Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/3, 2003: 392431

DIALOGUE
Sociolinguistics and authenticity:
An elephant in the room
Elephants in the room
Penelope Eckert
Stanford University, California
Research is a zoo. There are elephants in the room, moose on the table. These
are large presences that we collectively ignore, issues that we set aside in order
to get on with our research enterprise. One might say that we can't do research
without elephants, for if we didn't take some things as given, we'd never be able
to investigate anything. But eventually we have to look at those givens and
consider their implications for what we've done, and for what we will do in the
future. The two papers that follow, by Mary Bucholtz and Nikolas Coupland,
oer timely examinations of one such elephant that has become increasingly
visible in recent years: the notion of the `Authentic Speaker'.1 This spontaneous
speaker of pure vernacular is the dialectological poster child our direct access
to language untainted by the interference of reection or social agency. As the
following two papers will show, authenticity is an ideological construct that is
central to the practice of both speakers and analysts of language. Buried
unquestioned in our practice, belief in authenticity is part of a larger construction of language as a natural object a construction that could use some
scrutiny to see what it is buying for sociolinguistics and what it is obscuring.
Authenticity is constructed in relation to particular locations such as the
traditional peasant in an isolated community (Holmquist 1985), the street kid
in the inner city (Labov 1972a), and the burned-out burnout in a midwestern
high school (Eckert 2000). Locally located and oriented, the Authentic Speaker
produces linguistic output that emerges naturally in and from that location. The
notion of the authentic speaker is based in the belief that some speakers have
been more tainted by the social than others tainted in the sense that they have
wandered beyond their natural habitat to be subject to conscious, hence
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unnatural, social inuences. Thus the villager who travels to the city, or the
working class speaker who aspires to be middle class, or even the African
American speaker who uses African American Standard English, are all viewed
as linguistically less natural than their peers who have not strayed from the
variety assigned to them.
The general view of women's speech as hypercorrect (e.g. Trudgill 1972)
adds the gender spin to this picture for, as Mary Bucholtz mentions in her paper,
authenticity is normally gendered indeed it is part of gender ideology. Jane
Hill's discussion (1987) of the gendered use of Spanish and Mexicano is a case in
point, as women are sanctioned for laying linguistic claim to native authenticity
through the use of `pure' Mexicano, or to Spanish authenticity through the use
of standard Spanish. Keith Walters (2003) has also laid this out nicely in the
case of Tunisia, as women's greater use of French and particularly standard
French is seen as a sign of their inauthenticity as Arabs in contrast with men's
greater use of Arabic and heavily accented French. And sociolinguists have
participated in this gendering in, for example, focusing studies of African
American Vernacular English on the speech of urban boys. These boys'
authenticity as speakers of AAVE is tied to their participation in urban male
street life, and in certain authentically urban male speech events (e.g. playing
the dozens). The assumption that African American girls and women are
somehow less urban, less authentic AAVE speakers, if not stated, is implied
by their absence. So who, as both of the following papers ask, gets to dene
authenticity?
Authenticity implies stasis the `real' peasant is just like the peasant that
came before. But neither social locations and identities, nor language, are static.
Is the person who remains centrally located in what is viewed as prototypical
practice more authentic than the person who is pushing the envelope? Should
our focus be solely on those who reproduce the meanings from which social
locations are constructed, or should we also be focusing on those who are at the
vanguard of the production of new social meaning? I would argue that a crucial
part of the meaning-making enterprise in variation takes place in this
vanguard; hence studies of speakers who push, for example, the gender
envelope (Bucholtz 1996; Gaudio 1997; Hall and O'Donovan 1996), should
take center place in sociolinguistics.
Work on clearly intentional variability, such as studies of adolescent white
boys' use of AAVE features (Bucholtz 1999; Cutler 1999), may strike some as
pretty far removed from the kinds of more automatic patterns that we nd in
our studies of, for example, rotations in vowel systems (e.g. Labov 1994). Can
these studies be part of the same enterprise? The obvious answer is that such
linguistic behavior constitutes a conscious manipulation and as such is
qualitatively dierent from the unconscious patterning of the vernacular.
What I wish to interrogate here is that imagined line between the two kinds
of phenomena a line whose very existence is central to analytic practice.
Between the extremes of the most automatic and the most intentional we nd
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phenomena such as Allan Bell's (responsive) audience design (1984), in which

