Directions in Language and Society

Chapter II:
DIRECTIONS IN LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY
«... while everybody would agree that sociolinguistics has something to do with language and society, it is
clearly also not concerned with everything that could be considered 'language and society'. The problem,
therefore, lies in the drawing of the line between language and society and sociolinguistics. Obviously,
different scholars draw the line in different places».
Peter Trudgill (1978b: 1)
As far as the different directions within the spectrum of language and society are
concerned, on some occasions10 Peter Trudgill has emphasized some misinterpretations in this
discipline that affect its scope of study, its homogeneity. These misinterpretations have their
origin in the word sociolinguistics itself, as a term, which, from the beginning of the discipline
as a linguistic area, caused some problems of labelling: for many years William Labov resisted
this label11, which he considered as a «somewhat misleading use of an oddly redundant term»
(Labov 1972: 183), «since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice
which is not social» (Labov 1972: xix). In fact, while, in Trudgill's view, «whether you call
something sociolinguistics or not does not, in the last analysis, matter very much», he admits
that it is a fact that the term causes problems amongst scholars in the field: «it is a term which
means many different things to many different people»12. But why does sociolinguistics, as a
10
See Trudgill 1978b and 1983b.
11
Labov thought that this discipline should really have been referred to simply as linguistics instead of
sociolinguistics.
12
In fact, he states that the implications that the term sociolinguistics has in Europe, particularly in
Germany, are different from those it has in North America and Britain (Trudgill 1983b: 1). According to him, German
sociolinguistics has traditionally been much less oriented towards Labovian type of work than British sociolinguistics;
9
British Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to the Work of Professor Peter Trudgill
term, cause problems of multiplicity of interpretations? Where does the origin of possible
misunderstandings lie? According to Peter Trudgill, linguists do not bear in mind the fact that
Sociolinguistics, as a discipline, is concerned with something, but not everything, that could
be considered within the spectrum of language and society, and therefore, they draw the
boundaries between language and society and Sociolinguistics in different places:
The difficulty with sociolinguistics, then, is that it is a term which means many different things to many
different people. This multiplicity of interpretations is probably due to the fact that, while everybody would
agree that sociolinguistics has something to do with language and society, it is clearly also not concerned
with everything that could be considered 'language and society'. The problem, therefore, lies in the drawing
of the line between language and society and sociolinguistics. Obviously, different scholars draw the line in
different places.
The reasons that Peter Trudgill gives for arguing in this way are based on how
objectives of workers carrying out studies in this field vary, even using the same data and
methodology. One thing is to investigate the relationships between language and society with
the aim of a better understanding of the structure and nature of language and how languages
function in social interaction and another thing is to investigate those relationships with the aim
of a better understanding of society. Regarding objectives, thus, according to him, it is possible
to divide studies of language and society into three groups:
•Sociological Objectives: those studies where objectives are wholly sociological, or

social-scientific. Trudgill places here Ethnomethodology.
•Sociological and Linguistic Objectives: those studies where objectives are partly
sociological and partly linguistic. He considers here: The Sociology of Language, The Social
Psychology of Language, Anthropological Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, and The
Ethnography of Communication.
•Linguistic Objectives: those studies where objectives are purely linguistic:

Dialectology, Secular Linguistics, and Geolinguistics.
In this way he differentiates those studies that he considers to be clearly sociolinguistic in

nature, they use sociological data for linguistic purposes or both, from those that are not clearly
many people in Germany, who call themselves sociolinguists, were very interested in Bernstein's work, though
Bernstein is not a linguist at all (see II.1), and if Sociolinguistics is anything is a kind of Linguistics (personal
communication; see APPENDIX).
UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

10
sociolinguistic, since they use linguistic data for sociological purposes only:
And I think we can perhaps agree that we come to the point where language data is being employed to tell
us, not about language, but only about society, then this is the the point when, while linguistic expertise
might be useful to the sociologist, the student of language and society and the study of sociolinguistics have
to recognize that they are doing different things.
Next, in sections II.1, II.2 and II.3, we will proceed to discuss the three different objectives
within Sociolinguistics, and to describe their different sub-areas of study not with the aim of
reproducing contents, which are easy to be found in general handbooks and monographies, but
rather showing the most relevant points emphasized by Peter Trudgill within the scope of study
of every single sub-discipline. These points will be based some on references he makes in his
works and others, or probably most, on his 1990/91 Sociolinguistics Course given at the
University of Essex, United Kindgom. We will additionally include some monographic
bibliography at the end of each sub-area described.
II.1. Sociological Objectives: Ethnomethodology

This is the group that Peter Trudgill (1978b: 2) regards as «studies of language and society
which are purely social scientific in intent», and thus with no linguistic objectives. He gives as
candidates for this category both Ethnomethodology and the work of Basil Bernstein, Professor
in the Sociology of Education at the London University Institute of Education, who is not a
linguist at all but that has influenced a number of scholars concerned with Sociolinguistics,
mainly in Germany. Ethnomethodology is, according to Trudgill, «a way of doing ethnography
or sociology which studies people's practical reasoning and common-sense knowledge of their
society and the way it works». This discipline works using linguistic data, how language is
used in social interaction (particularly talk but not speech), for sociological purposes; that is,
not to tell us about language but about society, which therefore makes evident the fact that it
cannot be considered a sociolinguistic area:
Generally speaking, however, it seems clear that ethnomethodology, while it may deal with language and
society, is fairly obviously not linguistics, and therefore not sociolinguistics. Language ('talk') is employed
as data, but the objectives are wholly social scientific. The point is to use the linguistic data to get at the
social knowledge that lies behind it, not to further our understanding about language.
Peter Trudgill (1983b: pp. 4-5)
Ethnomethodology overlaps with some aspects of Discourse Analysis in its studies of

conversational discourse, the difference rests on the social aims of the former and the social
and linguistic aims of the latter. For instance, although there is no obvious linguistic connection
between A's question and B's answer, undoubtedly a conversational sequence such as the

11
following is a perfectly coherent piece of discourse:
A: Are you going to work tomorrow?

