LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY

 The English language consists of all dialects and all varieties of English including mutually

unintelligible and borderline cases. In this use of the phrase “a language”, one particular

variety of English, the standard is superordinate, raised above the other subordinate

varieties. The standardized variety is not considered a dialect.

 STANDARIZATION is a complex of belief is a complex of belief and behavior towards

language which evolves historically. It is a social behavior towards language, deeply

integrated into historical factors.

 A standard language is a social institution and part of the abstract, unifying identity of a

large and internally differentiated society-

 CODIFICATION is an attempt to create a uniform norm of usage to identify one variety as

“really” the language. Codification is a prerequisite to notions of correctness.

 A language is institutionalized and not viewed as an essentially dynamic process.

 STANADARIZATION has a an ideological dimension and is intimately related to the slow

process of nation building. The standard has more prestige than other varieties. One

source of this prestige is related to its role in the symbolic integration of the larger

national society. The language serves as a symbol of the society, a representation of its

identity and unity. Another source of the prestige of the standard is derived from its use

by the dominant group within society. In most cases, the standard is associated with a

national elite.

 There is language management: people within the society who are professionally involved

with language assist in both the creation and preservation of the standard.

o Codification is implemented through dictionaries, grammars and manuals of

usage; STANDARDS OF CORRECTNESS EVOLVE.

 o Importance of written language: it becomes the vehicle for the intellectual,

administrative and political life of a society.

o Literary tradition: reinforced prestige and the superordinate position of a

language.

 The standard is believed to have autonomy and historicity: its relation to other languages

is separate and equal.

 Language reflecting the “genius” of the particular societies in which they evolved. There is

often a feeling that this “excellence” is somehow threatened by degeneration or

innovation or outside influences: expression of political feelings.

 The attitude of individuals to the group is encoded in their attitude to the language.

 Just as a national standard is symbolic of the overall nation, other varieties are symbolic of

other groups within the larger whole. Attitudes to these varieties may conflict with

attitudes to the larger whole, and the conflict will reflect social and political processes at

work.

 UTILITARIAN VALUE OF STANDARDIZATION: it allows people to communicate with each

other over the whole extent of the state without the impediment of divergent dialects.

The practical and the symbolic meet at the vitality of most standards, their use in the

maximum of situations.

 From one perspective, a language is a dynamic process, a continua in many dimensions.

From another, it is an institutionalized entity, deeply identified with the life of a society,

and intricately in both its political and historical development and its social structure. In

this view, the language is a codified set of norms in which the ongoing processes of

variation and change are partially repressed from general social consciousness. From this

view, a language would consist of variant and invariant structures.

 DISCOVERING THE STRUCTURE IN VARIATION

 FLUCTUATION between forms is pervasive throughout language. The problem for the

linguist faced with such inconsistency is to find a structure which can explain it.

 Labov provided a paradigm for research into variation. Earlier explanations fell into two

categories: dialect mixture or free variation.

 A variety or code is a clustering together in terms of co-occurrence rules of linguistic

features into a single coherent linguistic object. Such entities are the things that switch in

code-switching.

 Both in individuals and communities , certain features vary continuously within a single

language system.

 Fischer: free variation is simply a way of excluding variability from the object of inquiry.

 Labovs’s aim: to confront the looseness of the system as the data of linguistics itself, and

thus to lower the degree of idealization of the object of inquiry- to study the language in

use in the speech community.

o His initial intuition was that large-scale variation was socially determined,

patterned. Social and historical factors interacting within the linguistic system.

o Without a description in institutional or group terms. The phenomenon is invisible

or incoherent viewed as individual behavior.

 Sociolinguistic variables

o Hypothesis: variation is socially conditioned.

o Method: quantitative; need to count the frequencies of the variants in order to

compare them between individuals, groups and contexts.

 o Labov introduced the notion of linguistic variable: any given linguistic feature

which can be freely realized by two or more variants, which are the values of the

variable. Idea of QUANTITATIVE DIFFERENCE.

 Sociolinguistic structures

o Sociolinguistic variable: variable that can be correlated with a non-linguistic

variable of social context.

o Each variable reflects a particular point in the dynamics of language change.

