Chapters 5 and 6 – Speech Communities and Language Variation

Top left: GreekBottom left: CherokeeMiddle: ArabicTop right: Russian

What is language?

A system of symbols with standard meanings.Allows humans to communicate and is the main vehicle of transmission of culture.Language provides context for symbolic understanding.

Other Communication

Human:Direct

• Body language (kinesics), tone of voice, personal space (proxemics), gesture

Indirect• Writing, mathematics, music, painting, signs

Nonhuman:Sounds, odors, body movementsCall systems, ethologistsASL – American Sign Language

PIE

Speech Community

“some kind of social group whose speech characteristics are of interest and can be described in a coherent manner” Wardhaugh 116

“fuzzy” Wardhaugh 116Groups? What does that mean? How do we avoid stereotyping? Ethnicity, class, geography, etc

“Our search must be for criteria other than, or at least in addition to, linguistic criteria if we are to gain a useful understanding of ‘speech community.’ (Wardhaugh 118)

“…a search for the various characteristics which make individuals feel that they are members of the same community” (Wardhaugh 118)

“r” dropping in NY, though commonly done, is considered “low” pahk de cah

“r” dropping in South England is considered “posh” ‘fahthah’

“h” dropping considered low in South England but normal in most American dialects

Eliza Doolittle vs “it’s erbal Herb”

A speech community is defined as much by what it is not as what it is. The group must manifest regular relationships between language use and social structure, and there must be norms (Wardhaugh 120)

Language and Culture not always connected:

Language and Culture not always connected

Ngoni of AfricaNo longer speak their own language but have adopted language of the people they conquered in Malawi.“However, they use that language in ways they have carried over from Ngoni, ways they maintain because they consider them to be essential to their continued identity as a people” (Wardhaugh 120)

Groups in North America with culture but not language?

Which onesAre these “speech communities?”Magdalene College, Cambridge!

Hypercorrection

• Lower Middle Class speakers sometimesuse prestige features at a greater rate thanUpper Middle Class speakers.• And LMC speakers use stigmatizedfeatures at a lower rate than the UMC.• Because the LMC wish to achieve the nexthigher level of status, they attempt to talklike members of the next higher class, butthey go too far.

Gender and Language Variation

• Trudgill also studied the effect of genderon variation in word-final –ing in words likerunning (runnin') and swimming(swimmin').• He found that women tend to use morestandard language features than men.• And men tend to use more vernacularforms in their speech.

Discussion Questions p. 122 Take 30 minutes in groups

1. Try to label yourself according to what kind(s) of English you speak. Explain why you choose the specific terms you use and any connotations these terms have for you, e.g. Lancastrian, Bakersfeldian, Texan English, Californian, American3. In what respects do the following pairs of people belong to the same speech community or to different ones: Presidents Bill Clinton and GWBush; Madonna and Guy Ritchie; Hugh Grant and Carey Grant; Sean Connery and Ewan McGregor4. Describe the linguistic uses of some bilinguals with whom you are familiar. When do they use each of the languages? If you are bilingual yourself, in what ways do you identify with people who show the same range of linguistic abilities? A different range?5. Answer question 5, time permitting.

Intersecting Communities

A great deal of bilingualism in the modern worldMost speech communities are fairly fluidWhat should the ‘target’ language and dialect be?Individuals shift identities and speech and languages freely

Communities of Practice

“an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagements in some common endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of their joint activity around that endeavor” Ekert and McConnell-Ginet in Wardhaugh 125Examples? Gangs, reading groups, etc…

Look at questions 1 and 2 on p. 126

What is Social Class?• Social class involves grouping people together and accordingthem status within society according to the groups theybelong to.

What is Social Class?• A number of modern thinkers have tried todefine what makes a particular “socialclass.”– Is it accent?–…neighborhood?–…occupation?–…income?–…wealth?

Determinants of Social Class• Personal performance

– Education– Occupation– Income– Awards and achievements

• Wealth– Amount– Source

• Social orientation– Interactions– Class consciousness– Value orientation

The United States of America is a classless and egalitarian society!!

Do you agree or disagree?