B: I'm on jury duty.
where the proposition known to both A and B, which B's reply can be heard as asserting, is that
people who are on jury duty are not allowed to go to work (Trudgill 1978b: 6). In an example
like this, Ethnomethodology would be interested in the study of the content of the proposition
and the speaker's knowledge of the world, whereas Discourse Analysis, would be concerned
with the form of the discourse rule itself and the fact of the proposition (cf. Trudgill 1978b and
1983b).
The incorporation into descriptions or grammars of everything that speakers know
about the world in which they are involved would be an impossible task. Ethnomethodology
therefore cannot be considered as a linguistic area in language and society13.
II.2. Sociological and Linguistic Objectives:

This is the group that Peter Trudgill considers as consisting of «studies of language and society
which are, in varying degrees, both sociological and linguistic in intent» (Trudgill 1978b: 4).
It is in this category where the main problem with sociolinguistics, as a term, lies; i.e. the
different places where scholars place the dividing line between language and society and
Sociolinguistics: «... some workers would include the whole of this category within
sociolinguistics; others would exclude it totally; yet others would include some areas but not
all» (Trudgill 1983b: 3). In fact, a number of areas of study that overlap in some way come into
this second group.
As sociolinguistic fields of study with sociological and linguistic objectives, we will
discuss the following: The Sociology of Language, The Social Psychology of Language,
Anthropological Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, and The Ethnography of Communication.
II.2.1. The Sociology of Language

It «deals with the study of who speaks which language (or variety) to whom, and with the
application of these findings to social, political and educational problems» (Trudgill 1983a: pp.
32-33) and is mainly associated with the work of Joshua Fishman. This discipline covers topics
such as language planning, bilingualism, diglossia, verbal repertoire, code-switching,
language loyalty, and so on, but it sometimes overlaps with aspects of Discourse Analysis,
13
For further details on Ethnomethodology, see H. Garfinkel (1967), R. Turner (ed) (1974), G. Psathas (ed)
(1979), K. Leiter (1980).

12
Anthropological Linguistics and The Social Psychology of Language. Language planning has
come to be a governmental, or quasi-governmental, activity which is designed to solve the
communication problems of a multilingual community by studying the various languages or
dialects that it uses and developing policies concerning the selection and use of those different
languages. One of those activities deals, for instance, with a problem that became of great
importance to teachers and those concerned with educational policy in the late sixties and early
seventies not only in the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. but in many other countries, mainly
in the developing ones: which language or languages should be used as a medium of instruction
in the schools of nations with more than one speech variety (John Platt 1977). All this must be
understood in the context of the new empirically based views that came with the sociolinguistic
movement: linguists realized that all speech varieties are worthy of investigation and that the
non-standard ones are not precisely deviations from the standard. The pioneering work on this
subject was carried out by American linguists such as William Labov, Roger Shuy, Ralph
Fasold and Walt Wolfram. In the United Kingdom, Peter Trudgill has also contributed to the
solution of this problem of non-standard dialects in education mainly with his Accent, Dialect
and the School (1975)14. These educational problems are concerned with the difficulties that
BVE-speaking 15 children and other non-standard-English-speaking children (working-class
normally) have in learning to read and write standard English; their difficulties are greater than
standard-English-speaking children (middle-class normally) because those non-standard
speakers «not only do they have to learn the mechanics of reading and writing, they also have
to learn standard English» (Trudgill 1983a: 70). In this way, if the teacher, for instance, is not
adequately aware of the possibility of accent differences, a conflict between, on the one hand,
the language of teachers and the school (standard English) and, on the other, the language of
many children (non-standard speakers) may take place, as has certainly happened. This fact
can be illustrated with the following incident observed at a junior school in Norwich, involving
a student teacher who was not familiar with Norwich accents and a pupil. In Norwich accents
words like rowed and road (which are homophones in RP) sound the same as road and rude in
RP respectively. The incident is the following:
On the occasion in question, a child had to read aloud the word road, and did so quite correctly, in his
Norwich accent. The student, however, misinterpreted this and thought he was saying rude. She therefore
14
In addition to Trudgill (1975a), he has also dealt with this problem in other works such as Trudgill et al
(1974), Trudgill (1975c, 1975d, 1976, 1977, 1979a, 1982a, 1983a, 1983b), Trudgill & Jahr (1979), Trudgill &
Cheshire (1989), and Andersson & Trudgill (1990), suffering even strong and often personal attacks in the press for
being misunderstood (Sunday Telegraph, 28 Nov. 1975; Daily Mail, 3 Dec. 1975; Reading Evening Post, 28 Nov.
1975; The Guardian, Education Section, 12 Aug. 1975).
15
Speakers of Black Vernacular English.

