 1920), largely accommodated to this pattern, with an important modification: they relax the noun phrase constraint so that Hyde County African-American English does not have a strong subject-type effect. This type of overgeneralization is, of course, a fairly typical characteristic of the kind of accommodation that takes place in situations of language contact (Weinreich 1953; Thomason 2001). At the same time, the African-American community also manifests optional marking on –s third-singular forms in such sentences as The dog bark at the birds. Although third-singular absence is found in some regions of the British Isles, such as East
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Anglia (Trudgill 1998), it has not been documented at all among elderly European Americans in Hyde County. Consider the figures for verbal –s marking for four different generations of African Americans in Hyde County and baseline elderly and young European-American groups of speakers given in figures 5.4 and 5.5. In figure 5.4, data are given for –s attachment with third-plural subjects, distinguishing between pronoun subjects such as They barks and NP subjects such as The dogs barks. Figure 5.5 presents the data for the same group of speakers for third-singular absence, as in The dog bark versus The dog barks. The generational differences for African Americans in figures 5.4 and 5.5 suggest that donor dialects have worked in tandem with language contact strategies in the formation of earlier African-American speech in the isolated context of coastal Hyde County. The -s marking pattern among elderly African Americans in this community stands between the model found in the Hyde County European-American version, strongly influenced by the verbal concord rule of the founder dialects, and
% Plural 100
African-Am. Plural -s (Pro Subj) African-Am. Plural -s (NP Subj)
75
Euro-Am. Plural -s (Pro Subj) Euro-Am. Plural -s (NP Subj)
50 25 0 Elderly
Senior
Middle-aged
Young
VARBRUL Results Input probability = .08 Ethnicity/Generation European American Elderly = .83; Young = .15 African American Elderly = .87; Senior = .79; Middle-aged = .61; Young = .36 Subject Type: Noun Phrase = .68 Pronoun = .33 Chi square per cell = 1.642
5.4. The Patterning of –S with Third-Plural Subjects in Hyde County (e.g., The dog barks, They barks)
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101
% Absence 100
African-Am. 3rd Sing Euro.-Am. 3rd Sing
75
50
25
0 Elderly
Senior
Middle-aged
Young
VARBRUL Results Input probability = .24 Ethnicity/Generation European American Elderly = .03; Young = .11 African American Elderly = .83; Senior = .78; Middle-aged = .83; Young = .77
5.5. The Patterning of Third-Singular –S Absence in Hyde County (from Wolfram and Thomas 2002)
the widespread model of generalized AAVE (Rickford 1999). The Hyde County pattern may be summarized as follows: (1)
The European-American Model: third -s attachment with plural NP a. The dogs likes the ducks, but NOT *They likes the ducks b. She likes the ducks, but NOT *She like_ the ducks
(2)
The Elderly Hyde County African-American Model: third -s attachment with plural NP and Pro; optional third-singular -s attachment a. The dogs likes the ducks AND They likes the ducks b. She like_ the ducks AND She likes the ducks
(3)
Contemporary AAVE: third-singular -s absence a. The dogs like the ducks but NOT *The dogs likes the ducks b. She like_ the ducks
In understanding the dynamics of isolated dialects, intracommunity and intercommunity contact must be recognized, not only in the formative stages of such dialects, but also as the varieties reconfigure themselves at various points over time and as they emerge from insularity.
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7. Sociolinguistic principles in the configuration of isolated dialects We conclude the discussion by postulating a set of the general principles that might apply to the remnant dialect communities. The principles are offered more as a set of hypotheses that need to be tested against a more expansive sample of peripheral communities rather than a definitive set of sociolinguistic axioms. 7.1. Principle of dialect exclusion Discontinuities in regular communication networks with outside groups impede isolated dialect communities from participating in ongoing dialect diffusion that occurs in more widely dispersed and socially dominant population groups. This exclusion may give rise to the selected retention and/or independent language change that leads to dialect divergence. 7.2. Principle of selective change Isolated dialects may retain and develop putative dialect structures in ways that result in divergence, even when the varieties are the product of a common founder variety. Such dialects may show conservatism in change for some dialect structures while indicating accelerated change for others. In part, the rate of change may relate to the linguistic status of the structure, but change may also be a function of the social role of the structure. For example, linguistic structures that carry symbolic social value are more likely to show accelerated rates of change than other dialect structures. 7.3. Principle of regionalization Natural, independent language change that occurs in peripheral dialect communities may lead to convergence with and divergence from other peripheral dialects, as well as with core dialect communities. The results of such changes may lead to regionalization in peripheral dialects. 7.4. Principle of social marginalization The relegation of peripheral dialects to nonmainstream social status naturally leads to a marginalized, subordinate sociolinguistic status for the speakers of such varieties. In keeping with the principle of linguistic subordination, the linguistic structures associated with these varieties will therefore be socially stigmatized 7.5. The principle of vernacular congruity Natural linguistic processes that involve analogical leveling, regularization, and generalization may lead to parallel dialect configurations in quite disparate isolated dialect communities. Given the subordinate social status of these communities, there will be reduced social pressure to preserve linguistic irregularities that are socially
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marked. Such changes may thus unite diverse peripheral dialects with one another and with other vernacular dialects. 7.6. The principle of peripheral community heterogeneity Speakers living in small, relatively self-contained communities may show considerable intracommunity variation. Some of this variation may correlate with localized, intracommunity social and ethnic boundaries (Wolfram et al. 1997), but some of it may also be a product of “patterned individual variation” (Dorian 1994) in which particular speakers simply retain divergent language patterns within the community apart from obvious social boundaries. Small homogeneous communities can tolerate considerable long-term language variation among speakers (Wolfram and Beckett 2000). 7.7. Principle of localized identity Speakers of peripheral dialects often embrace dialect distinctiveness as an emblematic token of local identity. Given the social construction of local identity, distinct dialect features may be perpetuated beyond the insular state of an isolated variety. Dialect perpetuation may range from restricted dialect focusing (Bailey et al. 1993) to overall dialect intensification (Schilling-Estes 1977; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2003a). No doubt, some of the sociolinguistic principles offered here will have to be amplified or abandoned on the basis of a more extensive sample of peripheral dialect situations. At the same time, our understanding of the interrelation of linguistic variation in its social context will advance most by extrapolating from the individual cases and postulating general principles that might apply to a broad base of peripheral dialect situations. In the process of formulating these principles, we stand to gain insight, not only into the sociolinguistic construction of remnant dialects, but also into the social embedding of language change and maintenance in general. References Allen, Harold B. 1973–1976. Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest. 3 vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Andersen, Henning. 1988. Center and Periphery: Adoption, Diffusion, and Spread. In Historical Dialectology, ed. Jacek Fisiak, 39–83. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bailey, Guy, Thomas Wikle, Jan Tillery, and Lori Sand. 1991. The Apparent Time Construct. Language Variation and Change 3:241–264. ———. 1993. Some Patterns of Linguistic Diffusion. Language Variation and Change 5:359– 390. Cedergren, Henrietta J., and David Sankoff. 1974. Variable Rules: Performance as a Statistical Reflection of Competence. Language 50:333–355. Chambers, J. K. 1973. Canadian Raising. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 18:113–135. ———. 1995. Sociolinguistic Theory. Cambridge: Blackwell. Childs, Becky. 2000. The Role of Contact in Isolated Transplant Communities: The Case of Consonant Cluster Reduction in the Bahamas. Paper presented at SECOL, Oxford, Mississippi, April.
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Dannenberg, Clare. 2003. Sociolinguistic Constructs of Ethnic Identity: The Syntactic Delineation of a Native American Variety. Publication of the American Dialect Society 87. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Dannenberg, Clare, and Walt Wolfram. 1998. Ethnic Identity and Grammatical Restructuring: Bes in Lumbee English. American Speech 73:153–159. Dorian, Nancy C. 1981. Language Death. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1994. Varieties of Variation in a Very Small Place: Social Homogeneity, Prestige Norms, and Linguistic Variation. Language 70:631–696. Fischer, David. 1989. Albion’s Seed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grenoble, Lenore A., and Lindsay J. Whaley, eds. 1998. Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future Prospects. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guy, Gregory. 1993. The Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Variation. In American Dialect Research, ed. Dennis Preston. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hannah, Dawn. 1997. Copula Absence in Samaná English: Implications for Research on the Linguistic History of African-American Vernacular English. American Speech 72:339– 372. Kallen, Jeffrey L. 1989. Tense and Aspect Categories in Irish English. English World-Wide 10:1–39. Kay, Marvin L., and Lorin Lee Cary. 1995. Slavery in North Carolina, 1748–1775. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kurath, Hans, 1939–1943. The Linguistic Atlas of New England. Providence, R.I.: Brown University. Labov, William. 1969. Contraction, Deletion and Inherent Variability of the English Copula. Language 45:715–762. ———. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal factors. Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. Language Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. London and New York: Routledge. Milroy, Lesley. 1987. Language and Social Networks, 2nd ed. Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell. Montgomery, Michael. 1996. Was Colonial American English a Koiné? In Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Halainen. Bamberger Beträge zur Englische Sprachwissenschaft 38, ed. Juhani Klemola, Merja Kyto, and Matti Rissanen, 213–234. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. ———. 1989. Exploring the roots of Appalachian English. English World-Wide 10:227–278. ———. 1998. In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare. In Language Myths, ed. Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill. London and New York: Penguin. ———. 1999. Accountability in Reconstructing Verbal -s. Special session, Tenth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology. St. John’s, Newfoundland. August. ———. 2000. Isolation as a Linguistic Construct. Southern Journal of Linguistics 24:41–54. Mufwene, Salikoko. 1996. The Founder Principle in Creole Genesis. Diachronica 12:83– 134. ———. 2001. The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pedersen, Lee, Susan McDaniel, and Carol Adams. 1986–1992. Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States. 7 vols. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Poplack, Shana, ed. 1999. The English History of African American English. Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell. Poplack, Shana, and David Sankoff. 1987. The Philadelphia Story in the Spanish Caribbean. American Speech 62:291–314.
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Poplack, Shana, and Sali Tagliamonte. 1989. There’s No Tense Like the Present: Verbal -s Inflection in Early Black English. Language Variation and Change 1:47–84. ———. 1991. African American English in the Diaspora: Evidence from Old-line Nova Scotians. Language Variation and Change 3:301–339. ———. 2000. African American English in the Diaspora. Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell. Rickford, John. 1999. African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution and Educational Implications Malden, Mass., and Cambridge: Blackwell. Rydén, M., and S. Brorström. 1987. The Be/Have Variation with Intransitives in English. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Sabban, Annette. 1984. Investigations into the Syntax of Hebridean English. Scottish Language 3:5–32. Sapir, David. 1921. Language. New York: Harcourt. Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1997. Accommodation vs. Concentration: Dialect Death in Two Postinsular Island Communities. American Speech 72:12–32. ———. 1998. Investigating ‘self-conscious’ speech: The performance register in Ocracoke English. Language in Society 27:12–32. ———. 2002. On the nature of isolated and post-isolated dialects: Innovation, variation, and differentiation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6:64–85. Schilling-Estes, Natalie, and Walt Wolfram. 1994. Convergent Explanation and Alternative Regularization: Were/Weren’t Leveling in a Vernacular English Variety. Language Variation and Change 6:273–302. ———. 1999. Alternative Models of Dialect Death: Dissipation vs. Concentration. Language 75:486–521. Schreier, Daniel. 2003. Isolation and Language Change: Sociohistorical and Contemporary Evidence from Tristan da Cunha English. Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave and Macmillan. Shores, David L. 2000. Tangier Island: Place, People, and Talk. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Tagliamonte, Sali. 1997. Obsolescence in the English Perfect? Evidence from Samaná English. American Speech 72:33–68. Thomas, Erik R. 2001. An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English. Publication of the American Dialect Society 85. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Thomason, Sarah G. 2001. Language Contact: An Introduction. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1990. The Dialects of England. Cambridge: Blackwell. ———. 1998. Third Person Singular Zero: African-American English, East Anglian Dialects and Spanish Persecution in the Low Countries. Folia Linguistica Historica 18: 139–148. ———. 1999. New-dialect Formation and Dedialectalization: Embryonic and Vestigial Variants. Journal of English Linguistics 27:319–327. Walker, James A. 1999. Rephrasing the Copula: Contraction and Zero in Early African American English. In The English History of African American English, ed. Shana Poplack, 35–72. Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact. The Hague: Mouton. Wolfram, Walt. 1996. Delineation and Description in Dialectology: The Case of Perfective I’m in Lumbee English. American Speech 71:5–26. Wolfram, Walt, and Dan Beckett. 2000. The Role of Individual Differences in Earlier African American Vernacular English. American Speech 75:1–30.
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Wolfram, Walt, Becky Childs, and Benjamin Torbert. 2000. Tracing Language History through Consonant Cluster Reduction: Evidence from Isolated Dialects. Southern Journal of Linguistics 24:17–40. Wolfram, Walt, and Donna Christian. 1976. Appalachian Speech. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. Wolfram, Walt, and Clare Dannenberg. 1999. Dialect Identity in a Tri-ethnic Context: The Case of Lumbee American Indian English. English World-Wide 20:179–216. Wolfram, Walt, Clare Dannenberg, Stanley Knick, and Linda Oxendine. 2002. Fine in the World: Lumbee Language in Time and Place. Raleigh: North Carolina State Humanity Extension Program and Publications. Wolfram, Walt, Kirk Hazen, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1999. Dialect Maintenance and Change on the Outer Banks. Publications of the American Dialect Society 81. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Wolfram, Walt, Kirk Hazen, and Jennifer Ruff Tamburro. 1997. Isolation within Isolation: A Solitary Century of African America Vernacular English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 1:7– 38. Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1995. Moribund Dialects and the Endangerment Canon: The Case of the Ocracoke Brogue. Language 71:696–721. ———. 1997. Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 1998. American English: Dialects and Variation. Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2003a. Dialectology and Language Diffusion. In Handbook of Historical Linguistics, ed. Brian Joseph and Richard Janda, 713–735. Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2003b. Remnant Dialects in the Coastal United States. In The Legacy of Colonial English: A Study of Transported Dialects, ed. Raymond Hickey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolfram, Walt, and Jason Sellers. 1999. Ethnolinguistic Marking of Past be in Lumbee Vernacular English. Journal of English Linguistics 27:94–114. Wolfram, Walt, and Erik R. Thomas. 2002. The Development of African American English. Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell. Wolfram, Walt, Erik Thomas, and Elaine Green. 2000. The Regional Context of Earlier African-American Speech: Reconstructing the development of African-American Vernacular English. Language in Society 29(3):315–355.
6 PENELOPE ECKERT
Variation and a Sense of Place
I began my research career in linguistic geography, asking myself how change spread from person to person and village to village across Gascony. But the “across Gascony” part lived in maps and atlases—in isoglosses and areas—whereas the “person to person” part lived in the worldly relations among the inhabitants of the village of Soulan, sitting on the south side of the lovely Pyrenees. Linguistic geography and sociolinguistic variation have remained surprisingly distant, even though in the eyes of most variationists they are inextricably connected. In this chapter, I will argue for the embedding of the study of variation within its sociogeographic context, most particularly, for the examination of the borders of communities in search of the articulation of social meaning between the local and the extralocal. At the same time, I will reflect on another aspect of method and personal trajectory—what did I learn from this work that would lead (has led) me to do the next study differently? At the heart of the study of sociolinguistic variation is the social and geographic placement of the speaker. Different analysts (or the same analysts at different times) approach social location in different ways, sometimes focusing on broad categorizations such as the class system (Labov 1966; Trudgill 1974; Macaulay 1977) and/or ethnicity (Wolfram 1969; Labov 1972a) and/or gender (Eckert 1990; Labov 1991), sometimes focusing on smaller social configurations such as networks (Milroy 1980) or peer groups (Labov 1972b; Cheshire 1982; Eckert 1989). These social locations are in turn located within a geographic unit—a speech community—which serves to define the dialect and circumscribe the population under study. The local community, in other words, is treated as a microcosm of the wider society—a kind of freefloating microcosm at that. Although the speech community is viewed as being located 107
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within dialect space, it is rarely treated as socially connected to anything beyond its boundaries. Class, ethnicity, race, and gender are seen as global categories that function to create distinctions in orientation to local practice. These distinctions are defined in abstraction from the community but are seen as applying similarly across communities. Perhaps because they are conceived of as global categories, they are treated as disconnected, with little attention paid to the connections that facilitate the flow of influence among them. Networks and groups, on the other hand, are seen as kinds of configurations that are defined locally but that are common to all speech communities. The potential that such configurations offer for the study of connections is explored in Milroy and Milroy (1985), which considers the role of weak ties in the spread of linguistic change through local areas. But weak ties and strong ties are, once again, disembodied—and apparently distinct—abstractions, and as we take up the Milroys’ suggestions, one of the first questions we need to ask is: what is the relation between weak and strong ties? Our focus on the social life of variation on categories and communities amounts to a focus on centers and on the “typical” inhabitants of those centers—of local networks, of neighborhoods, of socioeconomic strata, and of peer groups. We recognize the influence of other communities, but the communities are disconnected entities, and the influence is hence disembodied. Yet people move about, and linguistic influence flows in and out of communities, as well as through them. And to understand the social function of variation and the spread of linguistic change, we need to know more about the connections—to know what happens at the boundaries of places and categories. What I have to say is not new—only the application of insights to data on variation. Mary Louise Pratt (1988) observed some time ago that the focus on speech communities indicates a preoccupation with linguistic utopias—that in constructing such entities, linguists are putting into action a theoretical ideology in which normative speakers are monolingual, monodialectal, and core members of communities. Subcommunities are treated separately, but rarely in virtue of their relations. I take my inspiration from Pratt, who argued that linguists should be focusing not on centers but on borders—that we should move from a linguistics of community to a linguistics of contact. John Rickford (1986) has argued that norms within speech communities cannot be conceived of as consensual—that conflict may be central to the organization of linguistic behavior within a community. I will take Rickford’s argument one step further and argue that the speech community itself cannot be consensual—that there is no consensual sense of place. In doing so, I embrace Barbara Johnstone’ s argument in this volume that place is as much ideological as it is physical—or more accurate, that place is an idealization of the physical. Our focus on speech communities has led us to view the borders of communities as boundaries—as a cutoff between two places where different things are happening, rather than a transitional place where still more things are happening that are inseparable from what happens on either side. Rather than constituting some kind of envelope for the linguistic behavior of its inhabitants, the community is a contested entity that is differentially constructed in the practices and in the speech of different factions, as well as different individuals. When we focus on bounded categories, networks, and groups, and when we analyze linguistic variability within the com-
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munity in these terms, we tacitly assume a homogeneity of orientation—a kind of consensuality about the boundaries of the community itself. Crucially, although members of a population defined as living in the same community may all agree that they live in a particular area or political unit, they do not orient in a homogeneous way to that that area or unit or its surroundings. Different people in a given community will view the boundaries differently, use different parts of the community, and participate in the surroundings differently. These differences will result in different patterns of contact, which have implications for linguistic influence. They will also relate to different interpretations and ideologies and will enter into the patterns of diversity within the community. Categories, groups, and networks may, as a result, embody differences in spatial orientations and practices, with important consequences for patterns of linguistic variation.
1. The Detroit suburbs A variety of studies (e.g. Blom and Gumperz 1972; Labov 1972c; Gal 1979; Holmquist 1985) have shown the importance of orientation to the outside in explaining patterns of variation within speech communities. William Labov’s study of Martha’s Vineyard focused on speakers’ orientation to the mainland in such a way that the local reversal of a sound change moving from the mainland signals an orientation away from the mainland tourist economy. In his study of the Spanish village of Ucieda Jonathan Holmquist argued that the lowering of word-final /u/ to [o] under the influence of Castilian is an expression of movement away from the mountain-farming way of life to more modern farming and ultimately to work in the factories in town. In both of these cases, the connection between the geographic outside and social issues inside the community brings a synergy between the local and the extralocal. My ethnographic and sociolinguistic work with adolescents in the Detroit suburbs (Eckert 1989, 2000) has demonstrated that exploring how these connections are actually made can bridge the space between communities, between the local and the extralocal, and eventually between the local and the global. In the following pages, I will use data from this study to show how the “outsides” are articulated with the “insides” of communities and how language, along with other semiotic resources, brings the “outside” in and the “inside” out. I hasten to point out that I did not begin the study with this insight. My focus was on the internal mechanisms of variation in a variety of communities, possible similarities and differences among them, and their relation to the flow of linguistic change in the Detroit conurbation. What I did not anticipate was the particular way in which local and extralocal practice would explain the spread of linguistic innovation. For the purposes of this study, I selected five public high schools as discrete and representative speech communities. It is the terms discrete, representative, and speech community that I wish to problematize here. I chose to work in public high schools because these institutions normally bring together the entire social range of the towns they serve, constituting an adolescent microcosm of the town. I looked, therefore, to the adolescent age group, the town, the school catchment area, and the school building itself to constitute the boundaries around my speech community. And, indeed,
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within the school, I looked to the school’s age-grading system for an even closer age boundary, focusing on one graduating class. In constructing these boundaries, I did not necessarily assume that there were important linguistic differences on the other side of any of them, but I did assume that there was greater cohesion within than across the boundaries. And I made the implicit claim that the meaning of variation was constructed within those boundaries—possibly in response to the boundaries themselves and whatever was on the other side, but constructed within nonetheless. What I discovered is that what I was thinking of as boundaries—as some kind of social or geographic space around the community—were in fact borders that linked the community in heterogeneous ways to the area around it. Relations to the “outside” were built into relations on the “inside” as local factions aligned themselves with respect to each other and the larger world, orienting to, interpreting, and appropriating the world around them.
2. The local social order and the conurbation In this discussion, I will focus on the issue of borders and boundaries, not between groups or categories, but between schools and towns in the Detroit conurbation. It will be apparent, though, that the borders between groups and categories within these schools interact with the borders between schools. The Detroit conurbation consists of Detroit City—a largely poor and African-American, urban center—and an array of suburbs that become increasingly affluent and increasingly white as one moves away in any direction from the urban center. Each community, and each high school that serves it, is self-consciously located within the social geography of the conurbation, constructing a local identity in relation to it. The social order that forms within each high school articulates individual identities with these local identities. And it is in this articulation that the social meaning of variables is constructed as they spread across the conurbation. Because societal norms define legitimate adolescence by participation in secondary school, adolescents’ identities are closely linked to their orientation to school— even those who do not attend at all. The U.S. public high school strives to dominate the lives of students both when they are in school and when they are out. It encourages students to stay after school to participate in extracurricular activities—clubs, athletics, student government—and to devote much of their time outside of school to homework. It also expects students to develop friendships in school, particularly within its age-graded social system. From grade 1, students are expected to confine their friendships to others in their own graduating class and to time their social development according to prevailing institutional norms. Hanging out with older or younger kids is taken as a willful rejection of adult expectations for development. Those who participate enthusiastically in what the school sets down for them as legitimate activities and practices are in a position to gain access to resources and a certain kind of control over the institutional environment. Those who reject such participation are marginalized from the institutional perspective. Such marginalization can be inconvenient and at times unpleasant, but it is not always unwelcome because
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school participation is a highly ideological arena and there are positive reasons for both participation and nonparticipation. In U.S. high schools, an opposition commonly develops between students who enthusiastically embrace the institution as the center of their social lives and those who adamantly reject it. The adverbs point to the fact that there are plenty of students who are neither enthusiastic nor adamant and who emerge as “in-between” in this opposition. In the high schools of the largely white Detroit suburbs, the opposition constitutes two social categories—the jocks, who embrace the school as the center of their social lives and the burnouts, who reject it as such. The burnouts do not reject the school as a curricular center, but their mistrust of the institution extends to their feeling that the school is not fulfilling their curricular needs.1 The categories are class-based and are a major vehicle for the reproduction of class. The burnouts come by and large from the lower portion of the local socioeconomic range, whereas the jocks come by and large from the upper portion. Although the parents’ class does not determine category participation, the jock and burnout categories do constitute middle- and working-class cultures, respectively, and these categories and their class significance take center stage in the school. The differences in orientations of the jocks and the burnouts, although aimed at the school, are played out among the students themselves. The jocks and the burnouts construct themselves in mutual opposition and with considerable separation, even with hostility. The hostility emerges from differences in values—in norms that govern friendship and peer relations more generally, as well as relations with adults. And as the jocks embrace the school’s authority, they submit to school adults and at the same time benefit from the power that those adults accord them within the institution. The burnouts view the jocks’ acceptance of this arrangement as undermining adolescent autonomy and solidarity, whereas the jocks view the burnouts’ nonacceptance as compromising what they see as a profitable arrangement with the school. Regardless of its general socioeconomic makeup, each school in the Detroit suburban area has its jocks and its burnouts, who by and large represent the lower and the upper ends of the local socioeconomic hierarchy. This local socioeconomic scene is in turn located within the larger socioeconomic continuum of the Detroit conurbation. Residents locate themselves within this sociogeographic continuum— as residents of particular suburban areas, towns, and neighborhoods. They attribute a particular character to the area, the town, and the neighborhood (or subdivision) and orient themselves as groups and individuals to this character. Each community is a piece of this socioeconomic continuum, with the neighborhoods becoming wealthier as one moves away from the city. The schools that serve the different catchment area of any town have clear socioeconomic characteristics, and these differences are manifested in attitudes within and among the schools. This pattern is repeated across the suburban area. Schools are an important resource for adolescents to locate themselves within the larger area, as they develop a sense of local sociogeography by comparing the dominant social characteristics of the schools and the towns the schools serve. Economic geography is built into jock and burnout practice as well. The burnouts, headed for working-class workplaces in the Detroit area after high school, look
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beyond the school and into the larger urban-suburban area for access to work. They value, therefore, social networks that take them beyond their school and neighborhood and that give them access to the wider conurbation—particularly the “business” end of the conurbation, the places where things are happening. The jocks, on the other hand, are on an institutional track, intending to leave high school for college and to base their lives in the institution there, just as they have in high school. Indeed, although they express prospective nostalgia for their high school friends, they expect to develop a new social network in college and to move away from the suburban area, at least temporarily. The jocks, therefore, abstract themselves somewhat from the local area. They limit their main friendships to their own graduation cohort and to their own school, and they avoid the urban area except to participate in institutional activities such as attending professional sports games or visiting museums. I wish in particular to emphasize the difference between a local and an institutional orientation. If one thinks of Belten High as the speech community in question, then it is the jocks who are locally oriented. If one thinks of Westtown as the speech community, then the burnouts are more locally oriented than the jocks. But the burnouts’ local orientation is not to Westtown itself but beyond Westtown. In fact, many burnouts express hostility to Westtown—there are no jobs there, there is nothing to do, and they don’t feel that the local community is particularly hospitable to them. Rather, they look to the broader conurbation for a sense of place. They frequent parks either outside of or on the borders of Westtown. They strive to expand their networks to include people from other communities—people with access to other spaces, people, and opportunities—and they cruise the streets that lead toward Detroit. This does not go on just in Westtown but also in all the high schools around the suburban area. And the result is a network of arteries and meeting places where students from all around the area explore the conurbation and seek each other out. It is not everyone who does this, only those who are looking for something outside of institutional life. Thus, although the jocks and the burnouts are salient and opposed social categories in each high school, they are also oppositionally inserted into the sociogeography of the conurbation. If burnouts meet people from other towns through friends, in parks, and on the street, jocks meet them at interscholastic functions—athletic events, student government workshops, and cheerleading camp. The burnouts meet people as individuals, whereas the jocks meet people in their institutional roles. And in these situations, respect and admiration tend to orient in opposite directions. Burnouts tend to admire people with street smarts, something that is generally attributed to urban dwellers; jocks tend to admire people with institutional smarts, something that suburban students tend to have more access to. In this way, social practice within each school merges with geography itself. One might simply say that each school has the same social categories—that the jocks and the burnouts constitute a microcosm of the larger socioeconomic system. This is certainly true. However, the jocks and burnouts are somewhat distinct from school to school, and this distinctiveness is a function of the sociogeographic location of each school. Jocks in less affluent schools somewhat resemble burnouts from more affluent schools and may even consider burnouts in very affluent schools to be jocks. A jock in a high school next to the boundary of Detroit told me that she was con-
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cerned that, when she reached college, she would not be able to compete in extracurricular activities with the jocks from more affluent schools. Attending multischool events of various sorts, she had had plenty of evidence that her school’s jock culture was different from that of more affluent schools and that she was not gaining the same exposure to such things as parliamentary procedure and large projects. Students moving from the urban periphery to more distant and affluent suburban schools report having to upgrade their wardrobes. One such student told me that although he had been a jock in his original school, he did not fit in with the jocks in his new school, and he eventually became a burnout. This is not simply because he didn’t look and act like a local jock but also because the burnouts are more inclined than jocks to value “urban immigrants” for their knowledge and contacts. The issue of looking like a jock or looking like a burnout leads us to the role of semiotics in the articulation of the local with the extralocal.
