(Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics) Carmen Fought - Sociolinguistic Variation - Critical Reflections-Oxford University Press (2004) PDF

Sociolinguistic Variation:
Critical Reflections
CARMEN FOUGHT,
Editor
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Sociolinguistic Variation
OXFORD STUDIES IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
General Editors:
Nikolas Coupland
Adam Jaworski
Cardiff University
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Maryann Overstreet
A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar
Julie Lindquist
Critical Reflections
EDITED BY
CARMEN FOUGHT
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2004
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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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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 lan-
guage variation? How can we enrich our interpretations of interview talk and of nar-
rative 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, con-
flict, politics, cognition, and human development. Variationist sociolinguistics, and
viii 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 in-
tellectual space where multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary themes relevant to lan-
guage 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 in-
terdisciplinary 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 disci-
pline: 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, reflexiv-
ity, ritual, ageing, sexuality and desire, and even sociolinguistics’s staple of social
class are ripe for reinterpretation. Sociolinguistics needs to model and assess the im-
plications of profound global shifts in the organization of social life and communi-
cative 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 con-
figurations and problems. We firmly expect to maintain sociolinguistics’s long-
standing 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 reas-
sess sociolinguistics itself and the nature of sociolinguistic theory will also be wel-
come. 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 pos-
sible. 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 genu-
inely 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 confer-
ence was unique, many of the impressive roster of scholars who responded to our in-
vitation 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 (African-
American 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
x 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 re-
search on their own career paths and on the field in general. These personal expres-
sions 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 socio-

linguistics, 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 contra-
dictory 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 rela-
tionship 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 life-
time of recording, analyzing, and writing about them were not a burden or profes-
sional 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 to-
gether 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 xi
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. Scot-
tish 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.
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 31
3. Exploring Intertextuality in the Sociolinguistic Interview,

Natalie Schilling-Estes 44
Part II: The Exploration of “Place”
4. Place, Globalization, and Linguistic Variation, Barbara Johnstone 65
5. The Sociolinguistic Construction of Remnant Dialects, Walt Wolfram 84
6. Variation and a Sense of Place, Penelope Eckert 107

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 161
10, The Radical Conservatism of Scots, Ronald Macaulay 178
11, Spoken Soul: The Beloved, Belittled Language of Black America,

John R. Rickford 198
Index 209
CONTRIBUTORS
Guy Bailey Ronald Macaulay

Provost and Vice President for Department of Linguistics
Academic Affairs Pitzer College
University of Texas, San Antonio Claremont, CA 91711-6101
San Antonio, TX 78249-0603
Lesley Milroy
Penelope Eckert Department of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics University of Michigan
Stanford University Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Stanford, CA 94305-2150
Dennis R. Preston
Carmen Fought Department of Linguistics and Germanic,
Department of Linguistics Slavic, Asian, and African Languages
Pitzer College Michigan State University
Claremont, CA 91711-6101 East Lansing, MI 48824-1027
Barbara Johnstone John R. Rickford

Department of English Department of Linguistics
Carnegie Mellon University Stanford University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 Stanford, CA 94305-2150
William Labov Gillian Sankoff

Department of Linguistics Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
xv
xvi CONTRIBUTORS
Natalie Schilling-Estes Walt Wolfram

Department of Linguistics Department of English
Georgetown University North Carolina State University
Washington, DC 20057-1051 Raleigh, NC 27695-8105
Jan Tillery
Department of English, Classics, and
Philosophy
University of Texas San Antonio
San Antonio, TX 78249
CARMEN FOUGHT
Introduction
The chapters in this volume bring together some of the most prominent research-
ers 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 is-
sues, but within this diversity is a common theme: the critique of conventional wis-
dom 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 in-
stance, 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. Presum-
ably, 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 phe-
nomena 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 iden-
tity—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, an-
thropology, 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 sci-
entific understanding of identity and its role in social organization, and these chap-
ters illuminate the nature of that contribution.
The four main parts of the book provide different perspectives from which par-
ticular 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 col-
lecting and classifying data, particularly as a way of improving the applicability of
data from one small sample to a larger population. Challenging traditional socio-
linguistic methods, they illustrate how elements such as the identity or even the de-
gree 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 re-
membered 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 socio-
linguistic 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 dis-
cussions of place in geography and social theory. Paralleling the chapter by Schilling-
Estes, 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 rem-
nant dialect community. Remnant dialect areas are interesting, among other reasons,
because they allow us to look at a community where the relationship between indi-
vidual 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 them-
selves 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 per-
spectives that emphasize homogeneity, and she argues strongly for a more integra-
tive perspective on the sociolinguistic study of communities.
The third part explores influences on adult speech, including variations in reg-
ister and the acquisition of grammatical and other features after puberty. These chap-
ters draw new connections between sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, looking
at the cognitive and developmental side of social variation. Many of the other sec-
tions 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 chap-
ters direct their inquiries toward developments within individual speakers and ex-
plore 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 (ini-
tially), 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 de-
gree 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 lo-
cally relevant variables illuminates the value of focusing on the practices of indi-
viduals 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 varia-
tionist 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 high-
lighting 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 col-
lected 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 varia-
tion 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 lan-
guage 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 pro-
vides 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 ide-
alized, “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 pref-
ace, the conference from which these chapters emerged seemed to bring out the au-
thors’ 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.
PART I
SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
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 first-
generation 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 is-
sues 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 re-
liability (i.e., that the same results would be obtained in repeated observations of the
same phenomenon) and intersubjectivity (i.e., that two different researchers observ-
ing 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 summa-
rizes the distribution of zero third-person singular in ten studies of African-American
11
12 SOCIOLINGUISTIC METHODS
Percentage of Zero Third Singular

100
87 86
90 83 83
77 77
80 73 73 73
70
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50
40
30
20
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-H
TX
 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 percent-
age 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, in-
cluding 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 quan-
titative 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 Author/PI Community Age Social Class
Georgia Sommer (1986) Atlanta Adolescents Lower

Mississippi Wolfram (1971) Meadville Adolescents Lower working
Texas-Rural Bailey (1993) Brazos Valley Adolescents Lower
Texas-Urban Bailey (1993) Bryan Adolescents Lower
TX-Houston Cukor-Avila (1997) Houston Adolescents Working
North Carolina Butters & Nix (1986) Wilmington Adolescents Lower Working
Maryland Whiteman (1981) ? Adolescents Lower Working
Washington, D.C. Fasold (1972) — Adolescents Lower Working
California Rickford (1992) East Palo Alto Teenagers Lower Working
Michigan Wolfram (1969) Detroit Adolescents 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 re-
sults 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 prom-
ising 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 ef-
fect 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 oc-
currence 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

African-American White
Feature Interviewer Interviewer
Possessive –s absence 67% (6/9) 50% (5/10) ns

Plural –s absence 01% (4/282) 00% (0/230) ns
Third singular present absence 73% (83/114) 36% (45/124)a
Copula is/are absence 70% (197/283) 40% (70/176)a
Invariant habitual be 385 (=241 per hour) 97 (=78 per hour)a
a= significant at <.001 by chi square test.
Source: Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994).
Knox conclude, suggest that the race of the interviewer has a major effect on re-
sults 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 one-
on-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 experi-
ments to examine the effects of interviewer race.4 The first experiment included two
sets of interviews, one in which a white fieldworker interviewed three African-
American 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)
Rickford/McNair-Knox Cukor-Avila/Bailey #1 Cukor-Avila/Bailey #2
Study 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 yes no yes yes yes no b
interviewee
Other interlocutors yes no yes yes yes yes
present
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.
90 83.9 African-American FW
80 77 White FW
Percentage of Occurrence
70
60 53.655.5
50
50
42.3
40
30
20
10 6.5 6.6
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 in-
stance, 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 McNair-
Knox (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 context-
dependent, 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 Cukor-
Avila 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 inter-
viewers 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
90 African-American FW
80 76.7 White FW
73.7
Percentage of Occurrence
67.8
70
60 55.8
47.4
50
40 35.3
30
20
10 6.4
2.6
0
0 0 3rd sing. 0 copula habitual be
possessive
Feature
 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
Percentage of Nonstandard Forms
White FW 100
100 90.3
80 70 73.3 73
66.7 66.7 64.7
60
40
20.5
20 17.1
9.1
0
0
strong strong p. 0 3rd 3rd-plural was multiple
pret. p. sing. -s leveling neg.
Feature
 1.4. The Effects of the Race of the Fieldworker on Data from Aubrey, an African-
American Female Born in 1909 (Source: Cukor-Avila and Bailey 2001)
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 in-
terviewer effects are necessary prerequisites to achieving reliability and intersubjec-
tivity. 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) intrigu-
ing analysis of the distribution of the Southern American English double modal con-
struction 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 oc-
curred almost twice as often when the fieldworker was a female (see figure 1.5) and
25
23.76
Percentage of Informants Using Form
20
15
13.31
10
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)
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. Be-
cause LAGS used worksheets (a set of target items to be elicited) rather than a ques-
tionnaire, fieldworkers had considerable discretion in eliciting target items.6 Many
relied heavily on directed conversation, whereas others generally used direct elicita-
tion of the items. Barbara Rutledge, the most prolific LAGS fieldworker (she con-
ducted 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
Percentage of Informants Who Use might could
35
30
25
20
16.36
15 13.31
10
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)
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 con-
ducted 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 inter-
views 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
Percentage of Occurrences of might could
67.79 Elicited
70
Conversation
60
50.47
50
40
28.72
30 25.97
23.68
20 17.08
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)
researchers to link every occurrence of a form to a particular interview, to a particu-

lar 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 interview-
ers 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 sam-

pling 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) illus-
trates these effects.
This work consists of two complementary tape-recorded surveys, one a tele-
phone survey and the other a field survey.7 The former used a proportionate strati-
fied 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 na-
tives 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 com-
munities 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 signifi-
cant 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 sur-
veys are not particularly large, but in every instance they are statistically signifi-
cant (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-
Telephone Survey Field Survey
120
Percentage of Respondents Using Each Form
97.2
100 93.9
90.3 88.9
87.4
82.6
77.8 79.2
80
67.6
60 55.9
40 32.7
28.9
20
0
yall yall-sing. fixin to might pos. incept.
could anymore 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 differ-
ence exceeds 6%, and no difference is statistically significant. Virtually all of the
discrepancies between the SOD telephone and field surveys, then, reflect differ-
ences 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 popu-
lation 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 reliabil-
ity. These differences also demonstrate the importance of not generalizing beyond
the precise population that the sample represents.
Telephone Survey Field Survey