13
said: 'No, it's not rude, it's road'. But because of the differences between their accents, the child thought she
was saying: 'No, it's not road, it's rowed'. Confusion all around.
Peter Trudgill (1975a: 49)
Therefore, dialect differences in British schools constitute an educational problem when

standard English is required of children who have some non-standard variety as their native
dialect: they suffer educationally simply because standard English is not their native language.
According to Peter Trudgill, in educational circles this contrast between standard English and
the non-standard dialects in schools is still the focus of some considerable debate: standard
English is the dialect of education, it is spoken by most teachers, it is the dialect normally
employed in writing and is rewarded in examinations, but a majority of British children are not
native speakers of this particular dialect. Being conscious of this problem, he raises the
following questions:
... should we continue to teach (and reward) the use of standard English in schools, and attempt to solve the
difficulties caused by non-standard dialects as best we can? Or should we allow children to speak and write
those grammatical forms which come most naturally to them, and thereby avoid giving an advantage to those
who already speak standard English?
In order to find a solution, he evaluates the three approaches that had previously been adopted
to this problem since education became widespread in the English-speaking world: the most
traditional approach is the one referred to as 'Elimination of non-standard English', which
argues that non-standard dialects are 'incorrect' or 'bad' English and that the best way to solve
the dialect conflict is simply to eliminate them, asserting that children suffer just because they
do not speak standard English. This approach is believed to be wrong psychologically, socially
and practically. Firstly, it is wrong psychologically because language is not only a means of
communicating but also a symbol of identity and group membership. This means that «to
suggest to a child that his language, and that of those with whom he identifies, is inferior in
some way is to imply that he is inferior», which «in turn, is likely to lead either to alienation
from the school and school values, or to a rejection of the group to which he belongs» (Trudgill
1983a: 74) and even to produce linguistic insecurity in children. Secondly, it is socially wrong
because it can lead to the social stigmatization of the non-standard language, and thus having
an 'incorrect' or 'inferior' variety, the non-standard one, spoken by the lower class, and a 'correct'
or superior variety, the standard one, spoken by the upper class. Finally, it is practically wrong
because it can never work: to learn a different dialect of one's own native variety is even more
difficult than to learn a new language, and nobody wants to change his or her native variety,
among other things, because of group identification and peer-group solidarity, and also because
you do not gain communication advantages. The second approach is the one referred to as
'Bidialectalism', which recognises the linguistic validity and correctness of both standard and

14
non-standard dialects, and treats the two as separate varieties, with a definite social function
assigned to each one. In some way it is a diglossic situation16 where speakers can use the
mechanism of code-switching, that is «switching from one language variety to another when
the situation demands» (Trudgill 1983a: 75), and thus, in turn, there is a respect of the speakers'
feelings about their own native language. The third approach, the most recent of all, is the one
known as 'Appreciation of dialect differences', which argues that the solution is not to change
the language but the attitudes to language: if working-class children, or BVE speakers, suffer
because of their non-standard language, what has to be done is to make these people be able to
read standard English, and what is more important, «to educate our society to an understanding,
appreciation and tolerance of non-standard dialects as complex, valid and adequate linguistic
systems» (Trudgill 1983a: 76). As a defender of linguistic and cultural, diversity, Peter Trudgill
argues that «England would be a poorer place without its rich pattern of regional dialects»17:
The Traditional Dialects and Modern Dialects of England are part of our linguistic environment, and should
be protected, just as our physical environment should be protected.
After reading this quotation, it is not difficult at all to know by intuition what he advocates: the
best solution to the problem is the combination of the two last approaches, Bidialectalism and
Appreciation of dialect differences; that is, to teach standard English in schools, by means of
the bidialectalism method, at the same time as trying to cultivate dialect tolerance, which will
probably be simpler than changing the linguistic habits of the majority of the population
(Trudgill 1983b: 199):
From the point of view of the linguist, therefore, the most satisfactory solution to the problem of non-standard
speakers in a standard-English-dominated culture is the adoption in schools of a combination of the two
approaches, bidialectalism and appreciation of dialect differences, bearing in mind that bidialectalism is
likely to be only partially successful (and then probably only in the case of writing) and may be dangerous,
particularly if intensively handled, from the point of view of fostering linguistic insecurity.
Peter Trudgill (1983a: pp. 76-77)
What we have seen is a language planning activity in a, let us say, multi-dialectal

community such as the British one. But other studies also under the umbrella of the Sociology
16
Trudgill (1983a: 113-14) prefers to retain the concept of diglossia in the original sense introduced by
Charles Ferguson (1959).
17
In fact, works such as Trudgill & Hannah (1982) Hughes & Trudgill (1979), Trudgill (1984a) and Trudgill
& Chambers (1990) are implicitly intended to support and fill the lack of informed knowledge about linguistic diversity
in the British Isles and the English-speaking world.

15
of Language are activities of language planning in multilingual speech communities. If there

is a phenomenon which is common to nearly all the countries in the world, that is
multilingualism: «the vast majority of the nation-states of the world have more than a language
spoken indigenously within their frontiers» (Trudgill 1983a: 141), and what is difficult is to
locate a genuinely monolingual country. Even in Europe, despite what we are accustomed to
thinking, nearly all countries are multilingual and contain linguistic minorities, i.e., «groups of
speakers who have as their native variety a language other than that which is the official,
dominant or major language in the country where they live» (Trudgill 1983a: pp. 141-2). This
phenomenon of multilingualism brings with it problems, mainly educational, for those who are
members of linguistic minorities and for governments; on a different scale, and probably with
considerably greater difficulties, it is the same case as the one discussed above about the
approaches towards non-standard dialects in the United Kingdom, since children from those
linguistic minorities have to learn to read and write in a language which is basically different
from their own native one. The 'Elimination of non-standard speech' approach has been for
many years official policy in many countries. In the United Kingdom, where Celtic languages
such as Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and Manx18 had always constituted other varieties in
addition to English spoken in the British Isles, there was a law in 1871, the Education Act,
which compulsorily established that English had to be the language in schooling. But,
according to Peter Trudgill (1983a: 147), «happily, this approach and the attitude with it have
almost disappeared from the educational scene in the United Kingdom». Since 1918 Gaelic has
been allowed in schools in Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland, and since 1953, Welsh has been
officially, in addition to English, the language to be taught in schools in Wales. In this way,
with this solution based on the Bidialectalism approach, the teaching of minority languages to
minority-group children has the benefit of recognizing the child's social and cultural identity
and integrity, its development, and what is more, it does not deny the child access to the
majority language for the purpose of upward social mobility.
18
Apart from those Celtic languages, there are other linguistic minorities such as Hungarian, Italian,
Yiddish, Polish, Bengali, Panjabi, Greek and Maltese, which are languages brought to England in the last hundred
years or so by refugees and immigrants. Romani, Angloromani, Shelta and Polari are varieties, or rather in-group
jargons, spoken by travellers and other itinerant groups. For more details about all these varieties in the British
Isles, see Trudgill (1984b).