3. Semiotics, the local, and the extralocal Sue Gal and Judith Irvine (1995) have argued that our speech communities and the languages associated with them are ideological constructs—ideological with respect to linguistic theory and, more generally, with respect to language and society. They outline three semiotic processes by which we construct languages and speech communities out of unconstructed social and linguistic material. These processes are useful in understanding how the social order of each school produces and reproduces the wider sociogeography within which each school is located. According to Gal and Irvine, we create boundaries around dialects, languages, places, and categories through a process of erasure, by which we make certain differences salient by downplaying, or erasing, certain others. So, for example, a new racial category in the United States— Asian American—has been constructed by erasing the enormous differences among Koreans, Chinese, Laotians, Japanese, and so on and focusing on differences between all of these and other racialized groups such as European Americans and African Americans. We reinforce the oppositions by nesting them inside the categories they create, a process that Gal and Irvine refer to as recursivity. Thus, for example, the construction of a “black” and a “white” race is reinforced by evaluating people assigned to each group according to such things as relative darkness of skin color and hair texture, with the hierarchical relations between the two categories being mirrored in the cline of color within each category. Finally, we assign meaning to our categories through a process of iconization—attributing social stereotypes to linguistic practices themselves as a way of constructing a “natural” bond between a linguistic variety and the people who speak it. The common evaluation over the past century of peasant dialects in Europe as illogical and irregular—the products of ignorant and lazy minds—is a famous case in point. The jock-burnout opposition is played out not only in activities within and attitudes toward the school but also in a wide array of interacting semiotic practices that range from territory to eating habits to hairstyles. The issue of boundaries and borders is central to these practices, as jocks continually symbolize their institutional affiliation and the burnouts continually symbolize their urban orientation. Perhaps
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the most obvious is their use of territories—gathering places during downtime in school. In schools across the United States, the equivalents of jocks regularly occupy central areas of the school—gyms, offices, front hallways, and activity spaces. The equivalents of burnouts, on the other hand, demonstrate their “just visiting” status in school by occupying peripheral areas—areas that touch on the outside such as courtyards, front steps, and loading docks. In cold weather, burnouts wear their outdoor jackets in school, whereas jocks lock their outerwear in their lockers. The lockers and the outerwear, meanwhile, have similar significance. The jocks signal their residence in the school and their institutional status with the use of lockers as a home away from home, the use of the cafeteria, and the territorial appropriation of extracurricular activity areas. Burnouts’ mistrust of the school is itself part of the ideology of rejection, and they signal their rejection of the school’s in loco parentis role by, say, not eating cafeteria food (“it’s unsafe”) and not leaving their coats in their lockers (“they aren’t secure”). And the jackets with which burnouts signal their “visitor” status frequently signal urban status as well; popular among burnouts are jackets with Detroit or auto factory logos. These jackets simultaneously invoke class and geography, and burnouts who do not wear jackets with insignia often wear the popular working-class jeans jackets over hooded sweatshirt jackets. The jocks, meanwhile, commonly wear school jackets—varsity jackets, cheerleader jackets, or just jackets with the name of the school. In general, the jocks’ institutional orientation is manifested in a clean-cut collegiate style2—designer clothes in bright and pastel colors, school team jackets and sweaters, straight-leg jeans, short hair for boys and short or feathered hair for girls, and candy-colored makeup for girls. The burnouts’ antiinstitutional orientation, on the other hand, is manifested in an urban working-class style—dark colors, dark eye makeup for girls, long hair for both boys and girls, bellbottom jeans, rock concert T-shirts, wallet chains, and studs. Students talk about schools in terms of their general character—most particularly, characterizing schools as “jock” schools, “punk” schools, and “burnout” schools. These also fit into a larger semiotic whole with such things as clothing. A Belten student, commenting on a local school with a predominantly working-class student body, characterized the school as having “bells this wide.” In this way, the sociogeographic setup has a recursivity that builds social geography into each town and into each school. The jock and burnout social categories are reified by virtue of their insertion into social geography. This opposition reflects not just local but also regional character. In some schools outside of Baltimore, for instance, the opposition between jocks and grits in the high schools echoes the larger opposition between urban and rural, northern and southern. In the Southwest, the opposition between jocks and (shit-)stompers echoes the larger opposition between townie and rancher. These material symbols blend with linguistic variation to yield a similar recursivity, as the disposition of linguistic variables within the school map onto the same variables in urban-suburban geography. The current stages of the Northern Cities Shift (Labov et al. 1972; Labov 1994) appear to be spreading outward into the suburbs from the urban periphery. The backing of (ε) to [], the backing of () to [ɔ], and the lowering and fronting of (ɔ) to [ɑ] are all more advanced in the schools closer to the urban periphery than in the more distant, suburban schools. Furthermore, the
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backing and raising of the nucleus of (ay) to [ɔy] is more advanced in the urban schools as well. (See Eckert 2000 for a more thorough discussion of these variables.) And within each school, the burnouts generally lead the jocks in the use of these variables. Figures 6.1 and 6.2 show the percentage of innovative forms of the most salient urban variables, (ay) and (uh), comparing urban and suburban schools to the north and to the west of Detroit. As these figures show, the correlations with social category generally conform to the geographic correlations. If we seek the key to social meaning in variation, the answer is not to be found in oppositions within the community (e.g., jocks-burnouts) or in oppositions among communities (e.g., urban-suburban) but in the merger of the two. It is in this way that the geographic and the social spread of linguistic change are one. Although one could say that an urban pronunciation of a vowel is associated with “those people out there,” the implication is that local speakers are imitating, or aspiring to, extralocal people or characters. This is where the difference between the study of boundaries and the study of communities is theoretically meaningful. Qing Zhang (2001) has made this point in her study of Beijing yuppies’ use of the nonmainland full-tone feature. Although some see this use as a kind of “aping” of Hong Kong speech, Zhang argues that the nature of the contact between the mainland and nonmainland dialects of Mandarin has made this tone feature a common resource. Its use does not simply refer outward to nonmainland communities but also effectively creates a category of Beijingers who span communities and, in the process, expand the relation between Beijing itself and those other communities. In other words, the use of linguistic variables does not take place over a static social landscape but effects change in that landscape.
80 70 60 50
West Urban West Suburban
40
North Urban North Suburban
30 20 10 0 Burnouts
Jocks
6.1. Backing of (uh) by Jocks and Burnouts in Urban and Suburban Communities
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“PLACE ”
80 70 60 50
West Urban West Suburban
40
North Urban North Suburban
30 20 10 0 Burnouts
Jocks
6.2. Raising of the Nucleus of (ay) by Jocks and Burnouts in Urban and Suburban Communities
4. A question of method During the two-plus years I spent in these schools, and as it became apparent that social categories in each school were simultaneously based in class and in urbansuburban geography, I was able to shift strategies somewhat. But ultimately, my research design was category-based. I went into the schools looking for the adolescent version of the social class that had been our primary metaphor for explaining sociolinguistic variation. And, indeed, I found conflicting working- and middle-class categories based, not on adult class, but on an adolescent social order; and based, not on birth, but on speakers’ own construction of their places in that social order. But I was so focused on these categories that they took over in many ways. Thinking categorically, I did not give enough thought to the ways in which these categories served as foci for ideologies and practices across and beyond the community. The correlations shown in figures 6.1 and 6.2 between urban variants and the jock-burnout categories spring not from the status of these variants as markers of category affiliation but from their indexical value (e.g., Ochs 1991) based on their urban associations. This value holds across the school population, and the same correlations that I found between jocks and burnouts can also be found across the school population—inbetweens, as well as jocks and burnouts—as a function of urban orientation. Urban cruising, for example, is a key burnout activity; it is also an activity engaged in by many in-betweens, as is smoking dope and cutting school. Also, cruising correlates with the use of urban variables across the in-between population, as well as between the jocks and the burnouts. Although my ethnographic work made this clear, my
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discovery of the categories led me to focus on category members at the expense of deepening my understanding of the structuring of diversity among the in-betweens. Moreover, it kept my gaze on the school rather than on the borderlands inhabited by the burnouts and other people who do not base their lives in school. The methodological argument that I have made here—that studies of variation should examine the relation between the local and the extralocal—originated in a view of both as given rather than as emerging in practice. This chapter is intended as a contribution to method, which leads me to think not only about how we do our research but also about how we deal with the holes and shortcomings once it’s done. I believe that it would benefit us all if we savored and discussed our shortcomings as much (or almost as much) as we savor and trumpet our successes. It is in this spirit that I say that the most important part of the research I’ve reported on here is not what I did but what I learned to do next time. Notes 1. The burnouts are overwhelmingly vocational students, and feel that the school neglects its vocational sector, and that they are not receiving training that will maximally help them in the job market. 2. These styles are the ones that were current in the early eighties, when the fieldwork for this study was carried out.
References Blom, Jan-Petter, and John Gumperz. 1972. Social Meaning in Linguistic Structure: Codeswitching in Norway. In Directions in Sociolinguistics, ed. John Gumperz and Dell Hymes. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Cheshire, Jenny. 1982. Variation in an English Dialect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press. ———. 1990. The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in Variation. Language Variation and Change 1:245–267. ———. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell. Gal, Susan. 1979. Language Shift: Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria. New York: Academic Press. Gal, Susan, and Judith T. Irvine. 1995. The Boundaries of Languages and Disciplines: How Ideologies Construct difference. Social Research 62:967–1001. Holmquist, Jonathan. 1985. Social Correlates of a Linguistic Variable: A Study in a Spanish Village. Language in Society 14:191–203. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. ———. 1972a. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1972b. The Linguistic Consequences of Being a Lame. In Language in the Inner City, ed. William Labov. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1972c. The Social Motivation of a Sound Change. In Sociolinguistic Patterns, ed. William Labov, 1–42. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1991. The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change. Language Variation and Change 2:205–251.
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———. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Labov, William, Malcah Yaeger, and Richard Steiner. 1972. A Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey. Macaulay, Ronald K. S. 1977. Language, Social Class and Education: A Glasgow Study. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Milroy, James, and Lesley Milroy. 1985. Linguistic Change, Social Network and Speaker Innovation. Journal of Linguistics 21:339–384. Milroy, Lesley. 1980. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell. Ochs, Elinor. 1991. Indexing Gender. In Rethinking Context, ed. A. Duranti and C. Goodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1988. Linguistic Utopias. In The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe, 48–66. New York: Methuen. Rickford, John. 1986. Concord and Contrast in the Characterization of the Speech Community. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation, ed. Ralph W. Fasold. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Trudgill, P. 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolfram, Walt. 1969. A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech. Washington D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. Zhang, Qing. 2001. Changing Economics, Changing Markets: A Sociolinguistic Study of Chinese Yuppies. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, Stanford, Cal.
PART III
INFLUENCES ON ADULT SPEECH
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7 GILLIAN SANKOFF
Adolescents, Young Adults, and the Critical Period: Two Case Studies from “Seven Up”
1. Apparent time: The default interpretation for good reason The concept of “apparent time” developed in the early 1960s, was a crucial interpretive element in the study of language change in progress. As a means of slicing through the present to the past by studying the contemporary speech of people whose linguistic systems had been established in time periods increasingly removed from the present, the apparent time interpretation offered a window to a linguistic past that was especially valuable in the absence of records of previous states of a language. Of course, sociolinguists realized that age distributions might also reflect age grading. Labov (1994) laid out the possibilities in an eight-cell table, replicated here as table 7.1. In an age-grading interpretation (pattern 2), linguistic differences among speakers according to age might not be due to ongoing language change that led to subsequent generations’ acquisition of differences that then remained stable with those speakers throughout their lives (pattern 3). Rather, speakers might be changing various aspects of their language over the course of their lives. In making the choice between apparent time and age grading in the absence of reliable temporal benchmarks, sociolinguists displayed appropriate caution. Studies in which an apparent time interpretation was invoked usually focused on those aspects of language least subject to conscious manipulation or metalinguistic attention on the part of speakers—phonology rather than lexicon, for example. Researchers were also careful to point out that there might be an effect of age grading combined with change in progress. Within the domain of phonology, and with all these caveats, most studies tended to take apparent time as the default interpretation. 121
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7.1. Patterns of Change in the Individual and the Community Pattern
Individual
Community
1. Stability 2. Age grading 3. Generational change [= “apparent time” interpretation] 4. Communal change
stable unstable stable
stable stable unstable
unstable
unstable
Source: Labov (1994:83).
2. Glasgow glottal stop: Is age grading reasonable? Macaulay’s (1977) report on the use of glottal stop as a variant of the /t/ phoneme in Glasgow was a clear and well-documented case in which the apparent time interpretation appeared not to be the reasonable default. Macaulay’s data were drawn from an elegantly constructed, balanced sample in which children 10 and 15 years old from four social class backgrounds were selected from Glasgow schools that represented the different social class groups. These groups, labeled 1 for upper class; 2a and 2b for upper- and lower-middle class, respectively; and 3 for working class, were each represented by 12 speakers (2 male and 2 female speakers in each age bracket). The data are displayed in figures 7.1 and 7.2. We observe great stability in groups 2b and 3, in that for both male and female speakers, high levels of glottal stop usage are reported for all three age groups. At the other end of the social scale, we see that upper-class adults are preponderant users of the [t] variant, with relatively low use of the glottal variant; that their 15-year-old children use more glottal stop; and that their youngest children, the 10-year-olds, use even more glottal stop. In an apparent time interpretation, this would mean that glottal stop is a change in progress—that the adult upper-class speakers have gone through life with the low level of glottal stop use they now display and that their children will continue to use high levels of glottal stop as they age. The differential behavior of boys and girls in group 2a, however, leads to a different conclusion, especially in light of the fact that [t] is the standard variant. We see in figure 7.1 that the boys of all but the highest class show a slight increase in the nonstandard variant between ages 10 and 15 but that a sharp decline is then registered for adult men, holders of white-collar jobs where the standard language is valued. This pattern, I believe, is best interpreted as a withdrawal from the general use of glottal stop in the vernacular on the part of middle-class speakers as they get ready to enter the labor force. Among female speakers, the pattern is even stronger in that adolescent girls from both groups 1 and 2a begin to decrease their use of glottal stop, continuing to do so as adult women, who, in these two groups, end up with lower levels than the men. No significant sex differences are registered among members of groups 2b and 3. Though the age-grading interpretation of glottal stop in Glasgow appears the more likely on social grounds, the plausibility of such an interpretation is very difficult to gauge in the absence of independent evidence of what speakers can and cannot and
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100% 90% 80% 70%
% glottal
60% 50% 40% 30%
1 2a
20%
2b 3
10% 0% 10
15
Adult
Age Groups
7.1. Percentages of Glottal Stop Variants of /t/ for Male Glasgow Speakers, Ages 10 and 15 and Adults (Fathers of the Boys), According to Four Social Classes (data in Macaulay 1977: 174–176) 100% 90% 80% 70%
% glottal
60% 50% 40% 30%
1 2a
20%
2b 3
10% 0% 10
15
Adult
Age Groups
7.2. Percentages of Glottal Stop Variants of /t/ for Female Glasgow Speakers, Ages 10 and 15 and Adults (Mothers of the Girls), According to Four Social Classes (from Macaulay 1977: 174–176)
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do and do not change during the course of their lives. Lenneberg’s (1957) argument that there is a maturationally based, critical period for language acquisition has been convincingly supported by research over the past 40 years, and there seems no viable alternative to the finding that people form their basic linguistic systems as children, making only minor alterations later in life. Studies focusing on adolescents, however, suggest that linguistic alterations carried out at this stage in people’s lives may be of considerable sociolinguistic importance (Labov 1976; Kerswill 1996; Eckert 1999). It is clear that longitudinal sociolinguistic research, including both panel and trend comparisons, is needed to clarify the situation.
3. A pilot panel study of phonological change This chapter is intended as a contribution to the general project of discovering the nature of speakers’ abilities and propensities to modify their linguistic systems after early childhood. It analyzes panel data taken from a unique video document in the public domain: the film series known as “Seven Up.”1 British filmmaker Michael Apted filmed interviews with 14 children who were 7 years old in 1963. He has gone on to film a subset of this group every seven years since that time, the latest including a majority of the members of the original group at age 42 in 1999. For this chapter, I carried out a study of phonological variation in the speech of two of the boys, between the ages of 7 and 35, examined as a longitudinal study in order to address the question of the extent to which people can and do effect changes in their phonological systems in adolescence and young adulthood. 3.1. The speakers In the initial film devoted to the 7-year-olds, there were two children from the North of England: Neil, a lower-middle-class boy growing up in a suburb of Liverpool, and Nicholas, a farmer’s son from Yorkshire whose social-class background is not entirely clear. What is stressed in the case of Nicholas is his rural origins: at the age of 7 he was the only child of his age in his village, and he was attending a one-room village school 4 miles from his home. It seems Nicholas was firmly anchored in his local dialect throughout childhood and adolescence. At 14, he was at a Yorkshire boarding school and tells us that although he’s been to Leeds (a northern city) “a couple of times,” he has never been to Manchester and to London only once, when at the age of 7 he and the other children in the documentary were brought to London to spend the day at the zoo and at a party and playground. Both Nicholas and Neil were geographically and socially confined to the environment of their families and locality until the age of 16. In terms of their subsequent linguistic influences, both experienced geographic and social mobility. Nicholas was upwardly mobile, studying physics at Oxford, where at age 17 he met his future wife, a southern dialect speaker. At age 26, with doctoral degrees in physics in hand, they emigrated to the United States, where Nicholas took an assistant professorship in a major midwestern university. Neil, on the other hand, experienced downward mobility. Disappointed not to have been accepted at Cam-
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bridge, he attended Aberdeen University for only one semester. He then held a series of odd jobs, working in construction in London at age 21, but was mainly unemployed and living for periods of months in various parts of the country, including Wales and the Scottish Highlands, where he was living when filmed at age 28. At 35 he was still unemployed, but he had a stable residence in a Council flat in the Shetlands, where he was somewhat integrated into the local community. 3.2. Broad A The first feature I investigated—the broad A—is one of potentially great interest because of the clear difference between the native dialects of the two speakers, on the one hand, and the southern-dialect standard on the other hand. Though northern and southern dialects share a lengthened, low back [ɑ:] before syllable-final /r/, as in car or smart, as well as with following /l/, as in half or palm, they differ in that for many other words, nonsouthern dialects have a fronter, shorter /a/, whereas southern dialects have broad A. Thus, for northern speakers, /a/ in path and grass sounds like /a/ in pat or grab; southern speakers pronounce path and grass to sound like the /a/ in car.2 The broad-A word class is to some extent defined phonetically, in that /a/ is often broad after fricatives and nasals. However, there are many exceptions to this rule. For example, plant has broad A, but romance is short; ant is short, but aunt is broad (Trudgill 1986:18). Unfortunately, the number of instances of potential broad A in the speech segments available on the films was very small: a total of 19 tokens for Neil and 14 for Nicholas, across all time periods. These are listed in table 7.2. With very low token numbers, especially for ages 7 and 14, it is not really possible to say for certain that neither boy used broad A as a child or adolescent. It would, however, have been very surprising to find this feature at a time when the children were completely immersed
7.2. All Tokens of Words in the Broad-A Class (for Southern British Speech) Occurring in the Samples from Neil and Nicholas, Ages 7–35 Age 7 14 21 28 35
a
Neil (Liverpool) grass, grass ——— past last, last, last path, chance, after chances (.5), last, past after, after, after, answer, answer lasta
Nicholas (Yorkshire) last, last, answer, answer answer, asking answer, answer answer, after chance, chance, chance (.5) chances
= token in speech directed to local community members, not to the interviewer. Bold type = pronunciation with broad A, otherwise pronounced with short A (1 token of chance for each speaker seemed intermediate in pronunciation and was rated 0.5).
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in their local dialect areas. Indeed, the four tokens for Nicholas show only the [a] vowel in these words. And Neil’s two tokens—both of the word grass [gras]—at the age of 7 are spontaneous and un-self-conscious uses of the northern pronunciation. What about the postadolescent period? Have Neil and Nicholas adopted the southern broad-A pattern in the 19 years since they left their northern dialect homes at age 16? In the case of Nicholas, it looks as if there has been little change in his childhood pattern. Seven of the eight candidate broad-A words that we have in his speech since the age of 21 are solid short-A pronunciations. From age 16 to 26, Nicholas was exposed to southern dialect speech on a daily basis at Oxford. Nicholas’s wife, a southern dialect speaker, tells us that she met him at Oxford when Nicholas was 17, and by the time Nicholas was recorded at age 28, they had been married for four years. It is not certain what should be made of the one token of an intermediate pronunciation— one of the three instances of the word chance recorded at age 28. Continuing to live in the United States through age 35, Nicholas would not be hearing broad A regularly from the Americans around him, although he would still have been hearing his wife’s use of the broad-A word class. Whether we should attribute Nicholas’s one short token at age 35 to conservatism of his northern system or to the reinforcement of living in the United States is not immediately evident—perhaps there is some influence from both. As for Neil, we unfortunately have no adolescent data on southern broad-A class words. At 21, on the film clip recorded in London, Neil uses one instance of broad A in the word past [pɑ:st]. At 28, two of the six tokens receive a broad-A pronunciation. But it is at age 35 that we see a real shift, a lengthy interview with Neil being the result of the great interest viewers of the film had in him. Of the eight potential broad-A tokens Neil uses in being interviewed, only one instance of chances has an intermediate pronunciation, all the others being broad. The one clear instance of shortA pronunciation is in excited speech delivered to a fellow performer in the Christmas pantomime of the village where he is living in the Shetlands. We see Neil, in costume, coming off the stage, laughing, and saying in what seems a very spontaneous, unmonitored remark: (1)
Last year my moustache3 fell off! [Neil, age 35, Shetlands]
Have Neil’s travels resulted in his gradual elimination of childhood dialect features from the interview speech we must characterize (despite its emotional intensity and spontaneity) as “careful,” whereas these features may emerge in animated interaction with community members?4 Or are the northern features still characteristic of his current vernacular, with the external southern norm emerging only in interviews in which he is monitoring his speech to sound more standard? In terms of motivation, there are a number of questions we might ask: are Neil and Nicholas struggling to become, or sound like, broad-A speakers? Southern? Cultured? Accommodative of southern interlocutors? I believe that if they were trying to sound like broad-A speakers, they would probably have more [ɑ:] tokens than they do, as well as some hypercorrection. It is important to note that no instances of hypercorrect broad A were noted for either speaker. Perhaps what we are seeing is instead a transfer of particular lexical items to a word class that already has some phonetic instantiations in speakers’ grammars, in words like palm and car. These
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alternatives will be reconsidered below, after we have had an opportunity to examine a second phonological variable. 3.3. Short U Short U presents a case very different from that of broad A, in that the phonetic value of the southern variant is not elsewhere instantiated in northern dialect systems. In the history of the southern British dialects, there was a phonemic split in the short-u class, one reflex retaining a relatively high quality (PUT), the other moving off towards some kind of non-high quality (CUT). . . . Of the u: words which have undergone shortening, those affected by [an earlier shortening process] joined ME short-u items in lowering (e.g. blood, love). On the other hand, those subject to later shortening apparently arrived too late in the u class to participate in lowering (e.g. good, foot). (Harris 1996:12–13)5
Shortening seems to have begun in the sixteenth century and lowering in the seventeenth (Harris 1996:15). In southern British English, the rounded short-U words in table 7.3 are among the very few in common usage that have not joined the enormous wedge class.6 All but cushion, sugar, and cuckoo begin with labials, a phonetic gesture associated with rounding, but initial labials did not prevent many other words from lowering and unrounding: pus, bus, muss, but, much, pub, putt, mutt, puff, and many others. Following /l/ appeared favorable to retaining rounding in pull, bull, and full but was overridden in words like mull, dull, hull, gull, and so on. In northern dialects, this unrounding never happened. All short-U words remained in high back-rounded position, as members of one, unitary word class, and the wedge phoneme is not part of the system. This class was joined by words from the original ME o: class—both blood and good. Whereas buck and book form a minimal pair in southern English, they are generally homophonous with the book pronunciation in northern dialects.7 The isogloss is shown on the map in figure 7.3.
7.3. The Few Common Words Retaining [] in Modern Southern (Standard) English, Compared with Some of the Many Wedge-class Words Words in Which [] Was Unrounded in Southern British and All Colonial Dialects but, pub, putt, mutt, gut, puff, muff, cuff, hut, bud, shut, cut, gut . . . mull, dull, hull, gull, lull, null, cull, sully . . . pus, bus, muss, fuss . . . brush, hush, lush, crush, thrush, much, such, gush, rush, crush . . . puck, buck, suck, tuck, luck, shuck, truck . . . cup, pup, sup(per) . . . gun, fun, sun, pun, bun, run . . . sum, rum, dumb, crumb . . . trump, dump, rump, lump . . .
Words in Which [] Stayed Rounded in Southern British and All Colonial Dialects put, pudding pull, bull, full puss push, bush, bushel, cushion sugar, cuckoo
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INFLUENCES ON ADULT SPEECH
SED: // = x / / = ◆
7.3. Map of the Short-U Isogloss (from Trudgill 1974:242)
For the northern dialect speaker, then, acquiring the []~[] distinction is psycholinguistically very different from acquiring broad A, because it involves creating a new category—in effect, “unmerging” (though historically, this is, of course, putting it backward) the short-U words. Labov (1994: chap. 11) documents how rare splits are, as opposed to mergers, and in the historically well-supported generalization that mergers spread at the expense of splits, amplifies the principle he attributes to Paul Garde: a merger cannot be reversed by mechanical means. It is unlikely, however, that the “merged” dialect speaker, faced with the challenge of learning or accommodating to a “split” dialect, envisions the process as one of unmerging a category. Rather, I believe that the northern British speaker might conceive of the process as learning to pronounce this new sound, [], learning to say cup as [kp]. Another possibility is that speakers are oriented to avoiding the [] sound, a process that would logically appear to lead to the hypercorrection we have not observed with these speakers.
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At the same time that individual speakers may, because of contacts with southern dialects, be influenced to alter their pronunciation, it appears that the southern system has also been spreading northward. According to Trudgill (1986:59), “the southern six-vowel system is gradually spreading northwards, and in this transition zone . . . some speakers have transferred or are transferring particular words from the [U] pronunciation to the [] pronunciation.” He sets out the scale in (2), in which the leftmost word, but, is the least likely for an intermediate dialect speaker to pronounce as [], and the rightmost word, come, is one of the earliest to be altered. It would be interesting to see whether individual speakers obey this same scale, but unfortunately, with the exception of one token of come and two of up, the other words listed by Trudgill do not occur in the later speech samples in our data. (2)
but
<
up
<
cup
<
butter
<
love
< come
In the only sociolinguistically detailed research on this phenomenon to date, Britain (1997, 2000) studied the ongoing change in the pronunciation of Short-U among adolescents in the Fens, an area considerably to the southeast of the regions native to Nicholas and Neil. Britain (2002:629–630) tabulates the relative proportion of use of five phonetic variants between the extremes of [] and [] for individual speakers. He analyzes the process as one of progressive convergence on an intermediate form, []. As opposed to the “mixed dialect” in the transition zone as described by Trudgill (1986) above, the situation in the Fens would be one characterized by Chambers and Trudgill (1980) as a “fudged dialect.” Both from localities far north of the isogloss, neither Neil nor Nicholas would, in terms of their geographical origins, have grown up in either a “mixed” or a “fudged” dialect zone; however, in terms of their trajectories after leaving home, we may be able to see whether they as individuals adopt either of these patterns. Before returning to the question of whether a person like Nicholas or Neil would have any interest in acquiring the []~[] distinction, I will review how they pronounce Short-U from age 7 to 35. A sample from Nicholas’s speech at 7 years old is given in (3), with the [] vowels that we would expect of a Yorkshire speaker in the words come and country. In (4), 14-year-old Nicholas again uses three (of three possible) fully rounded tokens: (3)
They’d like to come [km] out for a holiday in the country [kntri:] [Nicholas, age 7, Yorkshire]
(4)
a. b. c. d.