Variability- the systematic differential frequencies in the use of the variants of a

single variable- is central to the process of change.

o Individual variables have histories.

o The difference between variants in social groups is a question of relative

frequencies, not of absolutes. They have varying frequencies in the production of

the variants which correlate with their position in society. It is a question of

frequency of occurrence.

o Structured variation is manifested most notably in the regular patterns found

when sociolinguists correlate social structure with linguistic structure.

o Variability is not haphazard, but structured and motivated.

Variability can only be systematically investigated using quantitative methods: VARIATION IS NOT

FREE! There are patterns of distribution in the frequencies of variants conditioned by social,

including stylistic, factors.

 Variables are usually conditioned by internal linguistic factors. The linguistic environments
of the variable can affect the frequency with which one or the other appears.
 Inherent variability: the coexistence of alternative ways of saying the same thing within
the speech of the same speaker who alternates between them in a statistically regular
way. Sets of environments inside language combine with social factors to yield the scores
of relative frequencies.
  Rules may be said to be more or less favoured in the frequency of its application by given
environments. Thus, the environments provide variable constraints on the rule. If a rule
always applies in a given environment, it is categorical. Environments can be ranked in the
order in which they favor the rule applying.
 Internal constraints interact with external factors, which further influence whether or not
the rule applies.

VARIATION AND LANGUAGE

 Variable: abstract representation of the source of variation. Realised by 3 or more variants

 Variants: The actual realization of a variable.
 Regular vs probabilistic alternations between variants:
o The distribution of variants is neither random nor free; it shows systematic
correlations with independent factors. These factors can be said to constrain the
variation, or to be the constraints on the variable.
o Free variation: the idea that some variants alternate with each other without any
reliable constraints on their occurrence in a particular context by particular
speakers.
o Speaker variability can be constrained by non-linguistic factors.
o The effects of social factors are seldom categorical. Speakers generally alternate at
some time. Probability can tell how likely we are to hear different forms in
different contexts and with different speakers. Determinism: the idea that there is
a strong casual relationship between two factors. Knowledge of the value of one
factor allows to predict the value for another.
o Sociolinguists’ studies of language in use have shown that variation is always more
or less constrained by some factor relevant to the context in which a speaker is
using their language
o Linguistics has a great deal to gain by distancing itself from a notion like free
variation.
o Even though sociolinguistic analyses don’t enable us to predict with 100%
certainty which variant will surface, where and when, sociolinguistic studies reveal
an additional layer of systematic structure that justifies the limited intermediacy
that remains.
o Sociolinguistic variable: linguistic variable that is constrained by social or non-
linguistic factors. Emerges straightforwardly from the traditions of dialectology.
o Social dialectology: the identification and mapping of boundaries between
different varieties on the basis of clusters of similar and different features in
particular regions, towns or villages.
 USING REGIONAL DIALECT DATA TO INFORM THEORY
o Moulton suggested that speakers prefer to maintain a safe level of differentiation
between the phonemes in their language, so if there is change in part of the