16
Sometimes one of the problems of multilingualism for national governments is the fact
that, as we have already mentioned, language acts as a very important symbol of group
consciousness and solidarity, a signal of group identity, and where language constitutes a
defining characteristic of a minority ethnic group19 claiming independence, it certainly plays
an important role. If a given government regards a minority, with its minority language, as a
subversive focus, and thus a menacing for the integrity of the nation, a very common strategy
used to achieve political subjugation (or unification) is precisely linguistic subjugation (this
has been the case of Catalan). In other cases, especially in the new countries, where linguistic
diversities are a result of ignoring the geographical distribution of different ethnic groups when
their frontiers were drawn by colonial powers, multilingualism is also a problem for
governments. In these cases, by means of language planning, governments not only have to
select a national language but also to establish, develop and standardize it. The use of a lingua
franca, «a language which is used as a means of communication among people who have no
native language in common» (Trudgill 1983a: 157), as a solution for problems of this type has
resulted in success. A different solution argued has been the use of Esperanto, but, currently, it
seems unlikely to work. A different solution for multilingual situations is Norway, which,
according to Peter Trudgill (1983a: 161), constitutes «one of the most interesting examples of
government activity in the field of language planning and language standardization» and is
certainly unique in Europe:
In my own view it is in many ways a very good situation, since it means that far more Norwegians than
would otherwise be the case are able to read and, if they wish, write, speak and express themselves in a
standard language that closely resembles their own native variety (dialectal variation being quite
considerable in Norway). Far fewer Norwegian children therefore find themselves in the difficult situation
of the Lowland Scots or black English Speakers.
In Norway there are two official standard languages, which are linguistically mutually
comprehensible: Nynorsk ('new Norwegian'), which comes from Landsmål ('language of the
country'), and Bokmål ('book language'), which comes from Riksmål ('state language'). The
former is used in the language of national press and as a medium of education, and the latter is
used in the local press and local literature. All official documents are written in both standards;
children have to learn and write in both varieties, and both are widely used in radio and
television. Even the standard to be used in public notices and in school districts is decided
democratically.
As we have seen, from this perspective, Sociolinguistics focuses on speech
19
See Trudgill (1983a: Ch. 3) and Section V.5 in this study for further details about the social symbolism
of language and its defining and identifying characteristics.

17
communities and languages as social institutions, trying to find solutions where both, speech
communities and languages, are not completely identified. Section VIII.4 provides an
application of this discipline, Applied Sociology of Language20.
II.2.2. The Social Psychology of Language

An important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the intellectual
and emotional response of the members of the society to the languages and varieties in their
social environment. The Social Psychology of Language «is an area of study which deals with
attitudes to varieties of language, and with the way in which speakers interact with each other
through conversation» (Trudgill 1984a: 2). Attitudes to different varieties of British English
have been evidenced with works of social psychologists such as Howard Giles, who
demonstrated (cf. Giles 1971a and 1971b) that in Britain speakers with RP accent are perceived
as having more competence -in the sense of being more intelligent, more reliable and more
educated- but less social integrity and attractiveness, in the sense of sincerity and
kindheartedness (less friendly and sociable), than regionally accented speakers. These results
are obtained by means of what are called matched-guise experiments where, although
informants believe they are evaluating different speakers, they are in fact reacting to the same
speaker using different accents: a given number of speakers, all with different accents of
English, are recorded reading the same passage of prose; but one of the speakers is recorded
twice, each time reading the passage with two different accents. Groups of subjects are played
those tape-recordings and asked to give their opinions on them with regards to the speakers'
attributes and capabilities just from their voices and locating them on scales ranging from 'very
intelligent' to 'very unintelligent', 'very educated' to 'very uneducated', and 'very friendly' to
'very unfriendly'. In this way, the same speaker is radically differently evaluated according to
the accent used: when using a local accent, the speaker was perceived as less intelligent and
less educated but more friendly, but when using RP accent, the same speaker was evaluated
just the other way round, more intelligent, more educated, and less friendly. To this respect,
Peter Trudgill (1983a: pp. 139-140) remarks the following:
This illustrates the way in which we rely on stereotypes when we first meet and interact with people [...] and
use the way they speak to build up a picture of what sort of person we think they are. An RP-speaker may
be perceived, as soon as he starts speaking, as haughty and unfriendly by a non-RP speaker, unless and until
he is able to demonstrate the contrary. He is, as it were, guilty until proved innocent.
Likewise, these attitudes can also be applied to the problem of children with working-
20
For further discussions on The Sociology of Language, see Robert Le Page (1964), Einar Haugen (1966),
and Joshua Fishman (1968, 1972).