Oh I’ve been to Leeds a couple [kpl] of times and— haven’t been to Manchester. And, I went to London [lndn] that— with the other []—wh—when you did the first program but that’s the only time I’ve been. [Nicholas, age 14, Yorkshire]
Table 7.4 shows the entire short-U data set for Nicholas for the five periods.8 Through age 21, he had 16 of 16 tokens as fully rounded—apparently a solid Yorkshire speaker. However, we see some drastic changes in his sample at 28 years of
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INFLUENCES ON ADULT SPEECH
7.4. Rounded and Unrounded Short-U for Nicholas, All Data Age
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
Total
7 14 21 28 35 Total
6 8 2 4 4 24
— — — 17 16 33
— — — 13 14 27
6 8 2 34 34 84
age. First, the tokens are no longer so readily characterizable in a binary fashion. Because many of them are phonetically intermediate, I classified the tokens according to a three-point scale. At age 28, only 4, or 12% of his 34 tokens, are phonetically similar to his earlier, fully rounded pronunciation, and the situation has remained stable at age 35. Nor are individual words in Nicholas’s data when 28 years old pronounced consistently as far as short-U is concerned. In (5), we see two instances of the word much, the first fully unrounded, the second fully rounded: (5)
I didn’t achieve very much [mtʃ] but, I’m not worrying about it very much [mtʃ]. [Nicholas, age 28, after two years in Wisconsin]
What can we infer about what has gone on linguistically? Has Nicholas adopted a new phonetic target across the board for his entire short high back rounded word class?9 If so, this new target should be used not only for the words that are unrounded for southern dialect speakers but also for the other words in the larger, northern high back rounded class: book, look, put, and so on. A classic strategy for a putative unmerger might be to try to blur the distinction, adopting an intermediate form, as we have in fact observed in Nicholas’s speech at 28.10 In other words, if it were only a matter of phonetically modifying [], withdrawing from its extreme peripherality and rounding to make it more centralized, we would expect hypercorrection.11 But whereas the word country, clearly [] in his two segments at 7 years of age, is altogether lower and unrounded in a segment at 28, he retains [] firmly in place in a word like put or look [as in the segment presented in (6b)]. It looks as if Nicholas has developed two word classes, the old [] class, retaining only those few words that southern dialects retain as [], and which he invariably pronounces in that way, and a new [] class, containing the many short-U words that southern dialects historically unrounded. The latter he pronounces variably but with a strong tendency toward some degree of unrounding, as we observed in the data from ages 28 and 35 in table 7.4. (6)
a. If one is wandering down a country [] lane, b. there’s an awful lot to look [] at in the world around you. [Nicholas age 28, after two years in Wisconsin]
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A further question is whether we have any evidence of how Nicholas is creating this new class: word-by-word learning or blanket but variable unrounding across the vocabulary? Of Nicholas’s 84 short-U tokens that appeared in table 7.4, 68 were in words that occurred more than once in the corpus. These are displayed in table 7.5, in which each token is registered according to the age at which Nicholas said it. Looking across the table from left to right, we see the high concentration of earlierpronounced tokens in the leftmost, rounded column, and we note again that no unrounding occurs before age 28 (there is unfortunately, very little data at age 21. But if we look word by word, we see that two words at age 28—much and up—occur in both the “somewhat rounded” and “unrounded” columns, and that some occurs in all three. It seems that variability is the order of the day. A last point before leaving Nicholas: the question I am posing is whether he has acquired a binary distinction, and yet I have arrayed the data in three columns. If we consider the intermediate column to still be rounded, we would conclude that although Nicholas has made valiant and very successful efforts to modify his phonetics, he is still a long way from making the categorical distinction. Even more challenging than the case of Nicholas is that of Neil, whose short-U data is given in table 7.6. What is surprising about Neil is the only very slight amount of rounding he shows at age 7, despite having grown up far north of the isogloss we see in Trudgill’s (1986) map. Were his parents from another dialect area? This we do not know, but he certainly has the northern short-A pattern firmly in place, as well as the distinctive Scouse intonation. Whatever the case, the only period in Neil’s life when he shows the fully rounded short-U pattern is in adolescence, when three of his—tantalizingly few—tokens are clearly []: three out of four, with the fourth classified in the intermediate category. At 21, when he had been working sporadically as a laborer in London for several years, all his short-U tokens were fully 7.5. Nicholas, All Short-U Words Occurring 2+ Times in Corpus. Each Entry Indicates Nicholas’s Age for That Token [ ]
Words brother but (be-)come country couple done money much other run(ning) some(-) stubbornness sun up(-) wonderful Total
[]
7
[ ] 35, 35
28, 35 35 28
7, 14 7, 7 14 21
35
14, 35 14
28, 28, 35, 35 28
7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 35*, 35*
28, 28, 28, 28, 35, 35, 35, 35, 35 35
7, 7, 14
28, 35
20
22
28 28 35, 35 28, 28, 28, 28,
28, 28, 28 28, 28, 35 28 35
28, 35 35 28, 28 28 28, 28 26
Total 3 2 4 4 3 2 4 10 4 2 19 2 2 6 2 68
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7.6. Rounded, Intermediate and Unrounded Short-U for Neil, All Data Age
[ ]
[]
[ ]
Total
7 14 21 28 35 Total
1 3 — 1 — 5
4 1 — 9 2 16
7 — 16 54 19 95
12 4 16 64 21 117
unrounded and I could detect no trace of his Liverpool intonation, though he retained most of his short-A, as noted above. His extensive interviews at age 28 in Scotland and age 35 in the Shetlands show a vast majority of unrounded tokens, with only about 10% to 15% of the tokens being slightly rounded. Neil’s life as a wanderer, over the many years from when he dropped out of Aberdeen University at age 16 until his mid-30s, exposed him to a wide variety of dialects and accents. He mentions jobs in construction and as a cook at a youth hostel, as well as long periods of being unemployed and living on public assistance. He retains a very educated and articulate style of speech but seems to have lost the northern short-U pattern (see table 7.7). Tokens occurring in the “partially rounded” column seem very slightly rounded, perhaps conditioned by adjacent segments like the labials in the words subject, suburb, and some of the –body words. Neil has lived his life from perhaps the age of 13 or 14 as pretty much of a loner. At 14 he mentions difficulty in adjusting to the comprehensive school he had been attending for two years at that time. And though his speech pattern at the age of 14 sounds very local, he was clearly not anchored socially. In later interviews, he discusses in a forceful and convincing way the alienation he felt growing up in suburbia: (7)
What my background has given me,—is, um, a sense of just being part, of, um, a very impersonal society. The suburbs are—the suburbs force this kind of feeling upon somebody . . . if I was living in a bedsit in suburbia, I’d be so miserable I’d feel like cutting my throat. [Neil, age 28, Scotland]
Perhaps Neil’s abandonment of the short-U pattern, tied to the locus of his painful adolescence, is part of his rejection of an entire lifestyle. If we compare the behavior of Nicholas and Neil over the 28-year span with respect to short-U, we see two quite different patterns. As adults, both of these speakers appear to virtually abandon their earlier phonetics of short-U, and both appear, amazingly, to have correctly identified the short-U class in that neither uses any hypercorrection. But there the similarities end. As shown in figure 7.4, Nicholas displays a categorically rounded form through age 21, but by at age 28 there is a sharp departure from this pattern. Intermediate and unrounded tokens dominate at both later ages, with a slight preference for the intermediate form, reminiscent of the Fenland adolescents studied by Britain (1997, 2000).
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7.7. Neil, All Short-U Words Occurring 2+ Times in Corpus. Each Entry Indicates Neil’s Age for That Token []
Words come enough funny London love money month much nothing other pub some somebody something some(where/times) subjects suburb(s) unup wonder(-) Total
[] 28
14 14
7 28
35 35 7, 7
7, 14, 14
28 7 28, 35
4
8
[] 7, 7, 7, 28, 28, 28 21 28, 28, 28 21, 21 21, 21 28, 28, 28, 35 21, 21 28, 35, 35 28, 28, 35 21, 28, 28, 35 28, 28, 28 28, 28, 28, 35 21, 21, 28, 28, 28, 21, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28 28, 28 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 35 28, 28, 28 82
Total
28, 35, 35, 35 28, 28, 35, 35, 35, 35 28
28, 28, 28
6 2 3 2 2 4 2 5 3 4 3 5 10 11 8 2 3 9 6 3 94
1.00 0.90 0.80 0.70 0.60 rounded 0.50
intermediate unrounded
0.40 0.30 0.20 0.10 0.00 age 7
age 14
age 21
age 28
age 35
7.4. Percentage of Nicholas’s Short-U Tokens Pronounced as Rounded, Intermediate, and Unrounded, age 7–35
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In contrast, Neil shows erratic behavior in childhood, with an adolescent spike in rounded pronunciations at age 14 (see figure 7.5). From age 21 on, Neil has an almost categorical use of a completely unrounded pronunciation.
4. Conclusions: Broader implications of the comparison of broad A and short U We are now in a position to compare the fate of the two northern phonemes, and we have seen that they fare very differently, both from each other and in the speech of the two individuals we have been following. Before summarizing these results, let us consider Trudgill’s (1986:18) presentation of the situation, which he presents on the basis of his own casual observations, noting that at the time of writing the situation had “not yet been studied in any systematic way.” His view of the British situation involves a consideration of the same two vowels we have been dealing with, beginning with a presentation of how speakers of the two dialects stereotype each other: In England, “Northerners” are stereotyped by “Southerners” as saying butter etc. as /btə/ rather than /btə/, and as saying /dns/ rather than /da:ns/. “Southerners,” on the other hand, are stereotyped by “Northerners” as saying /da:ns/ rather than /dns/, while the pronunciation of butter appears to be of relatively little significance and is rarely commented on. It is therefore interesting to note that Northerners moving to the South and accommodating to Southern speech usually modify butter /btə/ to /btə/ or at least to /bətə/, but much less rarely modify /dns/ to /da:ns/.” (Trudgill 1986:18)
1.00 0.90 0.80 0.70 0.60 rounded 0.50
intermediate unrounded
0.40 0.30 0.20 0.10 0.00 age 7
age 14
age 21
age 28
age 35
7.5. Percentage of Neil’s Short-U Tokens Pronounced as Rounded, Intermediate and Unrounded, age 7–35
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Taken as a prediction of what Neil and Nicholas would do, Trudgill’s characterization is remarkably accurate in the case of Nicholas. Nicholas modifies short A little if at all, but he has massively altered his phonetics in the pronunciation of short U. Trudgill interprets this differential as a consequence of the differential social meaning of the two vowels as explained in the passage above: short A is of social (regional) significance to northerners but not short-U. Trudgill (1986:18) thus goes on to say, “Many Northerners, it seems, would rather drop dead than say /da:ns/, the stereotype that this is a Southern form is again too strong” (emphasis in the original). In other words, short-U, not being salient to northern speakers, is available for phonetic adjustment at no social cost. Since both Neil and Nicholas have largely abandoned their northern short-U phonetics, Trudgill’s (1986) prediction seems right on target in this case. Neil has made a more radical change; Nicholas, a more modest adjustment in his predominant use of an intermediate form; but both have indeed changed. We are left with the mystery of how these speakers have succeeded in unmerging their previous merged short-U category. It is one thing to alter a phonetic target; it is a linguistically and cognitively more complex operation to differentially alter different lexical items originally merged in one category. A wordby-word learning process such as that suggested by Trudgill would seem the most likely path, yet we do not have evidence of this in the data we have been able to examine here. Indeed, some variation has been noted among individual tokens of the same word. As far as Trudgill’s (1986) prediction for short-A is concerned, Nicholas, but not Neil, may qualify as one of the “many Northerners” who would drop dead rather than say /da:ns/. Neil, however, seems to have adopted this pattern since he went to London at about age 17. In the case of short A, it would be difficult to imagine the learning process involved in acquiring the new pattern as anything other than the transfer of individual lexical items into the class in which a northern speaker would already have palm, can’t, father, and so on. Once again, no hypercorrections were found in Neil’s speech for short-A.12 One could claim that because Neil is clearly not at pains to affirm his northern identity, his identity is not invested in this northern feature and thus giving it up has had no significance for him. And yet, Neil’s one token of short-A at age 35 occurs in his excited and spontaneous reaction to a near mishap on stage, speaking to a local Shetlander [example (1) above]. In the case of Nicholas, an emotional factor appears with short-U. By age 35, Nicholas has largely abandoned his original short-U phonetics, but we suddenly hear two fully rounded short-U tokens when he is asked how he felt when, as a child, he came to understand that his baby brother was deaf. With a choked voice and tears in his eyes, Nicholas says, (8)
I just sort of desperately was hoping it wouldn’t be true, you know that somehow [] you know, some [] sort of miracle would happen.
I do not think that the occurrence of the northern forms for both Neil and Nicholas at these particular emotional moments is an accident, and yet I believe that we are far from fully understanding the three issues I think are involved:
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1. to what extent different phonological or phonetic features carry differential social meaning; 2. the degree to which speakers are conscious of such phonetic variation; and 3. the extent to which speakers can control this kind of variation in their speech production. One issue, however, seems to be resolved by the speech production of Nicholas and Neil over this 28-year-span of their lives, and that is the question posed at the beginning of this chapter in connection with the glottal stop in Glasgow: how plausible is it that speakers might alter their phonetics over the course of their lives? And secondarily, what implications can we draw in terms of age grading versus apparent time interpretations of synchronic distributions? It is clear that these two speakers have made some significant phonetic, and possibly phonemic, alterations to their speech after adolescence. Such data confirm the plausibility of age grading as a viable interpretation but tell us little about the probability that such an interpretation would be the correct one in any particular case. Both Nicholas and Neil have had unusual personal histories, and the fact that they have made significant alterations to the linguistic systems of their childhood and early adolescent days is an important psycholinguistic observation on the possibilities and the limits of individual malleability. But the social fact is that most people do not have such unique personal histories. The individual achievements of Neil and Nicholas are the products of their special social histories, and they are, in spite of their unique personalities, recognizable social types. Neil and Nicholas represent remarkable trajectories of individual linguistic enterprise, and they remind us that our generalizations about the speech community are not intended to set limits on what any individual can do in the way of language learning. Even in considering the phonetic changes they have made, we must remember that neither has somehow made himself over linguistically, so that he would in any circumstances be taken as a speaker of a different dialect. We must also remember that these two men represent exceptional individuals that can only be seen as exceptional against a backdrop of the stable social fact that most individuals do not alter their phonetic systems over their lifetimes. Brink and Lund (1975, 1979) show remarkable stability among the Danish speakers they investigated over many decades, and Sankoff et al. (2002) also show that change is the exception rather than the rule in a 24-year panel study of a cohort of Montreal French speakers. What are the implications of the present findings for the apparent time interpretation of age-graded data? In the 35 years since quantitative methodology was developed for the study of language change in progress, the few longitudinal studies have all shown a combination of age grading and real-time effects. Labov (1994) reviews four real-time replications of earlier work: Hermann’s restudy of Gauchat’s research in Charmey, Switzerland; Fowler’s replication of Labov’s department store study in New York City; and new work by Cedergren and Trudgill on Panama City and Norwich, respectively. In all cases, results showed real-time change in the community on a majority of the variables that had been studied initially, but they also showed some changes that looked as if individuals were modifying some of their
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phonological patterns as they grew older, that is, age grading. My own assessment is that apparent time, as well as the critical period for language acquisition, are both hypotheses well grounded in a substantial body of research. In both cases, they can guide longitudinal research, designed to refine and deepen our understanding of exactly how language change and variation plays out over the life course of individuals and of speech communities.
Notes Many thanks to Charles Boberg, David Britain, Jack Chambers, Bill Labov, and Peter Trudgill for very helpful advice at several stages in the work reported in this chapter. 1. Michael Apted’s remarkable and unique documentary, “Seven Up,” being in the public domain, is available to readers who would like to listen for themselves to the examples cited in this chapter. Though for reasons of length it was not possible to include my actual coding of the data as an appendix, I would be glad to furnish this document to interested readers (
[email protected]). 2. The actual phonetics of broad A may vary according to region. David Britain (personal communication) notes that the [ɑ:] form is only “truly back” in RP, and in London and surrounding counties, whereas “many southern dialects have a much fronter [a:] as the dominant one.” There is, however, no doubt about the basic southern pattern that involves broad A as a separate phoneme, whatever the variation in its phonetic instantiation. 3. Neil here uses a short-A pronunciation of moustache. Though Jespersen (1949) cites only the broad-A pronunciation for this word, both Peter Trudgill and David Britain noted (in personal communications, for which I am very grateful) that moustache is now variable for southern speakers. Thus it does not constitute a token that can be used as part of the pool of southern broad-A words in measuring the degree to which Neil has shifted. Excluding moustache gives Neil at 35 a “broadness” score of 7.5/9 (or .83) rather than the 8.5/10 (or .85) that he would have scored if moustache had been included in the data base. 4. Trudgill (personal communication) notes that in the Shetlands, “Pam and palm, lagger and lager etc. are pronounced the same.” Thus while the Shetlands does not share the northern pattern with respect to short-A versus broad-A words, it certainly does not have the southern broad-A category and thus does not constitute a milieu in which any recent adoption by Neil of southern broad A could be reinforced. 5. Harris (1996) notes that this picture is somewhat oversimplified, but it is adequate for our purposes of characterizing the major differences between northern (Harris’s Type I) and southern (Type II) dialects. 6. According to Harris (1996:13), wedge today “is typical of most North American English but is now recessive in southern English. The vowel tends to be nearer low central ɐ in Standard English English . . . with even fronter reflexes being found in vernacular southern English.” And Macaulay (1988) notes that RP much tends to be homophonous with match, an observation with which I concur on the basis of listening to the upper-class southern speakers in Apted’s films. 7. There are, however, some northern dialects in which a lengthened [u:] pronunciation is used in book, look, cook, hook, and so on, and thus these words are not homophonous with buck, luck, and so on (David Britain, personal communication). 8. I transcribed all of the speech from both speakers from the film, then selected the short-U tokens, going back to code them (on two widely separated occasions) for the degree of rounding. In selecting tokens, I omitted any that occurred in fully unstressed syllables since reduction to shwa in unstressed syllables made moot any assessment of vowel quality. Thus,
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prefixes like un- or function words like but were not included unless they were pronounced with some degree of stress. 9. According to Wells (1982:352), intermediate forms are also typical of “near RP Northern.” Although there may have been some speakers of this variety at the northern prep school Nicholas was attending as a boarder at age 14, there is no trace of intermediate forms in his own speech at this age. I therefore conclude that the intermediate forms in his speech at 21 and 28 years of age are a result of his exposure to southern dialects as of age 16. 10. Some Anglophone L2 speakers of French I have observed in Montreal pronounce the vowel of both le and la in such a way as to blur the vowel quality distinction, a solution they may find handy when not quite certain which gender to assign. 11. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I had intimate and regular contact with my maternal grandmother, Margery Gill, an unreconstructed northern dialect speaker who went through life with variable hypercorrection of short-U words. Born in the town of Eccles, just outside Manchester, she emigrated to Canada at the age of 25 and remained in Canada, without a return visit, until her death more than 50 years later. Her speech was full of sporadic hypercorrections. I remember hearing [pt] for put and both [bk] and [bu:k] for book (see note 6 above), as well as many others. Her strategy appeared to be to avoid the hated [U] sound at all costs. But it was only as a grown woman, many years after my grandmother had died, that I figured out that what appeared to me to be an exotic word in her vocabulary was in fact an ordinary lexical item that we shared. A professional seamstress, my grandmother frequently had occasion to refer to an item I called a snap, often used in sewing instead of a button. She called it what I heard as press-stood, and it took me years to make the stud~stood connection. 12. My years of listening to American productions of Gilbert and Sullivan have provided ample evidence of hypercorrection of short A. An American chorus may render a creditable broad-A pronunciation of, for example, class in “Bow, bow ye lower middle classes” and yet not restrain itself from hypercorrectly inserting the same vowel in, say, “at classical Monday Pops.”
References Apted, Michael. 1964. Seven Up. A Granada Television Production for the BBC. Produced and directed by Michael Apted. ———. 1978. Twenty-one Up. A Granada Television Production for the BBC. Produced and directed by Michael Apted. ———. 1985. Twenty-eight Up. A Granada Television Production for the BBC. Produced and directed by Michael Apted. ———. 1992. Thirty-five Up. A Granada Television Production for the BBC. Produced and directed by Michael Apted. Brink, Lars, and Jørn Lund. 1975. Dansk Rigsmål I-II. Lydudviklingen siden 1840 med særligt henblink på sociolekterne i København. (Standard Danish I-II. The Phonetic Development since 1840 with Special Regard to the Sociolects in Copenhagen.) Copenhagen: Gyldendal. ———. 1979. Social Factors in the Sound Changes of Modern Danish. Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, vol. 2, 196–203. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Britain, David. 1997. Dialect Contact, Focusing and Phonological Rule Complexity: The Koinesation of Fenland English. In A Selection of Papers from NWAVE 25. Special issue of University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, ed. C. Boberg, M. Meyerhoff, and S. Strassel, vol. 4, 141–170.
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———. 2000. Welcome to East Anglia! Two major dialect “boundaries” in the Fens. In J. Fisiak and P. Trudgill (eds.) East Anglian English. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. 217–242. ———. 2002. Space and Spatial Diffusion. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. J. K., Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes, 603–637. Oxford: Blackwell. Chambers, J. K., and Peter Trudgill. 1980. Dialectology. London: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, Penelope. 1999. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell. Harris, John. 1996. On the Trail of Short u. English World-Wide 17:1–42. Jespersen, Otto. 1949. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. London: Allen & Unwin. Kerswill, Paul. 1996. Children, Adolescents and Language Change. Language Variation and Change 8:177–202. Labov, William. 1976. The Relative Influence of Family and Peers on the Learning of Language. In Aspetti Sociolinguistici Dell’ Italia Contemponea, ed. R. Simone, G. Ruggiero, P. Ramat, A. Mioni, L. Renzi. Rome: Bulzoni. ———. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Lenneberg, E. 1957. Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley. Macaulay, Ronald. 1977. Language, Social Class, and Education. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 1988. RP—R.I.P. Applied Linguistics 9:115–124. Sankoff, Gillian, Hélène Blondeau, and Anne Charity. 2002. Individual Roles in a Real-time Change: Montreal (r- > R) 1947—1995. In ‘R-atics: Sociolinguistic, Phonetic and Phonological Characteristics of /r/, ed. Hans Van de Velde and Roeland van Hout, 141– 157. Brussels: ILVP. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. Linguistic Change and Diffusion: Description and Explanation in Sociolinguistic Dialect Geography. Language in Society 3:215–246. ———. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford and New York: Blackwell. Wells, John Christopher. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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8 DENNIS R. PRESTON
Three Kinds of Sociolinguistics: A Psycholinguistic Perspective
1. Introduction No account of sociolinguistics—certainly not one that I hope to make more sophisticated along psycholinguistic lines—can even get off the ground without a characterization of the field’s limits. But perhaps no subarea of linguistics is more difficult to delimit, and I will not even try to characterize everything that many might want to put under the sociolinguistic umbrella. For me, the first difficulty comes from the fact that one of the several approaches to the field is often called simply “sociolinguistics.” For those of us who belong to this camp, this approach is the prototype, and we are surprised to find that that is very often not the case with others. Table 8.1 shows a list (in a few cases with names of scholars who have done seminal work) of approaches to the study of language that, at least through the sociology of language (further for others, perhaps), might fit under the sociolinguistic umbrella, but in this chapter I will deal with the first only: quantitative linguistics, variationist linguistics, Labovian sociolinguistics, or, simply sociolinguistics. I do not intend to demean the other approaches by that choice, and I would be especially foolish to do so. I would both lose friends and deny the existence of a rich interdisciplinary harvest, which this long list has yielded over several decades of very productive research. But I will stick closer to what I know best, which is quantitative or variationist sociolinguistics, and my intent here is to characterize its psycholinguistic import. To do so, I will have to chop things up into even tinier pieces. Horrified as you may have been to learn that there are many “sociolinguistics,” I now invite you to 140
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8.1. Approaches That Make Up (or Include) Some Form of “Sociolinguistics” Quantitative Sociolinguistics (Labov) Ethnography of Speaking (Hymes) Interactionist Conversation Analysis (Gumperz) Social Psychology of Language (Lambert) Sociology of Language (Fishman) Dialectology Anthropological Linguistics Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff) Text Analysis Critical Linguistics (Fowler, Fairclough) Historical Linguistics Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Halliday)
consider at least three kinds of just variationist sociolinguistics, although I might more properly speak here of “levels” rather than “kinds.”
2. Level I Although they are rare in variationist work, from time to time some studies have concerned themselves only with the correlation of linguistic and social facts. Moreover, the outcomes from such Level I studies do not seem to lead to ready psycholinguistic interpretations. This does not mean that such studies have no theoretical interest; this interest, however, seems to lie principally in the area of social theory or in the interaction of social forces and linguistic forms. For example, in a study of doctor-patient interaction (Marsh 1981), the occurrence of the definite article versus the pronominal in such sentences as How’s the pain in the/your hand? is investigated. Table 8.2 shows how this choice is distributed for patients and physicians, patients’ social status, and long-term versus short-term physician-patient relationships.
8.2. Percentage of Appearance of the Definite Article New Patients Patient Class Upper middle Lower middle Upper working Lower working Average
Long-term Patients
Patient
Physician
Patient
Physician
52% 32% 32% 32% 37%
53% 38% 29% 25% 36%
12% 14% 16% 20% 16%
44% 28% 27% 25% 31%
Source: Marsh (1981:548).
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In his study, Marsh (1981) has nothing to say about the grammatical shape of determiners versus pronominals. What he has a great deal to say about concerns the use of one linguistic form or another to symbolize power, solidarity, and register—a whole host of sociocultural facts. It’s not surprising that he has little to say about determiners and pronominals. If one is a doctor or patient, in a lower or higher class, in a long- or short-term relationship, one cannot say either just “hand” (Hello doctor. *I’d like to have you take a look at hand) or article + pronominal + hand (Hello Dennis. *I’d like to have a look at the your hand). These are facts of English (although not Polish and Portuguese, respectively), and one may study the structure of such constructions with no reference whatsoever to sociocultural facts. It is only if one wants to study the distribution of determiners versus pronominals that he or she is lost without sociocultural facts. Somebody may be going around saying that you cannot study grammatical facts at all without reference to sociocultural facts, but I can assure you that that person is not a sociolinguist from the variationist tradition I represent. In a Level I variationist approach, sociocultural facts and linguistic ones are put in touch with one another. If one chooses to call that connection a psycholinguistic one, that is taking a broad view of psycholinguistics; I am not opposed to it, but I want to be clear about the separateness (or “modularity”) of the devices that are at stake here. Figure 8.1 (with apologies to Levelt 1989) shows what I have in mind. After you know what you want to say and have “contextualized” it according to information status (including knowledge of your interlocutor’s information state, caus-
INTENTION
Information highlighting, Information flow, etc...