Class Structure in the U.S.• Two upper classes

– Upper upper : Old money– Lower upper : New money

• Three middle classes– Upper middle : Professional– Middle class : White collar and entrepreneurs– Working class : Blue collar

• Two lower classes– Upper lower : Unskilled laborers– Lower lower : Socially and economicallydisadvantaged

Americans

Tend to think they are middle class or upper class or upper middle classTend to think that they will be upper class someday

Indexes of Social Class• How you look• How you dress• How you talk• What you like to do• Where you live• What your house looks like• What you eat

a lot of food, good tasting food, good looking food

Variables of Social Class• Power

– The degree to which a person can control other people• Wealth

– Objects or symbols owned by people which have value attached to them

• Prestige– The degree of respect, favorable regard, orimportance accorded to a person by members ofsociety

Networks and Repetoires

Various network relationships on p. 127. These diagrams show that a person can be part of various speech communities, some that intersect and some that do not. Certain individuals may be in one or more groups but not others.

Social Class and Speech Style

• Peter Trudgill studied variation in word-final ingin words like running (runnin') and swimming(swimmin') in Norwich, England.• Four speech styles– Reading aloud of word lists– Reading aloud of text– Formal speech– Casual speech• Trudgill found that variation across speech stylesparallels variation across social class.

What method is used in our accent presentations? Should we include class?

Now it is time for a ten minute break. When you return, we will do 10 to 15 accent presentations

Language VariationDialects

Language Variation

DialectsRegional Dialects (geography)Social Dialects (class, group, ethnicity, etc)

Regional Variation

Traditional study of dialectImportant part of Historical LinguisticsFamily trees and phonemic “splits” between languages and dialects attributed to time, space, etc…Latin v /w/ to /v/ in later periodIE. *ptr to Latin pater to French pereTo Germanic fader to English father

Dialect in Old English

They no doubt existed, but we don’t see them in the manuscripts very much because scribes wrote the literary standard for of Old EnglishHwaet we gardena in geardagum theodkinginga thrim gefrunon

Dialects in Middle English

At least fiveKentishSouthernNorthernEast-Midland

West-Midland

KentishKentish was originally spoken over the whole southeastern part of England, including London and Essex, but during the Middle English period its area was steadily diminished by the encroachment of the East Midland dialect, especially after London became an East Midland-speaking city (see below); in late Middle English the Kentish dialect was confined to Kent and Sussex. In the Early Modern period, after the London dialect had begun to replace the dialects of neighboring areas, Kentish died out, leaving no descendants. Kentish is interesting to linguists because on the one hand its sound system shows distinctive innovations (already in the Old English period), but on the other its syntax and verb inflection are extremely conservative; as late as 1340, Kentish syntax is still virtually identical with Old English syntax.

Southern

The Southern dialect of Middle English was spoken in the area west of Sussex and south and southwest of the Thames. It was the direct descendant of the West Saxon dialect of Old English, which was the colloquial basis for the Anglo-Saxon court dialect of Old English. Southern Middle English is a conservative dialect (though not as conservative as Kentish), which shows little influence from other languages — most importantly, no Scandinavian influence (see below). Descendants of Southern Middle English still survive in the working-class

country dialects of the extreme southwest of England.

Northern

By contrast with these southernmost dialects, Northern Middle English evolved rapidly: the inflectional systems of its nouns and verbs were already sharply reduced by 1300, and its syntax is also innovative (and thus more like that of Modern English). These developments were probably the result of Scandinavian influence. In the aftermath of the great Scandinavian invasions of the 860's and 870's, large numbers of Scandinavian families settled in northern and northeastern England. When the descendants of King Alfred the Great of Wessex reconquered those areas (in the first half of the 10th century), the Scandinavian settlers, who spoke Old Norse, were obliged to learn Old English. But in some areas their settlements had so completely displaced the preexisting English settlements that they cannot have had sufficient contact with native speakers of Old English to learn the language well.