18
class accents and dialects in schools. We saw in II.2.1 the fact that dialect differences in British
schools constitute an educational problem when standard English is required of children who
have some non-standard variety as their native dialect, mainly BVE-speaking and low-class
children in general and Scottish children: they suffer educationally simply because standard
English is not their native language and, therefore, they do not do so well at school as standard-
English-speaking children, normally middle-class, of the same intelligence. This problem, in
turn, is aggravated if teachers are not adequately aware of those dialect and accent differences,
and if they have unfavourable attitudes towards non-standard dialects: those children «may be
evaluated by some teachers as having less educational potential than those with middle-class
accents and dialects, unless they, too, are given an adequate chance to demonstrate the
contrary» (Trudgill 1983a: 140); fact that, according to Peter Trudgill, is obviously more
worrying than the previous problem referred to attitudes towards RP speakers. These
unfavourable attitudes towards children's non-standard dialects have their foundations on the
misunderstandings, misinterpretations and misuses21 of Basil Bernstein's theories of elaborate
code and restricted code and the verbal deprivation, or language deficit, hypothesis. Bernstein
postulated that there were two different varieties of language 'elaborate code', a sophisticated
language used in formal situations, and 'restricted code', a simple language used in informal
situations, and established a connection between both codes and social-class dialects: whereas
middle-class children use both codes, working-class children use only 'restricted code'. This
erroneously led to connect 'restricted code' with non-standard dialect, and thus to foster, and
even strengthen, the belief, among many teachers and educationalists, that there is something
intrinsically inferior about working-class language, non-standard English, which makes
working-class children be, according to them, verbally deprived and cognitively deficient.
Another instance of completely arbitrariness and subjectivity in the social attitudes
towards linguistic varieties and their prestige is the phenomenon of rhoticism. According to
John Wells (1982: 212), there are certain phonological developments that took place in the
British Isles and that did not spread out to all the different accents, though to most of them.
These features characterize British accents as innovating or conservative in relation to the
degree of acceptance or rejection of the phonological tendencies arisen in spoken language.
One of those innovations is R-Dropping, i.e., the elimination of a historical /r/ except in the
environment of a following vowel (non-prevocalic /r/), by means of which we can divide the
different British accents into those that underwent this process (non-rhotic accents), therefore
innovative, and those that did not (rhotic accents), thus conservative. Trudgill (1990a: 51)
includes Scotland, Ireland, and Central Lancashire (Blackburn, Burnley, Accrington) and
21
Peter Trudgill has criticized both Bernstein's theories and their misinterpretations in Trudgill (1975a,
1975d and 1983a).

19
Southwest (Bristol, Reading, Cornwall, Devon, etc.) in England as areas where the
conservative rhotic feature survives, though younger people are losing it; the rest uses the
innovating non-rhotic pronunciation. The point is that, in England, non-rhotic accents have
more status and are considered more 'correct' than rhotic accents, which are estimated as rural,
uneducated, or even both22. This rhotic pronunciation is socially stigmatized in England, and
the higher up the social scale a speaker is, the less non-prevocalic /r/s he is likely to pronounce.
Nevertheless, in several parts of the United States, New York City and others, the pattern is
completely reversed, and accents with non-prevocalic /r/ have more prestige and are considered
as more 'correct' than those without. This contrast in the attitudes towards forms of language
demonstrates something very important for social psychologists, and sociolinguists in general,
which is that «society evaluates different linguistic varieties in different ways»:
... value judgements about language are, from a linguistic point of view, completely arbitrary. There is
nothing inherent in non-prevocalic /r/ that is good or bad, right or wrong, sophisticated or uncultured.
Judgements of this kind are social judgements based on the social connotations that a particular feature has
in the area in question.
By paying attention to these subjective attitudes towards forms of language, we can also find
explanations which are often helpful in the study of linguistic change, since there is evidence
to suggest that subjective attitudes are the cause rather than the effect of many linguistic
changes, which can take place not only in the direction of a prestige form but also in the
opposite direction. An investigation into the speech of New York City and Martha's Vineyard
illustrates this point. We have said that in New York City rhoticism is a prestige feature;
however, this situation has not always been the same: New York City is known to have been
an r-pronouncing region in the 18th century but became a completely r-less in the 19th until
the Second World War. It was since the war when r-pronunciation became prestigious again
and the change in frequency of use of non-prevocalic /r/ increased in the speech of the upper
middle class, probably as a result of the influx into the city of many speakers from areas where
non-prevocalic /r/ was a standard or a prestige feature and also probably as a result of a shift in
New Yorkers' subjective attitudes towards this type of pronunciation, from apparent
indifference to a widespread desire to adopt such pronunciation. This can be seen from the
investigation carried out by William Labov (1966) on the informants' subjective attitudes to
test how they evaluated r-pronunciation. Those informants who considered /r/ as a prestige
marker were labelled 'r-positive'. The following chart shows the percentage of upper middle-
22
As Peter Trudgill points out (1983a: 21), very frequently, the rhotic feature, the pronunciation of non-
prevocalic /r/, is employed for comic effect in radio and television comedy series to indicate that a character is
rural, uneducated, or both.