?
a
Grammar b
Sociocultural selection device
Output 8.1. A Level I Psycholinguistic Model of Variation
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ing the “hedge” between the information and sociocultural components), you go to your grammar to choose those things that reveal your intention (and information organization). When it comes to talking about “hands,” you may choose either “the hand” (a in figure 8.1) or “my hand” (b in figure 8.1) with full grammaticality in English. In short, two forms (which are not internally incompatible, no matter what view of syntax you take) are available in the competence of at least the English speakers Marsh (1981) is talking about. In Level I variationist studies, the choice between one or another of these forms is based on the sociocultural selection shown in figure 8.1. From a more sophisticated sociocultural perspective, that device should be related to more general sociocognitive principles. Why do patients pay so much attention to the length of relationship and doctors so much more to the social status of the patient? Answers to such questions depend on our ability to characterize social relations and the sorts of social-psychological forces (e.g., power and identity) that underlie them. What linguistic forms we choose to symbolize such social facts may, in some cases, be relatively transparent (e.g., honorifics) and in other cases more subtle [e.g., the greater politeness of “preterit” (would) rather than “present” (will) models]. Even an elaborate theory of why some linguistic items are selected (e.g., the relationship between politeness and indirectness suggested in Brown and Levinson 1987) tells us only that the connection between the sociocultural selector and the grammar is not a completely unpredictable one; it does not suggest that sociocultural facts are the same as grammatical ones. (Note that the subtitle of Brown and Levinson’s work is, in fact, Some Universals in Language Usage; emphasis mine.) Let’s make sure we are not begging the question. What sort of linguistic competence does figure 8.1 suggest? I believe it accurately displays a linguistic (and I mean a strictly grammatical) competence that licenses two constructions in English (my/ your hand, the hand). That licensing (or “generating”) imposes no internal contradictions on the grammar. If by “inherent variability” one means that two (or more) forms that can fulfill the same communicative task (or, as in figure 8.1, realize the same intention) exist in a single linguistic competence, then this model of Level I variation displays such “inherent variability,” and I cannot think of any theoretical objections to it. Figure 8.1 can, in fact, be modified to take care of slightly more complex selection. Figure 8.2 shows a sociocultural selection device that has more than one grammar to select from. This has to be true, or fluent speakers of two languages would not know how to use sociocultural facts in determining the appropriateness of one language or the other. Unfortunately, there has been some rather irresponsible speculation about where different grammars are necessary: Every human being speaks a variety of languages. We sometimes call them different styles or different dialects, but they are really different languages, and somehow we know when to use them, one in one place and another in another place. Now each of these languages involves a different switch setting. In the case of [different languages] it is a rather dramatically different switch setting, more so than in the case of the different styles of [one language]. (Chomsky 1988:188)
It’s too bad that Chomsky (1988) asserts that there is necessarily a different grammar every time there is a stylistic shift, for, as we saw above in the physician-patient data, there is often no such requirement. No different switch settings (even of the
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less dramatic sort) are required for the variation observed there; it is all derived from one grammar of English, one in which its inherent options were made use of by the sociocultural selection device. It is easy to imagine cases when Chomsky is exactly right. I can say, Nobody came to my party, but I am also a fluent speaker of the equivalent Didn’t nobody come to my party. I will not plague you with the syntactic representations, but I am convinced that when I switch back and forth between these constructions I am switching between two different grammars of English (using the same sociocultural selection device represented in figure 8.2 that I use when I switch between English and Polish). I know that Chomsky knows that there is more grammatically at stake in multiple negation grammars than in the single-grammar internal fact of the the/your hand option; I just wish he would say so and not make such irresponsible claims as the one cited above. When he does, he misleads his troops. There is one more sophistication needed in Level I psycholinguistic representations. A selection device might be seen as one that peers into a grammar and chooses between one form or another. Table 8.2 shows, however, that no one of the social characteristics selected for that study had a categorical selection effect. The patient’s social class, for example, caused physicians to select the/your hand at different rates, whereas the length of relationship caused patients to radically alter their behavior, but never at 100% or 0%. That probabilistic influence has caused Bickerton (1971), for example, to argue that such behavior requires a speaker to keep a tally of occurrences so that he or she may modify selection up or down to keep the proportion right. He imagines a scenario in which, say, a lower-middle-class patient in a short-term relationship with his or her physician is about to make a “hand” reference and reasons as follows: “Let’s see; I’m lower-middle-class and I’ve only seen this doctor once before. The last two
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times I said hand, I said my. If I’m going to turn in my 32% the performance, I’d better get one in now.” Even if this is a representation of nonconscious mechanisms at work (and surely it is), Bickerton imagines much too difficult a task. In a number of places (e.g., Preston 1989, 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1996a, 1996b) I have suggested that variation ought to be considered from the point of view of a psycholinguistic model (i.e., from the point of view of the individual), as well as that of a sociolinguistic one (i.e., from the point of view of the speech community). The model I have proposed involves a probabilistic device, revised in the several versions cited above. For a two-way variable, a speaker (and I will operate on a speaker- rather than hearer-focused model) is equipped with a coin, the two sides of which represent the options for that variable; it is flipped before the product appears. In Marsh’s (1981) study, a two-sided coin (with my/your on one side and the on the other) is prepared. Since normal coins are fair, the one proposed here is as likely to turn up heads as tails (i.e., the two sides are in “free variation”), but, when I was a kid, we believed that unfair coins could be made. We thought that if you added weight to the tails side of a coin and flipped it, it was more likely to come up heads (and vice-versa); the more weight you added to one side, the greater the probability it would come up on the other side. Although this theory may be physically suspect, we believed it as kids (and suspected kids who won a lot of money of knowing how to do it); let’s also naively believe here that it is true so that we may make this coin responsive to various influences, some relatively permanent (e.g., social status), some fleeting (the phonetic environment). Marsh (1981) has shown that social and professional status and length of relationship all influence the probability of article versus pronoun realization—the result of “unfair coin” tosses. For the purposes of this illustration, let’s select the lower-middle-class patient in a short-term relationship with his or her physician mentioned just above, and let’s further imagine that we have done some more sophisticated statistical work in which we have shown the precise contribution of each factor (status, profession, relationship) to the probability for the1 (see table 8.3). If our fictional respondent uttered 100 mentions of his or her hand (admittedly unlikely in such a short-term relationship), there would be approximately 32 instances of the and 68 of my. In short, such a model is psycholinguistically plausible; it shows how Bickerton’s (1971) objection to variability is not an issue. When respondents issue 20%, 40%, or 60% of one form of a variable, they are not monitoring their overall performance with some sort of tallying device. They are showing the influence of a
8.3. Hypothetical Contribution of Social Factors in the Selection of the Factor Nonphysician Short-term relationship Lower middle-class status Combined influences Source: Marsh (1981).
Probability .40 .28 .30 .32
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set of probabilistic weights that come to bear on each occurrence, a cognitively plausible (rather simple) operation. Since this is Bickerton’s principal “psychostatistical” objection to the notion of variation, we may put it aside. Note that so far the model I have proposed is also compatible with the claim that variation is the result of moving back and forth between alternative grammars (or “lects”) but that Bickerton regards such fluctuation as due to unstudiable social factors. As Marsh (1981) has shown, however, the influence of such social factors as status, profession, and length of relationship are not unstudiable at all. Another objection to such modeling came from those who suggested that figures of groups or speech communities did not reflect the even more variable performance of individuals (e.g., Petyt 1980:188–190), although I am not sure what psycholinguistic claim was being made about the individual in this objection (except to somehow suggest that the variability is so idiosyncratic that it is not worth studying). The first (and most conclusive) answer to this claim was provided by Macaulay (1978), who showed that the actual performance of individuals reveals that such statistical modeling is accurate. In short, the community- or group-derived norms reflect individual (i.e., psycholinguistic) facts. From another perspective, it is perhaps true that sociolinguists have not been as preoccupied with the underlying cognitive foundations of the social categories used in Level I studies as theoretical linguists have been with the cognitive foundations of human language. But sociolinguists are still linguists and, even at Level I, seek correlations of social facts with linguistic form. It is the correlation that interests them, and they look to others (e.g., cognitive anthropologists) to provide evidence for the cognitive foundations of social identities and relationships. Perhaps such foundations will turn out to be as simple as X-bar relations. For example, perhaps they will be reducible to such characteristic animal behaviors as territoriality and display, and their correlation with variant linguistic features will, therefore, be no more than different superficial manifestations of relatively straightforward (perhaps innate and not even uniquely human) biological mandates. You might want to reanalyze Brown and Levinson’s (1987) “faces” and their correlation with linguistic “indirectness” in just that way. If you watch the same animal channels I do, it will not take you long to come up with the idea that the use of some linguistic forms might be thought of as “submissive displays.” But I am wandering. In summary, Level I sociolinguistics links sociocultural factors (however deeply rooted in even biological forces) with linguistic forms (all enfranchised by a grammar or several grammars, themselves all rooted in some sort of species linguistic mandate). That linking is probabilistic, not categorical.
3. Level II In Level II sociolinguistic studies, variationists tease out the influence of one linguistic factor on another. Table 8.4 shows the results of a recent example of such a study. In Ontario French, one may produce double subjects such as the following: (1)
Mes parents ils étaient partis. My parents they left.
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8.4. Factors Influencing Subject Doubling in Ontario French Factors
Factor Weight
Tokens
Percentage
KO .861 .681 .462 .261
145/195 51/118 496/2187 14/115
100 74 43 23 12
.607 .414 .251
477/1306 215/1160 14/149
37 19 9
1. NOUN TYPE 1st- and 2nd-person pronoun 3rd-person pronoun Proper noun Common noun Indefinite pronoun 2. SUBJECT NP Transitive/unergative Unaccusative Passive Source: Adapted from Nadasdi (1995).
Just as in Level I studies, the choice of alternatives here (double subject/no double subject) is controlled by certain factors. As table 8.4 shows, the specificity of the subject and the grammatical type of the subject promote (and demote) the occurrence of double subjects. Level II studies seek reasons for such linguistic influences, just as Level I studies try to provide sociocultural explanations for why certain identities and relationships distinguish themselves linguistically. In this case, Nadasdi (1995) suggests that the clitic personal pronouns that realize the subject doubling should share features with the subject they duplicate (as in the Matching Hypothesis suggested by Suñer 1988). Since these pronouns are +specific, they are more likely to be realized if the degree of specificity of the subject is high (as it is in first- and secondperson pronouns) and much less likely to be realized if the subject is less specific (as is the case with indefinite pronoun subjects). This specificity continuum has been independently suggested by, for example, Quirk et al. (1972), Comrie (1981), and Chesterman (1991). Doubling is also more likely to occur when the subject is a typical agentlike subject of a transitive (e.g., touch) or unergative (e.g., speak, sleep) verb. Doubling is much less likely when the subject is one of an unaccusative verb, in which the subject is patientlike (e.g., break, as in The vase broke), and double subjects are extremely unlikely when the subject is one of a passive. Nadasdi (1995) points out that again there is a feature mismatch, this time between the subjects of unaccusatives and passives and the clitics that duplicate them. The clitics have a +subject feature, but, although the subjects of unaccusatives and passives surface as subjects, their deeper patient or object role does not match up well with the +subject feature of the clitics. This search for influencing factors among (not outside) the components of a grammar characterizes Level II sociolinguistic research, and Level II work is not unusual; it is, in fact, common among sociolinguists. For example, the leading journal in our enterprise, Language Variation and Change, vol. 9 (1997), contains 15 articles in all; 2 are Level I only studies, 6 are Level II only, and the remainder combine Level I and II observations. That is not surprising to me, for I believe linguistic (not sociocultural) motives for variation are strongest. In an extensive review of the
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literature (Preston 1991a, 1991b), I found that linguistic influences were so much stronger than sociocultural ones that I formulated this relationship as the “Status Axiom” (by analogy with Bell’s 1984 “Style Axiom”). This observation suggests that such variability as that in Nadasdi’s (1995) study, determined as it is by linguistic forces, is available to lower-level sociocultural (or “status”) variability (so that it surfaces in Level I studies) but that such linguistic influences are nearly always probabilistically heavier than sociocultural influences. In some ways, I think my observation, although it was based on a large number of careful statistical studies, may have been almost too obvious. When some part of the sociocultural world (whether one that reflects identity or relationship) wants to symbolize itself linguistically, it most subtly does so by asserting a preference for one form or another. Where will it find alternative modes of expression? The sociocultural world itself is not prepared to provide the sort of variation described in Nadasdi’s study, for the sociocultural world is not made up of such things as passive versus unaccusative subjects. If there are options in the grammar, however, based primarily on accompanying linguistic forces, they may be reweighted by sociocultural ones to carry part of the burden of the presentation of identity and the manipulation of interactional stances. What sort of psycholinguistic device have we made for ourselves now? Figure 8.3 shows us two possibilities, both of which I suspect exist. In the first possibility, shown entirely inside Grammar 1, a fact c (e.g., transitive subjects in Ottawa INTENTION
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French) has an influence on the selection of a (double subject clitic pronouns) on the basis of the underlying and superficial matching feature +subject. One feature of the grammar selects another. A second possibility is that the occurrence of one feature in the grammar, in this case c (third-person pronoun subject in Ottawa French) refers to an extragrammatical feature d (degree of specificity, taken from the discoursal or information structure realm). This continuum, then, exerts an influence on the choice of double subjects, in this case, one that makes the occurrence more likely (a) since there is a more highly specified subject. We might go even further and suggest that the position of a double subject clitic pronoun in I of I' (as Nadasdi 1995 suggests; see figure 8.4) is precisely in the place where agreement is checked by subjects. If Ottawa French no longer recognizes the typically phonetically reduced verbal morphology that realizes agreement features on verbs, the presence of the “extra” clitic subject pronoun is motivated by the subject’s need to check off an agreement feature and the verb’s inability to satisfy it. In such a case, the clitic pronoun no longer has the status of pronoun (since it would require the same theta-role as the subject) and has simply become an agreement feature. Since the site (I) is there in French grammar in general, the variability has only to do with what sort of material fills it. Again, I see no need to suggest that a different grammar is required when the I is filled by a double subject clitic pronoun (perhaps only an “agreement feature”) and when it is not. When variationists try to explain such internal grammatical variability in Level II studies, they look for the same sorts of explanatory evidence as general linguists do. They are, admittedly, less likely (perhaps like old Occam and his razor, even reluctant) to believe that every such piece of variation requires a new grammar, suspecting instead that inherent variability exists
C' / C
\ IP /
\
NP
I'
Mes parents / \ I
VP
ils étaient partis 8.4. An Ottawa French Double Subject (Nadasdi 1995)
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where grammatical systems permit it and that different grammars (perhaps especially for the same speaker in the same language) are rather radical requirements. In fact, the desire to limit the number of grammars in individuals (especially in monolinguals) seems to me to go along with one of the very best traditions of the generative movement—the desire for economy and simplicity. Current models of syntax suggest that lexical items bring their grammatical demands with them. Items that have considerable categorical similarity may, in fact, bring very different syntactic demands, imposing natural variation on any human language. Let’s look at just one simple English example. English has verbs such as be, have, and walk. When verbs are used in question sentences, they trigger different kinds of syntactic behavior: (2)
Bill is in the other room. Bill walks to school.
Is Bill in the other room? Does Bill walk to school?
Why is there no “Does Bill be in the other room? (in most dialects) or “Walks Bill to school?” (in modern English)? The answer is easy: be verbs and non-be verbs bring different syntactic instructions along with them when they come from the lexicon. How about this? (3)
Bill has a dollar.
Does Bill have a dollar? Has Bill a dollar?
Most of you will recognize that most Americans cannot say “Has Bill a dollar?” but that many speakers of some other English variety can. You might be tempted to say (with Chomsky 1988 and Bickerton 1971) that these are two different grammars (and that a person who can use both has two different grammars). I would not like to say that. At least, I would not like to say that there are two grammars in a speaker’s mind on the basis of two settings for a verb like have when both of these settings correspond to those for such other items as be and walk. If you can say, “Does have Bill a dollar?” or “Has a dollar Bill?” I will grant you a different grammar, but I am not prepared to grant different grammars to individuals who have some lexical items set to different characteristics when those very characteristics are the same as those for many other well-established items. To be precise, if have can behave like a “be” verb and a “walk” verb in some varieties, I take that to be a double classification in the lexicon with no repercussions whatsoever on what syntactic configurations are allowed and disallowed in English. As suggested before, once both forms are there, either sociocultural (Level I) or other linguistic (Level II) items may (in fact, almost certainly will) exert probabilistic influences on their selection. The various linguistic features that have an influence on one another might belong to different modules of linguistic competence, but I know of no serious theoretical proposal that suggests that these modules are not in communication with one another. In short, that we have not yet arrived at a more definitive theoretical proposal concerning the exact shape of linguistic competence (and its relation to modules outside it) will not hurt the model proposed here, and I hope it will not damage any egos to suggest that theoretical work in variationist linguistics is simply a little ahead of some other subfields. That will be true almost by definition, for we have
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not had the luxury of “ideal native-speaker hearers,” a reasonable fiction that has allowed a productive head start in many areas of linguistic concern but will probably not do the job of providing a full account of linguistic competence of real people. Finally, perhaps it is important to note that sociolinguists who till Level II fields are not necessarily functionalists. Nadasdi’s (1995) work on the preference for subject doubling is based on syntactic features, and work by Scherre and Naro (1991) shows that subject/verb agreement marking in Brazilian Portuguese depends most crucially on whether or not a previous item was marked, not on any desire to disambiguate.
4. Level III Finally we come to whatever it is sociolinguists could be doing at Level III. Surely we must have covered the territory. Not at all; sociolinguists are particularly concerned with ongoing linguistic change, and they seek to relate patterns of linguistic change to both the sociocultural forces studied in Level I and the linguistic forces of Level II. Let’s look at one such data set. Tagliamonte (1998) studies a number of standard and nonstandard realizations of was/were in Yorkshire English. One context she looks at in detail is the occurrence of nonstandard was in existential constructions (e.g., There was no apples in the barrel). Table 8.5 shows the results. This is pretty clearly Level I work since, surprisingly, women outstrip men in nonstandard performance (.56 to .40), and, predictably, better-educated speakers use
8.5. Factor Weights and Percentages for Influences on Nonstandard was in Existential Constructions Factor Group
Weight
%
N
1. POLARITY affirmative negative
.54 .11
66 17
287 23
.55 .33
67 45
239 69
.56 .40
67 55
191 119
.70 .50 .50 .41
77 55 67 57
57 44 81 125
.55 .36
64 59
232 76
2. ADJACENCY nonadjacent adjacent 3. SEX female male 4. GENERATION 20–30 30–50 50–70 Over 70 5. EDUCATION To 16 years Beyond 16 years Source: Tagliamonte (1998:181).
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the nonstandard form less often (.36 to .55). It is also obviously Level II work since such grammatical features as polarity and such other features as adjacency proved to be significant. (The latter tells us whether the verb is next to or removed from the NP with which it should agree, e.g., There was three men here versus There was as recently as last Friday three men here, respectively.) Tagliamonte (1998) adds, however, as have many variationists, the category “Generation.” It is important to distinguish age as a social category from age as an attempt to look at emerging (and receding) linguistic practices (and, presumably, the grammars that underlie those practices). Of course, age may be simply a “social category.” Teenagers use slang items that they will not use when they become adults; they are, therefore, not indicators of cutting-edge forms in the language. They are, instead, generationally distributed features, ones that indicate a speaker’s age by virtue of his or her use but do not point us in the direction of the future of the language. It is often difficult to tell the difference between such age-related performance and actual change, but variationists have developed a number of tests that make the distinction less difficult. For example, in many cases, the younger and older members of a speech community agree in being the most frequent users of a nonstandard feature, for they are the groups least influenced by the daily pressure of the linguistic marketplace to conform to more overt community norms (e.g., Chambers and Trudgill 1998:78–79, who show such a distribution for a number of features, including -in versus -ing variation in English). That is clearly not the case in table 8.5. The youngest speakers are the principal users of nonstandard was in existential constructions, and the oldest use it least, with the generations between balanced at exactly .50. If, as Tagliamonte (1998) suspects, this is an indication of linguistic change in progress (i.e., that nonstandard was is emerging as a new norm), then the unusual pattern of sex and education can be explained. Since women are most often more inclined to use more overtly prestigious forms (i.e., those promulgated by schools, usage authorities, and the like), their preference for the nonstandard was form was surprising. Since younger speakers also prefer nonstandard was, however, and there is no surprising interaction between sex and age, young women are the most frequent users of this nonstandard form. This relationship between sex and age allows us to conclude, tentatively if you like, that nonstandard was is an emerging norm in this speech community, for young women are leaders (though usually not inventors) in implementing linguistic change. That is, as soon as a new form is relatively well established in the speech community, younger women are among the first to adopt it and promote its use. In this case, although conservative forces have kept the new norm slightly behind on the educational dimension, the relationship between the categories age and sex make us fairly certain that a new norm is emerging. Of course, all the work done in Level I and Level II studies should be done in such studies, as well as the “historical” interpretation (and its relation to the Level I and Level II factors, only one part of which has been done here). For example, although many sociolinguists would agree that women are both conservative (in their adherence to overt linguistic norms) and leaders (in being early promoters of incipient norms), why that is so is indeed difficult to explain (e.g., as the exchange between Eckert 1989 and Labov 1990 shows). But I will assume that you understand that it should be done
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and that grammatical or other cognitive interpretations of the effects of polarity and adjacency are also a part of the variationists obligation in such a study. If you grant that, on the basis of such suggestions given above, I will move on. What has Level III work done to the psycholinguistic model? I am afraid it will introduce an element not to everybody’s liking. Figure 8.5 shows a shaded area in Grammar 1, and all of Grammar 2 is shaded differently. These shadings represent weaker areas of the grammar (in one grammar) or weaker grammars (when two are present). What is the source of grammatical weakness? Native speakers typically learn a “vernacular”—the first-learned form of their language. Needless to say, it comes from interaction with parents, siblings, and other children in contexts that are relatively free from formal constructions. Whatever else we learn (whether native or non-native) is postvernacular, and it will, no matter how good we get at it, not have the deeply embedded status of our vernacular. We will not be as “fluent” in our postvernacular. Consider the following: (4)
a. If I had more money, I’d buy a BMW. b. Had I more money, I’d buy a BMW.
In my case (4a) belongs to the vernacular. If I want to express the idea contained in (a) and (b) (which I take to be the same), I will with the greatest of ease go to my INTENTION
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vernacularly embedded choice—namely, (a). I don’t know when I learned (b), certainly not while playing hoops in southern Indiana (“Quick! Had I the ball, I’d score!”), but I eventually learned it, no doubt first to process it and later to produce it, although I am fairly certain that my production is still “imitative” rather than productive. That is, I cannot imagine any circumstance in which I would use it (spoken or written) except to imitate (probably sarcastically) a high-falutin’ style (or, more likely, to mock such a speaker). I also have no doubt that you could find some weaknesses in my grammaticality judgments of sentences constructed along the lines of (4b) but that you would find me rock-solid in the (a) territory. This outrageous claim means, of course, that any real speaker who could hope to pretend to be an ideal native-speaker hearer (with the sorts of judgments we would want to elicit when we attempt to confirm claims about competence) would have to be questioned about the linguistic competence of his or her pre-postvernacular period. The further afield any postvernacular constructions are from the grammatical settings of the vernacular, the weaker the grammar at those points and the less reliable respondents’ judgments about that territory will be. It follows that performance in that area also is less likely to be an accurate reflection of competence. When we refer to adult grammars, therefore, we refer inevitably to grammars that look like Grammar 1 in figure 8.5—grammars that have postvernacular areas in which the constructions are less well embedded in competence or “weaker.” In short, adult learners of their own language encounter syntactic (and other) characteristics that they learn in no substantially different way than the second- or foreign-language learner learns things (the shaded area of Grammar 2), and I have no reason to assume that they end up embedded in the underlying grammars in any significantly different way. The idea of postvernaculars corresponds to recent, very sophisticated work in historical linguistics, which has shown that the statistical robustness of input is crucial to the establishment of parameters. Lightfoot (1999:436) reckons it to be somewhere between 17% and 30% in his account of the loss of V2 (“verb second”) in English. DeGraff (1999:33) summarizes what Lightfoot concludes: One of David Lightfoot’s cardinal pleas is that models for syntax acquisition and for syntactic change be sensitive to factors outside of syntax. . . . Assuming that UG . . . is genetically wired and remains constant, one reason why parameter values would shift through acquisition is that factors external to syntax and/or to language itself indirectly effect changes in certain aspects of the triggering experience—for example in the frequency of occurrence of particular construction types that “cue” the learner to the values of certain parameters. (emphasis in original)
First, if this is so, and Lightfoot reviews a great deal of careful quantitative historical work that suggests it is, at the very least one would want to know the quantitative product of variation studies in the search for parametric-setting cues, which are based, as he suggests, on their frequency in input. I hope you find this statement somewhat different from earlier representations of frequency in language use as having no relevance to the study of language competence whatsoever. Second, however, I find even Lightfoot’s (1999) welcome representation of the importance of E-language frequency to I-language settings not radical enough. He
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assumes a sort of facile Chomskyan bidialectalism in all speakers who use both forms, but he fails to demonstrate that factors predicted by V2 and non-V2 grammars cooccur exclusively when a speaker is using one dialect or the other. In short, he does not convince me that the non-V2 setting was not “weakly” established in some individual grammars (as I have shown in figure 8.5) and became the dominant pattern over the years. I do not doubt that the importance of south of England varieties of English at that time had the growing prestige that allowed the eventual crucial input figure to drive out the competing V2, but I do doubt that all speakers who used V2 and non-V2 constructions were fluent bidialectals, employing “properly” all the attendant constructions that would depend on those settings “downstream” from their occurrences. More likely, many had weak grammars of one setting or the other, so weak, for example, that the attendant characteristics of that setting could be suppressed or might emerge only in conjunction with certain lexical items, spreading to the entire grammar as it strengthened. At a different level of representation, the notions of strength outlined above seem to me to relate to the mysterious factor that lurks behind what has been called “style” in general throughout the history of quantitative sociolinguistics. Perhaps the major psycholinguistic upshot of such factors is, as Labov (e.g., 1972) has suggested, “monitoring” or “attention to speech.” Although “style” is, I suspect, a cover term for a much larger number of sociocultural functions that need to be teased out in greater detail, the psycholinguistic upshot of some items being sought by more careful monitoring may be conveniently related to the notion of the postvernacular outlined above. You must look more carefully for items not so well embedded, and even that will not ensure that you retrieve them (or retrieve them “correctly”). That fact suggests that the model provided so far, although based on “internal” and “external” factors, which are required for a general psycholinguistic account of competence and performance, overlooks the component that contains the abilities most often addressed in psycholinguistic accounts—memory, accessibility, processing, and the like. Figure 8.6 repairs that oversight, admittedly without detail (and it introduces another important connection, which I mention only briefly below). Although I agree with Lightfoot (1999) that changes are very often the result of misparsings, misunderstandings, mishearings, and the like, which the historical account of any language is rich with, I suspect I am much more likely than he is to suggest that those that ought to imply far-reaching parametric resetting consequences may not immediately do so (if ever). That they do not is another source of variable competence. Since sociolinguists have theirs ears to the ground, they are most likely to catch those emerging performances, whether they have far-reaching effects on the language or not. It is clear to anyone who has spent a great deal of time listening to current U.S. English that something is up with auxiliaries. I bet you can give me the interrogative form of He should not have left so soon. If you said, Should he not have left so soon? or Shouldn’t he’ve left so soon? you are a speaker pretty much like me. But if you are a little younger, you might be able to say, Shouldn’t’ve he left so soon? or even the amazing Shouldn’t’ve he’ve left so soon? I’m absolutely certain that these new patterns are tied to a reanalysis of the underlying form of have, one that goes far beyond its occurrence as stressed of, regarded by some as a trivial (misunderstood)
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INTENTION
Information highlighting, Information flow, etc...
d
?
c
Sociocultural selection device
a
Grammar 1
Output
Processing
Output
8.6. An Elaborated Level III Psycholinguistic Model
phonological (or only written) alternative to have. Although I am interested in the new encliticization (which I think the current grammar can handle), I am also interested in the repercussions of such reanalysis on the arrangement of items in the grammars of real, emerging varieties of English. As I suggested earlier, even if you will not buy my radical proposal that individual grammars contain not only alternatives but even competing alternatives (in the sense that they imply but do not deliver different constructions in related parts of the grammar), you will recall that Lightfoot (1999) endorses the idea that performance criteria (e.g., frequency), themselves based on such nonlinguistic features as prestige and geography, are essential in determining linguistic change. If you will not buy the weak grammars in figures 8.5 and 8.6, then you must at least acknowledge the importance of variable data in establishing the variable competence or, if you are really a hard-liner, the multiple grammars of my psycholinguistic representations of variation. Of course, there is much left undone here. I have not really outlined a careful representation of how these weak grammars are to be fully represented. In one sense, I have perhaps implied rather than shown that psycholinguistic processes such as retrieval, accessibility, memory, and the like are the areas precisely at stake in the concept of weaker grammars (or parts of grammars). Moreover, as the work of Ronald Macaulay has reminded me, and as the title of his 1994 book (The Social Art: Language and Its
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Uses) almost boldly asserts, the probabilistic model I have drawn here does not fully determine the output of grammars since, as I have shown in every figure, the “intention” of a speaker may, as I have shown only in figure 8.6, interact with his or her sociocultural identity. That is, one may choose to “perform” (or perform to a greater or lesser extent) an available sociocultural identity, and such choices must play a role in the activation of the selection determined by sociocultural selection. That proviso, however, makes this program more difficult but not inconceiveable.2 I would like to convince you of (or at least have you be agnostic about) the possibility of the sort of variable competence I have outlined here. By doing so, I think you will join those of the most theoretically oriented persuasion who see the importance of quantity in the development of new grammars (and the modification of old ones), and you will certainly join with us variationists whose modularity is, I hope to have shown you, beyond suspicion. Notes 1. Of course, the combined probability is not the same as the average. See Preston (1996b:12) for a sample computation. 2. I am grateful to Richard Young, who pointed out both the deterministic nature of variable rule probabilities and the failure of the model (through figure 8.5) to engage such “real” psycholinguistic factors as memory, attention, access, processing, and the like. Both these objections are addressed in figure 8.6, the first diminished, I hope, by the connection between “intention” and the “sociocultural selection device,” and the second at least represented by the introduction of a “processing” component.