Percentage of Respondents Using Each Feature
120
93.9 97.2
100 90.3 88.9
92 89.6 91.6
87.3
80 70.2
67.6
60
40 34.8
28.9
20
0
yall yall-sing. fixin to might pos. incep. got
could 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
50 Former Slaves
44 Adults, 50–100
45
Adults, 25–49
40
Children
35
the Environment
30
25
19
20
15 13
10
10 88
5 2332 1122
01 0000
0
V+ing gonna 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 dis-
crepancy, 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. Fig-
ures 1.10–1.12 show how the difference in categorization creates the discrepancy
in the data.
70
65
be + ing as a Percentage of All Invariant be
60
50
40
30 27.42
20
15
13
9.8
10
0
Viereck B&M B&M adults Ewers early Ewers late
children
Study
 1.11. The Occurrence of Habitual be+ing in Three Studies, with be+ing Calcu-
lated 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 evi-
dence, 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 to-
kens 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 dis-
crepancy. Ewers reports results that are quite different from those that Viereck re-
ports 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-
2.5
be as a Percentage of All Copula Forms Before
2
2
1.5
V + ing
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 ques-
tion 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.
(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 re-
searchers have been careful to exclude tokens derived from will/would deletion from
their analyses. However, as the examples above suggest, the differences are some-
times 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 consis-
tency in analytical strategies would certainly account for the intersubjectivity between
Viereck and Ewers (1996).
Even when researchers agree on analytical strategies and categories, those strat-
egies 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 sum-
mary 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 (par-
ticipial, nonstatives, and statives) to explore any differential effects that adjective
subcategory might have on the occurrence of zero copula in data from African Ameri-
cans in Springville, Texas. As figure 1.13 shows, those subcategories do have dif-
ferential effects, effects that are dramatic and complex. Zero copula is much more
frequent before participial than stative adjectives among informants born both be-
fore 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 differ-
ential 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 adjec-
tives. 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 Cukor-
Avila’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

90 Pre–World War II
Post–World War II
80 77
72
69
70
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: Cukor-
Avila 1999)
locatives with adjectives; if a corpus contains a high proportion of participial adjec-

tives, 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 pro-
cedures 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
Percentage Zero in Each Environment

100 Pre–World War II Infs. Post–World War II Infs.
89
90 86
82
80 77
69 72
70 64
58 60
60
50 42 41 42
40
30
30 21
20
10
0
j
j.
j.
a
P
ad
g
Ad
ad
nn
tiv
in
N
e
ca
go
e
rt.
tiv
iv
V
lo
pa
ta
at
ns
st
no
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.
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 Re-
search, 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 Sur-
vey 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 Dia-
lectology. 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 Varia-
tion 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. Montgom-
ery 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 Sub-
Categorical 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 Ap-
plied Linguistics.
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. Montgom-
ery 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: Evi-
dence from Copula Absence. In African-American English: Structure, History, and Us,
ed. Salikoko Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh, 154–200. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Rickford, John R., and Faye McNair-Knox. 1994. Addressee- and Topic-Influenced Style
Shift: A Quantitative Sociolinguistic Study. In Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Regis-
ter, 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: Cam-
bridge 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. Washing-
ton, 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 ex-

perience play a prominent role. In the sociolinguistic interview, narratives are one of
the primary means of reducing the effects of observation and recording. In dissect-
ing 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 every-
day 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 nar-
rative is such an important methodological step, attention has turned to narrative struc-
ture (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., Silva-
Corvalan 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 socio-
linguistic interviews; as an interviewer, he was able to draw forth the full eloquence
of the Scots speakers of Ayrshire and Glasgow.
31
1. The narrative
This chapter will deal with a single narrative recorded by Macaulay. It was origi-
nally 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 narra-
tives 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 daugh-
ter 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 intro-
duced 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 And it was an exceptionally good afternoon,
b and she put him out in a basket chair, sitting at the window ootside in the garden.
c She went in on the one bus
d and came back on the same bus,
because the conductress says to her, “Thought you said you were going for
messages [shopping],” she says.
e “So I was.”
f “Well,” she says, “I’m awful glad I’m no waiting on you,” she says.
g “You coudnae have got much
because you’ve got the same bus back.”
h “Ach well,” she says, “I don’t like the idea of leaving him too long,”
i and she went up the road.
j She noticed his basket chair was there,
k but he wasnae there.
l She never thought anything aboot it,
because it was too warm.
m She thought he’d naturally gone inside,
n and when she went in,
he was lying on the settee.
o And she’s auld-fashioned, very tidy, very smart.
p Everything had to go in its place.
q She took off her coat,
r hung it up,
ORDINARY EVENTS 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 straight-
forward 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 in-
tegration of the participants. Though we begin with the assumption that the events re-
ported 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 nar-
rative. 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 tem-
poral 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 ex-
tended temporal ranges, as shown in figure 2.1.
 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
ORDINARY EVENTS 35
However, there can be no doubt that clause (x) is the central point of the narra-
tive, 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 displace-
ment of the evaluation section.
3. The assignment of praise and blame
Narratives that center on conflict, violence, sickness, and death are normally con-
cerned 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 be-
cause 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 see-
ing 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 trag-
edy 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, mitigat-
ing 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 par-
ticipants as reported by Laidlaw (excluding reported internal thoughts). The capital
Her Her Mother The Conductress
A sat outside put him out
B [became ill] went in on bus

C [went inside] [ shopped]
D [lay on settee] [got on bus] “I thought you were going”
E [died] “So I was”
“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 dropped off shook him
S 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 anima-
tor (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 assign-
ment 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 nar-
rator 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 well-
being 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 cred-
ible. 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 equiva-
lent 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,
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 after-
noon?” 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 re-
lations. 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 re-
quired. 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 con-
struction. 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 He dropped off the settee [dead] in front of her

r–1 w because she shook him to ask him if he wanted coffee
r–2 t because she had made him coffee
ORDINARY EVENTS 39
r–3 n because when she saw him lying on the settee

l, m she thought he was all right
r–4 c, d because she had gone in and returned in a hurry
r–5 b because she had left him in the basket chair
r–6 a 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 a Because it was an exceptionally good afternoon

r–5 b she left him in the basket chair
r–4 c, d and so she went and returned in a hurry
r–3 l, m so she thought he was all right
n when she saw him lying on the settee
r–2 t so she made him coffee
r–1 w so she shook him to ask if he wanted coffee
r0 x 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 con-
sider 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 con-
versation 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.
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 nar-
rative’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 differ-
ently. 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 sec-
ond 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 She took off her coat,

r hung it up,
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,
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 con-
nections in (6) hold:
(6) w she shook him to ask him if he wanted tea

v because she had gone through
u because she had made the coffee
t because she had said, “. . . I’ll go ask him”
s because she had put away her shopping bag
r because she had hung it up
q 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
ORDINARY EVENTS 41
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
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 inten-
tion 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 She unbuttoned her coat

q' And pulled her arm out of the right sleeve
q" and then the left sleeve
q'" Then she took it by the collar
r 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 report-
able 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 slow-
ing 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 di-
rectors of films to heighten tension in anticipation of an attack or an imminent catas-
trophe. 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 re-
spect, 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).
Thus the contrast of the ordinary and the extraordinary is a third evaluative de-
vice in this narrative construction. As in other effective narratives of personal expe-
rience, 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 objectiv-
ity 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 thought-
less 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 auld-
fashioned, 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 Narra-
tives 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 His-
tory 7:395–415.
ORDINARY EVENTS 43
———. 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 Narra-
tives. 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.
NATALIE SCHILLING -ESTES
Exploring Intertextuality
in the Sociolinguistic Interview
1. Introduction
Despite the pervasiveness of theories of language in which memorized lists of particu-

lar 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 research-
ers maintain that memorized, and quite concrete, forms play a far greater role in lan-
guage 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
EXPLORING INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC INTERVIEW 45
invented utterances (e.g., Fillmore et al. 1988; Jackendoff 1997). In recent years, pho-
neticians 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 Ameri-
can and an African American who happen to be good friends. The analysis demon-
strates 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 to-
gether 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 as-
sumed, at least tacitly, to be his or her “own.” The current study also has implica-
tions 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 demon-
strate 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 cat-
egorizes 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 constitu-
ent 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 predict-
able, given the other, as in “stretch to the ______” or “______ to the limit”; and
(3)  , or word sequences in which all the content words are sub-
ject 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
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”), construc-
tional 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, car-
ries with it a particular pragmatic force—that of emphasizing the speaker’s commit-
ment 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 con-
struction 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 memo-
rized bits of linguistic material in language production:
Ready-made expressions stored in speakers’ memory play not only an important

but absolutely fundamental role in how the speakers compose and interpret com-
munications. 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 di-
versity—repertoire of those prefabricated expressions. (1999:1)
Gasparov calls these prefabricated expressions  , or

CFs, defining them as the “concrete corpuscles of familiar language matter, consti-
tuting, 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 previ-
ous 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 communica-
tively specific than an abstract scheme” (1999:14).
Gasparov provides examples from written sources, ranging from newspaper ar-
ticles 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 ap-
peal 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 pattern-
ing, ranging from phonetics to discourse analysis, have noted that memorized forms
may play a far greater role in speech perception and production than commonly as-
sumed. 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 tra-
ditional 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 lan-
guage.” Like Gasparov (1999), Tannen notes that remembered bits of linguistic mate-
rial 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 perva-
siveness 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 speak-
ers 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
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 de-
cades—the sociolinguistic interview. I focus on one interview drawn from a large-
scale 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 African-
American 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 rela-
tively 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 min-
utes later, they abruptly resume their discussion of race relations. This time, the dis-
cussion 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 gen-
eral (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 classifica-
tion scheme that has long been entrenched in the American South. One of their big-
gest 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 socio-
historical 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 “remem-
bered prior texts,” as Becker (1984:435) calls them, from numerous different sources.
For example, one frequent source of material for the current conversation is previ-
ous 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 previ-
ously 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,
“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 repeat-
ing 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)

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 African-
American 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 psychol-
ogy, 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)
(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 self-
esteem. 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
a drunk, he’s a wife beater, he’s a criminal,” you know?