20
class speakers in three 'r-positive' age-groups together with the average percentage of non-
prevocalic /r/s used in normal speech by the same three groups. The results of this experiment
are displayed below:
It can be seen that there is a sharp increase in the favourable evaluation of r-pronunciation for
speakers aged under forty, and that the younger the speakers are, the more they use non-
prevocalic /r/. A linguistic change undergone in the direction not precisely of a prestige pattern
but on the reverse is the case of Martha's Vineyard, an island lying three miles off the coast of
Massachusetts, in New England. Martha's Vineyard was formerly relatively isolated, having a
small permanent population of about 6,000 people, but began to suffer an increase in the
number of tourists during the summer months. This increasing number of visitors caused
striking social changes that also had linguistic consequences on the island, and that were
studied by William Labov (1963). He concentrated his attention on the way that native
Vineyarders pronounced the diphthongs in the two set of words out, house, and trout, on the
one hand, and while, pie and night, on the other. In fact, there were two different pronunciations
of each diphthong: one is a low-prestige, old-fashioned pronunciation typical of the island, [əʊ]
for the out set and [əɪ] for the while set; the other is more recent on the island and resembles
more closely the diphthongs found in RP and some mainland American prestige accents, [aʊ]
for out and [aɪ] for while. In his study, Labov observed that the 'old-fashioned' form was on the
increase, becoming more exaggerated and occurring more frequently in the speech of more
people. The explanation found to this linguistic change is closely related to the subjective
attitudes of the speakers: residents have exaggerated the 'old-fashioned' pronunciation to show
their difference from the summer population:
Natives of the island have come to resent the mass invasion of outsiders and the change and economic
exploitation that go with it. So those people who most closely identify with the island way of life have begun
to exaggerate the typical island pronunciation, in order to signal their separate social and cultural identity,
and to underline their belief in the old values. This means that the 'old-fashioned' pronunciation is in fact
most prevalent amongst certain sections of the younger community.

21
If the case of Martha's Vineyard demonstrates that attitudes to language can be a

powerful force in the diffusion of linguistic changes, it is also true that linguistic
accommodation between speakers can help to produce linguistic modifications in face-to-face
interaction, and even the diffusion of linguistic change (cf. VII.2). Howard Giles and his co-
workers23, as social psychologists of language, using linguistic data, developed what is known
as accommodation theory, which focuses on speech and discusses and attempts to explain why
speakers modify their language in the presence of others in the way and to the extent that they
do (Trudgill 1986a: 2):
This, briefly, attempts to explain temporary or long-term adjustments in pronunciation and other aspects of
linguistic behaviour in terms of a drive to approximate one's language to that of one's interlocutors, if they
are regarded as socially desirable and/or demonstrate good will towards them. This may often take the form
of reducing the frequency of socially stigmatized linguistic forms in the presence of speakers of higher
prestige varieties. The theory also allows for the opposite effect: the distancing of one's language from that
of speakers one wishes to disassociate oneself from, or in order to assert one's own identity.
The first case would be related to what Howard Giles called process of accent convergence,
«if the sender in a dyadic situation wishes to gain the receiver's social approval, then he may
adapt his accent patterns towards that of this person, i.e., reduce pronunciation dissimilarities»
(Giles 1973). The second case, the opposite process, if speakers wish to dissociate themselves
from or show disapproval of others, would be related to Giles' accent divergence; in this way,
the use of a formal style in an informal situation, for instance, can be used as a joke or to signal
disapproval or social distance. But the accommodation theory is not only concerned with
adjustments of high-low prestige accents but also with regionally differing accents.
Also, under the umbrella of The Social Psychology of Language is the problem
concerned with value judgements about correctness, adequacy and aesthetics of accents,
dialects and languages in general, the use of swear-words and discourse markers -or fillers-
amongst young speakers in the United Kingdom. In this study they will be discussed in separate
sections (see III.6 and III.10) on account of their relevance. Furthermore, an application of
this area is provided in Section VIII.2.
As we have seen, different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted
emotional responses, social attitudes in short, such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and
prejudices about people, social, ethnic, and religious groups, and political entities. The Social
Psychology of Language is concerned with language considering these extra-linguistic
factors24.
23
See Giles (1973), Giles & Smith (1979), and Trudgill (1981a).
24
For further details on the Social Psychology of Language, see Howard Giles & Robert St Clair (eds)

22
II.2.3. Anthropological Linguistics

It is well known that the study of a language constantly requires an interpretation of socially
determined meaning, and, vice versa, the study of different aspects of culture requires an
understanding of the verbal aspects of that culture (Stern 1983: 201). Anthropological
Linguistics, or Anthropolinguistics, therefore appears as that discipline which «studies
language variation and use in relation to the cultural patterns and beliefs of man, as investigated
using the theories and methods of anthropology» 25 . Through the study of a community's
language, anthropological linguists investigate kinship systems, systems of linguistic taboo and
linguistic relativity with the aim of knowing more about the language, structure, and values of
a community. The complex inter-relationships between language and society may take place
in different directions: the influence of society on language, the covariation of linguistic and
social phenomena, and the influence of language on society. Taboo words and kinship systems
will reflect the first direction, the influence of society on language, whereas linguistic relativity
will show the third, the influence of language on society.
II.2.3.a. Taboo Words

This has to do with the different ways of dividing up the world, particularly how cultural
meanings, the values of a society, are expressed in language. The role played by social taboos
in language-behaviour is something that falls within the scope of Sociolinguistics, since they
are clearly a linguistic as well as a sociological fact: they do affect the expressive and social
meanings of words. Taboo is a Polynesian word that refers to a general behavioural
phenomenon believed to be immoral, magical, or supernaturally forbidden in an apparently
irrational manner, and once broken it leads to obscenity, blasphemy, rudeness, immorality, and
so on: «anthropologists commonly use it to refer to prohibitions which are explicit and which
are supported by feelings of sin and supernatural sanction at a conscious level» (Leach 1964:
30). In the same way that there are things which we are not supposed to do, there are also words
which we are not supposed to say: certain things are not said, not because they cannot be, but
because people don't talk about those things (linguistic taboos); or, if those things are talked
about, they are talked about in very roundabout ways (euphemisms). In fact, as Trudgill points
out (1983a: 29), «failure to adhere to the often-strict rules governing their use can lead to
punishment or public shame».
(1979). Peter Trudgill deals with this area in Trudgill et al. (1974), Trudgill (1975a, 1975c, 1983a, 1983b), Trudgill
& Giles (1978) and Andersson & Trudgill (1990).
25
Definition taken from David Crystal (1985) A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics , Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, p. 18.