References Bell, Alan. 1984. Language Style as Audience Design. Language in Society 13:145–204. Bickerton, Derek. 1971. Inherent Variability and Variable Rules. Foundations of Language 7:457–492. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, J. K., and Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chesterman, A. 1991. On Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, N. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DeGraff, Michel. 1999. Creolization, Language Change, and Language Acquisition: A Prolegomenon. In Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony, and Development, ed. Michel DeGraff, 1–46. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Eckert, Penelope. 1989. The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in Variation. Language Variation and Change 1:245–267. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1990. The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change. Language Variation and Change 2:205–254. Levelt, Willem J. M. 1989. Speaking: From Interaction to Articulation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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Lightfoot, David. 1999. Creoles and Cues. In Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony, and Development, ed. Michel DeGraff, 431–452. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Macaulay, Ronald K. S. 1978. Variation and Consistency in Glaswegian English. In Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English, ed. Peter Trudgill, 105–124. London: Arnold. ———. 1994. The Social Art: Language and Its Uses. Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press. Marsh, John. 1981. Social Factors of Language Use in Physician-Patient Interaction. In Variation Omnibus, ed. David Sankoff and Henrietta Cedergren, 545–562. Carbondale, Ill., and Edmonton: Linguistics Research. Nadasdi, Terry. 1995. Subject NP Doubling, Matching, and Minority French. Language Variation and Change 7:1–14. Petyt, Malcolm. 1980. The Study of Dialect. Boulder, Col.: Westview. Preston, Dennis R. 1989. Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1991a. Sorting Out the Variables in Sociolinguistic Theory. American Speech 66(1):33–56. ———. 1991b. Style, Status, and Change: Three Sociolinguistic Axioms. In Development and Structures of Creole Languages. Essays in Honor of Derek Bickerton. Vol. 9, Creole Language Library, ed. Francis Byrne and Thom Huebner, 43–59. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ———. 1991c. Variable Rules and Second Language Acquisition: An Integrationist Attempt. PALM (Papers in Applied Linguistics Michigan) 6(1):1–12. ———. 1996a. Variationist Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. In Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, ed. William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia, 229–265. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1996b. Variationist Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. In Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Variation, ed. Robert Bayley and Dennis R. Preston, 1–45. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Quirk, Randolph, Stanley Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1972. A Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman Group. Scherre, Maria Marta Pereira, and Anthony Naro. 1991. Marking in Discourse: “Birds of a Feather.” Language Variation and Change 3(1):23–32. Suñer, M. 1988. The Role of Agreement in Clitic Doubled Constructions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6:391–434. Tagliamonte, Sali. 1998. Was/Were Variation Across the Generations: View from the City of York. Language Variation and Change 10:153–191.
PART IV
ATTITUDES AND IDEOLOGIES
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9 LESLEY MILROY
Language Ideologies and Linguistic Change
1. Introduction and preliminaries Ronald Macaulay’s (1977) account of the Glasgow speech community would today be described as “variationist,” that is, contributory to the core area of sociolinguistics, which focuses primarily on developing socially sensitive accounts of language variation and processes of language change. Macaulay also dealt extensively, but separately, with language attitudes. In this chapter I present work in progress, which similarly addresses both language attitudes and processes of language variation and change. My goal is to propose a framework for incorporating into mainstream variationist work an account of language attitudes, treated as manifestations of locally constructed language ideologies. In one sense this is a rather uncontroversial goal since from the publication of Weinreich et al.’s (1968) classic article the evaluative dimension has been viewed as a major component of a comprehensive account of language change. And indeed, Labov’s (1963) classic analysis of socially motivated change in Martha’s Vineyard treats attitude as central. For the most part, however, variationist accounts of language attitudes and ideologies and of language variation and change have tended to proceed along independent, parallel tracks. Influential work on attitudes was carried out not by sociolinguists but by social psychologists (see also Giles and Coupland 1991; Milroy and Preston 1999) and was seldom integrated into basic accounts of variation and change.1 This disjunction between analyses of attitudes and of sociolinguistic patterns is evident in Macaulay’s (1977) monograph, where attitudes to language in Glasgow and analysis of the sociolinguistic variables to which these 161
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attitudes refer are treated quite separately. Similarly, the recent work of Preston and his colleagues on attitudes is carried out independently of analyses of variation and change (e.g., Preston and Niedzielski 2000). In this chapter, I outline a framework that treats attitudes expressed by individuals embedded in social groups as only one kind of instantiation of ideologies, which may be defined initially as thoroughly naturalized sets of beliefs about language intersubjectively held by members of speech communities. A larger goal is to consider how ideologies interact with internal linguistic constraints to structure patterns of variation and trajectories of change. My orientation is quite similar to that of Labov’s (1963) Martha’s Vineyard study and is indebted to its insights. In the period since the appearance of that influential work, surely one of the gems of sociolinguistics, variationists have demonstrated extensively the capacity of phonological elements to index group collectivities of many kinds. For example, Macaulay showed in great detail the massive consistency of language variation as a fine-grained index of social class; in a set of composite scores for four Glasgow vowel variables, only 1 of 48 speakers was out of the rank constructed in accordance with social-class indexes. Moreover, the indexicality revealed in these rankings supported an analysis of social class in Glasgow as tripartite, consisting of a unitary workingclass group, a white-collar group, and a professional and managerial group (Macaulay 1978:138). Indexicality of language, primarily with respect to the social categories of class, gender, and ethnicity, was demonstrated by other early work (e.g., Labov 1972; Trudgill 1974). A few years later, in L. Milroy ([1980] 1987a) and Milroy and Milroy (1985), I argued further for the relevance of individual social network structures to accounts of the social dynamics of language maintenance and trajectories of language change. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) objected to the treatment in much early sociolinguistic work of social categories as “given,” independent of the actions and attitudes of speakers. They therefore proposed a multidimensional account of individual “acts of identity” as speakers indexed their multiple and shifting allegiances to different groups at different times. Eckert’s (2000) more recent work also implicitly grants agency a central role in determining patterns of variation and trajectories of change. She argues for an ethnographically driven investigation of social categories indexed by language, treating categories as constructed by social actors. Hence, the researcher’s task is to discover rather than to assume the relevance of particular categories. Her approach is similar to that of Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, not only in its focus on agency, but also in treating indexicality as a product of social practice that simultaneously projects more than one analyzable “identity.”
2. Standard English and language attitudes Almost all variationist work uses the standard language as a pivotal reference point, thus rendering attitudes to the standard a crucial component of the variationist framework. Yet the concept of the standard is surprisingly underspecified and undertheorized. Standard English is the construct which I shall consider in this section, and I shall argue that it is both misleading and unhelpful to treat it as a cross-culturally comparable and
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sociolinguistically unproblematic entity. In early work by Labov, Trudgill, and others, the standard is treated ad hoc as the norm to which speakers shift in their most careful speech. This norm is generally identified with a prescriptive standard. For example, Labov (1972:64–65) discusses the emergence of postconsonantal [r] as a prestige norm in school systems and radio networks in the 1940s as a reaction against “an Anglophile tradition which taught that (r-1) was a provincial feature, an incorrect version of the consonant and that the correct pronunciation of orthographic r in car was (r-0).” Although this spoken standard to which speakers shift in careful styles is thus oriented to the norm prescribed by the New York City school system, for Trudgill (1974) the codified British elite accent, Received Pronunciation, provides the standard reference point.2 Even such a limited comparison between what Labov and Trudgill mean by “Standard English” reveals the quite different sociologies underlying British and American images of the standard. Labov’s (1972) claim that postvocalic [r] in New York City emerged as a new prestige norm on the heels of a reaction against an Anglophile tradition (cf. Mencken 1948:28) is, in fact, not self-evidently correct. Bonfiglio (2002) offers an alternative account, starting from the observation that Americans imagine the standard to be located in the so-called midwestern, agricultural “Heartland,” not in the old and culturally influential cities of the East Coast. In view of the cultural antecedents of standards in Europe (and elsewhere), this is an oddity parallel to the British standard being imagined in relation to the dialects of rural Yorkshire or Dorset, or the French standard in relation to an agricultural region like Aquitaine. Bonfiglio presents compelling evidence to support an argument that in the early twentieth century, American xenophobia became focused on the immigrant cities of the East Coast, with a concomitant loss of linguistic capital for their nonrhotic dialects. Industrial centers were seen as sources of contamination of race, religion, and language, and purist ideologies developed that associated American virtues of all kinds with the rural areas of the Midwest. These ideologies are clearly manifested in (for example) the writings of Brander Matthews, who taught at Columbia from 1892 to 1924. His 1921 article “Is the English Language Degenerating?” concluded that it was in a bad way—even worse in America than in Britain. For Matthews, “Linguistic decay [was] inseparable from racial decadence” the reason being “its immediate contact with a host of other and inferior tongues” (Bonfiglio 2002:147). In Matthews’s view, standardization was a means of maintaining linguistic and racial purity, and Bonfiglio provides many examples of such discourse that focus on [r] pronunciation as indexical not only of racial purity but more generally of virtue and national vigor. Mencken (1948:28) characterizes general American (i.e., the variety spoken west of the eastern seaboard) as “mainstream” and as an ideal candidate for the standard. This rhotic variety was adopted by the radio networks, starting with CBS in the 1930s, and constructed as the homogeneous language of the majority. Bonfiglio (2002) argues that the linguistic ideologies that locate an American standard in the Midwest spring from a rejection not only of urban immigrants but also of African Americans and white Southerners. This analysis appears to be consistent with an American ideology that foregrounds race and ethnicity (see also L. Milroy 2000). It also highlights the relationship between such an ideology and the trajectory of a linguistic change in mid-twentieth-century New York City. An analysis of the social motivations
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underlying the changing social evaluation of (r), which treats race and ethnicity as salient, is also consistent with important variationist preoccupations; consider particularly the emergence during the twentieth century of a set of supralocal norms that increasingly distinguish African-American English from ambient white dialects (Wolfram and Thomas 2002:11). It is difficult, on the other hand, to find much evidence of “Britishness” as a salient social category either in contemporary American culture or in American sociolinguistics, despite the traditionally favorable attitude to British accents noted by Lippi-Green (1997). Yet, this is what Labov’s (1972) analysis of the revalorization of (r) in New York City seems to assume. The association of (r) revalorization under these circumstances with a new American standard supports the general proposition that standard languages are best treated as constructs that are emerging from the particulars of a nation’s history and social structure. This being so, we would not expect “Standard English” to be a comparable sociolinguistic entity in different English-speaking countries. Although, indeed, RP is a class-defined reference accent with a social positioning very different from Labov’s (1972) standard in New York City, Norwich speakers appeared to orient to RP norms in a way that made it possible for Trudgill (1974) to adapt Labov’s (1966) framework without much difficulty. However, Scotland and Ireland have long histories of independence from and opposition to the English metropolis, and sociolinguists who attempt to employ Labov’s framework in those countries report significant difficulties in specifying the norms to which individuals might be shifting in careful speech (L. Milroy [1980] 1987a:105). An example of such a problem is the behavior of Belfast working-class speakers, who certainly modified vernacular norms in careful spontaneous speech but not when reading word lists. Furthermore, in both Edinburgh (Romaine 1978) and Belfast (L. Milroy [1980] 1987a), a range of different middle-class and educated accents could be heard, so unlike the situation reported in New York City and Norwich, more than one high-status linguistic model was available. And as noted by Harris (1991) and Gunn (1990), ethnicity in Belfast is indexed by a speaker’s choice of norm in careful or rhetorical speech more overtly than in the vernacular varieties discussed by (L. Milroy [1980] 1987a). This situation was not envisioned by earlier work, which assumed a relatively unitary and focused set of standard norms. These norms were associated in an unproblematic way with social class and with stylistic variability, represented on intersecting continua from most to least standard. It is clear also that the target phonological system(s) of careful speakers in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Belfast were rarely oriented to RP. Indeed, the phonologies of these Celtic fringe dialects could not be mapped directly onto RP, as is shown by the example of the low vowel /a/ in both Glasgow and Belfast (Macaulay 1977, 1978; L. Milroy [1980] 1987a). RP and many Anglo-English dialects are characterized by a clear phonological distinction between short high front and long back variants of this vowel in pairs like Sam: psalm and have: halve. Variation in length and quality in Scotland and Northern Ireland, however, is allophonic rather than phonologically distinctive. A very few careful middle-class speakers in Glasgow—and indeed in Belfast—display an orientation to an RP type of norm with respect to /a/. However, most Belfast speakers (Macaulay’s methods do not reveal this pattern in Glasgow) construct careful styles by reducing the range of allophonic variation, thus
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eliminating the extreme back and front variants characteristic of the vernacular system ([ε,,a,ä,ɑ,ɔ]).Such speakers sharply contract the allophonic range and overwhelmingly realize /a/ class items with allophones in the region of [a,ä], avoiding back or front-raised variants, which strongly index working-class status in the city. James Milroy (1982) describes this pattern as “normalization,” but following more recent sociolinguistic work that borrows insights from dialect contact models, I would now describe it as leveling. Leveling is typically a linguistic process that has the effect of reducing variability both within and across language systems and which in principle operates independently of an institutional norm (Watt and Milroy 1999; L. Milroy 2002). Standardization as manifested in careful or higher-status speech typically displays an orientation to an institutionally supported norm.3 In any event, the analytic difficulties produced by the near irrelevance of RP as a careful speech model in the Celtic fringe cities is yet another reason for variationists to deconstruct the notion of the standard. All the upper working- and lower-middle-class Belfast speakers interviewed in the 1970s in the research projects described by Milroy (L. Milroy 1987b: see also Milroy and Gordon 2003) were oriented to a leveled norm, which is more plausibly conceptualized as a modification of the vernacular than as an externally supported norm of the kinds identified in Norwich and New York City. I conclude this section with an account of a particular problem for variationists that emerges if the linguistic standard is treated as “given” and therefore not requiring further analysis. It is generally presented as a neutral reference point for descriptions of variability, and although sociolinguists are aware of its intrinsically hegemonic character, by treating it as neutral they both have their cake and eat it. Silverstein (1996:284) points out correctly (if a little opaquely) that “once the debate is focused on linguistic issues in terms of The Standard versus whatever purportedly polar opposites [sic], then the fact that the situation is conceptualized in terms of The Standard indicates what we might term its hegemonic domination over the field of controversy, no matter what position is taken with respect to it.” Since there is no neutral reference point and no neutral way of reacting to and analyzing language variation, scholars imbue their sociolinguistic analyses with unintended ideological significance when they focus on the characteristics of some variety by comparing it with a supposedly neutral standard. James Milroy (2001) explores in some depth such ideological effects on the theories and descriptive frameworks of linguists, but there is little systematic discussion in the variationist literature of the particular contradictions that arise when the linguistic standard is subjected to the oxymoronic treatment described by Silverstein. These contradictions occasionally become visible, as do other unacknowledged reference points arising from sociolinguistic hegemonies. For example, in a manner uncontroversial to linguists, Labov and Harris’s account of divergence between black and white vernaculars treats both varieties as linguistically equal. However, when the possibility of an ultimate convergence is discussed, the curtain is briefly lifted and the assumption of a concealed reference point is evident: “If the contact is a friendly one, and we achieve true integration in the schools, the two groups may actually exchange socially significant symbols, and black children will begin to use the local vernacular of the white community” (Labov and Harris 1986:21; my emphasis). In one of the few discussions in the literature of the hegemonies underlying the neutral standard assumption, Walters (1996) details the
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problems and inconsistencies visible to African-American students who are introduced to elementary linguistics textbooks. These texts proclaim the linguistic equality of all varieties, while simultaneously presenting a supposedly neutral standard variety as the embodiment of the language ‘English’.
3. Language ideology as social process I have argued so far that an infrastructural prerequisite for an analysis of language attitudes and ideologies is a systematic account of the concept of the standard, and related covert linguistic hegemonies. It is evident that such an account has implications also for analytic procedures (as in the case of leveled vowel systems in Belfast) and for a motivated analysis of the particular ideologies that structure the trajectories of linguistic changes [in the case of (r) in New York City]. Taking as a starting point the account of the revalorization of (r) set out in the previous section, I turn now more generally to the capacity of language ideologies to structure language change, and I consider a style of ideological analysis that seems potentially able to contribute to an integrative account of language attitudes and language use. The approach of scholars such as Woolard, Silverstein, Irvine, and Gal, set out in Kroskrity (2000), is particularly promising in this respect. This approach does not treat ideologies primarily as manifestations of hegemonic practices, as has commonly been done by sociolinguists (cf. Lippi-Green 1997; Ronkin and Karn 1999), but rather models the semiotic processes that give them their social significance. They are thus presented as a central feature of the sociolinguistic landscape rather than as cultural models embraced by the prejudiced and linguistically naive. In accordance with this approach, language ideologies are defined by Silverstein (1979:193) as “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure or use” and by Irvine (1989:255) as “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests.” These definitions are mutually consistent but slightly differently focused. Silverstein suggests a motivation for constructing ideologies in the first place; speakers construct “stories” to explain observed linguistic phenomena. Irvine emphasises the political and other interests that structure intersections between cultural conceptions of language and the social world. For both Irvine and Silverstein, ideologies provide a window on everyday understandings of the social significance of language, playing an important role in delimiting and defining salient social groups and, indeed, whole nations. They involve not only beliefs about language variation and language users but also the creation of lineages and histories for national standard languages that arise from these beliefs. J. Milroy (2002) and Woolard (2002) illustrate this dimension of ideological activity in analyses of the lineages created, respectively, for English and Spanish. Both scholars show clearly how these ideologized histories emerge from specific political-economic and social circumstances. This historical dimension is crucial for an understanding of how ideologies work since, typically, they are historically deep-rooted and thoroughly naturalized—hence their resistance to analysis or argument. Thus, far from manifesting a misguided approach to language variation, which serious investigators should
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ignore, language ideologies link the cultural world of the language user to macrolevel social and political forces. This is, of course, the very link that sociolinguists attempt to create when they model sociolinguistic structure with reference to social categories. Noting that languages and language forms index speakers’ social identities fairly reliably in most communities, Silverstein (1992, 1995) further elaborates his notion of ideology as a system for making sense of this inherent indexicality. Importantly, indexicality can usefully be ranked into different orders of generality. For him, firstorder indexicality entails the association by social actors of a linguistic form or variety (accurately or otherwise—accuracy is beside the point) with some meaningful social group such as female, Asian, Spanish, working class, aristocratic, and so forth. Although social class, gender, and ethnicity are the time-honored sociolinguistic social categories, they by no means exhaust the indexical potential of language: consider, for example, the use of phonological resources in rural Wales to index association with different villages or different chapels (L. Milroy 1982; Thomas 1988) or in Detroit high schools to index association with particular adolescent social categories (Eckert 2000). The point here is that an ideological analysis treats social categories as locally created by social actors and discoverable by analysis, rather than as given. Consequently, an ideologically oriented account of language variation and change treats members of speech communities as agents, rather than as automatons caught up ineluctably in an abstract sociolinguistic system. Whereas Silverstein’s (1992, 1995) first-order indexicality refers rather straightforwardly to the association of linguistic form with social category, second-order indexicality is a metapragmatic concept, describing the noticing, discussion, and rationalization of first-order indexicality. It is these second-order indexical processes that emerge as ideologies. But crucially, language varieties are likely to be differently noticed, rationalized, and evaluated from community to community and from nation to nation. In different communities, different varieties are foregrounded, and the kind of people who speak these varieties are differently ideologized. Particular ideologies need to be explained in terms of local histories and local social, political, and economic conditions. The key point here is that an analysis of ideologies in terms of Silverstein’s (1992, 1995) concept of second-order indexicality provides for relative prominence in cultural models of particular social groups, and the recession of others as first-order indexicalities are rationalized in different ways. This sociolinguistic relativity accounts for the evident salience of race and ethnicity in American language ideology and of social class in British ideology, as noted by (L. Milroy 2000). And since ideologies purport to explain and rationalize the source and significance of linguistic differences, they restructure and distort relationships between the index (i.e., the linguistic form) and the social group indexed, locating linguistic forms “as part of, and as evidence for, what they believe to be systematic behavioral, aesthetic, affective and moral contrasts among the social groups indexed” (Irvine and Gal 2000:37). Hence the pervasiveness of strongly held but palpably counterfactual beliefs about (for example) the superiority of the standard, the impoverished character of working class or ethnically distinctive dialects, the superiority of English or French over other languages, of Colombian and Argentinian varieties of Spanish over other New World varieties, and so forth.
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It is important for sociolinguists that second-order reactions to basic indexicality are visible not only in such attitudes and beliefs about variability but also in other kinds of rather familiar behaviors. For example, the kind of sociolinguistic variables described by Labov (1972) as stereotypes, as distinct from indicators and markers, show the effects of ideological construction particularly clearly. Reactions to such forms by participants are evidenced in stylistic shifting and hypercorrection (such as Cuba[r], idea[r] in nonrhotic dialect areas of the United States). Because they instantiate a reaction to a hegemonic standard, these behaviors are sometimes interpreted as manifestations of linguistic insecurity. Similar reactions to forms associated with nonstandard varieties in which speakers misanalyze a system as they orient to local dialects are not usually cited as evidence of linguistic insecurity—another example of the unacknowledged effect on variationist frameworks of standard as covert reference point. Trudgill (1986: 66–78) describes such misanalyses as “hyperdialectisms.” Thus, for example, in Tyneside, northern England: He divvn’t drink “he doesn’t drink” is a traditional dialect form. Although *he div drink “he does drink” is not, such forms do in fact occur, spoken chiefly by young male speakers of a dialect that is progressively losing extremely localized forms (see Watt and Milroy 1999). All such misanalyses display a sensitivity to the indexical relationship between language and social category. Therefore, regardless of the status of the social group triggering the misanalyses, they can be viewed as instantiations of second-order indexical processes and hence as evidence of local ideological systems. Crucially, an ideological analysis in these terms addresses both language attitudes and sociolinguistic patterns evident in the distribution of variants. Citing a familiar example, Irvine and Gal (2000:47) exemplify the kind of account of socially motivated linguistic change (incorporating both language attitudes and patterns of language use) that such an analysis might offer. They somewhat refocus Labov’s (1963) interpretation of high levels of centralization in the first elements of the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/ in Martha’s Vineyard, emphasising the content of the ideology that gives rise to them. Thus, distinctions among ethnic groups on the island (Yankees, Portuguese, and Indians) were important in the 1930s but receded into the background as an opposition between islanders and mainlanders became salient 30 years later in response to changing economic pressures. This social change structures the trajectory of change in /ay/ and /aw/ since centralized variants of these phonological elements are associated particularly with island versus mainland affiliation, whereas distinctions among ethnic groups are no longer ideologized: “The sudden increase in centralization began among the Chilmark fishermen, the most close-knit group on the island, the most independent, the group which is most stubbornly opposed to the incursions of the summer visitors” (Labov 1972:37). The resulting divergence between variants that index mainlander versus islander affiliation is ideologically mediated in the sense that it depends upon “local images of salient social categories that shifted over time” (Irvine and Gal 2000:47). Forty years after Labov’s (1963) landmark study, Blake and Josey (2003) report the results of a real-time study of /ay/ variants on the island. Adopting the analytic framework set out by Irvine and Gal (2000) and elaborated by L. Milroy (2003), they note that social conditions on the island have changed in several ways. First, the island economy has diversified considerably, so that average incomes are now higher
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than 40 years ago and unemployment rates lower. Second, the socially constructed distinction emphasised by Labov between incomers as “others” and islanders as “locals” has virtually disappeared. Third, as a result of a movement toward a less localized economy and the development of service industries, the fishermen constitute a less distinctive community. The localized fishing industry has been absorbed into larger conglomerates, and the close-knit networks previously characteristic of the fishing community have been disrupted. Blake and Josey note that whereas local identity is still a salient social category on the island, it is no longer associated with the Chilmark fishermen or even with year-round residence on the island. Most Vineyarders, with the important exception of the Native Americans of Gay Head, can be assigned a middle-class status. This social restructuring, which has obliterated the ideological distinction between the social categories “islander” and “mainlander,” also appears to have structured the trajectory of recent changes in the social distribution of /ay/ variants. Blake and Josey (2003) observe that the trend toward high degrees of centralization among the fishermen reported by Labov has halted. The fishermen’s mean index score for /ay/ is not significantly different from that of other social groups, and no speaker or group of speakers emerges as distinctive. The authors argue that the socially motivated pattern of change affecting /ay/ as reported by Labov has disappeared. They characterize the subsequent trajectory of change as the phonologically related but linguistically conditioned process known as Canadian Raising, which affects many more communities than Martha’s Vineyard in different parts of the English-speaking world (Chambers 1973; J. Milroy 1996; Britain 1997). Unlike the trajectory noted by Labov 40 years earlier, Canadian Raising cannot easily be described as socially motivated by local ideological factors.
4. Social and language internal constraints on change: Some points of intersection At this point, let me review and elaborate on the major issues discussed so far. We have considered rather broadly the role of ideological and attitudinal factors in an account of language variation and change, and an ideological analysis of specific changes was exemplified by the well-known cases of (r) in New York City and /ay/ and /aw/ in Martha’s Vineyard. Ideologically motivated change is explicated with reference to local images of language variation, which construct some social groups and their language forms as salient while others are consigned to the background; and of course, different groups may be foregrounded at different times. Such an analysis addresses central concerns of variationist research, treating the social categories not only as constructed by social actors but also as variably salient. A motivation is explicitly provided for speakers to structure variation and change in accordance with their understanding of changing social configurations. The identification of relevant social factors is therefore seen as part of the analysis rather than a framework for structuring a subsequent analysis. Dyer’s (2002) account of the relationship between changing social saliences and phonological change in a town in the English Midlands provides a clear example of how such an analysis works in practice.