(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.”
(b)
A: Jesus said you have to love, and men should be treated equally.
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 sen-
tences 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 con-
versation, several sentences in length. In addition, the CFs in the interview show
various degrees of fixity of form: some fragments are readily recognizable as word-
for-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 prob-
ably 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.
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-
brance of one source will trigger the remembrance of another. Given that (9) is em-
bedded 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 in-
clude 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 discus-
sion 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: In his (King’s) speeches, um, he starts [out, you know—]
A: [God knows he could speak.]
L: He could speak.
A: He could speak, now L—.
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) ex-
amines, 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 ex-
amples, errors and false starts may provide clues to what these communicative con-
tours 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)
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 in-
terview 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 al-
tered 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 indicat-
ing 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 con-
versational 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 ap-
proximate 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 typi-
cally regularizes past tense be to was, as in We was home or They wasn’t there. In con-
trast, 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
once uses wasn’t, whether in regularized or nonregularized contexts, even when re-
peating 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 sys-
tem 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 sys-
tem, 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.
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.
Given that (15) and (16) are both drawn from others’ words and ways of speak-
ing, 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 agree-
ment 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 lan-
guage 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, ca-
sual, “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.”
(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?
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, in-
cluding 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-
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 al-
tered, 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 inter-
view 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 gen-
eral. 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 work-
ing in the framework of phrase structure grammar (in its various forms) place far more em-
phasis 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-
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 figur-
ing 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 “trig-
ger” their innate knowledge of language structure, or Universal Grammar. Hence, the par-
ticulars 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 struc-
ture, 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 explo-
rations 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 in-
dicate 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).
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Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, 36–97. Cam-
bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1997. Involvement as Dialogue: Linguistic Theory and the Relation between Con-
versational and Literary Discourse. In Dialogue and Critical Discourse: Language,
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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.
PART II
THE EXPLORATION OF “PLACE”

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 moun-
tain ranges gave rise to communicative isolation of one group of speakers from an-
other, 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 lexi-
cal 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 identi-
fying where someone is, where someone is from, and who else is from there is
65
66 THE EXPLORATION OF “ PLACE ”
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 atten-
tion 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 con-
tinue to be useful in answering such questions. Finally, I sketch some of the method-
ological 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 lo-
cation 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 charac-
teristics 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,
PLACE , GLOBALIZATION , AND LINGUISTIC VARIATION 67
Place as Location Place as Meaning
Place is seen as “the relative location of Place is seen as "the meaningful context of
objects in the world” (Entrikin 1991:10). human action” (Entrikin 1991:10).
Place is the natural context of human life, Place is the symbolic context of human life,
setting in the physical sense. “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 An example: the College Station, Texas, area as
as “post-oak savanna” or as a set of longitude “Aggieland.”
and latitude coordinates.
Places can be viewed objectively (e.g., out of Places can only be “viewed” subjectively.
an airplane window), from the outside. Humans are centered in places, which can only
be seen from the inside outward.
The epistemological underpinnings of this The epistemological underpinnings of this way of

way of working are modernist, positivist. working are postmodernist, relativist, and
phenomenological.
Places are value-neutral. (Somebody is Places, because they are meaningful, are
someplace if he or she is physically located normative. (Being someplace means acting a
there; from someplace if he or she was born corresponding way, believing a set of ideas
there.) 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 focus of analysis is on “voluntary” or

the basis of physical, historical, or economic “vernacular” regions.
criteria. The focus is on “generic” regions,
as in the traditional geography on which
aereal classifications are based.
Discourses about place are expository. Discourses about place are jointly “formulated”
(Schegloff 1972), narrative.
Doing geography is like science: the focus is Doing geography is like reading (Rose 1980); the
on the large-scale and the general. analytical emphasis is on what is specific, what is
Appropriate methods are larger scale, unique, “the small scale, the taken-for-granted
quantitative. 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)
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 large-
scale 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 objec-
tively 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 con-
text of human action.” Seeing human experience as fundamentally “emplaced,” these
geographers are interested in such things as “sense of place,” in the difference be-
tween 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 participa-
tion 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 lo-
cation in the school atlas or road map . . . population or number and kind of indus-
tries” (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-
chures, and advertisements (Guerin 1999) or public debate about community devel-
opment (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 demo-
graphic 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 obser-
vation 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 na-
tionalism. It once consisted of the study of what Zelinsky (1973:110) calls “tradi-
tional 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 dia-
lectology 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 histori-
cal 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
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 re-
sults 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 analo-
gous 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 communi-
tarianism (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 Roman-
tics’ 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 “general-
ized sense of homelessness” experienced by the globally mobile.
According to Anthony Giddens (1991:14–21, 146, 147), the dynamism of mod-
ern 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 explana-
tory 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
The electronic media are often associated with a sort of liberation from place.
Meyrowitz (1985) claims, for example, that the electronic media make place obso-
lete 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 anthro-
pologists 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 at-
tempt 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 tradi-
tional 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 pro-
ceed (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, imper-
sonal world of the globalized forces which we do not understand.” Face-to-face com-
munity 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, anthro-
pologist 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 under-
standings and ways of acting because there is more constant oppor-
tunity for surveillance, for checks on deviance, and for positive
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 ques-
tion “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 in-
creasingly are, on what is creative about discourse rather than on what is predict-
able, 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 theo-
retically the most interesting (Johnstone 1996).
The general point about region that is made in humanistic geography is that re-
gions are meaningful, constructed, as well as selected, as reference points by individu-
als. 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
Claims and Suggestions Made in Research in Dialectology and Sociolinguistics
Contemporary Studies of Place, Region Bearing on Those Claims
Americans (and presumably others) now New uses of dialect atlas data (e.g., Johnson 1996)
inhabit “lifestyle enclaves” rather than show that cultural and psychological factors, not
communities centered around common just region of origin or habitation, affect how
experience of place. Physical place is “much regional variants pattern Ethnolinguistic
. studies
less significant than it used to be as an of variation show how other aspects of identity
external referent for the lifespan of the interact with place (Johnstone and Bean 1997).
individual” (Giddens 1991:147).
The idea that humans can be categorized into Work on “mixed” varieties (e.g., Heller 1995)
separate, autonomous “cultures” in separate, and on code switching calls into question “the
bounded places is mistaken. discreteness of linguistic systems”
(Gar dner-Chloros 1995).
New attention needs to be paid to what Marginal people with weak social ties are
happens on the borders and the boundaries, responsible for key processes in language change
to heterogeneity and adaptiveness. (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 Bailey (Bailey et al. 1993), in Texas and
within a local milieu” (Giddens 1991:147), Oklahoma, and Montgomery (1993), for Southern
e.g., through attempts to cultivate community speech, have found that certain features can
pride. Languages, dialects, and “ways of become symbols of local identity and then be
speaking” create and reflect “at-homeness” preserved and even spread in the face of
in a region (Mugerauer 1985). in-migration from elsewhere.
Localness can become a commodity, which Bell (1999) describes the use of a Maori song in
gives rise to competitions over the control of advertisements for the New Zealand airline.
what localness means or over its uses. 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 Ash (1988), Macaulay (1991), Labov
continuity (Hannerz 1996:26–27) because (1994:98-112), and others show that aspects of
“everyday life” is local; local encounters language that are acquired early, such as
tend to be face to face and long term; earliest phonology, are relatively (though not entirely)
experiences usually take place in a local resistant to change. Features that are local in this
context; the local is sensually real. sense may actually be less available as symbolic
markers of localness.
In a given situation or setting, some people Some of the well-known findings about variation
may be more global in orientation, some and gender, such as Trudgill’s (1972) work on
more local. “cover prestige,” support this claim.
Regions are meaningful places that are Preston’s (1989, 1997) work on “folk
constructed, as well as selected, as reference dialectology” shows that different people
points by individuals. The process by which construct different meaningful regions and relate
individuals ground their identities in socially to them differently. Johnstone and Bean’s work
constructed regions is analogous to, or the in Texas (Johnstone 1995; Johnstone and Bean
same as, the process by which people 1997; Johnstone 1999 ) shows how different
construct, claim and use ethnic identities women create and orient to different senses of
(Reed 1982). 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 Uses of discourse analysis and ethnography in
through text analysis (Rose 1980). dialectology are increasing.
 4.2. Sociolinguistics, Globalization, and the Local

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 cul-
tural 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 is-
land 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 sev-
eral 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 Mont-
gomery (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 stud-
ies of this process are studies of “performed” or otherwise highly strategic and styl-
ized 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
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 bear-
ing 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 envi-
ronment and political boundaries mean to people need ways of finding out about
particular people and particular meanings, not just about physical space and large-
scale 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 socio-
linguistic fieldwork always requires good participant observers, people with an
understanding of what is going on in the situations in which they conduct inter-
views, 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
variationist analyses can be the basis for micro-sociolinguistic studies that are ex-
plicitly 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 ob-
servation 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 ex-
plains 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 ex-
planations of human behavior. Variationists who are interested in the local mean-
ings 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 find-
ings or statistical outliers. This requires not just adding participant observation to
our repertoire of field techniques but also rethinking—in some ways, fundamen-
tally—how we do our work.
For example, a study of regional dialect that is open to the possibility that ver-
nacular 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 Penn-
sylvania. 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 sug-
gests that the form is not disappearing, at least among working-class men (Johnstone
et al. 2002). One possible reason is that the form has become a marker of local iden-
tity; 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 stud-
ies 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 lan-
guage and gender, in which gender was treated as more or less equivalent to biologi-
cal 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 evi-
dence 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 Tabouret-
Keller 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 Mont-
gomery (1993) propose for the persistence of Southern features that might be ex-
pected 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
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 pro-
noun,14 for example, and a “yinzer” is a person with a strong local identity and ac-
cent. 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 hypo-
thetical 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 imag-
ining the meanings of these and others of the concepts we use in generating hypoth-
eses 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 in-
structions 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 associ-
ated with conservationists and preservationists. For them, places will become meaningless if
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 struc-
turation 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 emerg-
ing, 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 dif-
ferently 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 encour-
aged a shift in pronunciation from [ynz] toward [yinz] and a shift in spelling from forms
like “youns” toward forms like “yinz.”
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WALT WOLFRAM
The Sociolinguistic Construction

of Remnant Dialects
1. Introduction
Recent studies of historically isolated speech communities have underscored the sig-
nificance 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 vari-
eties 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 recon-
structing 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 Appala-
chian 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” (Mont-
gomery 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 condi-
84
THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTION OF REMNANT DIALECTS 85
tions for classifying the community as historically isolated and the associated dia-
lect 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 correspond-
ing 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 establish-
ment of historically isolated speech communities. Next, we examine issues of dia-
lect 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 domi-
nant 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 iso-
lation 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 geographi-
cal location. On the other hand, it might be assumed that each situation is so par-
ticularized 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 commu-
nities. At the same time, these conditions are also quite fluid and may exist in dif-
ferent 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 communi-
cation discontinuities that lead to linguistic divergence.
Although isolated speech communities are typically characterized by geographi-
cal separation from other groups, the speech community may be concentrated in a
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 sepa-
rated 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 exam-
ined 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 geographi-
cal factors have played a prominent role in their formation, though the type and ex-
tent 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 main-
land 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 (Wol-
fram and Christian 1976; Montgomery 1989) were at one point difficult to access
because of mountainous terrain. Still others were located in remote areas where out-
siders 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 isola-
tion 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
Lumbee Indian community in Robeson County, North Carolina, which has a num-
ber 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 com-
munities 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 promi-
nent role in shifts in insularity and the eventual emergence of a community from
insularity (e.g., Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995; Schilling-Estes 1997). Commu-
nities are vulnerable to wider influences without the ability to maintain an indepen-
dent 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 communi-
ties 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 sepa-
ration from mainstream population groups, but the time frame can actually be quite
compressed. As we shall see, linguistic change that leads to divergence or conver-
gence 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 so-
cially 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 rela-
tive 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 main-
land 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
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 com-
munities. 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 out-
migration 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 na-
tive 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. Gene-
alogy supercedes all other considerations in delimiting an authentic O’cocker, in-
cluding 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 in-
migration, 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 (Wol-
fram 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 interac-
tion 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 institu-
tions 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 non-
mainstream groups is socially constructed in such a way as to ensure an asymmetri-
cal social hierarchy. Thus, although Lumbee Indians in Robeson County, North
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 associ-
ated 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 domi-
nant groups (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998:6). The traditional speech of rem-
nant 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 (Mont-
gomery 1998), this is ultimately attributed to the community’s backward, nonpro-
gressive ways. Therefore, such lifestyles and their associated dialects are negatively
valued in North American society—even if they are “purer.” Certainly, the cul-
tural 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 stig-
matized on some level, even in cases in which the variety might have some ideal-
ized 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” associ-