23
The type of word that is tabooed in a particular language is generally a good reflection
of at least part of the system of values and beliefs of the society in question. Tabooed subjects
can vary widely from community to community: one's mother in law; certain game animals;
death; excretion, bodily functions; religious matters; the left hand (the origin of sinister); sex
and female relations; in some communities word-magic plays an important part in religion, and
even certain words considered as powerful are used in spells and incantations; and so on, and
so forth. In Western societies, there are taboos relating to sex, religion, bodily functions, ethnic
groups, food, dirt, and death, and, as Andersson & Trudgill (1990: 14) point out, «English is
not different from other languages in having words and expressions that no one is supposed to
say but that everyone does say -or nearly everyone». The British anthropologist Edmund Leach
(1964: 26) has suggested that taboo words in English fall into three major categories which, in
practice, are not sharply distinguished but somehow interrelated:
1.-Dirty Words, usually referring to sex and excretion;

2.-Blasphemy and profanity; and
3.-Animal abuse.
In the English-speaking world, some of the most severe taboos are associated with sex and
excretion, and, because of being powerful, they are used as swear-words (you deliberately
break the rules; see III.6.4). Words such as fuck have very different social connotations from
make love, have sex or sexual intercourse. In fact, the use in print of the words fuck and cunt
used to lead to prosecution and even imprisonment, and now they are not still commonly used
in the press.
As Trudgill (1983a: 30) points out to demonstrate that taboo is a linguistic as well as a
sociological fact, the use of taboo words in non-permitted contexts, such as television,
generates violent reactions which are irrational reactions to a particular word, and not to a
concept: it is perfectly legitimate to say sexual intercourse on television but not fuck. Even the
activity itself, not only the word which is tabooed, is culturally-governed by some patterns of
beliefs:

24
To say that a certain area of life is taboo is not to say that it is altogether forbidden, but that is regulated by
conscious or unconscious rules. It is certainly not forbidden or improper to have sex, given the right time,
place, person and maybe even the right motivation. The partner should be fairly close in many cultures (a
certain class, group, colour, etc.) but not too close (incest), and should definitely be a human being (not an
animal -bestiality).
Lars Andersson & Peter Trudgill (1990: pp. 55-6)
There are some 'unmentionable' bodily functions, related with excretion, which we do not want
to talk about, and we must obey the rules and use the proper expression: urine and faeces
instead of piss and shit respectively. Similarly, the activities for these bodily functions are also
culturally governed:
These activities are certainly not forbidden. On the contrary, they are absolutely necessary for survival, but
there are certain appropriate hidden places for them.
Lars Andersson & Peter Trudgill (1990: 56)
According to Leach (1964: 29), any theory about the sacredness of supernatural beings
is likely to imply a concept of sacrilege which in turn explains the emotions provoked by
profanity and blasphemy. In Catholic and Orthodox countries there are taboos associated with
religion, and for instance, many more expressions relating to the Virgin Mary, sacrilegious
expressions, can be found in those countries than in Protestant ones (Andersson & Trudgill
1990: 57). In fact, in Norway, some of the most strongly tabooed expressions are related to the
devil (Trudgill 1983a: 30).
The third category suggested by Edmund Leach refers to 'animal abuse', in which a
human being is equated with an animal. He asks the intriguing question «why should
expressions like 'you son of a bitch' or 'you swine' carry the connotations that they do, when
'you son of a kangaroo' or 'you polar bear' have no meaning whatever?» (Leach 1964: 29). He
argues that there is here a connection with food taboos and with the way we separate the self
from the world itself. There is a relation of edibility and social valuation of animals; that is to
say, there is a cultural and linguistic, but not natural, determination of food values, and some
animals are recognized as food in some cultures but not in others, and vice versa. Consequently,
most cultures have three animal categories regarding edibility:
1. Edible substances that are recognized as food and consumed as part of the normal
diet.
2. Edible substances that are recognized as possible food, but that are prohibited or else
allowed to be eaten only under special (ritual) conditions. These are substances which are
consciously tabooed.
3. Edible substances that by culture and language are not recognized as food at all.

25
These substances are unconsciously tabooed.
To illustrate this, we can bear in mind the Jewish prohibitions against pork, the Brahmin
prohibition against beef, and even the Christian attitude to sacramental bread and wine.
According to Leach (1964: 47), a curious usage suggests that in the English-speaking world
there seems to be some culpability about killing and eating large animals: when dead, bullock
becomes beef, pig becomes pork, sheep becomes mutton, calf becomes veal, and deer becomes
venison. In turn the way we separate the human self from the world is also relevant here.
Somehow contradictory or anomalous phenomena are frequently tabooed: incarnate deities,
virgin mothers, supernatural monsters which are half man/half beast such as centaurs, body
excretions, locks of hair (neither self nor non-self), and so on. Taboo, therefore, applies to
categories which are anomalous with respect to clear-cut category oppositions socially
established26. We separate the human self from the world, which, in turn, is also divided into
zones, or categories, of social distance. The gap between two logically distinct categories, this
world/other world, is filled in with tabooed ambiguity. In the English language, it is established
as follows:
In this way, those animals that belong to two different categories are considered as anomalous,
involving a tabooed ambiguity, and therefore are used as insults:
If you are offended if someone calls you a bitch, but not if they call you a kangaroo, this may have to do
with the fact that dogs, although they are clearly not human, are often in our society associated with humans
26
In fact, Edmund Leach (1964: 34) postulates that those categories are acquired by the child, who
perceives the physical and social environment first as a continuum, and later, in due course, he is taught to impose
upon this environment a kind of discriminating grid which serves to perceive the world as composed of a large number
of separate things, each linguistically labelled.