 system they will reorganize the rest of the system so as to keep the distinctions
between different words clear.
o Linguists have found that regional variation can highlight the importance of non
linguistic factors
o Reallocation: reassignment or reanalysis of forms in contact in a systematic way.
Speakers reallocate the regional forms according to regular linguistic principles.
o Intermediate forms: forms emerging following contact between closely related
varieties that fall in between the various input forms.
o Importance of Britain´s study:
 He reaffirms the usefulness of regional dialect data as a resource for
inducing linguistic principles and constraints on variation and change.
 He illustrates how sociolinguists have to think about a whole range of
different issues when analyzing data. They have to be sensitive to :
 Aspects of linguistic structure
 Aspects of social structure
 Aspects of how speakers conceive of themselves and relate to
others
 His study provides a point for exploring more closely how regional
dialectology expanded into social dialectology. Social dialectology: the
study of linguistic variation in relation to speakers´participation or
membership in social groups, or in relation to other non-linguistic factors.
 STANDARDS, NORMS AND ALTERNATIONS FROM THE NORMS
o When we consider how people use language, one of the things we are trying to do
is understand better what the norms are underlying some of the alternations we
observe in practice.
o Standard: norms which represent an intersection of other sociolinguistically
interesting phenomena (carefulness, education, social status, etc.)
o Standard English: a set of norms that are shared across many localities and which
have acquired their own social meaning. In general, they are the norms that are
associated with education, and they may function as gatekeeping norms,
establishing who will and who will not be able to exercise authority or power.
They may be deployed as signs of upward mobility (or aspirations for upward
mobility).
o The process of standardization involves a community of speakers converging on a
shared sense that some forms (spoken or written) are valued more than others
and are therefore more appropriate in situations where people are speaking
carefully and the exercise of social power is relevant.
 Study of Social Dialects:
o Sociolinguistics: the relationship between different linguistic variants and the local
social order.
o INTERSPEAKER VARIATION: variation between individual speakers.
 o INTRASPEAKER VARIATION: variation within individual speakers. It is a necessary
corollary of inherent variability in grammars.
o Labov´s findings fundamentally challenged the notion of free variation.
o Sociolinguists use both social and linguistic factors to explain or account for
different patterns of usage.
o Differences are systematic and not free or unconstrained.
o Sociolinguistics are interested in the people, the use of language and linguistic
structure.
o Variation in how people use language is often attributed to certain drives:
 a desire to show how you fit in with some people and are different from
others;
 (ii) a desire to do things that have value in the community (and associate
yourself with that value);
 (iii) a desire not to do things that are looked down on in the community
(and have others look down on you);
 (iv) a desire to work out how others are orienting themselves to the
concerns in (i)–(iii).
o Language not only reflects social and interpersonal dynamics, it also constitutes
them. The constitutive role of language introduces a degree of indeterminacy in
every interaction. Communication accommodation theory takes this
indeterminacy to heart, and it argues that a lot of variation may result from
speakers testing their hypotheses about these factors.
o Quantitative methods have demonstrated that non linguistic factors pattern with
language in non-random ways