ated 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 iso-
lated 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
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 island-
ers. This distinction is one of the most fundamental social boundaries and may tran-
scend 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 Lan-
guage 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 inno-
vations that happen to come their way. Thus, Andersen (1988:74–75) maintains
that a distinction be drawn between open versus closed communities and endo-
centric 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, lin-
guistic) 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 attitudi-
nal 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 con-
siderations but with identity factors as well.
Although settlement history and demographic, geographic, economic, sociocul-
tural, 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 communi-
ties may reshape and perpetuate dialect distinctiveness during less insular periods,
just as they maintain dialect distinctiveness during periods of greater isolation.
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 de-
velopment 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 rem-
nant dialect situations in the coastal region of the mid-Atlantic and Southern United
States. These include a sample of island communities populated primarily by Euro-
pean 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; Wol-
fram 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 dia-
lect 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 situ-
ations? Is there evidence for autonomous, parallel linguistic development across dif-
ferent 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 struc-
tural traits of a given dialect are predetermined by the varieties spoken by the popu-
lation that first brought the language to the region. For example, we assume that the
primary dialect group that brought English to Southern Appalachia (Montgomery
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 Philadel-
phia left an indelible imprint on the English dialect established in the transplant com-
munity 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 rela-
tively intact after the formative period.
It is not difficult to find support for both the founder principle and the relic as-
sumption in remnant dialects. For example, the existence of the Southern Appala-
chian 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 character-
istic dialect trait in the Ulster region of Ireland at the time of the emigration (Mont-
gomery 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 iso-
lated 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 through-
out the British Isles (Trudgill 1990:80). In the meantime, this form has virtually van-
ished 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 le-
gitimately 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 dia-
lects 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 par-
ticular 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-
rive from other sources, including parallel, independent development and diffusion.
It assumes further that we have a clear understanding of dialect lineage during ear-
lier time periods. For isolated dialect communities whose dialect histories sometimes
go back almost three centuries, ascertaining genuine founder effects can be an elu-
sive 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 per-
fective 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, pro-
ductive 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 first-
person 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 per-
fect 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 tradi-
tional definition of such items, it must be understood that these items are hardly static
structurally or functionally. Indeed, these forms may undergo independent develop-
ments 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 ear-
lier 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.
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 Wol-
fram (1999), based on a moribund dialect in the Chesapeake Bay of Maryland, pro-
vide evidence that peripheral varieties that exist in closed, concentrated communities
may not only show rapid change but also actually show the “ability to sustain exor-
bitant 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 assump-
tion 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 as-
sumptions 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 differ-
ent age groups from these two island communities, based on the assumption of ap-
parent 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 back-
ing 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 vari-
eties, 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-
100
90
80
70
Percentage
Smith Island, Voiceless

60
Smith Island, Voiced
50
Ocracoke, Voiceless
40
Ocracoke, Voiced
30
20
10
0
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 devel-
oped into a full-fledged systemic form at a later point (Trudgill 1999).
100
90
80
70
Percentage
60
Smith Island
50
Ocracoke
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)
The diphthongal shifts found in Smith Island in particular demonstrate that

changes can indeed take place within a relatively compressed time frame in periph-
eral 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 conserva-
tism, over the course of isolation.
The changes in Smith Island vowels seem to involve phonetically natural pho-
netic 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 pe-
ripheral 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 ap-
parently 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 communi-
ties, we find an alternative pattern in which past be is leveled to was in positive con-
texts [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 plu-
rality. 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 in-
tegrated 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 develop-
ment, or “drift” (Sapir 1921), because of the operation of general processes of anal-
ogy 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 ex-
pand the regularization of once irregular plurals (e.g., two sheeps), the regulariza-
tion 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 iso-
lated 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 vari-
ables 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 any-
thing, analogical pressures to regularize and generalize linguistic processes distin-
guish 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
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 mani-
fest themselves in systematic variability. As variation studies over the past three
decades have demonstrated, fluctuation between forms is not random but highly struc-
tured, and linguistic and extralinguistic constraints on variability can be hierarchi-
cally 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 dif-
ferent 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 com-
pares the effects of different subject types on leveling to weren’t in the two commu-
nities. 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 En-
glish, 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 dif-
ferent 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.
0.85 0.85
Probability
0.5 0.52
Lumbee
0.51 0.48
Outer Banks
0.4
0.29 0.29
0
1st sing. 3rd-sing. 3rd-sing. Existential
NP 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 inhab-
ited 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 mid-
twentieth 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 centu-
ries, thus provides a convenient setting for examining several critical issues regard-
ing 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 re-
mained distinct in some of its phonotactic patterns. For example, Childs (2000) shows
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 ab-
sence 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 dis-
tinctive phonotactic trait has persisted while the vowel systems of Hyde County Afri-
can 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 African-
American family living on the island of Ocracoke maintained some distinctive dia-
lect 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 com-
munity does not, in and of itself, lead to linguistic homogeneity (Dorian 1994; Wolfram
and Beckett 2000). Even when a small community is relatively homogeneous, consid-
erable “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 En-
glish 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
100 THE EXPLORATION OF “PLACE ”
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 Af-
rican 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 ver-
sus The dog barks.
The generational differences for African Americans in figures 5.4 and 5.5 sug-
gest 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 com-
munity 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
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)
% Absence
100
African-Am. 3rd Sing
75 Euro.-Am. 3rd Sing
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 inter-

community contact must be recognized, not only in the formative stages of such dia-
lects, but also as the varieties reconfigure themselves at various points over time and
as they emerge from insularity.
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 iso-
lated 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 indi-
cating accelerated change for others. In part, the rate of change may relate to the lin-
guistic 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 regionali-
zation 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 variet-
ies. 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 gen-
eralization may lead to parallel dialect configurations in quite disparate isolated dia-
lect communities. Given the subordinate social status of these communities, there
will be reduced social pressure to preserve linguistic irregularities that are socially
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 consider-
able 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 emblem-
atic 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 dia-
lect 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 periph-
eral 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.
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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 ar-
ticulation 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 categoriza-
tions 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 commu-
nity, in other words, is treated as a microcosm of the wider society—a kind of free-
floating microcosm at that. Although the speech community is viewed as being located
107
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 communi-
ties. 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 communi-
ties. The potential that such configurations offer for the study of connections is ex-
plored 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 com-
munities amounts to a focus on centers and on the “typical” inhabitants of those cen-
ters—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 bound-
aries of places and categories.
What I have to say is not new—only the application of insights to data on varia-
tion. 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 norma-
tive 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 linguis-
tics of contact. John Rickford (1986) has argued that norms within speech commu-
nities 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 argu-
ment one step further and argue that the speech community itself cannot be consen-
sual—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 physi-
cal—or more accurate, that place is an idealization of the physical.
Our focus on speech communities has led us to view the borders of communi-
ties as boundaries—as a cutoff between two places where different things are hap-
pening, 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-
VARIATION AND A SENSE OF PLACE 109
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 commu-
nity 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; Holm-
quist 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 influ-
ence 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 sub-
urbs (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 ex-
plain 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 build-
ing itself to constitute the boundaries around my speech community. And, indeed,
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 “out-
side” 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 appro-
priating 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 con-
urbation, 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 sec-
ondary 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 encour-
ages 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 de-
velopment 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
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 stu-
dents 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 opposi-
tion 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 re-
ject 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 burn-
outs construct themselves in mutual opposition and with considerable separation, even
with hostility. The hostility emerges from differences in values—in norms that gov-
ern 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 institu-
tion. The burnouts view the jocks’ acceptance of this arrangement as undermining
adolescent autonomy and solidarity, whereas the jocks view the burnouts’ nonac-
ceptance 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 commu-
nity is a piece of this socioeconomic continuum, with the neighborhoods becom-
ing 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 adoles-
cents 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 burn-
outs, headed for working-class workplaces in the Detroit area after high school, look
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 neighbor-
hood 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, al-
though 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 institu-
tional activities such as attending professional sports games or visiting museums.
I wish in particular to emphasize the difference between a local and an institu-
tional 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 burn-
outs’ 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 every-
one 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 cate-
gories in each high school, they are also oppositionally inserted into the socio-
geography 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 govern-
ment 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 stu-
dents 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-
cerned that, when she reached college, she would not be able to compete in extracur-
ricular 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 re-
port 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 articula-
tion 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 com-
munities 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 as-
signed 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 mir-
rored 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 atti-
tudes 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 bor-
ders is central to these practices, as jocks continually symbolize their institutional
affiliation and the burnouts continually symbolize their urban orientation. Perhaps
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 oc-
cupy central areas of the school—gyms, offices, front hallways, and activity spaces.
The equivalents of burnouts, on the other hand, demonstrate their “just visiting” sta-
tus 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 out-
door jackets in school, whereas jocks lock their outerwear in their lockers. The lock-
ers 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 extra-
curricular activity areas. Burnouts’ mistrust of the school is itself part of the ideol-
ogy 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 “visi-
tor” status frequently signal urban status as well; popular among burnouts are jack-
ets 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 popu-
lar 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 mani-
fested 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’ anti-
institutional 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, bell-
bottom 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 geog-
raphy 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 re-
cursivity, 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 sub-
urbs 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
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 vari-
ables. Figures 6.1 and 6.2 show the percentage of innovative forms of the most sa-
lient 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 com-
munities (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 char-
acters. 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 communi-
ties and, in the process, expand the relation between Beijing itself and those other com-
munities. 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
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 urban-
suburban geography, I was able to shift strategies somewhat. But ultimately, my re-
search 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 socio-
linguistic variation. And, indeed, I found conflicting working- and middle-class cate-
gories 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 cate-
gorically, 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 correla-
tions shown in figures 6.1 and 6.2 between urban variants and the jock-burnout cate-
gories 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—in-
betweens, 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
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 method-
ological 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 trum-
pet our successes. It is in this spirit that I say that the most important part of the re-
search 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 ne-
glects 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: Code-
switching 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
———. 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.
———. 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.
———. 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 be-
tween 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 Commu-
nity. 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
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