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Indeed, a good deal of recent sociolinguistic work is quite consistent with this analysis (see particularly Dubois and Horvath 1999 and, of course, Eckert 2000). More broadly, ideological motivations underlie the long-term maintenance of stigmatized norms in the face of pressures from focused and codified standard languages so familiar to sociolinguists; speakers want to sound like Southerners, African Americans, Tynesiders, Belfasters, New Zealanders, and other groups with whom they align. They also want to sound unlike whatever group they currently perceive themselves as contrasting with. The loyalty of such speakers to their own dialects and their resistance to language forms associated with others constructed as oppositional is usually described by sociolinguists as exemplifying the capacity of spoken language to index identity. The identity factor is, in fact, precisely what an ideological framework addresses, assuming also (and crucially) that salient social groups with which speakers identify are subject to change. Factors constraining4 change, which are generally described as “language internal,” appear to operate independently of local ideologies, and in this section I shall attempt to examine the ways in which such factors work together with ideological motivations to give rise to particular linguistic outcomes. We can exemplify the point at issue here by referring to Eckert’s (2000) account of the interaction between complex configurations of adolescent social category and gender, on the one hand (social factors), and the trajectories of change constrained by the rotations of the Northern Cities Shift on the other (internal factors). Eckert emphasises the local construction of the social categories that provide the dynamic for change, and her account of the ideologies underlying them is entirely consistent with the approach developed in this chapter. However, the interaction between these changes and the principles of change in vowel systems that constrain the Northern Cities Shift is not clear. The remainder of this section focuses on points of intersection such as this one. Internally constrained changes are generally understood to be explicable in terms either of human speech production or perception mechanisms or of intrasystemic constraints on possible changes. They are therefore widely distributed across the world’s languages (see Campbell 1999:chap.11). For example, C-J. Bailey’s (1996:369) notion of connatural change (i.e., internally constrained as opposed to socially motivated) adopts the first kind of explanation, assuming neurobiological rather than phonological constraints. Ohala (1993) emphasises the role of perceptual mismatches, proposing that misperceptions of the speech signal by the listener result in a change in phonetic target; if this target is phonologized, sound change results (see also Beddor and Krakow 1998). Using a more overtly teleological kind of reasoning, Lindblom (1986, 1990) argues that vowel systems evolve to maximize perceptual distance between units in the system and that natural phonetic processes underlie many regularities. Much of Labov’s most influential recent work has focused on internally constrained change. Although he alludes to universal articulatory or perceptual constraints of the kind mentioned above (1994:220–221), he attributes internally constrained change primarily to the symmetry-preserving pressure of the system. Vowel changes are seen as constrained by a limited set of language-internal principles, replacing an earlier, more atomistic analysis of individual phonological variables. The chain shift notion is central to Labov’s account of language internal change, the fundamental principle being that movement of one vowel in the system triggers a series of further
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changes, as adjacent vowels move sequentially to fill emerging gaps. A series of principles derived from a survey of a large number of documented chain shifts is said to constrain possible changes; for example, long vowels are said to rise, short vowels to fall, and back vowels to move to the front (1994:115–154). The nature of language-internal factors in language change, and the relationship between languageinternal and social factors are perennial subjects of debate in historical linguistics. Accordingly, parts of Labov’s work have drawn criticism from historical linguists, particularly Lass (1997:34ff) and Stockwell and Minkova (1997, 1999), chiefly because the chain shift formulation carries with it unacknowledged implications of causality. Also problematic is the applicability of the chain shift concept to work in contemporary speech communities (see also Gordon 2000; Watt 2000). Reservations about chain shifts as an appropriate model do not invalidate Labov’s (1994) principles of vowel change since empirical research can confirm whether long vowels do indeed rise and short vowels fall or back vowels move to the front, and it is certainly clear that such principles frequently capture recurrent types of change. For example, Trudgill et al. (2000) appeal to internal principles to account for a set of changes associated particularly with Southern Hemisphere varieties of English, southern British English and the Southern dialect of the United States. These changes are described by Wells (1982) as “diphthong shift” to refer to ongoing developments whereby the first elements of the rising diphthongs associated with the Great Vowel Shift (/i: u:, ei, ou, ai, au/) continue to move in an apparently coordinated fashion. Labov (1994:217) discusses the same set of changes in a somewhat different way, as a subsystem of the Southern Shift. Although these changes cannot be accounted for within an overarching theory, some can be accommodated by universal principles of the kind posited by Labov, and all appear to be attributable to properties of the language rather than to any detectable social factor. Many other sets of vowel changes identified by sociolinguists as operating in widely separated communities are explained with reference to language-internal constraints. Canadian Raising is one such change, and we noted already that Blake and Josey (in press) describe recent changes in Martha’s Vineyard in relation to this process. The point here is that the ideological system motivating an earlier association of /ay/ raising with the Chilmark fishermen changed when that group ceased to be salient. Thus, the socially motivated pattern of change reported by Labov (1963) disappeared. What is observable now is a phonologically similar pattern, which is, however, linguistically rather than socially constrained and arises independently in different communities (see again Chambers 1973; L. Milroy 1996; Britain 1997). The general proposal here is that local social factors (treated as ideologically driven processes rather than as the social categories more familiar to sociolinguists) operate as constraints on changes driven by internal factors. If the local social boundaries set in place by ideological processes weaken or disappear, language-internal changes can take their course, uninhibited by local ideologies. An analysis of this kind offers an answer to a pair of related questions about the Northern Cities Shift: why does this major series of vowel shifts have a particular geographical distribution and why does it stop where it does? The shift is reported to be most vigorous in the cities settled after the opening up of the Great Lakes by the Erie Canal in an era of greatly increased mobility ushered in by the steamship, the
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railroad, and the automobile (see further Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998). However, it appears to be blocked when it encounters the social boundaries set up by historically well-established and linguistically focused communities; hence it does not affect the older East Coast cities or eastern New England. The suggestion here is that this set of language-internal changes is blocked by speech communities where historically long-standing and thoroughly ideologized patterns of indexicality are firmly in place. It might further be predicted that if social changes in a particular speech community weakened the indexical relationship between language and local social categories, the NCS changes would spread into that community. This account of the intersection between local ideologies and internal factors as catalysts of change builds upon a good deal of solid variationist research that focuses either on social motivations or on internal constraints. Discussing the issue of the relationship between internally motivated and externally constrained change in an adjacent field, Clyne (2003:3) similarly emphasises their complementarity. Although Jones and Esch (2002:1) are surely correct in noting a tendency to focus disjunctively on either social or internal constraints on change, accounts that attempt to integrate both kinds of factors are not new, and some are in certain respects similar to the one presented here. Consider the example of the set of coordinated changes in Southern Hemisphere English described as diphthong shift, which was discussed earlier in this section. Noting its continuation along a trajectory already present in nineteenth-century local accents of southeastern England, John Wells suggests that the changes were free to take a natural course in the colonies, particularly Australia, because they were uninhibited by the sociolinguistic constraints of RP: “In a village or small town . . . in 1800, a man would be in regular contact with RP speakers (squire, rector, doctor) and the social pressures to admire and imitate qualities associated with this culturally dominant class were strong” (1982:593). Although Wells (1982) characterizes a relationship between language internaland ideologically motivated change similar to the one proposed here, he appears to restrict to high-status models the effect of ideology in structuring change. I would suggest a larger generalization of the kind already proposed to account for the barriers encountered by the American Northern Cities Shift, namely, that Southern Hemisphere diphthong shift can take place because it is uninhibited by the social boundaries associated with first-order indexicalities of all kinds. This conception does not privilege varieties that index the high status of the English rector and squire but includes also those that index other salient social groups in the migrants’ original homes. Similar comments might be made about Kroch’s (1978) theory of change, which characterized ideology as suppressing “natural” phonetic processes. Like Wells, Kroch restricts his discussion of the inhibiting effects of ideology to standard or high-status varieties. It is also worth commenting here on Labov’s (1994:78) long-standing distinction between “change from above” and “change from below,” which refers simultaneously to levels of social awareness and positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy. “Change from above” appears to be ideologically motivated, being triggered by a response to a particular social group [as in the case of (r) in New York City]. However, its characterization with reference to a high-status group of speakers is problematic since the social semiotics underlying ideologically motivated change are not thus restricted.
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5. Conclusion My main goal in this chapter has been to develop an analysis of the role of speaker attitude in language change that can be incorporated into a variationist account. To this end, I have adapted an ideological analysis of the kind developed by scholars such as Gal, Irvine and Silverstein. Since attitudes toward the standard in speech communities are usually very salient, I began by looking at different local images of Standard English. I argued particularly that the concept of the standard was underspecified in sociolinguistics, and I discussed some consequences of this underspecification. The way in which an ideological analysis might handle the task of characterizing trajectories of socially motivated change was illustrated by several examples, some very prominent in the sociolinguistic literature. In addition, L. Milroy (2003), and Anderson et al. (2002) discuss changes in the back vowel system in the African-American community in Detroit with reference to this framework. The previous section focused on the intersections between “internally” and “externally” constrained change. The fundamental proposal is that local social factors, discussed here in terms of ideologically driven processes rather than as social categories, operate as constraints on language-internal change. The corollary to this proposal is that if social boundaries become permeable and ideological systems were disrupted as a result of social change, language-internal changes will take their course, uninhibited by social barriers; hence (for example) the spread of the Northern Cities Shift in the United States across large territories. Building upon existing variationist work on language change, I have attempted to integrate perspectives that usually appear disjunctively in our large and rich body of research into sociolinguistic patterns in speech communities. Notes Versions of parts of this chapter were presented in October 1999 at NWAVE-28, Toronto, and in November 1999 at the conference organized at Pitzer College, Claremont, California, in honor of Ronald Macaulay. I am grateful to colleagues at both of these meetings for helpful contributions. I thank James Milroy for helpful comments on the entire chapter. 1. Bell’s work (1984, 1999) and very recently that of Garrett et al (2003) is a notable exception to this generalization. 2. However, whereas Trudgill characterises RP as the relevant norm at the standard end of the sociolinguistic continuum, he elsewhere (most recently Trudgill 1999) treats British standard English as a dialect that can be spoken with any accent. 3. This distinction simplifies matters somewhat. It does not, of course, preclude the emergence in speech communities of leveled varieties as institutionally supported spoken standards, as seems to have happened in the United States (L. Milroy 2000). 4. A pedantic terminological point is in order here. Given that speakers are agents with attitudes and motivations, it is reasonable to speak of socially motivated change. But for two reasons it is preferable to speak of internal constraints on change rather than internal motivations. First, it is not easy to attribute motives to abstract systems; second, the term motive and its derivatives implies a teleological way of thinking about language-internal change that is not consistent with the proposal developed in this chapter. In a recent article that addresses a range of issues overlapping the subject matter of this chapter (Milroy 2003),
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I have commented on some difficulties arising from the dichotomy between language-internal and social factors in language change.
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10 RONALD MACAULAY
The Radical Conservatism of Scots It is not just the formal skills of the hearers and speakers that produce social sense; although it is a technical accomplishment, it is not only that. On the contrary one must listen to what people say and the terms in which they say it. (Clegg 1993:33)
A
lthough Saussure (1986: 200) may have had the right idea when he claimed that “there are as many dialects as places,” the notion of place is complex (Johnstone, this volume) and the term dialect tends to be associated with the kind of relic communities described by Wolfram (this volume). It is, however, not only small communities that have dialects; there are also what I have called magna-dialects (Macaulay 2002), such as American English and Australian English, and it is possible to chart the differences between the former and Canadian English and between Australian English and New Zealand English. It is hardly surprising that nations should wish to assert their independence through language, as the Norwegians did after gaining their independence from Denmark (Haugen 1966). Such an attitude is not restricted to independent countries. In the conclusion to his book Understanding Scotland, David McCrone (1992:214) claims that nationalism in Scotland “draws very thinly on cultural traditions; there is virtually no linguistic or religious basis to nationalism” (emphasis added). He bases this claim on the view that “there is little to distinguish Scotland linguistically from England, since Gaelic is spoken by less than 2 per cent” (1992:211). Such a view limits significant linguistic differences to those between clearly distinct languages. In this he is not alone. J. G. Kellas (1980:3) in Modern Scotland is even more categorical: “Scottish nationality is not linguistic, for there is no Scottish language.” In response to McCrone and Kellas, my claim is that the differences between Scottish English and English English are great enough to play a key role in the sense of Scottish identity. McCrone and Kellas may have underestimated the importance of language because they view Scotland from a middle-class perspective, whereas much of the strength of 178
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“Scottishness” comes from a thriving and lively lower-class culture, linked to a form of speech that has markedly maintained its distinctiveness from southern varieties. The linguistic history of Scotland is as complicated as its political history. In addition to Pictish, about which little is known, the following languages have been spoken in Scotland: British (p-Celtic, related to Welsh), Gaelic (q-Celtic related to Irish), Northumbrian (the northern form of Old English), and varieties of Scandinavian languages. All these languages have contributed to the place-names of Scotland, but the basis of modern Lowland Scots, spoken south and east of the Highland Line, is the Northumbrian form of Old English. By the end of the fifteenth century, Scottish had become identifiable as a language separate from the language spoken by the king of England’s subjects. According to David Murison (1979:8–9), “The years 1460–1560 can be considered the heyday of the Scots tongue as a full national language showing all the signs of a rapidly developing, all-purpose speech, as distinct from English as Portuguese from Spanish, Dutch from German, or Swedish from Danish.” The first setback came with the Reformation because there was no Bible in Scots: “To put it in broad, simple terms, English gradually took over as the literary or written language of Scotland, while the local forms of speech, the dialects, continued as the spoken tongue.” The process was accelerated with the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England, and even more by the Act of Union in 1707, when a single Parliament was established in London. Scotland retained its own religion, legal system, educational philosophy, and a keen sense of its own identity. Despite the anglicizing effect of the use of English in the church, schools, administration, and all written materials, the spoken dialects continued to flourish, and their prestige received a symbolic boost with the publication of the poems of Robert Burns at the end of the eighteenth century and, more questionably, by the moderate use of Scots by Sir Walter Scott to represent the speech of lower-status characters. Burns was not the only poet to write in dialect, but his success gave his democratic message (“A man’s a man for a’ that”) and his satirical attitude to the “unco guid” (the self-righteous) a place in the average Scot’s sense of identity and tradition. The linguistic border between Scotland and England is clearly marked (Speitel 1969) and may even be strengthening (Glauser 1974). In the over 200 interviews I have conducted in Scotland, Scots speakers are more or less unanimous in the belief that what distinguishes the Scots from the English is the way that they speak. All Scots are aware of English forms of speech from the radio and television, but only the upper-class Scots who have been educated at public schools speak Received Pronunciation (RP) or anything approaching it. Middleclass Scots speak a form of Standard English that is distinguished from RP by a number of features: it is rhotic (i.e., r is pronounced in final position, as in car, and before a consonant, as in card); there is no neutralization of vowels before r, so fir and fur are distinct, as are tern and turn; there is no distinction between long and short a, so Sam and psalm are the same; there is no distinction in the high back rounded vowels, so food rhymes with good; there are other differences in vowel quality and length, and Scottish intonation is markedly different from southern English. It is generally very easy for Scots speakers to identify fellow Scots from even very short overheard utterances. It is a highly focused form of speech (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985).
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The lower-class Scots speakers show even greater differences from southern English. The Great English Vowel Shift operated differently north of the border and produced a very different system. The most salient feature is that the Middle English long high back rounded vowel u did not diphthongize, with the result that lowerclass Scots speakers can be heard saying doon, oot, and hoose for down, out, and house. Another consequence of the difference in the vowel shift is that lower-class speakers will sometimes use forms such as hame, mair, and stane for home, more, and stone. However, all Scots know the standard forms and can use them when they wish. The use of forms such as doon and hame is not because of ignorance of the standard forms or an inability to produce them. There are many other vowel differences and some consonantal differences, many of them varying from one part of the country to the other. There is also a fairly rare but very salient use of the velar fricative in words such as night and bought, which may be pronounced nicht and bocht. In these features, Scottish English, as spoken by many ordinary people today, is on several counts a very conservative form of English, with some forms (e.g., doon, oot, nicht, bocht) that have remained almost unchanged since the days before English was a separate language but which were lost or altered in most varieties of English by the sixteenth century. The persistence of these forms is all the more remarkable in that they are not generally used in education, in the mass media, in the institutionalized bureaucracy, or by the more prosperous sector of Scottish society (Macaulay 1988). This conservatism is not political but is a traditionalism; it is the standard language that adopted innovations such as the loss of the velar fricative and the Great Vowel Shift. There are a number of factors that probably have contributed to this conservatism over the years: the desire of a minority group to maintain its distinctness from the dominant majority group; a relatively low level of prosperity, which limited social mobility and contributed more to emigration than immigration; a cultural traditionalism that takes many forms; the Scots’ view of their own national character; and no doubt many others. However, none of these alone nor all combined explain why Scots’ forms of speech should be so resilient, despite the pressures of education, employment, and the media. The situation is complicated by social-class differences. Although most Scots reveal their Scottishness through their speech, it is the lower-class speakers who display the most marked features. Working-class solidarity is much stronger in Scotland than in England (e.g., in the trade union movement and in voting patterns). The lower-class speakers thus have a double reason for their form of speech: (1) to assert their Scottishness and separateness from the English and (2) to affirm their workingclass loyalty and rejection of middle-class values. This is important because too often the speakers of nonprestige varieties are believed to accept the values of the dominant group or class (Gal 1989: 353–354). What I hope to show in the examples that follow is that the kinds of linguistic features (e.g., in pronunciation, morphology, syntax, and lexicon) that distinguish social varieties of language are indexical of the kinds of attitudes and opinions that the speakers hold. (For this sense of indexical, see Hanks 1996 and Silverstein 1996.) In other words, I am claiming that it is not a coincidence that a highly marked form of speech should be used by people who are proud of their independence, who do
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not feel insecure, and who do not see the dominant form of speech or the mainstream way of life as so desirable as to lead to a determination to change or to a dissatisfaction with their own practices. As Ben-Rafael (1994:242) has pointed out: Where . . . the carriers [of a weak social status] neither define themselves, nor are defined a priori as an integral part of the social entity described by the dominant culture, their allegiance to the low-value code measures the strength of their identification with their own collective identity, reinforces their social cohesion, and supports their self-respect and dignity.
There is plenty of evidence that Scots are aware of the significance of different forms of speech. When I was setting up the arrangements for the interview in Ayr with the former coal miner, Andrew Sinclair, he told me that he might not sound as “broad” in speaking with me as he would in talking with his friends: This is where after being in the likes of community associations et cetera and that for quite a number of years eh you begin to—well is the right word “learn”—you begin to realize that it just doesnae do for to speak your normal way that you would do to everybody else. You’ve got to try and compromise, as I would say, and all like that.
I had not told him that I was interested in his form of speech, but he had worked that out for himself. In the interview, his prediction proved to be accurate; he was not as “broad” as two other respondents from a similar background (Macaulay 1991:250). Ella Laidlaw,1 another respondent in Ayr, referred to “the auld Scotch tongue” and observed to me, “You saw us up at the Centre Council meeting, you saw how we can all sit and talk wer ain [our own] tongue wer ain wey among werselves [ourselves].” She and her husband (JL) talked about their son-in-law, who is English and “a lovely speaker,” and his two children who speak in the same way. Their comments show how clearly they understand the sociolinguistic significance of differences: EL:
they’re beautiful speakers I mean my daughter’s broad Scotch she’s like me JL: she’s worse than you EL: if I’m—what do you caw [call] it if I’m in among company the likes of Mr. Bruce and them well you talk to him ony old road [any old way] you don’t blow the heid [head] wi Jimmie but if you go further than that highers or the cooncillors you’ve got to keep your—match them sort of style but when I’m among my ain [own] I just talk whatever wey [way] that suits me Despite the apparent contradictions (the son-in-law and children are “beautiful” speakers because of English influence, but his mother is “the worst”; because they can’t understand her English form of speech, and “us folk with oor Scottish tongues we
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think everybody should speak the same way as us,” even though speaking very broad Scots can be referred to as “worse”), it is clear that “the auld Scotch tongue” is highly valued. Dittmar (1988:xv), in his introduction to The Sociolinguistics of Urban Vernaculars, speaks of the characteristics of urban speech: “The speaker’s fast tongue, monotonous intonation, denseness of jokes and quick-wittedness (hypothetically) appear to be characteristics of urban vernaculars which seem to develop naturally out of the necessity to survive communicatively in complex cities.” It is appropriate that Dittmar should speak of survival skills. The speakers who will be quoted are survivors of the class war that modern capitalist society wages against the underclass. T. C. Smout (1986:1), in the introduction to his A Century of the Scottish People 1830–1950, observes, “If I have dwelt excessively upon the dark exterior of life, it is inevitably so in a book concerned with working-class experience in an age when most Scots were working-class and when their experience was, to the modern eye, bad.” Smout was mostly dealing with an earlier period than the lives of the speakers whose voices I will be quoting, but there is some overlap. However, as the speakers themselves made clear, the “dark exterior” did not manage to crush their spirit; they are all survivors in their different ways. Hugh Gemmill had been a farm laborer when the wages were £5 for six months plus your keep (“and you didnae get mony claes [clothes] you know then”). In one place he explained that the laborers did not get fed properly and had to steal eggs and suck them. At one time he had been “on the Buroo” (i.e., unemployed) and his benefits were 26 shillings a week, out of which he had to pay 10 shillings rent for his room (“and you werenae left with much”). He never got overtime when he worked on the farms (“you were sorry for fermers in these days because there were nae money connected to the thing and everybody had to work and work dashed hard”). He had had to wait until he got some money upon retirement to be able to put carpets on the floors (“that was handy”). He was comfortably off with his old-age pension only because he did not drink or smoke. He told of a time when the miners were on strike and they would come and work part time on the farm: you seen them coming up by you in the efternin [afternoon] aboot three o’clock and you’re working slaving away and that was you maybe slaving until eicht or nine o’clock at nicht and the other point was that if the miner wrocht [worked] he got peyed [paid] for it you never got—you got nothing you got what your wage was supposed to be but overtime—you didnae get any overtime and the other point was you were sorry for fermers in these days because there were nae money connected to the thing and everybody had to work and work dashed hard whereas noo—fermers—jeez there fermers’ clubs all over the place and that’s what they dae they don’t work
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When I asked Hugh Gemmill if there was anything he thought was better in the old days, he replied: not that I ken [know] of naw [no] the fact is you’ve got money noo that you hadnae and money’s—it’s maybe the root of all evil but it’s a necessity tae [too] at the same time Gemmill’s speech is the most traditional of all the speakers I interviewed in Ayr (Macaulay 1991:238–241) and very similar to that recorded by Wilson 60 years earlier (Wilson 1923) in his investigation of what had happened to the dialect of Robert Burns. Gemmill’s whole interview shows complete self-assurance and no indications of insecurity, linguistic or otherwise. There are no signs anywhere that he was accommodating to me as a middle-class speaker or that he felt any anxiety about his form of speech. His language is as confident as his demeanour. Willie Lang, another ex–coal miner in Ayr, told me how his mother had gone into domestic service on a farm at the age of 12. She ran away, but her father took her back. Lang himself had driven a cart for a farmer when he was only 6 years old, and at the age of 11 he had driven a coal cart. He had gone into the pits when he was 14 “because my folks were in the pits you see.” As all the miners told me, it was important to have your father in the pits as that way you got to go down the mine earlier: “of course your father had the contract and he got the money sort of thing you see,” but “you had to produce oh aye you had to produce.” “It was seven-andnine [about 40p] a ton so you’d to produce a lot of tons to get some money and it wasnae much use leaving here quarter past five in the morning to get to Dailly and working for nothing.” At the time of the interview, he had fallen from the status of a miner to being the caretaker of the local community center. Like several other miners, he spoke of the “comradeship” down the mine: I liked pit work and I’ll tell you one thing aboot it the comradeship you have in the pit is amazing and you see the difference going to the likes o a job like this—a caretaker there’s no comparison because you’ve nobody there sort of thing you know with the— with the same harmony you work among one another in the pit you helped one another He told of the difference when he went to work in a factory: well there a difference with the stamp works and the pit a great difference take—take going to the pit there you got your pey [pay] on a Friday sort of thing
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and you’d a piece-box and a bag with you ower your shooder [shoulder] you put your pey-poke [pay packet] into your piece-box [lunchbox] stuck it in your bag you stuck it doon in the side of the pad when you’re going into the baths you could come back oot you’d see your pey’s there but could you do that in the stamp works? no way no way so that was the difference you see somebody would go and take it Lang told me many stories about his success in the pits, but he also illustrated his sense of independence: there were one day I was on the road hame [home] in fact when I met him the manager and you know kenning him that weel [knowing him that well] being a local lad you see “Where are you going?” “Och” says I “Bobby you ken where I’m going” says I “I’m no trying to cheat you in any way” says I “I’m going hame” says I “it’s stripped there’s only aboot half a dozen ledges to come” says I “the shots are aw aff [all off ] and the coal’s just aboot redd up [cleared away]” ken what he says to me? “Too early” says I “I’ll no be so early the morn, Bobby there your lamp there your cap back you can keep it” Despite his rash words, Lang had not quit the mines at that time and must have made his peace with the manager later, but the story illustrates an independent mind, resistant to criticism. When I asked about changes since he had left the mines, he replied: oh aye things have changed but mind you I don’t know whether it’s for the good or no it’s no for the good of the workers I don’t think because I mean there’s so many being laid off and you’re supposed to create wealth to make a better state well it’s no going to be able to create enough wealth to pay for the leisure time we’ve got you see what I mean
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Many of the working-class speakers I interviewed expressed similar concern about the economy and particularly about the shortage of jobs. Lang was a very rewarding respondent (Macaulay 1991:245–248). He was fully at ease while talking with me and told his stories with the confidence of someone who had been a good worker and was recognized as such. None of his stories indicates any sense that he ever felt inferior to those in positions of authority over him. The following story illustrates his way of dealing with his superiors: there another wee man he was undermanager when Kennedy was the manager and he said to me “What aboot gieing up the stripping ken and going to developing?” I was developing you see making these pan runs and what-have-you but the wee man says to me “How aboot going to any bit I send you an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay?” but I says “What do you coont an honest day’s pay?” I says “That’s the vital bit” I says “An honest day’s pay to you micht not be an honest day’s pay to me” so he suggested an amount and I says “Oh well fair enough” and if I went oot in the morning I didnae know where I was going Note that Lang is not anxious about what might be considered “an honest days’s work;” he knows he can provide that, but he wants to be sure that the pay is appropriate. Relations in the mines were not always as amicable as Lang suggests. Archie Munroe was interviewed as part of the Scottish Working People’s Oral History Project. He had been a miner in Fife and told the following story: well in those days the oversman he was—he was like Christ the manager was God the oversman was Christ I didn’t know there was such a thing as an under-manager I don’t think there was I think it was just the oversman but this man was Jimmy Robb and he had a very deep voice and what he said it was true whether it was true or false if he said it it was right but eh I decided that this man cannae just kick me about Munroe persuaded the other men not to do some extra work unless they got paid for it. Finally, the oversman agreed to pay them, but he said to Munroe: Robb come to me later and he says “Munroe you’re no going to get on very far in here sir
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if you’s carrying on like that” I says “I’ll get as far as you sir” Although the oversman “was Christ” and “what he said it was true whether it was true or false,” Munroe decides that “this man cannae just kick me around.” He had got his first opportunity to work at the coal face when he was only 17. It did not take him long to assert his independence: well it was very shortly after that that this deputy approached me and asked me if I wanted a constant place on the face line and I said “Yes” so I started on this face line and for the first two weeks I still had to collect my wages from Bobby Cumming and I said “Bobby” [the man he served his apprenticeship under] it was Bobby Cumming I said “Bobby I’m a man on my own now and I want a pay line the same as the rest of the men and there’s no contractor going to be exploiting my lamp or my body” he said “What are you worried about sir? you’re going to get your wages” I says “Aye but I’m no making no wages for no contractor sir” so that was the last time I worked for a contractor and I started earning my own living Although he was only 17, he was not going to have any contractor “exploiting” his lamp or his body. Bella K. was interviewed as part of the Dundee Oral History Project, and a few years later I interviewed her personally. She told me how her mother had become radicalized after her father had been arrested and tried for taking part in a demonstration. Bella’s mother employed a solicitor to defend her husband. After he had been convicted, Mrs M went to pay the solicitor: she said to him “That policeman told a lot of lies” she said “Is that justice?” and he said “Madam you do not go to the court for justice you only go to the court to be tried” so my mother said “Well instead of one rebel now you’ve got two and all the bairns [children] we bring up with us” Independence of spirit, however, was there in the family before this time. Bella K. had known what it was to be poor both as a child and as an adult, although generally she had been better off than those around her. She told me about her grandmother: my mother’s youngest brother George he died because of the jute mills because he was a conscientious worker
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and the mill went on fire and he put the fire out got soaked to the skin kept on working came home took pneumonia and died and he wasn’t twenty-one and when—it was weeks after that the mill master came up to my granny’s door with some money and she threw it at him and said “I don’t want your bloody bloody money stick it” As a young woman, Bella had tried working in the jute mill that produced rolls of canvas, but she found it a very lonely job because the noise of the shuttles going “clacketty-clack” made it impossible to talk to anyone, so she left. Then she got a job in a munitions factory during World War II: it was nightshift and it was twelve hours and they were making six pound shells and I got put on a saw sawing up big long poles of metal into—to—to shells you know the size of the shells and it took about an hour for this ruddy saw to come down and munch its way through this bar of steel Christ sit there for twelve hours a day I was young I was full of life I was strong it was soul destroying it was killing me so I left that as well Many years later she had a factory job, and she turns the comment of the supervisor in the Timex factory into a graphic description of the job: and when the women went up and asked in this Timex to Thompson for recognition as—as—as eh skilled workers he turned round and said “I could get chimpanzees to do the job” and really I went on a machine in Timex to be successful you would’ve had to be a fucking chimpanzee because the machine was so made that you would’ve needed at least four-feet-long legs
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six-feet-long arms and a two-feet body But she had found reward in being a welder in the shipyard during World War II: it was great building boats you know this—this—this em rusty piece of metal was going up and you were welding it and when it was finished it was aa painted and polished how they put the wood on how they put the furniture in how they made their lounge and you knew at the back of that bonnie wood there was a pissy corner where the men used to piss and the difference—the difference when it was finished you know they designed—designed oak panelling and and the ships were beautiful the ships were beautiful and you—you seen it going down into the water and lo and behold it floated what an end product instead of this rolls and rolls of canvas that you didn’t know what happened to it you never saw an end product here was a finished product where men lived on they read they slept they ate they worked on this thing it was a great sense it was to me it was fulfillment of everything and it did great for your ego and great for your sense of achievement it took away the drudgery out of the word work all at once you were a creator This is the voice of someone who has known the drudgery of work and what it could do to those condemned to it. In the jute mills it was impossible to carry on a conversation because of the noise of the machinery. She believed that there were a lot of spinsters because they never came in contact with anybody: and I thought it was a very isolated job white faces
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She thought that she would go mad in such circumstances or in the Timex factory, where her job was countersinking a number-nine hole: and you had to produce eleven thousand five hundred a day so you can imagine me sitting there “one two three four” Bella had been frustrated after the war because she had been unable to get work as a welder because she was a woman. Eventually, when, as she put it, “equality came,” she went back to work in the shipyard at the age of 54. However, she had tried many times before that to get work at a job that she knew she could do but was always denied because she was a woman. One of the things that Bella K. did after she retired was to talk to young women and encourage them to stand up for themselves the way she had. In her interview with me, she told me one of things she said to them: I used to say to the women round about I used to say “You know if I die when I go to heaven God will not ask me if I’m a man or a woman he’ll only ask me what I have done and he’ll say to me ‘Well you deserve your wings and your halo and your harp off you go’ and if it is that I go down below he won’t ask me he’ll just say to me ‘What’ve you done?’ and I’ll say ‘Well I’ve done this and I’ve done that’ and he’ll say ‘Right into the furny furnace with you’ and I will be burnt.” and I says “They never asked me if I’m a man or woman they just asked me what I’d done the only person that asks me if I’m a man or a woman is my employer now I’ve got to ask myself ‘Is he more godly than God or is he more devilish than the Devil? What is he?’” She talked about her father and his influence on her: it was a very strong influence as regards to politics beliefs honesty and full of sense such as “They may have more money than you but they’re never better than you nobody is ever your betters bairn you are as good as them any time” It is a theme that runs through many of the interviews: they may have more money than you, but you are as good as them.