More on NorthernThey learned it badly, carrying over into their English various features of Norse (such as the pronoun they and the noun law ), and also producing a simplified syntax that was neither good English nor good Norse. Those developments can be clearly seen in a few late Old English documents from the region, such as the glosses on the Lindisfarne Gospels (ca. 950) and the Aldbrough sundial (late 11th century). None of this would have mattered for the development of English as a whole if the speakers of this "Norsified English" had been powerless peasants; but they were not. Most were freeholding farmers, and in many northern districts they constituted the local power structure. Thus their bad English became the local prestige norm, survived, and eventually began to spread (much later — see below).

East-Midland and West-MidlandThe East-Midland and West-Midland dialects of Middle English are intermediate between the Northern and Southern/Kentish extremes. In the West Midlands there is a gradation of dialect peculiarities from Northern to Southern as one moves from Lancashire to Cheshire and then down the Severn valley. This dialect has left modern descendants in the working- class country dialects of the area. The East-Midland dialect is much more interesting. The northern parts of its dialect area were also an area of heavy Scandinavian settlement, so that northern East-Midland Middle English shows the same kinds of rapid development as its Northern neighbor. But the subdialect boundaries within East-Midland were far from static: the more northerly variety spread steadily southward, extending the influence of Scandinavianized English long after the Scandinavian population had been totally assimilated.

More on East and West MidlandIn the 13th century this part of England, especially Norfolk and Suffolk, began to outstrip the rest of the country in prosperity and population because of the excellence of its agriculture, and — crucially — increasing numbers of well-to-do speakers of East-Midland began to move to London, bringing their dialect with them. By the second half of the 14th century the dialect of London and the area immediately to the northeast, which had once been Kentish, was thoroughly East-Midland, and a rather Scandinavianized East Midland at that. Since the London dialect steadily gained in prestige from that time on and began to develop into a literary standard, the northern, Scandinavianized variety of East-Midland became the basis of standard Modern English. For that reason, East-Midland is by far the most important dialect of Middle English for the subsequent development of the language.

Dialect Atlases

“Try to show the geographical boundaries of the distribution of a particular linguistic feature by drawing a line on a map” (Wardhaugh 134)Such a line is called an isogloss

On one side of the line people say one thing, on the other they say a different thing.

Isogloss

The isogloss is the boundary line between groups who say something differentlyWhen there are a number of different things said on one side of the boundary from what is said on the other side, we can say that the boundary marks a dialect boundary

Examples from some Middle English Dialects

We’ll use the ELMO for this.

Relic areas and transition areas (Back to modern examples)

Simply terms referring to sub areas where shifts do not occur. As if the Antelope Valley continued to refer to any bubbly soft drink as ‘coke’ while the rest of LA county shifted to calling it ‘soda’. AV would be a relic area, and perhaps Beverly Hills, a status area where the shift might originate or Watts a low status area where the shift might originate would be focal areas and LA county would be the transition area

The Soda pop page

http://www.popvssoda.com/

American Dialect page(note area for San Francisco dialect)

http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/1906/dialects.html

Linguistic Atlas of the US and Canada

“The selection of informants tends not to be very well controlled” Wardhaugh 137Broken down into simplified categories like high, middle, and low class – no education, some education, superior education – old, middle aged, youngMost studies tend to prefer older peopleOne survey of British dialects instructed researchers to choose informants who were over sixty, at least second generation, and had good teeth

Dialects remember two kinds

Geographical dialects. We’ve just done.Social dialects. We discussed social dialect and class in the first part of this powerpoint.

William Labov

Sociolinguist who we mentioned in the first part of this presentationInterested in class and did most of his studies in New York City.

Linguistic VariableA linguistic item which has identified variants.