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 interpre-
tive 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 lin-
guistic 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 vari-
ous 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 as-
pects 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
122 INFLUENCES ON ADULT SPEECH
 7.1. Patterns of Change in the Individual and

the Community
Pattern Individual Community
1. Stability stable stable

2. Age grading unstable stable
3. Generational change stable unstable
[= “apparent time” interpretation]
4. Communal change 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 interpre-
tation 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 glot-
tal 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
ADOLESCENTS , YOUNG ADULTS , AND THE CRITICAL PERIOD 123
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
% glottal
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%
60%
% glottal
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)
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 vi-
able alternative to the finding that people form their basic linguistic systems as chil-
dren, 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 includ-
ing a majority of the members of the original group at age 42 in 1999. For this chap-
ter, 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 phono-
logical 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-
bridge, he attended Aberdeen University for only one semester. He then held a se-
ries of odd jobs, working in construction in London at age 21, but was mainly unem-
ployed 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 Shet-
lands, 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 seg-
ments 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 Neil (Liverpool) Nicholas (Yorkshire)
7 grass, grass last, last, answer, answer

14 ——— answer, asking
21 past answer, answer
28 last, last, last answer, after
path, chance, after chance, chance, chance (.5)
35 chances (.5), last, past chances
after, after, after,
answer, answer
lasta
a = 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 pronuncia-
tion and was rated 0.5).
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 south-
ern 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 ex-
posed to southern dialect speech on a daily basis at Oxford. Nicholas’s wife, a south-
ern 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 pronuncia-
tion. 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 short-
A pronunciation is in excited speech delivered to a fellow performer in the Christ-
mas 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 spontane-
ous, 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 fea-
tures from the interview speech we must characterize (despite its emotional intensity
and spontaneity) as “careful,” whereas these features may emerge in animated inter-
action 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 try-
ing 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
alternatives will be reconsidered below, after we have had an opportunity to exam-

ine 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 short-
ening 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 enor-
mous wedge class.6 All but cushion, sugar, and cuckoo begin with labials, a pho-
netic 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 Words in Which [] Stayed Rounded in
British and All Colonial Dialects Southern British and All Colonial Dialects
but, pub, putt, mutt, gut, puff, muff, cuff, hut, bud, shut, put, pudding
cut, gut . . .
mull, dull, hull, gull, lull, null, cull, sully . . . pull, bull, full
pus, bus, muss, fuss . . . puss
brush, hush, lush, crush, thrush, much, such, gush, push, bush, bushel, cushion
rush, crush . . .
puck, buck, suck, tuck, luck, shuck, truck . . . sugar, cuckoo
cup, pup, sup(per) . . .
gun, fun, sun, pun, bun, run . . .
sum, rum, dumb, crumb . . .
trump, dump, rump, lump . . .
SED:
// = x
/ / = ◆
 7.3. Map of the Short-U Isogloss (from Trudgill 1974:242)
For the northern dialect speaker, then, acquiring the []~[] distinction is psycho-
linguistically very different from acquiring broad A, because it involves creating a
new category—in effect, “unmerging” (though historically, this is, of course, put-
ting 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 generaliza-
tion 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 chal-
lenge 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.
At the same time that individual speakers may, because of contacts with south-
ern 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 pro-
nounce 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 propor-
tion of use of five phonetic variants between the extremes of [] and [] for indi-
vidual 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 charac-
terized 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 geographi-
cal 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 pro-
nounce 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 pos-
sible) fully rounded tokens:
(3) They’d like to come [km] out for a holiday in the country [kntri:] [Nicholas, age
7, Yorkshire]
(4) a. Oh I’ve been to Leeds a couple [kpl] of times and—

b. haven’t been to Manchester. And, I went to London [lndn] that—
c. with the other []—wh—when you did the first program
d. 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 York-
shire speaker. However, we see some drastic changes in his sample at 28 years of
 7.4. Rounded and Unrounded Short-U

for Nicholas, All Data
Age [ ] [ ] [ ] Total
7 6 — — 6
14 8 — — 8
21 2 — — 2
28 4 17 13 34
35 4 16 14 34
Total 24 33 27 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 accord-
ing to a three-point scale.
At age 28, only 4, or 12% of his 34 tokens, are phonetically similar to his ear-
lier, 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 consis-
tently 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 [mtʃ]. [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 alto-
gether 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 histori-
cally unrounded. The latter he pronounces variably but with a strong tendency to-
ward 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]
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 earlier-
pronounced tokens in the leftmost, rounded column, and we note again that no un-
rounding 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 sporadi-
cally 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 [ ] [] [ ] Total
brother 7 35, 35 3
but 28, 35 2
(be-)come 7, 14 35 28 4
country 7, 7 28 28 4
couple 14 35, 35 3
done 21 35 2
money 28, 28, 28, 28 4
much 14, 35 28, 28, 35, 35 28, 28, 28, 35 10
other 14 28 28, 28 4
run(ning) 28, 35 2
some(-) 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 28, 28, 28, 28, 35, 35, 35,
35*, 35* 35, 35 28, 35 19
stubbornness 35 35 2
sun 28, 28 2
up(-) 7, 7, 14 28, 35 28 6
wonderful 28, 28 2
Total 20 22 26 68
 7.6. Rounded, Intermediate and

Unrounded Short-U for Neil, All Data
Age [ ] [] [ ] Total
7 1 4 7 12
14 3 1 — 4
21 — — 16 16
28 1 9 54 64
35 — 2 19 21
Total 5 16 95 117
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 hos-
tel, 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 north-
ern short-U pattern (see table 7.7). Tokens occurring in the “partially rounded” col-
umn 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, amaz-
ingly, to have correctly identified the short-U class in that neither uses any hyper-
correction. 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 depar-
ture from this pattern. Intermediate and unrounded tokens dominate at both later ages,
with a slight preference for the intermediate form, reminiscent of the Fenland ado-
lescents studied by Britain (1997, 2000).
 7.7. Neil, All Short-U Words Occurring 2+ Times in Corpus. Each Entry Indicates
Neil’s Age for That Token
Words [] [] [] Total
come 7, 7, 7, 28, 28, 28 6

enough 28 21 2
funny 28, 28, 28 3
London 21, 21 2
love 21, 21 2
money 28, 28, 28, 35 4
month 21, 21 2
much 14 7 28, 35, 35 5
nothing 14 28 28, 28, 35 3
other 21, 28, 28, 35 4
pub 28, 28, 28 3
some 35 28, 28, 28, 35 5
somebody 35 21, 21, 28, 28, 28, 28, 35, 35, 35 10
something 21, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 35, 35, 35, 35 11
some(where/times) 7, 7 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28 8
subjects 28, 28 2
suburb(s) 28 28, 28 3
un- 7 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28, 28 9
up 7, 14, 14 28, 35 28, 28, 35 6
wonder(-) 28, 28, 28 3
Total 4 8 82 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, Interme-

diate, and Unrounded, age 7–35
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 situa-
tion had “not yet been studied in any systematic way.” His view of the British situ-
ation 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 /btə/ 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 signifi-
cance and is rarely commented on. It is therefore interesting to note that Northern-
ers moving to the South and accommodating to Southern speech usually modify
butter /btə/ 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
Taken as a prediction of what Neil and Nicholas would do, Trudgill’s character-
ization 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 word-
by-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:
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 plau-
sible 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 vi-
able 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 possi-
bilities 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 pho-
netic 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 excep-
tional 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 life-
times. 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 interpre-
tation of age-graded data? In the 35 years since quantitative methodology was de-
veloped 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 com-
munity 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
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 indi-
viduals 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
(gillian@central.cis.upenn.edu).
2. The actual phonetics of broad A may vary according to region. David Britain (per-
sonal 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 domi-
nant 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 north-
ern 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 south-
ern 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,
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 spo-
radic 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 pro-
vided ample evidence of hypercorrection of short A. An American chorus may render a cred-
itable 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 Develop-
ment 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: Uni-
versity 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.
———. 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 Lan-
guage. 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 Pho-
nological 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.
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 sophis-

ticated along psycholinguistic lines—can even get off the ground without a charac-
terization 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 “socio-
linguistics.” 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 soci-
ology 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 interdis-
ciplinary harvest, which this long list has yielded over several decades of very pro-
ductive 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
THREE KINDS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS : A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE 141
 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. More-
over, the outcomes from such Level I studies do not seem to lead to ready psycho-
linguistic 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 Long-term Patients
Patient Class Patient Physician Patient Physician
Upper middle 52% 53% 12% 44%

Lower middle 32% 38% 14% 28%
Upper working 32% 29% 16% 27%
Lower working 32% 25% 20% 25%
Average 37% 36% 16% 31%
Source: Marsh (1981:548).

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 deter-
miners 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 construc-
tions 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 socio-
cultural 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...
Grammar Sociocultural
a b selection device
Output
 8.1. A Level I Psycholinguistic Model of Variation

ing the “hedge” between the information and sociocultural components), you go to your
grammar to choose those things that reveal your intention (and information organiza-
tion). 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 re-
lated to more general sociocognitive principles. Why do patients pay so much atten-
tion 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 rela-
tions and the sorts of social-psychological forces (e.g., power and identity) that un-
derlie 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 rela-
tionship 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 compe-
tence 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 contra-
dictions 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 lan-
guages would not know how to use sociocultural facts in determining the appropri-
ateness 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 differ-
ent styles or different dialects, but they are really different languages, and some-
how 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 [dif-
ferent 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 gram-
mar 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
INTENTION
Information flow,
etc...
Sociocultural
Grammar 1 Grammar 2
a b a b selection device
Output Output
 8.2. A Level I Psycholinguistic Model of Interlanguage Variation
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 equiva-
lent Didn’t nobody come to my party. I will not plague you with the syntactic repre-
sentations, 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 gram-
matically at stake in multiple negation grammars than in the single-grammar inter-
nal 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 representa-
tions. 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 char-
acteristics 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
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 varia-
tion 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 vari-
ous 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 rela-
tionship all influence the probability of article versus pronoun realization—the re-
sult 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 so-
phisticated 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 Probability
Nonphysician .40
Short-term relationship .28
Lower middle-class status .30
Combined influences .32
Source: Marsh (1981).

set of probabilistic weights that come to bear on each occurrence, a cognitively plau-
sible (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 mov-
ing back and forth between alternative grammars (or “lects”) but that Bickerton re-
gards 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 fig-
ures of groups or speech communities did not reflect the even more variable per-
formance 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 (ex-
cept 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 cor-
relations 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 “submis-
sive displays.” But I am wandering. In summary, Level I sociolinguistics links socio-
cultural 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 lin-
guistic 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.
 8.4. Factors Influencing Subject Doubling in Ontario French

Factors Factor Weight Tokens Percentage
1. NOUN TYPE
1st- and 2nd-person pronoun KO 100
3rd-person pronoun .861 145/195 74
Proper noun .681 51/118 43
Common noun .462 496/2187 23
Indefinite pronoun .261 14/115 12
2. SUBJECT NP
Transitive/unergative .607 477/1306 37
Unaccusative .414 215/1160 19
Passive .251 14/149 9
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 sug-
gested 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 second-
person 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 ex-
tremely 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 jour-
nal 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 com-
bine 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
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 linguis-
tic 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 linguis-
tically, 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 socio-
cultural 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 lin-
guistic 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? Fig-
ure 8.3 shows us two possibilities, both of which I suspect exist. In the first possibil-
ity, shown entirely inside Grammar 1, a fact c (e.g., transitive subjects in Ottawa
INTENTION
d Information flow,
etc...
Sociocultural
c a b selection device
Grammar 2
Grammar 1
a b
Output Output
 8.3. A Level II Psycholinguistic Model

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 recog-
nizes 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 differ-
ent grammar is required when the I is filled by a double subject clitic pronoun (per-
haps 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)
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 gen-
erative 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 En-
glish 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. Is Bill in the other room?