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Money also came up as a topic in my interview with the Dalgleishes in Aberdeen. The Dalgleishes were fortunate enough to all be working at the time of the interview and doing comparatively well, mainly because Bill Dalgleish had had the security of a job with the railway, and his wife, Nan, had always worked. They had been able to travel widely (including several trips to Canada and the United States), partly because of concessionary fares and travel vouchers that he got through his work. They liked traveling, and that was how they chose to spend their money. But it had not always been easy. Nan Dalgleish’s mother had worked: ‘at Peary’s the paperworks that was six in the morning to six at night—Saturday and aa [all] eight till twelve’ and all for ten shillings a week. Present during the interview were also Nan’s mother, their daughter Pat, and their son-in-law, Jim Dyce. They all had strong Aberdeen accents, but Jim Dyce’s form of speech was the most strongly localized. Although he would have been tempted to emigrate to Canada if he had seen it at an earlier age, Jim now feels less positive about the way of life there: maybe it’s mair American than Canada the impression I get the pace of life is eh ken eh ken like here you spick to the—the guys you ken they spick about fitbaa [football] they spick aboot their cars broken doon when we went over to Canada I dinna ken it’s maybe me that’s thinks of this but every time you’re spicking with Canadians aathing [everything] seems to be money He is also critical of the notion of upward mobility because of the insecurity he senses in both Canada and the United States: they’re sitting ower there ken the big cars, big hooses and they’ve got aa [all] this money but when you listen to them spicking [speaking] the wey—I get the impression they got a built-in fear of somebody’s going to come along and take it aall off of them and they’ve got to start aa ower [all over] again He contrasts this “built-in fear” with the “contentment” of the kind of people he knows in Aberdeen: like here I think people if they’ve got enough money to live here they’re nae oot to hae thoosands [have thousands] or millions they’re nae wanting big cars
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they’re wanting a car but nae necessarily a big car or necessarily a big hoose to me uh—the majority of people that I ken onyway I would say they’re mair prepared to hae contentment than to hae big money ken if they’ve enough money With such an attitude, it is not surprising that he feels no need or desire to change his way of speaking for upward mobility: J:
I aye used to laugh fen [when] I left the school and started working used to—I—the—the company I worked for ken was a high class standard of work they did aa [all] the Westend ken up Rubislawden and aathing [everything] you ken and well I just spoke the wey I spoke and I was born in Fitdee and aathing and eh ken it was a queer thing to go to somebody’s hoose that spoke proper English “Oh yes how are you doing? you’re the—you have come to sort—mend our roof” and ken I associated eh I wouldnae say now but fen I was a kid fifteen sixteen year aald I associated somebody that spoke proper as haeing [having] money G: as being well aff [well off ] J: as being well aff eh nae educated but haeing money and if you spoke proper “Oh he’s well aff he’s well aff ” but nae now B: of course ootside Aberdeen you’ll get a totally different speaker outside Aberdeen the like of Huntley and all these places you get the real country speaker J: we canna even understand them can we? N: no sometimes but I mean look at the folk that doesnae understand us [J = Jim; G = Nan’s mother; B =Bill; N = Nan; P = Pat] In this passage there is a clear awareness of the heteroglossia in the community. There is “proper English,” which is not Received Pronunciation but the language of the “well off ” in Aberdeen who would have marked Aberdeen accents and would use words like mend rather than sort and expressions like How are you doing? There is the speech of someone who “was born in Fitdee” (i.e., Footdee, a poorer part of the city) and who “just spoke the wey I spoke.” There is the language of “the real country speaker” outside of Aberdeen, whose speech is not always understandable even to the people of Aberdeen. Finally, although not mentioned explicitly, there is
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the form of speech used by the Dalgleish family, which people elsewhere “doesnae understand.” When I was thanking them at the end of the evening, concern was expressed as to whether I would be able to understand the tape or whether I would need to have it “translated.” Mary Ritchie was another of the Ayr respondents (Macaulay 1991: 223–225). Her father had been a miner, and she was the widow of a woodcutter. She told about her first job: eh—fourteen—fourteen and a half by the time I started working that was the age for leaving—fourteen (RM: What kind of job was it?) eh—carpet weaving it was—it suited—eh it suited me my mother wasnae strong and eh you had er—you only worked a half day on a Saturday and that let me get home to do the heavy work you know and just so as my mother just had light work to do all week after it but—eh—I wasnae in love with it either I hated thon big gate clanking at the back of me I felt as if I was in a prison The job suited her because she had Saturday afternoon off, not to amuse herself, but “to do the heavy work” for her mother, even though she felt as if she “was in a prison.” She had left the factory when she got married but had to go out to work again when her husband became too ill to work. Rather than take what would probably have been a better-paid job in the factory, Ritchie preferred to do what many might see as the lowest kind of menial work. What comes through many of the interviews is a desire to do work that is in some sense rewarding with little concern for the status of the work. Scotland has always been a relatively poor country. People like Hugh Gemmill, Willie Lang, Mary Ritchie, Ella Laidlaw, Jim Dyce, Bella K., and Archie Munroe expected to work hard and did not expect to get paid much (“an honest day’s pay”), but they did not want to be treated like “chimpanzees” or slaves. They are truly the working class and take a pride in doing a job well. Their contempt is reserved for those who do not want to work or who have betrayed the interests of the workers. All of those I have quoted left school at the minimum age and had not gone on to higher education, yet they express themselves very effectively and in some cases eloquently. Most of them had experienced hard times, but they do not complain. Despite their low ranking on any socioeconomic or social-status scale, they do not manifest any feelings of inferiority or insecurity (“They may have more money than you but they’re never better than you”). Their voices come over with a clear sense of independence and self-reliance. Their views are expressed without hedges, qualification, or repairs, as is normal when people are expressing what Claudia Strauss (2002) calls “common opinions.” It may be worth emphasizing that these individuals were not chosen in advance for any special qualities or political views. It is only chance that brought them to my attention, and I had
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no idea what I would hear when I set up the interviews. Nor did I set out to elicit particular views of this kind through direct questions. There are several themes that recur in the interviews. One is pride in work and doing work well. The greatest disaster is to be out of work or to have to do work that is perceived to be, in Bella K.’s words, “soul destroying.” There is also a fierce sense of independence; like Archie Munroe, they feel about their bosses “that this man cannae just kick me about,” and they do not want anyone “exploiting” their skills or their body. They are not greedy about money, but like Willie Lang they want “an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work” because, as Hugh Gemmill says, money may be “the root of all evil but its a necessity tae at the same time.” They have no respect for those that are “only out for the money.” They do not want to hear “a load of tripe” from politicians or clergymen. On the other hand, they have respect for their parents, despite what in many cases was a rather harsh upbringing. Another theme is loyalty to the area in which the speakers grew up and where they still live. Although many of them had traveled abroad and most had relatives who had emigrated, they often make it quite clear that where they live is the best place for them. Finally, there is their pride in their form of speech, contrary to what middle-class speakers might expect. As Ella Laidlaw said, “We can all sit and talk wer ain tongue wer ain way.” The Dalglieshes and Gillespies can joke about the differences between their speech and that of others. Bella K., eloquent as ever, spoke about another side of language. In the world of work, Bella had learned to use a certain kind of language for survival, but this does not mean that she had lost her femininity: of course you’re—you’re coarsened off but inside you are still female you have still the ability to love your children and to love your husband and to understand if your husband’s no working and he’s willing to work that it’s not his fault you’re still willing you’re still feminine enough to know what love is and to shelter and to shield and protect your own and they’re wrong when they say that we are coarse women okay wer speech is coarse we can swear but four-letter words was left here behind with the Romans and we—we didn’t invent them they were given to us to express werself we’re uneducated in lots of ways and working women what way are we going to express werself? In the Glasgow study I recorded a number of very negative comments from middle-class speakers about the speech of the city (Macaulay 1977:84–130). Even at the time I wondered about the legitimacy of accepting these remarks as evidence
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of linguistic attitudes. I am now convinced that some of the comments were probably made because I perhaps gave the impression that I was looking for negative responses.2 Most of the negative comments came from middle-class respondents and probably did not adequately represent the views of the working-class speakers. What is wrong with Bourdieu’s (1991), and Bernstein’s (1971) view of the linguistic market is that they take a very narrow view of the economy. In his introduction to the latest translation of Bourdieu’s work, Thompson (1991:14) explains: One of the central ideas of Bourdieu’s work, for which he is well known among sociologists of education, is the idea that there are different forms of capital: not only “economic capital” in the strict sense (i.e. material wealth in the form of money, stocks and shares, property, etc.), but also “cultural capital” (i.e., knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical qualifications), “symbolic capital” (i.e., accumulated prestige or honour), and so on. One of the most important properties of fields is the way in which they allow one form of capital to be converted into another—in the way, for example, that certain educational qualifications can be cashed in for lucrative jobs.
In Bourdieu’s society, as Jim Dyce said of Canada, “aathing seems to be money,” and the assumption is that everybody is similarly motivated by the desire for money. But there are many conditions under which people, like Bella K.’s granny, do not want “your bloody bloody money.” Mary Ritchie does not want to go back to the prison of the factory. Bella does not want to be “a fucking chimpanzee” countersinking 11,500 number-9 holes; she wants to be “a creator.” On the other hand, being out of work is the worst thing that can happen. Bella K. had been miserable when she had not been able to work as a welder just because she was a woman, partly on account of the money she was not earning but also because it is your work that gives you a position in society: and they say to you “What are you?” you’re unemployed you’re only an army you’re only one of an army you’re no nothing you’re nothing if you’re not—if you havenae got a job you havenae got a trade you’re nothing Sociolinguistic investigation has tended to focus on the form of the language, mainly fine phonetic detail, and to ignore what the speakers are saying. Ethnographic studies, such as Brenneis (1978, 1986, 1987, 1988), Duranti (1981), Ochs (1988), Hanks (1990), and Schieffelin (1990), and community studies, such as Heath (1983), Rickford (1987), and Eckert (1989), provide not only accounts of the use of language but also insights into why people speak as they do. Sociolinguists can obtain information of this kind from the materials they have recorded (e.g., Schilling-Estes 1998) if they are willing to look at the content as well as the form, of the language recorded.
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Although social identity is a complex notion (Rampton 1995; Erickson 2001), and speakers have been shown to manifest their membership in social groups through minute differences of pronunciation (e.g., Milroy 1980; Fought 1999; Eckert 2000), there are many other ways in which speakers assert aspects of their social identity through language. The views and attitudes of the speakers quoted above are as much part of their social identity as the distinctive form of speech in which they are expressed. They are consistent with the maintenance of a strongly marked form of speech that has no obvious economic justification for its survival in a world dominated by standard English speakers. Contrary to the views of Kellas (1980) and McCrone (1992) cited earlier, it is not a coincidence that Scottish identity is manifested so clearly in speech. Notes 1. All the names are pseudonyms. This is probably overscrupulous, but in most cases I do not (and in some cases could not) have permission to quote their exact words. 2. By the standards of, for example, the teachers I interviewed in Glasgow (Macaulay 1977:91–112), the language of most of the speakers quoted here is to be deplored because of the use of stigmatized forms such as I seen and I done, negative concord, and other features that these speakers use quite freely. Yet their language is generally more expressive than most of that which I have recorded in interviews with middle-class respondents. According to Wolfson (1976), the latter ought to have felt more at ease with a middle-class interviewer. According to Giles and Powesland (1975) and Bell (1984), the lower-class respondents should have been so busy accommodating to me as a middle-class interviewer that they would have felt as uncomfortable as Wolfson’s hypothetical participants. The reality is very different. It is the lower-class speakers who are at ease, fluent, interesting, entertaining, and in the profoundest sense, moral. Interviewing is not a neutral activity (Bailey and Tillery, this volume; Macaulay 2001). All speech is dialogic (Bakhtin 1981; Markova and Poppa 1990), and the interviewer’s voice is important, though often not discussed. I grew up in a middle-class home in Ayrshire, but the boys and girls I went to school with came from a fairly wide range of social backgrounds and I was not cut off from them by differences in the way we spoke. In the Letter to a Teacher the pupils of the School of Barbiana (1970:96) pointed out one of the problems for middle-class speakers: “Whenever you speak to a worker you manage to get it all wrong: your choice of words, your tone, your jokes.” Despite my obvious middle-class background, signaled even more strongly by my anglicized form of speech, I did not feel uncomfortable talking with those I interviewed from very different kinds of background, and I did not perceive that they displayed feelings of discomfort in the interview. In the past, as an adolescent and young adult, I had spoken with many such individuals, and I did not find the interaction in the interviews noticeably different from the kinds of conversations I had had in trains, in pubs, and workplaces with similar kinds of individuals. Whether it is equally easy for people to speak to each other across the class divide in other stratified societies is something that might be worth exploring.
References Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bell, A. 1984. Language Style as Audience Design. Language in Society 13:145–204. Ben-Rafael, Eliezer. 1994. Language, Identity, and Social Division: The Case of Israel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Bernstein, Basil. 1971. Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity. Brenneis, Donald. 1978. The Matter of Talk: Political Performances in Bhatgaon. Language in Society 7:159–170. ———. 1986. Shared Territory: Audience, Indirection and Meaning. Text 6:339–347. ———. 1987. Performing Passions: Aesthetics and Politics in an Occasionally Egalitarian Community. American Ethnologist 14:236–250. ———. 1988. Telling Troubles: Narrative, Conflict and Experience. Paper delivered at the American Ethnological Society Spring Meeting. Clegg, Stewart R. 1993. Narrative, Power, and Social Theory. In Narrative and Social Control: Critical Perspectives, ed. Dennis K. Mumby, 15–45. Newbury Park, Cal.: Sage. Dittmar, Norbert. 1988. Foreword to the series Sociolinguistics and Language Contact. In The Sociolinguistics of Urban Vernaculars: Case Studies and Their Evaluation, ed. Norbert Dittmar and Peter Schlobinski, ix–xii. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Duranti, Alessandro. 1981. The Samoan Fono: A Sociolinguistic Study. Canberra: Australian National University, Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies. Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College. ———. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Oxford: Blackwell. Erickson, Frederick. 2001. Co-membership and Wiggle Room: Some Implications of the Study of Talk for the Development of Social Theory. In Sociolinguistics and Social Theory, ed. Nikolas Coupland, Srikani Sarangi, and Christopher N. Candlin, 152–179. London: Pearson Education. Fought, Carmen. 1999. A Majority Sound Change in a Minority Community: /u/-fronting in Chicano English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(1):5–23. Giles, Howard, and Peter E. Powesland. 1975. Speech Style and Social Evaluation. New York: Academic Press. Gal, Susan. 1989. Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender. Papers in Pragmatics 3(1):1–38. Glauser, B. 1974. The Scottish-English Linguistic Border: Lexical Aspects. Bern: Francke Verlag. Hanks, William F. 1990. Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. Language and Communicative Practices. Boulder, Col.: Westview. Haugen, Einar. 1966. Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Heath, Shirley Brice. 1983. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kellas, J. G. 1980. Modern Scotland. London: Unwin Hyman. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. Le Page, Robert and Andrée Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of identity: creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macaulay, Ronald K. S. 1977. Language, Social Class, and Education: A Glasgow Study. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 1988. Linguistic Change and Stability. In Linguistic Change and Contact, ed. K. Ferrara, B. Brown, K. Walters, and J. Baugh, 225–231. Austin: University of Texas. ———. 1991. Locating Dialect in Discourse: The Language of Honest Men and Bonnie Lasses in Ayr. New York: Oxford University Press.
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———. 2001. The Question of Genre. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford, 78–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. I’m Off to Philadelphia in the Morning: A Scotsman Looks at Dialect in America. American Speech 77:227–241. Markova, Ivana, and Klaus Foppa, eds. 1990. The Dynamics of Dialogue. Hemel Hempstead, Eng.: Harvester Wheatsheaf. McCrone, David. 1992. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. London: Routledge Milroy, Lesley. 1980. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell. Murison, David. 1979. The Historical Background. In Languages of Scotland, ed. A. J. Aitken and Tom McArthur, 2–13. Edinburgh: Chambers. Ochs, Elinor. 1988. Culture and Language Development: Language Acquisition and Language Socialization in a Samoan Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. New York: Longman. Rickford, John. 1987. Dimensions of a Creole Continuum: History, Texts, and Linguistic Analysis of a Guyanese Creole. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1986. Cours de linguistique générale. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1990. The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. School of Barbiana. 1970. Letter to a Teacher. New York: Random House. Silverstein, Michael. 1996. Monoglot “Standard” in America: Standardization and Metaphors of Linguistic Hegemony. In The matrix of language, ed. Donald Brenneis and Ronald K. S. Macaulay, 284–306. Boulder, Col.: Westview. Smout, T. C. 1986. A Century of the Scottish People 1830–1950. London: Collins. Speitel, Hans-Henning. 1969. A Typology of Isoglosses: Isoglosses Near the ScottishEnglish Border. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 7:49–66. Strauss, Claudia. 2002. Cultural Standing in Discourse. Ms. Pitzer College, Claremont, CA. Thompson, John B. 1991. Editor’s introduction. In Language and Symbolic Power, Pierre Bourdieu. Cambridge: Polity. Wilson, Sir James. 1923. The Dialect of Robert Burns as Spoken in Central Ayrshire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolfson, Nessa. 1976. Speech Events and Natural Speech: Some Implications for Sociolinguistic Methodology. Language in Society 5:189–211.
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11 JOHN R. RICKFORD
Spoken Soul: The Beloved, Belittled Language of Black America
My chapter for this volume is an adapted version of the first chapter of my recent book, Spoken Soul (Rickford and Rickford 2000). It reinserts all those passages excised from the book for reasons of space or coherence by the senior editor at John Wiley—someone I really do like and appreciate, I should add—plus some other data and reflections that I have added more recently. The title of this chapter also includes the book’s subtitle, which the publisher didn’t accept either, despite my ardent pleadings. So you may think of this chapter as an author’s revenge, or as my last, desperate attempt to get my own way. Let me begin, like a preacher, by citing two relevant quotations, the first biblical: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? (Mark 8:36–37) SOUL: 1. The animating and vital principle in humans. . . . 6. The central or integral part; the vital core. . . . 9. A sense of ethnic pride among Black people and especially African Americans, expressed in areas such as language, social customs, religion and music. (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., 2000)
“Spoken Soul” was the name that Claude Brown (1968), author of Manchild in the Promised Land, coined for the informal speech, or vernacular, of many African Americans. In a 1968 interview, he waxed eloquent in its praise, declaring that it “possesses a pronounced lyrical quality which is frequently incompatible to any music other than that ceaselessly and relentlessly driving rhythm that flows from poignantly 198
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spent lives.” A decade later, James Baldwin, legendary author of The Fire Next Time, described “Black English” as “this passion, this skill . . . this incredible music . . .” ([1979] 1981). In the 1980s, two extraordinary black women also “testified” to the value of “Spoken Soul.” Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison (1981:27) insisted that the distinctive ingredient of her fiction was this: The language, only the language. . . . It is the thing that black people love so much— the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It’s a love, a passion. Its function is like a preacher’s: to make you stand up out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself. The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language. There are certain things I cannot say without recourse to my language. It’s terrible to think that a child with five different present tenses comes to school to be faced with books that are less than his own language. And then to be told things about his language, which is him, that are sometimes permanently damaging. He may never know the etymology of Africanisms in his language, not even know that “hip” is a real word or that “the dozens” meant something. This is a really cruel fallout of racism. I know the standard English. I want to use it to help restore the other language, the lingua franca.”
And June Jordan (1985), celebrated essayist and poet, identified “three qualities of Black English—the presence of life, voice and clarity—that testify to a distinctive Black value system.” Jordan, then a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, chided her students for their uneasiness about the Spoken Soul in Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, and she went on to teach them about the regularities of the African-American vernacular. So much for the “beloved” attitude toward African-American vernacular, particularly common among black writers between the 1960s and 1980s. By the end of the 1990s, “belittlement,” or disparagement, was far more common, and one could scarcely find a spokesman (or spokeswoman) for the race who had anything flattering to say about it. In response to the Oakland School Board’s December 18, 1996, resolution to recognize “Ebonics” as the primary language of African-American students in the California district, poet Maya Angelou (1996) told the Wichita Eagle that she was “incensed” and found the idea “very threatening,” although she has used the black vernacular herself, for example, in poems like “The Pusher” and “The Thirteens (Black).” The president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Kweisi Mfume (1997), denounced the measure as “a cruel joke,” and although he later adopted a more conciliatory position, Jesse Jackson (1996), on national television, initially called it “an unacceptable surrender, borderlining on disgrace. “ Jackson found himself curiously aligned with Ward Connerly, the black University of California regent whose ultimately successful efforts to end affirmative action on University of California campuses and in the state as a whole Jackson had vigorously opposed. Calling the Oakland proposal “tragic,” Connerly (1996) went on to argue, “These are not kids who came from Africa last year or last generation, even. These are kids that have had every opportunity to acclimate themselves to American society, and they have gotten themselves into this
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trap of speaking this language—this slang, really, that people can’t understand. Now we’re going to legitimize it.” As another example of how Ebonics united African Americans from totally different sides of the ideological spectrum, note that the black conservative academic and author Shelby Steele (1996) characterized the Oakland proposal as just another “gimmick” to enhance black self-esteem, and the black liberal academic and author Henry Louis Gates (1997) chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, dismissed it as “obviously stupid and ridiculous.” (Author and former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver (1997) agreed, as did entertainer Bill Cosby (1997), who despite his own use of Ebonics in comedy routines like “The Lower Tract,” penned a biting column entitled “Elements of Igno-Ebonics.” The virtual consensus blurred political lines among white pundits, as well. Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh assailed the Ebonics resolution, and leading Republican Bill Bennett (1996), former U.S. Secretary of Education, described it as “multiculturalism gone haywire.” Leading liberal Mario Cuomo (1996), former governor of New York, called it a “bad mistake,” and Education Secretary Richard Riley (1996), a member of President Clinton’s Democratic cabinet, declared that Ebonics programs would not be eligible for federal bilingual education dollars: “Elevating black English to the status of a language is not the way to raise standards of achievement in our schools and for our students.” At the state level, anti-Ebonics legislation was introduced both by Republicans, like Rep. Mark Ogles of Florida, and by Democrats, like Georgia State Senator Ralph Abernathy III. Newspaper, radio and television commentators of all stripes tended to agree in their critiques of Ebonics (as a way of speaking) and of the Oakland proposal itself.1 Millions and millions of other people across America and around the world also rushed in to express their vociferous condemnation of Ebonics and the proposal to take it into account in schools. (“Ebonics,” in fact, quickly became a stand-in both for the language variety and for Oakland’s proposal, so the recurrent question, “What do you think about Ebonics?” elicited reactions to two topics.) The forums of everyday folk were the animated conversations that sprung up in homes, workplaces, and at holiday gatherings, as well as the TV and radio programs, letters to the editor, and electronic bulletin boards that were deluged after the Oakland decision. According to Newsweek (January 13, 1997), “An America Online poll about Ebonics drew more responses than the one asking people whether O. J. Simpson was guilty.”2 The vast majority of those America Online responses were not merely negative. They were caustic. Ebonics was vilified as “disgusting black street slang,” “incorrect and substandard,” “nothing more than ignorance,” “lazy English,” “bastardized English,” “the language of illiteracy” and “this utmost ridiculous [sic] made-up language.” And Oakland’s resolution, almost universally misunderstood as a proposal to teach Ebonics instead of as a plan to use Ebonics as a springboard to Standard English, elicited superlatives of disdain, disbelief, and derision: “I’m embarrassed and appalled at this latest fiasco.” (December 21, 1996) “idiocy of the highest form” (December 21, 1996)
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“Man, ‘ubonics will take me far back to de jungo!” (December 21, 1996) “what a joke! Ebonics. . . . Sheesh!” (December 23, 1996) “This has to be the silliest thing that my black brothers and sisters have done yet.” “I think it be da dumbest thing I’d eber heard be.” (December 23, 1996) “. . . this is a joke. Why not use Pig-Latin?” (December 24, 1996) “Ebonics is a terrible mistake and a complete waste of time.” (December 26, 1996) These comments, dripping with deprecation, are clearly far removed from the adulation that Brown, Baldwin, Morrison, and Jordan had heaped on the AfricanAmerican vernacular in earlier decades. As another example of how much things had turned around, listen to the following incident, which Graylen Todd Graham, a black graduate student at a university in Tennessee, shared with me recently: I am still in the Ebonics fight. I belong to an African-American male book club here in Nashville. There are a lot of professional black men who attend these meetings. In our last meeting, we discovered that only two guys read the book of the month. So we decided just to sit around talking. One of the guys just came out with the statement that he did not think Ebonics was part of our culture. . . . Then another guy stated that if Ebonics is a part of our culture, then it was an ignorant part that we need to let go of. . . . When I stated that I . . . supported and respected Ebonics, the room went wild. One of the two brothers who were against Ebonics, blurted out, “I can’t believe you!” There was an adjunct professor from Vanderbilt who supported me. All in all, a lot of the men had a lot of legit questions they had been dying to ask. Anyway, the two guys who were totally against Ebonics got really ugly. One guy (who . . . is always asking me to help edit his work so that the whites will stay off his back) stated that when he first met me he assumed I was very ignorant because of the way I talk. He was trying to use the . . . example to point out to the rest of the group how white people viewed Ebonics speakers and why our culture should let go of Ebonics. Anyway, the brother in the group had my back and stated the remark was uncalled for. I even held my own and went on edu-cating the brothers. Then at the end the other brother was so upset that he blurted out that there was a boy in his class who sleeps most of the time during class and when he did speak, he spoke Ebonics. This brother went on to say that this boy is an embarrassment to him. He also stated that he felt that he would label “the boy’s lazy posture” as also being part of Ebonics. He directed the comment to me. Afterward, a lot of guys came up to me to inform me that they respected and supported my position on Ebonics. Anyway, out in the parking lot, one of the guys (who was against my position on Ebonics) tried to start a fight with me. I simply asked him to get out of my face because I did not have time to raise anybody else’s kids. I was mad that the brother had the nerve to come up on me like that. One of the guys (whom I was having a serious conversation with and who was also in support of my position on Ebonics) jumped in between us. The security guards, who had been watching us, came out to show themselves. You know how they get when
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they get a lot of black males in one place. Needless to say, we did not throw down, even though I really wanted to wipe the floor with that dude.
This readiness to castigate and even fight about AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) at the end of the 1990s seems a far cry from the AAVE lovefest that Brown, Baldwin, Morrison, Jordan, and others had manifested in earlier decades. Why the about-face? What had happened to transform “Spoken Soul,” in the interim, from an object of praise to an object of ridicule? Well for one thing, the frame of reference was different in earlier days. The Ebonics controversy that ignited in 1996 was clearly about the use of the vernacular in school, whereas the earlier commentaries were more about the expressive use of the vernacular in literature and informal settings. Several of the America Online respondents drew a sharp distinction between the appropriateness of Ebonics in casual and formal domains: “I feel like there is a time and place to speak in different dialects. When you are out with your friends you can speak in ‘slang’ but when it comes time to apply for jobs, apply to college, and things of that nature, you better know how to speak proper English” (December 23, 1996). Moreover, the almost universal misconception that the Oakland School Board intended to teach and accept Ebonics rather than English in their classrooms (with Ebonics itself interpreted as “gansta rap” or “street slang”) made matters worse. Most of the fuming and fulminating about Ebonics stemmed from the mistaken belief that it was to replace Standard English as a medium of instruction and a target for success: Teaching our teachers to teach our youth to speak EBONICS makes about as much sense as telling these children that once they learn to speak it they will now have to unlearn it so they can learn how to fit in as adults. What a waste. . . . (December 22, 1996) if you[r] black students are told that it is all right to talk in slang and actually practice it . . . they will grow up with even more illiterate speech. (December 23, 1996)
The few positive responses on America Online stressed the fact that the Oakland School Board agreed with its detractors on the importance of learning Standard English and that they simply wished to use Ebonics as a means toward that larger goal: I think the public should read past the headlines (sensational) to what is actually proposed by the school board. This is not a reinforcement or glorification of what are thought to be black ghetto patterns, but rather a teaching method to enable the student to translate his or her black ghetto language into the more common or “accepted” grammar commonly used in our country. It is primarily a learning tool. (December 20, 1996) The posted summary misrepresents the position of the Oakland Schools. Teachers are not to teach or teach in Ebonics. They are to understand Ebonics as a distinct language in order to assist students to translate the “dialect” in which they were raised into Standard English. The goal is to facilitate the learning of standard English by empowering students to validate, yet distinguish, their “native” language from that of the majority culture. . . . Please note that I am a white middle-aged male . . . educator who has no links to the Oakland schools. (December 21, 1996)
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Those who applauded the Oakland proposal were willing to accept the fact that many black children speak quite differently from their white classmates and that this way of speaking might be harnessed to steer them toward the speech of corporate success. The idea is not new, of course. And actually, it is inaccurate to suggest that critics have always bashed the vernacular whenever discussions surfaced about its presence in schools. Indeed, James Baldwin’s praise-song for the vernacular was penned in the aftermath of the July 12, 1979, ruling by Michigan Supreme Court Justice Charles Joiner that the negative attitudes of Ann Arbor teachers toward the home language of their black students (“Black English”) created a psychological barrier to their academic success.3 At the time, media accounts and public commentary revealed the avalanche of misunderstandings surrounding the case, for instance, nationally syndicated African-American columnist Carl Rowan (1979), writing the day before Justice Joiner’s decision: For a court to say that “black English” is a “foreign tongue” and require schools in Ann Arbor, Mich., or any place else to teach ghetto children in “black English” would be a tragedy. . . . What black children need is an end to this malarkey that tells them they can fail to learn grammar, fail to develop vocabularies, ignore syntax and embrace the mumbo-jumbo of ignorance—and dismiss it in the name of “black pride.” (emphasis added)
Of course, no one had proposed teaching children in ‘black English,’ or telling them that they could ignore syntax and vocabulary. But the anxieties surfaced nevertheless. By contrast, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. (1979), then president of the Urban League (and yes, the same President Clinton chum who helped Monica Lewinsky land a job) got the story straight: Black English became a barrier to learning not because of the children’s use of it, but because teachers automatically assumed its use signified inferior intellectual intelligence, inability to learn or other negative connotations . . . by focusing on the teachers, the judge made the right decision. Sensitizing teachers to Black English will equip them to communicate better with pupils who use the language in their daily lives. And it should help them to make better assessments of their students’ ability to read and speak public English.