 CHALLENGING STYLE AS ATTENTION TO SPEECH

o Howard Giles: British social psychologist that had begun to look closely at the role
language plays in shaping the dynamics of interaction between groups and
between individuals.
 Giles drew on principles that social psychologists had determined play a
significant role in how people behave in intergroup and interpersonal
interactions quite generally.
 Giles therefore suggested that Labov was wrong in attributing speech
differences across different styles to the effect of speakers’ attention to
their own speech.
 He argued that social behaviour is seldom so egocentric, and that
interviewees would have interpreted their sociolinguistic interviews as
intergroup or interpersonal interactions.
 The distinction Labov made between informal speech (to the interviewer)
and casual speech (to family and friends) was a move in the right
 direction, but Giles argued that Labov’s paradigm did not fully grasp or
deal with the effects that our interlocutors may have on the way we talk.
 Giles suggested that all the stylistic variation was actually caused by
speakers attuning, or accommodating, to the norms associated with
different addressees: speakers fine-tune the way they talk according to
the situation they find themselves in. And an important factor in
determining how speakers make adjustments to their speech is who they
are talking to. . Learning to make the expected attunements to others is
part of the process of becoming socialised in a community of speakers.
o STYLE AS ATTENTION TO OTHERS
 Giles suggested that many of the effects observed in the New York studies
might be caused by speakers attuning their speech to the more salient
aspects of the context.
 The difference between informal and casual speech can be seen quite
simply as a function of who the speaker is addressing, rather than
pushing this dynamic to one remove (as Labov did) by proposing that a
change in addressee changes how much attention the speaker pays to
her/himself. Furthermore, when asked to perform nonconversational
tasks, an accommodating person would be very likely to attune their
behaviour to the norms they have been socializes to associate with those
tasks.
 this alternative view of the way speakers shift between styles foregrounds
the importance of the speaker’s and addressee’s relationship and their
attitudes towards one another.
 Emphasis on agency and the dynamic quality of group and personal
identities has become very influential in sociolinguistics.
 Giles’s work – and most of the work following his lead – has been done
within the experimental traditions of social psychology; that is, it has
relied on data elicited under highly controlled circumstances rather than
on the kind of naturally occurring speech favoured by sociolinguists. This is
one reason why it has proved difficult to convince some sociolinguists that
a speaker’s attitude to and relationship with their addressee can and
should be incorporated into models of variation and change.
 Allan Bell refined Giles´s insight and tailored it more directly to the
predictive and explanatory interests of sociolinguists. He introduced the
idea of a broader framework for analysising variation audience design.
 In this view, both the speaker and the interlocutor play an integral role
in contributing to style, though the initial formulation was grounded in
speakers’ accommodation of their differential audiences.
 The term audience design both classifies the behaviour (the speaker is
seen as proactively designing their speech to the needs of a particular
audience) and encapsulates the presumed motive for the behaviour (who
 is the speaker’s audience). Assumption hat speakers attune their speech
to what they believed the norms were for the different audiences. It
claims that an individual´s style-shifting (intraspeaker variation) derives
from differences probabilistically associated with different groups of
speakers (interspeaker variation). Therefore, specific prediction could be
made about the variants used by different speakers.
 Different audience types:
 Bell’s framework made another helpful contribution to the way
sociolinguists might apply principles of accommodation and
convergence to sociolinguistic variation: Distinction between
several kinds of audience that a speaker might be thinking about.
He suggested that our addressee has the greatest impact on the
way we talk. he proposed that we distinguish between ‘auditors’,
‘overhearers’ and ‘eavesdroppers’. Each of these other kinds of
listeners would have progressively less and less influence on the
way you speak. . An addressee is known to be part of the speech
context, ratified (that is, the speaker acknowledges their presence
in the speech context) and is addressed (that is, ‘I’m talking to
you’).
 Audience design predicts that the speaker will attune their speech
most to an addressee, next to an auditor, and then to any
overhearers who the speaker thinks might be lurking around.
 Any effect that the topic of conversation might have would also be
extremely limited. Under this framework, topics would derive
their effects from a speaker’s stereotypes about whothey are
likely to be talking to when a topic comes up.
 Stylistic or intraspeaker variation derives from and mirrors
interspeaker variation. Style is essentiallt speakers´response to
their audience.
 Variation on the style dimension within the speech of a single
speaker derives from and echoes the variation which exists
between speakers on the social dimension.
 Speaker design: (Coupland) speakers use different styles to present
themselves differently according to the context or who they are talking to.
It stresses the speaker´s desire to represent herself or himself in certain
ways. The speaker’s identity and relationships with interlocutors are the
prime motivators of shifts in speech style. Unlike the other theories, the
Speaker Design approach focuses on the speakers themselves rather than
outside influences as the reason for linguistic change. This model
hypothesizes that in choosing to use or exclude certain linguistic features,
speakers aim to project group membership and personal identity. Thus, a
speaker’s style is the consequence of his or her own choices in seeking to
 promote a particular persona. Interest in the ways in which speakers
combine meaningful linguistic variants to construct social personae. Under
this framework speakers actively draw upon the social meanings that are
indexed sometimes recursively by a given sociolinguistic variant.
o RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL AND LINGUISTIC CONSTRAINTS

Bell conceptualized the relationship between social variation and stylistic variation :
intraspeaker variability derives from the variability that differentiates social groups.

(variation between groups) > (variation in individuals)

When a speaker attunes their speech to the norms of a group that they do not personally identify
with, they will be approximating a target that they have only limited firsthand knowledge of. The
variability triggered by topic alone should be even less than an individual’s stylistic variation since
topic effects are supposed to derive from the speaker’s pre-existing variation space.

 Preston considered the relative strength of purely linguistic constraints on a

variable. The linguistic constraints have the most powerful effect of all on a
variable. The effect of any social constraints defines a smaller range of
variation than the linguistic constraints do.