Bill walks to school. 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 corre-
spond 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 al-
lowed 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 be-
long to different modules of linguistic competence, but I know of no serious theo-
retical 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 pro-
posal concerning the exact shape of linguistic competence (and its relation to mod-
ules 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
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 con-
cerned 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 con-
text she looks at in detail is the occurrence of nonstandard was in existential con-
structions (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 .54 66 287
negative .11 17 23
2. ADJACENCY
nonadjacent .55 67 239
adjacent .33 45 69
3. SEX
female .56 67 191
male .40 55 119
4. GENERATION
20–30 .70 77 57
30–50 .50 55 44
50–70 .50 67 81
Over 70 .41 57 125
5. EDUCATION
To 16 years .55 64 232
Beyond 16 years .36 59 76
Source: Tagliamonte (1998:181).

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 re-
cently 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 cate-
gory.” 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 ex-
plained. 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 pref-
erence 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, al-
though conservative forces have kept the new norm slightly behind on the educa-
tional 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
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
d Information flow,
etc...
Sociocultural
c a selection device
Grammar 1
Output Output
 8.5. A Level III Psycholinguistic Model

vernacularly embedded choice—namely, (a). I don’t know when I learned (b), cer-
tainly 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 pe-
riod. The further afield any postvernacular constructions are from the grammatical
settings of the vernacular, the weaker the grammar at those points and the less reli-
able 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 as-
sume 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 cru-
cial to the establishment of parameters. Lightfoot (1999:436) reckons it to be some-
where 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 rele-
vance 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
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 co-
occur 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 indi-
vidual 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 at-
tendant 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 en-
tire 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, “moni-
toring” 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 moni-
toring 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 psycho-
linguistic accounts—memory, accessibility, processing, and the like. Figure 8.6 re-
pairs 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 ac-
count 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 inter-
rogative 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)
INTENTION
d Information flow,
etc...
Sociocultural
c a selection device
Grammar 1
Processing
Output 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 inter-
ested in the repercussions of such reanalysis on the arrangement of items in the gram-
mars of real, emerging varieties of English.
As I suggested earlier, even if you will not buy my radical proposal that indi-
vidual 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 pres-
tige 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 rep-
resentation 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
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 “inten-
tion” of a speaker may, as I have shown only in figure 8.6, interact with his or her so-
ciocultural 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 pos-
sibility 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 impor-
tance 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 repre-
sented by the introduction of a “processing” component.
References
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7:457–492.
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Chambers, J. K., and Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Chesterman, A. 1991. On Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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———. 1990. The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change.
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linguistic Patterns in British English, ed. Peter Trudgill, 105–124. London: Arnold.
———. 1994. The Social Art: Language and Its Uses. Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press.
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and Edmonton: Linguistics Research.
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Petyt, Malcolm. 1980. The Study of Dialect. Boulder, Col.: Westview.
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———. 1991a. Sorting Out the Variables in Sociolinguistic Theory. American Speech
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———. 1991c. Variable Rules and Second Language Acquisition: An Integrationist Attempt.
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———. 1996a. Variationist Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. In Handbook of
Second Language Acquisition, ed. William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia, 229–265. New
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———. 1996b. Variationist Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. In Second Lan-
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and Linguistic Theory 6:391–434.
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York. Language Variation and Change 10:153–191.
PART IV
ATTITUDES AND IDEOLOGIES

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 varia-
tion and processes of language change. Macaulay also dealt extensively, but sepa-
rately, 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 varia-
tionist 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 lan-
guage 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 socio-
linguistic patterns is evident in Macaulay’s (1977) monograph, where attitudes to
language in Glasgow and analysis of the sociolinguistic variables to which these
161
162 ATTITUDES AND IDEOLOGIES
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 lin-
guistic 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 working-
class group, a white-collar group, and a professional and managerial group (Macaulay
1978:138). Indexicality of language, primarily with respect to the social catego-
ries 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 struc-
tures 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 ac-
count of individual “acts of identity” as speakers indexed their multiple and shift-
ing allegiances to different groups at different times. Eckert’s (2000) more recent
work also implicitly grants agency a central role in determining patterns of varia-
tion and trajectories of change. She argues for an ethnographically driven investi-
gation 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 frame-
work. 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
LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES AND LINGUISTIC CHANGE 163
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).” Al-
though 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 codi-
fied 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 im-
ages 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 cul-
turally influential cities of the East Coast. In view of the cultural antecedents of stan-
dards 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 stan-
dard in relation to an agricultural region like Aquitaine. Bonfiglio presents compel-
ling 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 con-
comitant loss of linguistic capital for their nonrhotic dialects. Industrial centers were
seen as sources of contamination of race, religion, and language, and purist ideolo-
gies 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) ar-
gues 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 ide-
ology that foregrounds race and ethnicity (see also L. Milroy 2000). It also high-
lights 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
underlying the changing social evaluation of (r), which treats race and ethnicity as
salient, is also consistent with important variationist preoccupations; consider par-
ticularly 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 evi-
dence 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 differ-
ent 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 socio-
linguists who attempt to employ Labov’s framework in those countries report sig-
nificant 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 differ-
ent 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 situa-
tion was not envisioned by earlier work, which assumed a relatively unitary and fo-
cused 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 phonolo-
gies 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 character-
ized by a clear phonological distinction between short high front and long back vari-
ants 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 phono-
logically 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
eliminating the extreme back and front variants characteristic of the vernacular sys-
tem ([ε,,a,ä,ɑ,ɔ]).Such speakers sharply contract the allophonic range and over-
whelmingly 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 requir-
ing further analysis. It is generally presented as a neutral reference point for descrip-
tions 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 Stan-
dard indicates what we might term its hegemonic domination over the field of con-
troversy, 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 sup-
posedly neutral standard. James Milroy (2001) explores in some depth such ideo-
logical effects on the theories and descriptive frameworks of linguists, but there is
little systematic discussion in the variationist literature of the particular contradic-
tions 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 ex-
ample, in a manner uncontroversial to linguists, Labov and Harris’s account of di-
vergence 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 hege-
monies underlying the neutral standard assumption, Walters (1996) details the
problems and inconsistencies visible to African-American students who are intro-

duced to elementary linguistics textbooks. These texts proclaim the linguistic equal-
ity 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 implica-
tions 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 trajecto-
ries 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 ideolo-
gies 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 pre-
sented 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 rationaliza-
tion 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 consis-
tent but slightly differently focused. Silverstein suggests a motivation for construct-
ing ideologies in the first place; speakers construct “stories” to explain observed
linguistic phenomena. Irvine emphasises the political and other interests that struc-
ture intersections between cultural conceptions of language and the social world. For
both Irvine and Silverstein, ideologies provide a window on everyday understand-
ings 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 analy-
ses 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 mani-
festing a misguided approach to language variation, which serious investigators should
ignore, language ideologies link the cultural world of the language user to macro-
level 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, first-
order indexicality entails the association by social actors of a linguistic form or va-
riety (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 straight-
forwardly 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 differ-
ently 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 cul-
tural 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 superior-
ity of the standard, the impoverished character of working class or ethnically distinc-
tive 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.
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 in-
stantiate a reaction to a hegemonic standard, these behaviors are sometimes inter-
preted 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 ex-
ample of the unacknowledged effect on variationist frameworks of standard as covert
reference point. Trudgill (1986: 66–78) describes such misanalyses as “hyperdia-
lectisms.” 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 dia-
lect that is progressively losing extremely localized forms (see Watt and Milroy 1999).
All such misanalyses display a sensitivity to the indexical relationship between lan-
guage and social category. Therefore, regardless of the status of the social group trig-
gering 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 ac-
count of socially motivated linguistic change (incorporating both language attitudes
and patterns of language use) that such an analysis might offer. They somewhat re-
focus Labov’s (1963) interpretation of high levels of centralization in the first ele-
ments 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 re-
ceded into the background as an opposition between islanders and mainlanders be-
came 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 main-
land 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 stub-
bornly opposed to the incursions of the summer visitors” (Labov 1972:37). The re-
sulting 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) re-
port the results of a real-time study of /ay/ variants on the island. Adopting the ana-
lytic 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
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 consti-
tute 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 Vine-
yarders, 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 be-
tween the social categories “islander” and “mainlander,” also appears to have struc-
tured 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 moti-
vated 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 cate-
gories not only as constructed by social actors but also as variably salient. A motiva-
tion 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 frame-
work for structuring a subsequent analysis. Dyer’s (2002) account of the relation-
ship 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.
Indeed, a good deal of recent sociolinguistic work is quite consistent with this analy-
sis (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 lan-
guages so familiar to sociolinguists; speakers want to sound like Southerners, Afri-
can 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 opposi-
tional is usually described by sociolinguists as exemplifying the capacity of spoken
language to index identity. The identity factor is, in fact, precisely what an ideologi-
cal 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 inter-
nal,” 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 com-
plex configurations of adolescent social category and gender, on the one hand (so-
cial 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 con-
straints 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) no-
tion of connatural change (i.e., internally constrained as opposed to socially motivated)
adopts the first kind of explanation, assuming neurobiological rather than phonologi-
cal constraints. Ohala (1993) emphasises the role of perceptual mismatches, propos-
ing 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 con-
strained 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
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 language-
internal 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 be-
cause 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 lan-
guage 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 associa-
tion 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) oper-
ate as constraints on changes driven by internal factors. If the local social bound-
aries 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
railroad, and the automobile (see further Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998). How-
ever, 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 disjunc-
tively on either social or internal constraints on change, accounts that attempt to in-
tegrate 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 internal-
and 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 barri-
ers encountered by the American Northern Cities Shift, namely, that Southern Hemi-
sphere 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 privi-
lege 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. Simi-
lar comments might be made about Kroch’s (1978) theory of change, which charac-
terized 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 hi-
erarchy. “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.
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 socio-
linguistics, 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 commu-
nity 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 fac-
tors, 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 pat-
terns 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, Cali-
fornia, in honor of Ronald Macaulay. I am grateful to colleagues at both of these meet-
ings 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),
I have commented on some difficulties arising from the dichotomy between language-inter-
nal 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 pos-
sible 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 lim-
its 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
THE RADICAL CONSERVATISM OF SCOTS 179
“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 Scandina-
vian languages. All these languages have contributed to the place-names of Scot-
land, 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 dis-
tinct 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, con-
tinued 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, ad-
ministration, 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 pub-
lic schools speak Received Pronunciation (RP) or anything approaching it. Middle-
class 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).
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 lower-
class 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 differ-
ences 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 En-
glish 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 re-
markable 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 conserva-
tism 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 so-
cial mobility and contributed more to emigration than immigration; a cultural tradi-
tionalism 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 dis-
play the most marked features. Working-class solidarity is much stronger in Scot-
land 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 working-
class 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 domi-
nant 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
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 dissatisfac-
tion 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 iden-
tification 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” speak-
ers 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
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 Vernacu-
lars, speaks of the characteristics of urban speech: “The speaker’s fast tongue, mo-
notonous 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 sur-
vivors 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
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 ear-
lier (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 ac-
commodating 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-and-
nine [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 min-
ers, 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
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, resis-
tant 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
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
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 demon-
stration. 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
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
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 conver-
sation 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
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 them-
selves 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.
Money also came up as a topic in my interview with the Dalgleishes in Aber-