Fishin / fishing/ fishenCar / cah With / wit / wifLatin / la?in thirty / thirdyCoffee / cowfee“It was a macao Tom not a parrot!”He’s happy / he be happy / he happyClimbed / clombLook for a present for my mom / look for my mom a present

Labov also uses indicator, marker, stereotype

Indicator: a linguistic variable without social importance. Cot/caught. merry/marry/MaryMarker: a linguistic variable with social significance. Car/cah, schedule/shedule, Magdalene college/ Maudlin college, Down Below/LA, Los Angeles/Los Angeles, The City/Frisco?Stereotype: a popular and therefore concious characterization of speech of a group. Boid for NY, Chap for Brit, Howdy partner, dude for Ca

William Labov’sDepartment Store Study• Saks Fifth Avenue– At 50th Street and 5th Avenue, near the centerof the high fashion shopping district• Macy's– Herald Square. 34th Street and Sixth Avenue,near the garment district• S. Klein– Union Square. 14th Street and Broadway, notfar from the Lower East Side

Discussion Questions on p. 143

1. What is a shibboleth?3. What linguistic variables might be usefully investigated in our part of the world? What kind of variations have you noticed? 4. Examples where people hypercorrect and get things wrong? English avacado?5. What’s wrong with double negatives?

Hypercorrection

It is I. We want to sound high class sometimes, so we say and write things that are stilted and/or purple.The upper class often don’t care what fork they use and use slang with relish. Middle class people sometimes reveal themselves as middle class by being too proper in dress, behaviour, and language.

Labov and class

In one study (Wardhaugh 147) Labov used education, occupation, and income to set up ten social classes.What class are you? How can we tell?House size? In AV there wasn’t much variation, now there is. Do people with really big houses act and speak differently?

Idiolects and Sociolects

Idiolect (idios Greek “self” lect “speech” as in lecture): speech characteristics and linguistic behaviour of individualsSociolect: speech characteristics of members of social groups

Idiolects

How can we tell if someone is speaking in a unique way because of individual difference rather than dialect?Clint Eastwood? Truman Capote? Johny Depp as Willy Wonka? Carol Channing? Fran Drescher? George Bush?

Data Collection

How to we properly design and deliver and analyze our studiesObserver’s paradox, how can we adjust for our own biasesCan any sociolinguistic study be completely objective and clean?Questionnaires

Questionnaires: four-fold distinctions

1. Casual situation2. An interview3. Reading aloud a story4. Reading aloud a list of word pairs

Casual and careful speech

We should try to distinguish whether the speech involved is casual or carefulWhat is the speech of the Please call Stella speakers? Does it vary from speaker to speaker?

Please call Stella

Are there any words that are clear linguistic variables in the paragraph?What is the different between the accent of a native speaker and the accent of a learner?

Random Sample or Judgment Sample

Random: usually better way to do it. It is more objective, but more difficult to do.Judgment sample: an investigator chooses subjects according to a set of criteria: age, gender, social class, education, etc… These are the kind of samples that sociolinguists usually take

Dependent and independent variables

The linguistic variable in these studies is the dependent variable – the difference that we are interested in.Other variables may be incidental or unrelated to the correlation being studied.Statisticians consider most of these sociolinguistic studies to lack sufficient rigour.

Sociolinguistics and scientific studies

Sociolinguists need to collect reliable data, but how can they? Since we can not even give satisfactory definitions of sociolingustics, or language, or society, or dialect, or creole, how can we do scientific studies in this field?

Epistemic relativism vs Logical Positivism

Relativism: sociolinguistic studies are not useful because all linguistic norms are relative. Jibberish or the sound of gas escaping from a tube is as important and interesting as human speechLogical positivism: since we can not be sure about any of these claims, we should not make any claims. We need scientific proof. Theoretical linguistics is about universals. It is rigorous and highly structured.

Is Sociolinguistics

A scienceA social sciencePart of the humanities A liberal studies requirement

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Nonhuman Communication - Washoe

Born 1965Taught ASL 1966Mastered 100s of signsFirst nonhuman to learn language

Nonhuman Communication - Lana

Taught with keyboard, 1970sAble to use and combine signs

Nonhuman Communication - Koko

1970s, first gorilla taught ASLIQ of 85 at 4 years oldKoko learning ASLKoko on AOL

Nonhuman Communication – Nim Chimpsky

1980s taught ASLWouldn’t initiate conversationNever signed to other chimps

Nim Chimpsky and his namesake, the famed linguist Noam Chomsky

Nonhuman Communication - Kanzi

1980s, communicates with lexigramsVocabulary of 90 symbolsCould understand EnglishCommand of syntax