But even he went on to stress, lest anyone get ideas, that it would be “a big leap from that to advocate teaching Black English in the schools. That would be a big mistake.” The fear that affirming the vernacular involves teaching “bad” English instead of “good” English is not strictly an American obsession. Proposals by Caribbean linguists to take students’ Creole English into account to improve the teaching of standard English—in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana—have been similarly misinterpreted and condemned over the past 40 years as attempts to “settle” for Creole (or patois) instead of English.4 This despite the fact that—as in the United States—attempts to teach standard English that ignore or disparage the vernacular of the students have been notoriously unsuccessful. The con-fusion that always seems to mire such efforts is largely due to the disdain people around the world have for vernacular (or nonmainstream) language varieties and for the folk who speak them. We may recall
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Professor Higgins’s disparaging remarks to Eliza about her market vendor speech in the film My Fair Lady and how she roiled him with her pronunciation of “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” And Penelope Eckert (personal communication) recently reminded me that in France in the late 1970s, speakers of rural Breton dialects were derided for their dialect and forced to wear wooden shoes around their necks in school as a badge of shame. Speakers of so-called prestige varieties (the languages of political and social clout) are most prone to such disdain, but those whose linguistic and social status are themselves insecure—for instance, the lower middle class in New York City—also harbor similar hostilities and anxieties.5 These attitudes are often transmitted to and adopted by people who speak the vernacular vigorously or exclusively. The Ebonics firestorm of the 1990s was ignited and fueled by a variety of elements, including the ambiguous wording of the resolutions, the media’s voracious coverage, and ancient, class-based apprehensions and misunderstandings about the role of the vernacular in schools. But much of the kindling was also a product of the unique American climate that exists now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For example, there is much more concern today for the unity and uniformity of America (see Arthur Schlesinger’s [1991] 1998 popular book, The Disuniting of America)—and for emphasizing what we have in common as Americans, including English—than there was in the 1960s and 1970s, when ethnic, linguistic, and cultural pluralism had their heyday and everybody wanted to be “exotic” in one way or another. Just look at the rise in the number of residents who claimed a non-English mother tongue in the 1970 national census as compared to the 1960 census and the decline in that number between the 1970 and the 1980 censuses.6 That seesaw is an indication of several factors, including the rise and fall of cultural pluralism. The success that English-Only legislation has enjoyed at the state level in the 1980s and 1990s is further evidence that many Americans believe a shared identity should somehow be rooted and expressed in a common language, English. Many of those who thrashed Ebonics in Internet forums were concerned that the dialect would isolate African Americans and lead to further linguistic and social fragmentation: There seems to be a movement with the cultural diversity, bilingualism, and quotaoriented affirmative action campaigns to balkanize the country and build walls between people and dissolve the concept of being an American. This Ebonics question will successfully keep a segment of the black community in ghetto mode. . . . A KKK [Ku Klux Klan] member would love it. (December 20, 1996) The recognition of Ebonics only further marginalizes those that use this fractured slang. English as a language is one of the few things that binds us as a nation. (December 22, 1996) This is such a crock considering that we are changing laws to make English the only language of America. (December 23, 1996) One more way that the Black people of this country wish to put themselves into a special category. Try to get them to spell American first, and without a hyphen or the word African. It’s separatism and racist. (December 23, 1996)
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Significantly, these and other critiques of Ebonics were often couched in larger objections to bilingual education, affirmative action, and any measures that seemed to offer special “advantages” or consideration for ethnic minorities and women (despite the centuries of disadvantage and discrimination these groups have endured). Just a month before Oakland passed its Ebonics resolution, Californians had endorsed Proposition 209, outlawing affirmative action in education and employment. Residents of Orange County had also approved a measure eliminating bilingual education in their schools. And in June 1998, the electorate stood behind Proposition 227, which prohibited most forms of bilingual education statewide.7 Politicians in other states have been scrambling to draft and pass similar measures ever since, and similar legislation is under consideration at the federal level. This is the reactionary historical context in which the Ebonics fracas unfurled. Truth be told, some of the antagonism Ebonics encountered in 1996 stemmed from pure, unadulterated racism: Blacks can’t compete with the high standards of whites so they must lower theirs to suit themselves. They will lower themselves out of existence. (December 22, 1996) The joke is on the Black folks in America who are proving themselves to be the most self-destructive group of people in the history of the world. You pro-Ebonics clowns are determined to keep the minstrel show going for another hundred years. (December 23, 1996) These stupid niggers are born in America. What else should they speak??? Theres [sic] no excuse. Though its [sic] true, they talk in such broken english [sic] you can’t understand what they are trying to say. Oakland is infested with niggers. (Niggers meaning the low-class, poor, stupid African American)… Blacks have the highest crime rate. . . . Blacks have the lowest grade avrg in the WORLD. Now they ruin english [sic] because of more stupidity. Pathedic [sic]. (December 26, 1996)
Even among African Americans, however, the 1990s saw internal divisions— by socioeconomic class, generation, and gender—grow more pronounced than they were in the 1960s. This accounts for some of the stinging criticism of Ebonics that originated “within the race.” It’s significant, for instance, that whereas the 1960s featured “The March on Washington”—a united protest by African Americans and others against racial and economic inequality, blacks in the 1990s found themselves participating in separate “Million Man” and “Million Woman” marches and two “Million Youth” marches that took place almost simultaneously in New York and Atlanta. Moreover, while the proportion of African Americans earning over $100,000 (in 1989 dollars) tripled between 1969 and 1989 (from 0.3% to about 1% of all African-American households), the proportion earning below $15, 000 remained the same (about 43% of all African-American households), and their mean income actually dropped in the interim (from $9,300 to $8,520).8 When we recall that Ebonics pronunciation and grammar are used most frequently by poor and working-class African Americans, and that the comments from black America that made it onto the airwaves and internet exchanges came mainly from the middle- and upper-middleclass people, their deprecatory tone is far from perplexing.
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What’s more, the distance between the younger hip-hop generation and older African-American generations—marked by the politics of dress, music, and slang— has in some ways also grown more stark in the 1990s. Some middle-aged and elderly black folk have increasingly come to view baggy jeans and boot-wearing, freestylin’ youngsters as hoodlums who are squandering the gains of the Civil Rights movement. Most of the publicly aired comments on Ebonics came from black baby boomers (now in their 40s and 50s) or older African Americans. When discussing the “slang” of hip-hop youth—which they (mis-)identified with Ebonics—they often bristled with indignation. Although today’s debate is charged with new elements, the question of the vernacular’s role in African-American life and literature has been a source of debate among African Americans for more than a century. While Paul Laurence Dunbar was establishing his reputation as a dialect poet in the late 1800s, James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” (long hailed as “The Negro National Anthem”), chose to render the seven African-American sermons of God’s Trombones in standard English because he felt that the dialect of “old-time” preachers might pigeonhole the book. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a similar debate raged among the black intelligentsia, with Langston Hughes endorsing and exemplifying the use of vernacular, whereas Alain Locke and others suggested that African Americans needed to put the quaintness of the idiom behind them and offer the world a more “refined” view of their culture. These enduring attitudes reflect the attractionrepulsion dynamic, the oscillation between black and white (or mainstream) poles that W. E. B. Du Bois defined a century ago as “double-consciousness.” But the Ebonics controversy at this century’s end represents a dismally new low in terms of the degree of denial and deprecation to which the vernacular was subject. Although most linguists suggest that speakers of AAVE should also master Standard English, corporate English, mainstream English, the Language of Wider Communication, or whatever you want to call the variety you need for school, formal occasions, and success in the business world, we must not forget that Ebonics, African-American Vernacular English, black English, Spoken Soul, or whatever you want to call the informal variety spoken by the majority of African Americans also plays an essential role in African-American life and culture and, by extension, in American life and culture. Black people use it now, as we have for hundreds of years, to laugh, to cry, to preach and praise, to shuck and jive, to sing, to rap, to shout, to style, to express our individual personas and our identities as black people (“’spress yo’self!” as James Brown put it), to confide in and commiserate with friends, to chastise, to cuss, to act, to act the fool, to get by and get over, to pass secrets, to make jokes, to mock and mimic, to tell stories, to reflect and philosophize, to create authentic characters and voices (in novels, poems, and plays), to survive in the streets, to relax at home and recreate in playgrounds, to render our deepest emotions and embody our vital core. If we lost all of that in the heady pursuit of Standard English and the “world” of opportunities it offers, we would indeed have lost our soul. But despite widespread deprecation and denial, we are not convinced that African Americans really want to abandon “down-home” speech to become one-dimensional, “white bread” speakers. Nor—judging from their continuing enjoyment and adoption of many of the distinctive linguistic elements of African-American music, literature, and popular culture—
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do we believe that whites and Americans of other ethnicities want to see it abandoned either, quiet as it is kept. It is certainly not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to abandon jazz to appreciate classical music. But this complexity is just part of the dizzying love-hate relationship that Americans of all ethnicities have with Spoken Soul. Furthermore, abandoning Spoken Soul would be unwise since recognizing and building on its contrasts with mainstream English represents a much more successful strategy for helping inner-city children master the latter than the abysmal but widespread policy of pretending that the vernacular does not exist or treating it as a disease. The fact is that most African Americans do talk differently from whites and Americans of other ethnicities, or at least they can when they want to. And the fact is that most Americans, black and white, know this to be true, and they know that what makes many African-American writers, storytellers, orators, preachers, comedians, singers, and rap artists successful is their skillful deployment of Spoken Soul. Notes 1. Information on legislative efforts to ban Ebonics from schools and other official contexts is in Richardson (1998). 2. The report of the America Online poll about Ebonics was in John Leland and Nadine Joseph, “Hooked on Ebonics,” Newsweek, January 13, 1997, p. 78. For the America Online quotations cited in this chapter we are grateful to linguist and school volunteer Lucy Bowen of Menlo Park, California, who printed out hundreds and hundreds of them during the holiday season in December 1996 and passed them on to me. 3. For summaries of Justice Joiner’s ruling, see the New York Times, Friday, July 13, 1979. The ruling itself is reprinted in Smitherman (1981). 4. For information on proposals by Caribbean linguists to consider Creole English in schools, see Rickford (1999). 5. For information about New York residents’ linguistic insecurity about their English, see William Labov’s (1966) classic study, The Social Stratification of English in New York City. For information on the negative attitudes toward their own vernacular language or dialect, which speakers of such varieties often share with or learn from speakers of mainstream varieties, see Lambert (1967). 6. Information on the number of people in the United States who claimed English and/ or other languages as their native language is available in Fishman (1985). 7. For more about Propositions 209 and 227 and similar measures in California and other states, see Gibbs (1998). 8. The income statistics for African Americans are from Carnoy (1994). For other income statistics and for a discussion of the generation gap within the black community, see Chideya (1998).
References Angelou, Maya. 1996. Oakland Decision Spurs Debate over Ebonics. Wichita Eagle, December 22, 7A. Baldwin, James. [1979] 1981. If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? In Black English and the Education of Black Children and Youth, ed. Geneva Smitherman, 390–392. Detroit: Center for Black Studies, Wayne State University.
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Bennett, Bill. 1996. Cited in Calling Black English a Language Prompts Chorus of Criticism, by Maria Puente. USA Today, December 23, 1A. Brown, Claude. 1968. The Language of Soul. Esquire, April, 88, 160–161. Carnoy, Martin. 1994. Faded Dreams: The Politics and Economics of Race in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chideya, Faral. 1998. Money. Power. Respect? Emerge, October, 35–38. Cleaver, Eldridge. 1997. ‘We Need to Rescue Kids from Ebonics’; Education: Black Pride, Yes. But Keep It in the Context of Standard English. Los Angeles Times, January 31, 9. Connerly, Ward. 1996. Cited in Critics May Not Understand Oakland’s Ebonics Plan. Elliot Diringer and Lori Olszewski. San Francisco Chronicle, December, A17. Cosby, Bill. 1997. Elements of Igno-Ebonics. Wall Street Journal, January 10. Cuomo, Mario. 1996. Cited in Calling Black English a Language Prompts Chorus of Criticism, Maria Puente. USA Today December 23, 1A. Fishman, Joshua A. 1985. The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gates, Henry Louis. 1997. Cited in The Ebonic Plague, Frank Rich. New York Times January 8. Gibbs, Jewelle Taylor. 1998. The California Crucible. San Francisco: Study Center Press. Jackson, Jesse. 1996. Cited in Calling Black English a Language Prompts Chorus of Criticism, Maria Puente. USA Today, December 23, 1A. Jordan, June. 1985. On Call: Political Essays. Boston: South End Press. Jordan, Jr., Vernon. 1979. Teacher Preconceptions at Crux of Black English Problem. Detroit Free Press, December 7, 11A. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. Lambert, Wallace E. 1967. The Social Psychology of Bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues 23:91–109. Leland, John, and Nadine Joseph. 1997. Hooked on Ebonics. Newsweek, January 13, 78. Mfume, Kweisi. 1997. Cited in Hooked on Ebonics, John Leland and Nadine Joseph. Newsweek, January 13:78. Morrison, Toni. 1981. Cited in A Conversation with Toni Morrison. “The Language Must Not Sweat,” Thomas LeClair. New Republic, March 21, 25–29. Richardson, Elaine. 1998. The Anti-Ebonics Movement: “Standard” English Only. Journal of English Linguistics (Special Issue: Ebonics) 26(2):156–169. Rickford, John R. 1999. Using the Vernacular to Teach the Standard. In African American Vernacular English. Oxford: Blackwell. Rickford, John R. and Russell J. Rickford. 2000. Spoken soul: the story of Black English. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Riley, Richard. 1996. Cited in U.S. Says Ebonics Isn’t a Language, Nanette Asimov. San Francisco Chronicle, December 25, 1. Rowan, Carl. 1979. Black English. Philadelphia Bulletin July 11. Schlesinger, Arthur. [1991] 1998. The disuniting of America: reflections on a multicultural society. New York: W.W. Norton. Smitherman, Geneva, ed. 1981. Black English and the Education of Black Children and Youth. Detroit: Center for Black Studies, Wayne State University Press. Steele, Shelby. 1996. Cited in Calling Black English a Language Prompts Chorus of Criticism, Maria Puente. USA Today, December 23, 1A.
INDEX
AAVE. See African-American Vernacular English acquisition of a second dialect, 124–34, 143 ‘acts of identity’ model, 162 adolescents, 14, 24, 109, 121, 124, 170 in Detroit, 109, 167, 170 in England, 124–34 and identity, 110, 167 African-American English. See AfricanAmerican Vernacular English African-American Vernacular English, 12, 54–55, 57, 84, 198, 200 divergence from white vernaculars 26, 164–66, 206 features (see phonetic variables; syntactic variables) internet reactions to, 200–206 in North Carolina, 12, 54–55, 57, 98–101 and Oakland School Board decision, 199
age, 121, 205–6 age-grading, 109–10, 121–24 and changes in phonetics over the lifespan, 122–24, 136–37 and moribund dialects, 94–96 as social category vs. indicator of change, 152 and use of nonstandard features, 26, 94–96, 152 Aggieland, 69 Andersen, H., 90, 94 Angelou, M., 199 Ann Arbor, 203 Appalachia, 84, 86, 88–89, 91–92 apparent-time data, 94, 121–24, 136–37 assimilation, linguistic, 90, 199
Bailey, G., 11–28, 74–77 Baldwin, J., 199 Bean, J., 74–75 Becker, A. L., 49 Belfast, 164–65, 170
209
210
INDEX
Bell, A., 75, 147 Bellah, R. N., 70 Ben-Rafael, E., 181 Bennett, B., 200 Bickerton, D., 144–46 Blake, R., 168–69, 171 Bonfiglio, T. P., 163 Bourdieu, P., 194 Brown, C., 198 Brown, J., 206 Brown, P., 143, 146 burnouts, 66, 111–16 Burns, R., 183
Canadian raising, 96, 169, 171 Chafe, W., 44, 45 Chambers, J., 96, 129 Childs, B., 98 Chomsky, N., 143–44, 155 Clyne, M., 172 communicative contour (CC), 47 communicative fragments (CFs), 47 community of practice, 107–8 Connerly, W., 199 Cosby, B., 200 creole languages, 203 critical period, 121, 124, 137 crossing, 75 Cukor-Avila, P., 14–17, 26 Cuomo, M., 200
DeGraff, M., 154 Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), 65 Dittmar, N., 182 Detroit, 74, 109–10, 167, 170 AAVE in, 173 jocks and burnouts in, 74, 111–16 dialects 11, 20–22, 143, 155, 164, 168, 179 acquisition of, 124–34 adolescents and, 107, 124–34 contact between, 66, 77, 97–101, 164–65
“magna-dialects”, 178 prejudices toward, 113, 167, 198– 207 remnant, 84 Standard English, 57, 77, 96, 162– 66, 179, 200, 206 as a symbol of identity, 49, 74, 77– 78, 135 vernacular 14–5, 31, 70, 76, 96, 102, 122, 126, 198 (see also regional dialects) dialectology, folk. See folk dialectology discourse analysis, 45, 47–48, 75, 77 Du Bois, W. E. B., 206 Dyer, J., 169
Ebonics. See African-American Vernacular English Eckert, P., 66, 74, 107, 162, 170, 194, 204 Edinburgh, 164 education, 179, 192 and acquisition of styles, 152, 179 and nonstandard forms, 152, 180 England, 124–37, 155, 168, 172, 179 Esch, E., 172 ethnicity, 49, 107, 108, 162, 164, 167, 205 and crossing, 75 and ideological constructs, 113, 163– 64 intra-ethnic contact, 45–49, 91, 98 ethnographic approach. See ethnography ethnography, 74, 75–77, 109, 116, 162 Ewers, T., 24–26
fieldworkers, influence on data collection of, 13–20 Fillmore, C., 44, 46 folk dialectology, 72 founder principle, 91–94 French, 136, 146–50, 163, 167
INDEX
Gal, S., 113, 166–68, 173 Gasparov, B., 46–48, 52–53 Gates, H. L., 200 gender, 107, 162, 167, 205 of fieldworker, 13–20 and regional identity, 74–75 and sense of place, 72 and use of nonstandard features, 77, 122, 152, 170 Giddens, A., 70–71, 74 Glasgow, 74, 122–24, 136, 161–62, 164 Graham, G. T., 201 grammars, 126, 142, 153, 156, 203 adult, 154 construction, 46 postvernacular, 153–55 “weak”, 153–56 grammatical variables. See syntactic variables Great Vowel Shift, 171, 180
211
interviewer, effects on data collection. See fieldworker intertextuality, 44–58 Irvine, J., 113, 166–68, 173 isolated dialects. See remnant dialects
Jackendoff, R., 44, 45–46 Jackson, J., 199 jocks, 66, 111–16 Johnson, E., 74 Johnson, J. W., 206 Johnson, K., 48 Johnstone, B., 48, 65, 89, 108 Joiner, Justice C., 203 Jones, M. C., 172 Jordan, J., 199 Jordan, Jr., V., 203 Josey, M., 168–69, 171
King, Jr., Martin Luther, 53, 57 Kroch, A., 172 Hall, S., 71, 74 Hannerz, U., 71–72 Holmquist, J., 109 Hoodoo texts, 23–25 Hughes, L., 206 Hyde County, 86–88, 91, 98–101 hypercorrection, 126–35, 168
identity, 49, 89, 143, 170, 181, 195 and ‘acts of identity’ model, 162 ethnic (see ethnicity) and language ideology, 108, 167–70 local, 72–77, 89–90, 103, 110, 135, 169 national, 178, 204 ideologies. See language ideologies idioms, 45–46 constructional, 46 indexicality, 162, 167–68, 172 internet, reactions to AAVE on, 200–206 interview, sociolinguistic. See sociolinguistic interview
Labov, W., 11, 31, 33, 74, 75, 121–22, 128, 136, 155 Martha’s Vineyard study, 74, 109, 161–65, 168–69 New York City study 13, 136, 163– 65, 169 theory on chain shifts, 170–71 language ideologies, 66, 77, 161 and language change, 129, 168–72 and maintenance of nonstandard dialects, 170 and the ‘standard’, 162–66 language contact, 66, 77 intra-ethnic, 45, 49, 91, 98, 115 and isolated dialects, 87–91, 97– 101 Lenneberg, E., 124 LePage, R., 162 leveling, 96–98, 102, 165 Levinson, S., 143, 146 life stories. See personal histories
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INDEX
Lightfoot, D., 154–56 Limbaugh, R., 51–52, 57–58, 200 Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS), 17–20 linguistic market, 152, 194 linguistic variables. See phonetic variables; syntactic variables local dialects. See regional dialects Locke, A., 206 Lumbee, 45, 49–58, 87–89, 91, 93, 97
Macaulay, R., 9–10, 11, 31–35, 74– 75, 122–24, 146, 156, 161–62, 178 Marsh, J., 142–46 Martha’s Vineyard study, 74, 109, 161–65, 168–69 Matthews, B., 163 Maynor, N., 22–25 McCrone, D., 178 McNair-Knox, F., 13–17 Mencken, H. L., 163 Meyrowitz, J., 71 Mfume, K., 199 middle class. See social class Milroy, J., 72 108, 162, 165 Milroy, L., 108, 161, 162, 173 Montgomery, M., 17–20, 74, 77 Morrison, T., 199 Mugerauer, R., 74 multiple negation. See syntactic variables multivariate analysis, 97 Murison, D., 179
Nadasdi, T., 147–51 narratives, 56 coda, 33 complicating action, 33 evaluation section, 34 narrative chain, 39 orientation, 33 reportability in, 37
resolution, 33 role in sociolinguistic interview of, 31, 56 rule of narrative construction, 38 negative concord. See syntactic variables networks, 65, 72, 107–8, 162, 169 adolescent, 112 and isolated communities, 86, 102 New England, 92, 172 New York City, 13, 136, 163–65, 169, 204 North Carolina, 45–58, 86–91, 98 Northern Cities Shift (NCS), 114, 170– 73 Norwich, 74, 136, 164–65
Ocracoke Island, 74, 86–90, 94–101 observer’s paradox, 11, 13 Ontario, 146–50 Ottawa, 148–49
participant observation, 75–76 performance, 48, 74, 76, 145–46, 151– 57 personal histories, influence on dialect acquisition, 136 Philadelphia, 92 Pisoni, D. B., 48 phonetic variables /ai/ diphthong, 94, 168–69 /au/ diphthong, 94, 168–69 /aw/ monophthong, 76–78 /ay/ raising, 168–69, 171 “broad A”, 125–27, 134–37, 164–65, 179 centralization of /ay/ and /aw/, 74, 168–69 glottal stop, 122–24 initial h, 92 interdental fricatives, 96 postvocalic /r/, 98 “short U”, 127–37 (see also Northern Cities Shift)
INDEX
“place”, 67, 108, 112, 178 and cyber place, 70–71 definition of, 65–70 and historically isolated communities, 86, 89 and ‘locale’, 70 Portuguese, 142, 151 postvernacular, 153–55 Pratt, M. L., 108 Preston, D., 72, 140, 162 principle of linguistic subordination, 89, 102 “proper English”, 77, 191, 202
real-time data, 136–37, 168 Received Pronunciation (RP), 163–65, 172–73, 179, 191 regional dialects in Ayr, 31, 181 in Belfast, 164–65, 170 in California, 12 in Detroit, 74, 109, 167, 170, 173 in Edinburgh, 164 in Georgia, 12 in Glasgow, 31, 74, 122–24, 161–62, 164 in Maryland, 12, 86, 94 in Michigan, 12 in Mississippi, 12 in North Carolina, 12, 49, 54, 86–91, 98 in Norwich, 74, 136, 164–65 in Oklahoma, 20–22, 74 in Pittsburgh, 76–78 in Texas, 25, 66, 74 in Washington D.C., 12 register. See style relic assumption, 91–94 relic communities, 178 remnant dialect, 84–103 Rickford, J. R., 10, 13–17, 22, 26, 108, 194, 198 Riley, R., 200 Rose, C., 69, 75 Rowan, C., 203 Rutledge effect, 17–20
213
Said, E., 70 Saturday Night Live, 51, 58 Saussure, F., 178 Schiffrin, D., 76 Schilling-Estes, N., 44, 74, 84, 90–94 Scotland, 31, 92, 125, 132, 164, 178–95 Scott, Sir W., 179 Seven-Up television program, 121–37 sensitive period. See critical period sex. See gender Silverstein, M., 165–67, 173 slang, 152, 200, 202, 204 Smith Island, 86, 90, 94–97 Smout, T. C., 182 social class, 66, 69, 97, 107, 108, 111, 114, 116, 122–24, 142–45, 162– 64, 205 lower class, 179, 180 lower middle class, 122–24, 145, 165 middle class, 111, 116, 164, 169, 178, 179, 180 upper class, 179, 205 and variation in Scotland, 122–24, 162, 180–92 working class, 32, 76–77, 111, 114, 116, 122–24, 162–65, 167, 180 sociolinguistic interview, 13–20, 31, 44–58 Spanish, 109, 166–67 speech communities, 31, 136–37, 145, 152, 167, 171–73 as compared with community of practice, 107–8 endocentric vs. exocentric, 90 historically isolated, 84–90 open vs. closed, 90 Standard English, 57, 77, 96, 162–66, 179, 200, 206 “Status Axiom”, 148 Steele, S., 200 Strauss, C., 192 style, 132, 143, 148, 155, 164, 166 acquisition of formal, 153–54 informal speech, 31, 56, 198 ownership of, 54–58 style-shifting, 56, 163
214
INDEX
stylistic variation. See style Survey of Oklahoma Dialects (SOD), 20–22 syntactic variables a-prefixing, 92 copula absence, 13, 22–28, 57, 92 double modals, 17–22 habitual (or invariant) be, 13, 15, 22–27 leveling to weren’t, 54, 96–98 multiple negation, 96, 144 negative concord. See multiple negation nonstandard was/were, 54, 151–53 perfective be, 93 plural –s, 13, 92, 96, 99–101 possessive –s, 13 regularization of past tense, 54, 96 subject doubling, 146–49 verbal concord, 55, 92, 99–100 verbal –s, 12, 13, 92, 99–101 yinz for 2nd plural pronoun, 78 zero third-person singular, 11–12, 55–56, 100–101
Tannen, D., 48 teenagers. See adolescents Texas, 24–26, 66, 69, 72–77 Thompson, J. B., 194 Tillery, J., 11, 17–20 Trudgill, P., 11, 74, 129, 131, 134–36, 163–64, 168, 171 Tuan, Y., 68
Tabouret-Keller, A., 162 Tagliamonte, S., 151–52
Zelinsky, W., 69 Zhang, Q., 115
VARBRUL analysis. See multivariate analysis variables. See phonetic variables; syntactic variables vernacular. See dialects Viereck, W., 23–26
Walters, K., 165–66 Weinreich, U., 161 Wells, J., 171–72 Wolfram, W., 11, 84, 90–92, 94, 96, 99 Woolard, K., 166 working class. See social class