one might say that changes in audience trigger fairly automatic adjustments of
dialect. And then there is Nikolas Coupland's work (1985, 2000) showing the
seamlessness of a Cardi DJ's use of his native dialect features and of features of
other dialects, as he negotiates meanings and identities with his audience and
his subject matter. Our data are full of these kinds of acts of identity (Le Page
and Tabouret-Keller 1985), but they remain at the margins of theoretical
practice because they run counter to the central ideology of linguistics that is,
that what is interesting in language is what is beyond the conscious control of
speaker agency.
In a discussion of style, Leonard Meyer points out that, `By far the largest part
of behavior is a result of the interaction between innate modes of cognition and
patterning, on the one hand, and ingrained, learned habits of discrimination
and response, on the other.' (1979: 5) Beyond that, he argues, are the creative
things we do to make stylistic moves. In linguistics, some might argue that the
innate lies in universals, and more generally in cognitive and articulatory
limitations on acquisition, processing and production, while the features of
particular languages are the ingrained, learned habits. Modern linguistics
denes itself in relation to the innate end of this continuum and sociolinguistics,
particularly the study of variation, does as well. Thus while the data of variation
lie in the continuum between the ingrained and the creative, the tension from
the eld is to discount all but the ingrained. This exclusion of evidence of social
creativity constitutes what Latour (1993) refers to as the process of `purication' that constructs an opposition between the natural and the social an
opposition that underlies modern scientic practice. It is the status of language
as a natural and transcendent phenomenon as an inalienable part of human
nature, the product of the human mind, dening of our species, and involving
forces beyond our conscious control that makes it a proper object of scientic
investigation.2
With a view of language as `in' the human mind, waiting to be discovered,
sociolinguists boast special methods for getting at language in its natural state
in the form of the vernacular. If the Authentic Speaker is an elephant hovering
in the corner, the vernacular is a moose sprawling in the middle of the table.
The vernacular is the central naturalizing concept of sociolinguistics, dened
(e.g. Labov 1972b) as the individual's most natural speech, learned early in life,
and forever `xed' in the speaker's ingrained patterns thanks to a critical period
for language and dialect acquisition. These ingrained patterns are produced
most regularly in spontaneous speech which, by virtue of its naturalness, is the
source of regular linguistic change. Conscious monitoring of speech, on the
other hand, interrupts the regularity of the vernacular and slows down the
progress of change. Finally, the spread of changes from speaker to speaker
requires sucient continuous contact to allow the unconscious absorption of
often complex patterns.
The Authentic Speaker, the vernacular, the critical period, and the need for
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regular contact for spread, are all wildlife supporting the view of language as a
natural object. I would certainly not argue with some version of each of these,
but I would not take any of them for granted. It is not clear, in fact, how much
the age constraints on acquisition, and perhaps particularly of dialect features,
are due to cognitive limitations and how much to the social conditions under
which we learn and use language.3 And while there is evidence that speakers
lose some ability to adapt their phonology to new dialects as they approach
adolescence, there is also some evidence (e.g. Paunonen 1994) that speakers'
phonetic output can change and in the direction of the vernacular as late as
late adulthood. We also fortify our view of the vernacular as natural, or at least
ingrained, in our view of the necessity of regular contact for the spread of
change. We have all been told by non-linguist acquaintances that language
change comes from the television. The idea that language change could be
accomplished in such a trivial fashion is part of the popular `bag o' words' view
of language (Pullum and Scholz 2001) that we're all tired of dealing with.
However, we shouldn't ignore the possibility that not all changes are equal. We
need to ask ourselves what kinds of changes require the kind of repeated
exposure that regular social interaction gives, and what kinds can be taken
right o the shelf.
I recognize that in my characterization of sociolinguistics as cleaving to the
natural, I am creating something of a caricature. In practice, we all recognize
the complexity of the relationship between social agency and ingrained
behavior. But inasmuch as the line between the social and the natural is
itself a social construction, and poised as we are at that line, the very status of
language as natural the location of that line is, or should be, a central issue
in sociolinguistics. Is there a uidity between ingrained behavior and conscious
speech monitoring? The lengthening of vowels before voiced consonants is not
universal, hence natural, but a deeply engrained feature of English.4 If I really
wanted to, could I train myself to consistently produce short vowels in this
environment? No doubt not. But could I train myself to consistently lengthen
post-tonic syllables? And could this become so automatic that I'd have trouble
getting rid of it? Quite possibly.
The issue of the Authentic Speaker is ultimately an issue of where the social
resides in sociolinguistics. In 1968, Uriel Weinreich, William Labov and Marvin
Herzog argued for the incorporation of social variation in models of grammar.
The battle that they began back in the sixties is nally bearing fruit or, I might
say, the `core theorists' have nally discovered variation on their own and are
rapidly laying claim to it. What for years was `not linguistics' has now been
incorporated into the new stochastic models of grammar. But, predictably, it's
been asked to leave its social friends at home. If we concern ourselves primarily
with how the social deployment of language hooks onto an asocial model of
grammar, we may look more like `linguists', but we will most certainly not be
exploring the nature of the social in language. It is thanks to elephants such as
the Authentic Speaker that the study of variation has moved so far since
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Weinreich, Labov and Herzog's ground-breaking paper. What I am arguing

here is not that they are improper constructs, but that they have done their
work and it is now time to pull them out and examine what they have helped us
take for granted. Sociolinguistics should be located not at the edge of social
variability, but squarely in the center. This means that we have to view
language and the social world including the social locations that provide
our ideological map of that world as a continuous human production. And it
is up to us, above all, to explore the nexus between that world and whatever
that linguistic system is that resides in our most ingrained behaviors.
NOTES
1. Earlier versions of these papers were presented in a panel at NWAV31 at Stanford in
2002, a conference whose theme was `Elephants in the Room'. Other elephants
discussed at this conference were the issues of the critical period for dialect acquisition
and the inuence of the media on language.
2. I am grateful for fruitful discussions on the scientic construction of linguistics with
Ashwini Deo and Itamar Francez.
3. Eve Clark and Gillian Sanko presented papers on the issue of the critical period in the
same panel as the papers under discussion here. See Clark (2000) for a discussion of
this issue.
4. I owe this observation to Robert Podesva.

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Address correspondence to:

Penelope Eckert
Department of Linguistics
Stanford University
Stanford
California 943052150
U.S.A.
eckert@csli.stanford.edu

# Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003