Nonhuman Communication – Jane Goodall

Gombe Game ReserveChimps need stimulus to make soundsSince 1960s

Animal v. Human Communication

Four differences:Productivity (infinite expressions)Displacement (past, present, future)Arbitrariness (no link between word and sound)Combining sounds (phonemes)

• Dime versus dine or lock versus rock in English• English has 45 phonemes; Italian 27; Hawaiian 13• Nonhuman animals cannot combine sounds (1:1

correspondence of sounds)

Anatomy of Language

BrainSizeLateralityWernicke’s areaBroca’s areaMotor cortex

Motor cortex

Sociolinguistics

Like descriptive linguistics in a way, in that sociolinguists are concerned with the ethnography of speaking—cultural and subcultural patterns of speech variation in different social contexts.Examples:

Pronunciation and dialectsHonorifics and social statusGender differencesMultilingualism

Anatomy of Language

Respiratory SystemLarger lung capacityLarynx, pharynxTongue, lips, noseHyoid

Structure of Language

Phonology (sounds)Morphology (words)Syntax (sentence structure)Semantics (meaning)Pragmatics or grammar (rules)

Structure of Language - Phonology

The study of sounds of a language.No human language uses all the sounds humans can make.IPA – International Phonetic AlphabetPhonemes and phones

/l/ and /r/ = phonemes (English has 40)/p/ and /ph/ = phones Ghoti = fish (tough, women, position)

Other soundsTones, nasals, clicks (Genesis in the !Kung language)

Structure of Language - Morphology

Morphemes are the smallest units of language.

Words (dog, cat) = free morphemesPrefixes (un-, sub-)Syllables (-s, -ly )

Declining and conjugatingVerbs are conjugated (am, are, is)Nouns are declined in some languages

• Latin, Greek, German, Russian, etc.• Word form changes based on position in sentence.

= bound morphemes

Structure of Language - SyntaxRules for how to put together sentences and phrases.Six possible arrangements, based on Subject, Verb, Object

English is SVO = The girl will hit the boy.Forming questions: English = V1SV2O?

Structure of Language - Syntax

Example of syntaxLewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe.All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe.

Verb Noun Adjective

Structure of Language - Semantics

The meaning of symbols, words, phrases, and sentences of a language.Ethnosemantics and kinship terms

Aunt/uncle versus non-gendered cousin

Evolution of Language

Old Theories:“bowwow” and “ding-dong”Locke, B.F. Skinner, Descartes

New Theories:Noam Chomsky

• Universal and generative grammar• Principles and parameters

Creoles, pidgins, and EbonicsSapir-Whorf

Historical LinguisticsFocuses on how language changes over time and how languages relate to one another.Anthropologists are interested in cultural features that correlate with language families.Reconstruction of languages:

Proto-Indo-EuropeanSino-Tibetan

Linguistic divergenceGradual or by force

Historical Linguistics – Old English

Compare Old, Middle, and Modern EnglishBeowulf (Old English):

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas.

Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped, we have heard, and what honor the athelings won! Oft Scyld the Scefing tore the mead-bench from squadroned foes, from many a tribe awing the earls.

Historical Linguistics – Middle English

The Canterbury Tales (Middle English):

This worthy lymytour, this noble Frere,

He made alwey a maner louryng chiere

Upon the Somonour, but for honestee

No vileyns word as yet to hym spak he.

This worthy limiter, this noble friar, He turned always a lowering face, and dire, Upon the summoner, but for courtesy No rude and insolent word as yet spoke he.

Descriptive Linguistics

Also called structural linguisticsTries to discover the rules of phonology, morphology, and syntax of another language, especially those with no written dictionary or grammar.Seeks to discover language rules that are not written down but are discoverable in actual speech.

Fun Stuff

Language as artCalligraphyIllumination

Left to Right: Chinese Greek Arabic English

Fun Stuff

Internet and English

… as a tool of mass communication

… as a way to propagate non-standard

English

… as a dialect, or a linguistic event?

Romeo & Juliet - IM style