deen. 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
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
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 ex-
pressed 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 them-
selves 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 socioeco-
nomic or social-status scale, they do not manifest any feelings of inferiority or inse-
curity (“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 quali-
ties or political views. It is only chance that brought them to my attention, and I had
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
of linguistic attitudes. I am now convinced that some of the comments were prob-
ably 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 lin-
guistic market is that they take a very narrow view of the economy. In his introduc-
tion 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 qualifi-
cations), “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 edu-
cational 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” counter-
sinking 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 infor-
mation 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.
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 lan-
guage. 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 obvi-
ous 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 pro-
foundest 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 dis-
played 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.
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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 ex-
cised 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 plead-
ings. So you may think of this chapter as an author’s revenge, or as my last, desper-
ate 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 inte-
gral 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
SPOKEN SOUL : THE BELOVED , BELITTLED LANGUAGE OF BLACK AMERICA 199
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, play-
ing 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 cer-
tain 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, par-
ticularly 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 flatter-
ing 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 stu-
dents 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 Jack-
son (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 ef-
forts 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 ac-
climate themselves to American society, and they have gotten themselves into this
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 dif-
ferent 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. Con-
servative 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 educa-
tion 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,” “incor-
rect and substandard,” “nothing more than ignorance,” “lazy English,” “bastardized
English,” “the language of illiteracy” and “this utmost ridiculous [sic] made-up lan-
guage.” 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)
“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 African-
American 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 meet-
ings. 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 sup-
port 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
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 ca-
sual 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 prac-
tice 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 En-
glish 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 “ac-
cepted” grammar commonly used in our country. It is primarily a learning tool. (De-
cember 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 En-
glish 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)
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 commen-
tary 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 syn-
tax 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 neverthe-
less. 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 En-
glish 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 stu-
dents’ 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 lin-
guists to take students’ Creole English into account to improve the teaching of stan-
dard 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 ef-
forts 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
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 dia-
lects 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 atti-
tudes are often transmitted to and adopted by people who speak the vernacular vig-
orously or exclusively.
The Ebonics firestorm of the 1990s was ignited and fueled by a variety of ele-
ments, 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 cen-
tury. 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 cul-
tural 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 some-
how 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 quota-
oriented affirmative action campaigns to balkanize the country and build walls
between people and dissolve the concept of being an American. This Ebonics ques-
tion 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. (De-
cember 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)
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 (de-
spite 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. Resi-
dents of Orange County had also approved a measure eliminating bilingual educa-
tion 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 simi-
lar legislation is under consideration at the federal level. This is the reactionary his-
torical 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 ac-
tually 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-middle-
class people, their deprecatory tone is far from perplexing.
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 eld-
erly 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 Na-
tional Anthem”), chose to render the seven African-American sermons of God’s Trom-
bones 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 exempli-
fying 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 attraction-
repulsion 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 Communica-
tion, 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 in-
formal 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 cul-
ture. 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 distinc-
tive linguistic elements of African-American music, literature, and popular culture—
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 wide-
spread 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 Ameri-
cans 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 con-
texts 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 holi-
day 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 dia-
lect, 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 in-
come statistics and for a discussion of the generation gap within the black community, see
Chideya (1998).
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INDEX
AAVE. See African-American age, 121, 205–6

Vernacular English age-grading, 109–10, 121–24
acquisition of a second dialect, 124–34, and changes in phonetics over the
143 lifespan, 122–24, 136–37
‘acts of identity’ model, 162 and moribund dialects, 94–96
adolescents, 14, 24, 109, 121, 124, as social category vs. indicator of
170 change, 152
in Detroit, 109, 167, 170 and use of nonstandard features, 26,
in England, 124–34 94–96, 152
and identity, 110, 167 Aggieland, 69
African-American English. See African- Andersen, H., 90, 94
American Vernacular English Angelou, M., 199
African-American Vernacular English, Ann Arbor, 203
12, 54–55, 57, 84, 198, 200 Appalachia, 84, 86, 88–89, 91–92
divergence from white vernaculars apparent-time data, 94, 121–24, 136–37
26, 164–66, 206 assimilation, linguistic, 90, 199
features (see phonetic variables;
syntactic variables)
internet reactions to, 200–206 Bailey, G., 11–28, 74–77
in North Carolina, 12, 54–55, 57, Baldwin, J., 199
98–101 Bean, J., 74–75
and Oakland School Board decision, Becker, A. L., 49
199 Belfast, 164–65, 170
209
210 INDEX
Bell, A., 75, 147 “magna-dialects”, 178

Bellah, R. N., 70 prejudices toward, 113, 167, 198–
Ben-Rafael, E., 181 207
Bennett, B., 200 remnant, 84
Bickerton, D., 144–46 Standard English, 57, 77, 96, 162–
Blake, R., 168–69, 171 66, 179, 200, 206
Bonfiglio, T. P., 163 as a symbol of identity, 49, 74, 77–
Bourdieu, P., 194 78, 135
Brown, C., 198 vernacular 14–5, 31, 70, 76, 96, 102,
Brown, J., 206 122, 126, 198
Brown, P., 143, 146 (see also regional dialects)
burnouts, 66, 111–16 dialectology, folk. See folk
Burns, R., 183 dialectology
discourse analysis, 45, 47–48, 75, 77
Du Bois, W. E. B., 206
Canadian raising, 96, 169, 171 Dyer, J., 169
Chafe, W., 44, 45
Chambers, J., 96, 129
Childs, B., 98 Ebonics. See African-American
Chomsky, N., 143–44, 155 Vernacular English
Clyne, M., 172 Eckert, P., 66, 74, 107, 162, 170, 194,
communicative contour (CC), 47 204
communicative fragments (CFs), 47 Edinburgh, 164
community of practice, 107–8 education, 179, 192
Connerly, W., 199 and acquisition of styles, 152, 179
Cosby, B., 200 and nonstandard forms, 152, 180
creole languages, 203 England, 124–37, 155, 168, 172, 179
critical period, 121, 124, 137 Esch, E., 172
crossing, 75 ethnicity, 49, 107, 108, 162, 164, 167,
Cukor-Avila, P., 14–17, 26 205
Cuomo, M., 200 and crossing, 75
and ideological constructs, 113, 163–
64
DeGraff, M., 154 intra-ethnic contact, 45–49, 91, 98
Dictionary of American Regional ethnographic approach. See
English (DARE), 65 ethnography
Dittmar, N., 182 ethnography, 74, 75–77, 109, 116, 162
Detroit, 74, 109–10, 167, 170 Ewers, T., 24–26
AAVE in, 173
jocks and burnouts in, 74, 111–16
dialects 11, 20–22, 143, 155, 164, 168, fieldworkers, influence on data
179 collection of, 13–20
acquisition of, 124–34 Fillmore, C., 44, 46
adolescents and, 107, 124–34 folk dialectology, 72
contact between, 66, 77, 97–101, founder principle, 91–94
164–65 French, 136, 146–50, 163, 167
INDEX 211
Gal, S., 113, 166–68, 173 interviewer, effects on data collection.

Gasparov, B., 46–48, 52–53 See fieldworker
Gates, H. L., 200 intertextuality, 44–58
gender, 107, 162, 167, 205 Irvine, J., 113, 166–68, 173
of fieldworker, 13–20 isolated dialects. See remnant dialects
and regional identity, 74–75
and sense of place, 72
and use of nonstandard features, 77, Jackendoff, R., 44, 45–46
122, 152, 170 Jackson, J., 199
Giddens, A., 70–71, 74 jocks, 66, 111–16
Glasgow, 74, 122–24, 136, 161–62, Johnson, E., 74
164 Johnson, J. W., 206
Graham, G. T., 201 Johnson, K., 48
grammars, 126, 142, 153, 156, 203 Johnstone, B., 48, 65, 89, 108
adult, 154 Joiner, Justice C., 203
construction, 46 Jones, M. C., 172
postvernacular, 153–55 Jordan, J., 199
“weak”, 153–56 Jordan, Jr., V., 203
grammatical variables. See syntactic Josey, M., 168–69, 171
variables
Great Vowel Shift, 171, 180
King, Jr., Martin Luther, 53, 57
Kroch, A., 172
Hall, S., 71, 74
Hannerz, U., 71–72
Holmquist, J., 109 Labov, W., 11, 31, 33, 74, 75, 121–22,
Hoodoo texts, 23–25 128, 136, 155
Hughes, L., 206 Martha’s Vineyard study, 74, 109,
Hyde County, 86–88, 91, 98–101 161–65, 168–69
hypercorrection, 126–35, 168 New York City study 13, 136, 163–
65, 169
theory on chain shifts, 170–71
identity, 49, 89, 143, 170, 181, 195 language ideologies, 66, 77, 161
and ‘acts of identity’ model, 162 and language change, 129, 168–72
ethnic (see ethnicity) and maintenance of nonstandard
and language ideology, 108, 167–70 dialects, 170
local, 72–77, 89–90, 103, 110, 135, and the ‘standard’, 162–66
169 language contact, 66, 77
national, 178, 204 intra-ethnic, 45, 49, 91, 98, 115
ideologies. See language ideologies and isolated dialects, 87–91, 97–
idioms, 45–46 101
constructional, 46 Lenneberg, E., 124
indexicality, 162, 167–68, 172 LePage, R., 162
internet, reactions to AAVE on, 200–206 leveling, 96–98, 102, 165
interview, sociolinguistic. See Levinson, S., 143, 146
sociolinguistic interview life stories. See personal histories
212 INDEX
Lightfoot, D., 154–56 resolution, 33