(linguistic factors) > (variation between groups) > (variation in individuals)

 Other researchers have found evidence that leads them to conclude the
opposite to Bell and Preston – namely, that for some variables the range of a
speaker’s style-shifting exceeds the differences between social groups. John
Baugh’s work on African American Vernacular English in Los Angeles seemed
to indicate that certain variables may rank social and individual factors
differently: for some variables speakers’ style-shifting may outweigh even the
effects of linguistic constraints (Baugh 1979, cited in Rickford and McNairKnox
1994). Thus, for the variable use of third-person singular s and non-prevocalic
(r), Baugh found that:

(variation in individuals) > (variation between groups)

o Baugh suggested that whether a variable shows greater effects for
linguistic or non-linguistic constraints depends on whether it carries
much semantic information. suggested that the two variables showing
this pattern – (r) in non-prevocalic environments (the same variable as
Labov studied in NYC) and third-person singular agreement on verbs
(which may or may not be marked with s , i.e., she walks or she walk _)
– do not carry any crucial information. Baugh suggested that when a
variable carries limited informational or semantic load, it might show
more variation within the speech of individuals than it does between
groups.
 (linguistic factors: high information/semantic load) > (variation
between groups) > (variation in individuals)
(linguistic factors: low information/semantic load) > (variation in
individuals) > (variation between groups)
Social segmentation and Linguistic variation: class and race
 Contextual variation plays a significant role in the manifestation of all forms of
language.
 Speakers employ different syles, depending on relative formality or informality
of situations and on other social factors, including relationships with
coparticipants and topics of conversation
 The structure of Black English. BEV is a NATIONAL dialect.
o Reduction of word-final consonant clusters: when the final consonant
has a grammatical function (semantic load), it is less likely to be
deleted. It has been proved (Baugh) that speakers are well aware of
the importance of grammatical roles of sounds and are responsible to
underlying semantic content.
o Variation of /r/ : black speakers tend to delete the post vocalic /r/ at
even higher rates than do white speakers in all contextual syles. In
addition, intervocalic /r/ is sometimes omitted, esp. when a preceding
vowel in stressed.
o Contraction and deletion of the copula: deletion of present forms
entirely. Deletion of the copula is constrained: it only takes place
where contraction in standard English is possible. Deletion of the
copula in BEV is also sensitive to syntactic context, so that operation of
the rule depends in part of the kind of grammatical from that follows
the copula. According to Baugh´s probability values, the copula is most
likely to be deleted preceding “gonna” or a progressive verb and most
likely to be retained preceding locatives and noun phrases. Gneder
and class also influenced differences in patterning of this grammatical
feature
o Rules in BEV are sensitive to phonological and morphological traits of
SE but manifest innovative expansions.
o Hypercorrection: process of extending linguistic rules in a overly
generalized and regularized fashion. Baugh suggested that such
speech behavior occurs more frequently in formal contexts when
speakers are particularly aware of the stigmatization of their speech.
Hypercorrection is a response to social pressures and to people
sensitivity to the fact that their colloquial style is criticized by the
general population. In attempting to “correct” their speech, speakers
actually outdo standard norms by overextending grammatical rules.
People respond through their use of language to social perceptions of
them, knowing that they are judged negatively and hoping to make a
better impression by changing the way we speak.
o Grammatical aspects indicate the manner or duration of an event´s
occurrence. BEV contains many more kinds of aspect marking than are
available in SE. BEV continually expands on aspectual meanings using
contemporary forms.
 INVARIANT BE
  PERFECTIVE DONE
 FUTURE PERFECTIVE BE DONE
 STRESSED BEEN
 ASPECTUAL STEADY
 MULTIPLE NEGATION
o As with all languages, speakers of BEV are sensitive to situational
requirements and adapt their linguistic performance to context.
People stylistic alternatives depending on the degree of familiarity and
solidarity with co-participants in speech events. Features of BEV occur
with greatest frequency in informal contexts when speakers share life
experiences, expectations, and values. In contrast, standard forms are
used in situations of formality and social distance. Speakers are often
acutely aware of their status in relation to co-participants and adjust
their behavior accordingly. Social issues related to the use of BEV have
arisen particularly in contexts of school and educational practices.