Limbaugh, R., 51–52, 57–58, 200 role in sociolinguistic interview of,
Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States 31, 56
(LAGS), 17–20 rule of narrative construction, 38
linguistic market, 152, 194 negative concord. See syntactic
linguistic variables. See phonetic variables
variables; syntactic variables networks, 65, 72, 107–8, 162, 169
local dialects. See regional dialects adolescent, 112
Locke, A., 206 and isolated communities, 86, 102
Lumbee, 45, 49–58, 87–89, 91, 93, New England, 92, 172
97 New York City, 13, 136, 163–65, 169,
204
North Carolina, 45–58, 86–91, 98
Macaulay, R., 9–10, 11, 31–35, 74– Northern Cities Shift (NCS), 114, 170–
75, 122–24, 146, 156, 161–62, 73
178 Norwich, 74, 136, 164–65
Marsh, J., 142–46
Martha’s Vineyard study, 74, 109,
161–65, 168–69 Ocracoke Island, 74, 86–90, 94–101
Matthews, B., 163 observer’s paradox, 11, 13
Maynor, N., 22–25 Ontario, 146–50
McCrone, D., 178 Ottawa, 148–49
McNair-Knox, F., 13–17
Mencken, H. L., 163
Meyrowitz, J., 71 participant observation, 75–76
Mfume, K., 199 performance, 48, 74, 76, 145–46, 151–
middle class. See social class 57
Milroy, J., 72 108, 162, 165 personal histories, influence on dialect
Milroy, L., 108, 161, 162, 173 acquisition, 136
Montgomery, M., 17–20, 74, 77 Philadelphia, 92
Morrison, T., 199 Pisoni, D. B., 48
Mugerauer, R., 74 phonetic variables
multiple negation. See syntactic /ai/ diphthong, 94, 168–69
variables /au/ diphthong, 94, 168–69
multivariate analysis, 97 /aw/ monophthong, 76–78
Murison, D., 179 /ay/ raising, 168–69, 171
“broad A”, 125–27, 134–37, 164–65,
179
Nadasdi, T., 147–51 centralization of /ay/ and /aw/, 74,
narratives, 56 168–69
coda, 33 glottal stop, 122–24
complicating action, 33 initial h, 92
evaluation section, 34 interdental fricatives, 96
narrative chain, 39 postvocalic /r/, 98
orientation, 33 “short U”, 127–37
reportability in, 37 (see also Northern Cities Shift)
INDEX 213
“place”, 67, 108, 112, 178 Said, E., 70

and cyber place, 70–71 Saturday Night Live, 51, 58
definition of, 65–70 Saussure, F., 178
and historically isolated Schiffrin, D., 76
communities, 86, 89 Schilling-Estes, N., 44, 74, 84, 90–94
and ‘locale’, 70 Scotland, 31, 92, 125, 132, 164, 178–95
Portuguese, 142, 151 Scott, Sir W., 179
postvernacular, 153–55 Seven-Up television program, 121–37
Pratt, M. L., 108 sensitive period. See critical period
Preston, D., 72, 140, 162 sex. See gender
principle of linguistic subordination, Silverstein, M., 165–67, 173
89, 102 slang, 152, 200, 202, 204
“proper English”, 77, 191, 202 Smith Island, 86, 90, 94–97
Smout, T. C., 182
social class, 66, 69, 97, 107, 108, 111,
real-time data, 136–37, 168 114, 116, 122–24, 142–45, 162–
Received Pronunciation (RP), 163–65, 64, 205
172–73, 179, 191 lower class, 179, 180
regional dialects lower middle class, 122–24, 145, 165
in Ayr, 31, 181 middle class, 111, 116, 164, 169,
in Belfast, 164–65, 170 178, 179, 180
in California, 12 upper class, 179, 205
in Detroit, 74, 109, 167, 170, 173 and variation in Scotland, 122–24,
in Edinburgh, 164 162, 180–92
in Georgia, 12 working class, 32, 76–77, 111, 114,
in Glasgow, 31, 74, 122–24, 161–62, 116, 122–24, 162–65, 167, 180
164 sociolinguistic interview, 13–20, 31,
in Maryland, 12, 86, 94 44–58
in Michigan, 12 Spanish, 109, 166–67
in Mississippi, 12 speech communities, 31, 136–37, 145,
in North Carolina, 12, 49, 54, 86–91, 98 152, 167, 171–73
in Norwich, 74, 136, 164–65 as compared with community of
in Oklahoma, 20–22, 74 practice, 107–8
in Pittsburgh, 76–78 endocentric vs. exocentric, 90
in Texas, 25, 66, 74 historically isolated, 84–90
in Washington D.C., 12 open vs. closed, 90
register. See style Standard English, 57, 77, 96, 162–66,
relic assumption, 91–94 179, 200, 206
relic communities, 178 “Status Axiom”, 148
remnant dialect, 84–103 Steele, S., 200
Rickford, J. R., 10, 13–17, 22, 26, 108, Strauss, C., 192
194, 198 style, 132, 143, 148, 155, 164, 166
Riley, R., 200 acquisition of formal, 153–54
Rose, C., 69, 75 informal speech, 31, 56, 198
Rowan, C., 203 ownership of, 54–58
Rutledge effect, 17–20 style-shifting, 56, 163
214 INDEX
stylistic variation. See style Tannen, D., 48

Survey of Oklahoma Dialects (SOD), teenagers. See adolescents
20–22 Texas, 24–26, 66, 69, 72–77
syntactic variables Thompson, J. B., 194
a-prefixing, 92 Tillery, J., 11, 17–20
copula absence, 13, 22–28, 57, 92 Trudgill, P., 11, 74, 129, 131, 134–36,
double modals, 17–22 163–64, 168, 171
habitual (or invariant) be, 13, 15, Tuan, Y., 68
22–27
leveling to weren’t, 54, 96–98
multiple negation, 96, 144 VARBRUL analysis. See multivariate
negative concord. See multiple analysis
negation variables. See phonetic variables;
nonstandard was/were, 54, 151–53 syntactic variables
perfective be, 93 vernacular. See dialects
plural –s, 13, 92, 96, 99–101 Viereck, W., 23–26
possessive –s, 13
regularization of past tense, 54, 96
subject doubling, 146–49 Walters, K., 165–66
verbal concord, 55, 92, 99–100 Weinreich, U., 161
verbal –s, 12, 13, 92, 99–101 Wells, J., 171–72
yinz for 2nd plural pronoun, 78 Wolfram, W., 11, 84, 90–92, 94, 96, 99
zero third-person singular, 11–12, Woolard, K., 166
55–56, 100–101 working class. See social class
Tabouret-Keller, A., 162 Zelinsky, W., 69

Tagliamonte, S., 151–52 Zhang, Q., 115

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Sociolinguistic Variation:

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Recently Published in the Series:

Talking About Treatment: Recommendations for Breast Cancer Adjuvant Treatment

Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

We are delighted to introduce Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections as the first

sociolinguistics generally (where it will become less relevant to differentiate between

[Ronald Macaulay] is, I think, an underheralded pioneer and leader in socio-

Introduction, Carmen Fought 3

Part I: Sociolinguistic Methods

1. Some Sources of Divergent Data in Sociolinguistics, Guy Bailey

2. Ordinary Events, William Labov 31

3. Exploring Intertextuality in the Sociolinguistic Interview,

Part II: The Exploration of “Place”

4. Place, Globalization, and Linguistic Variation, Barbara Johnstone 65

5. The Sociolinguistic Construction of Remnant Dialects, Walt Wolfram 84

6. Variation and a Sense of Place, Penelope Eckert 107

Part III: Influences on Adult Speech

8. Three Kinds of Sociolinguistics: A Psycholinguistic Perspective,

Part IV: Attitudes and Ideologies

9. Language Ideologies and Linguistic Change, Lesley Milroy 161

10, The Radical Conservatism of Scots, Ronald Macaulay 178

11, Spoken Soul: The Beloved, Belittled Language of Black America,

Guy Bailey Ronald Macaulay

Barbara Johnstone John R. Rickford

William Labov Gillian Sankoff

Natalie Schilling-Estes Walt Wolfram

carefully to the views on language variation of the speakers in the communities we

GUY BAILEY AND JAN TILLERY

Some Sources of Divergent Data

Percentage of Zero Third Singular

 1.1. Zero Third-Person Singular in Ten Sources of African-American Vernacular

 1.1 Sources for Figure 1

Georgia Sommer (1986) Atlanta Adolescents Lower

ers, of differences in sample populations, and of differences in analytical strategies

 1.2 The Effects of the Race of the Interviewer

Possessive –s absence 67% (6/9) 50% (5/10) ns

 1.3 Comparison of Interviewer Characteristics in Rickford and McNair-Knox

Study A-A FW Wh. FW A-A FW Wh. FW AA-FW Wh. FW

Community member yes no yes no* yes no a

doing fieldwork in the community.

quency of vernacular forms is higher with the African-American fieldworker in two

demonstrate conclusively that the race of the interviewer is a significant factor,

2.2. The Rutledge Effect

researchers to link every occurrence of a form to a particular interview, to a particu-

Quantitative sociolinguistics began with a strong emphasis on representative sam-

Telephone Survey Field Survey

Telephone Survey Field Survey

4. The effects of analytical strategies

In an important overview of methodological issues that have emerged in the study of

be as a Percentage of All Copula/Auxiliary Forms in

onstrates, the increase is limited almost entirely to one environment—before V + ing

Percentage of Zero in Each Environment

locatives with adjectives; if a corpus contains a high proportion of participial adjec-

Percentage Zero in Each Environment

Following Grammatical Environment

the situation problematic is that quantitative sociolinguistics has no body of research

In most sociolinguistic studies of the speech community, narratives of personal ex-

s put away her shopping bag,

2. Temporal organization and evaluation

3. The assignment of praise and blame

(a): She brought him outside because it was an exceptionally pleasant

To understand the narrative construction as a whole, it is useful to consider the chart