26
and thought of as having at least some human attributes. They are therefore, as far as animals are concerned,
anomalous.
Lars Andersson & Peter Trudgill (1990: 16)
Sometimes words are taboo for linguistic (phonetic) reasons: in some circumstances,
there is a strong reluctance of speakers to utter words which are phonetically similar to taboo-
words. In English, the words rabbit, rooster (North American use), and donkey are preferred
to be used rather than (coney, the older word), cock, and arse (British)/ass (North American)
respectively. According to Otto Jespersen (1922), among Carib Indians, only adult males were
allowed to use a number of words when Carib men were on the warpath, and bad luck was
believed to result if those words were used by women or uninitiated boys. In some cultures, in
the area of the islands right north of Australia, particularly in the Tiwi culture, the proper name
of a dead person is taboo, and even words that sound alike also become taboo. Mary Haas
(1951) has pointed out that certain purely linguistic taboos seem to arise from bilingual
situations, which are considered as interlingual word taboos. It can be noticed, for instance,
among Thai students learning English in an English environment: they avoid Thai words like
fâg, 'sheath', fág, 'to hatch', phríg, '(chilli) pepper', chíd, 'to be close, near', and khán, 'to crush,
to squeeze out', in the presence of anglophones because of the phonetic resemblance of these
words to certain taboo English words. But they also suffer the problem in reverse, since Thai-
speakers also find it difficult to say the English words yet and key, which sound very much like
the Thai words jed, a vulgar word for 'to have sexual intercourse', and khîi, 'excrement',
respectively. Likewise, American Indian girls speakers of Nootka are also said to be reluctant
to use the English word such because of its close phonetic similarity to the Nootka word for
vagina.
Yet patterns of taboo change in the same way as language changes. 'Breaking the rules'
is currently less dramatic than it used to be. An example of a social change that also reflects a
change in linguistic behaviour is the English swear-word bloody (originally by our Lady),
which is now relatively harmless.
II.2.3.b. Kinship Systems

It is also related to the way the world is divided up. All human beings have the same
kin relationships, it is universal. However, what is different is the way of labelling, or referring
to, the relatives of a family. Kinship terminology shows how basic are systems of classification
in language and society: a society's kinship system is generally reflected in its kinship
vocabulary. English has eleven kinship terms in language:
Father - Mother Son - Daughter Nephew - Niece

Brother - Sister Uncle - Aunt Cousin

27
Some of them are reciprocal in their relationship but others are not. That is, if I am your father
or uncle, you obviously are not my father or uncle, but if you are my cousin, I am certainly
your cousin too. There are four systems of modification of those eleven kinship vocabulary
items:
1) through the terms great/grand, which are only applied to those non-reciprocal
relationships. They express generations apart, though they are not always used as terms of
address, despite being the terms of reference: great parents, great father, great mother, great
son, great daughter, great nephew, great niece, grandparents, grandfather, grandmother,
grandson, granddaughter.
2) through the in-law system, which has to do with marriage. It is only for the
father/mother, brother/sister and son/daughter relationships: father-in-law, mother-in-law,
brother-in-law, sister in-law.
3) through the by marriage system, which applies for uncle/aunt and nephew/niece:
uncle by marriage, niece by marriage, and so on.
4) through 'cousin' modification: first/second/third cousin, once/twice (generations

from ancestor) removed.
But these kin relationships could also be divided differently using different labels:
eldest/youngest son/daughter, older/younger brother/sister, paternal/maternal uncle/aunt.
Modern terminology, step and half, is concerned with re-marriage: half-brother, half-sister,
step-brother, step-sister, step- father, step-mother, step-son, step-daughter. If one's parent re-
marries someone, that person will be your step-father/mother, and any child born as a result of
that new marriage will be your half-brother/sister. But if that person, your step-father/mother,
brings with him/her a child who was the result of an earlier marriage, that child will be one's
step-brother/sister. As far as the correspondence terms of address and terms of reference is
concerned, this is not total; mother-in-law and father-in-law, for instance, are right as terms of
reference but not as terms of address.
The way cultures organize their kin relationships and how relevant they are in terms of
use give rise to different kinship vocabularies. The more different a culture is, the more
different its kinship system is. Robbins Burling (1970) described the kinship system of the
Njamal, a tribe of Australian aborigines. A study of the Njamal terms in comparison with the
English equivalents reveals much about the differences between both societies. While striking
for an English speaker, in Njamal society the distinction between father and father's brother is
not as relevant as in English. The Njamal term mama is used for all males of the same
generation as the father, whereas English has father, uncle, male cousin of parent, and so on.

28
However, whereas Njamal distinguishes between mama, also to refer to father's brother and
mother's sister's husband, and karna, to refer to mother's brother and father's sister's husband,
English only uses uncle for both pairs. Moreover, other Njamal kinship terms such as maili
distinguish not generation, as in English, but generation distance: it refers both to a father's
father and to a daughter's son's wife's sister, implying two generations removed.
In Central Australia, the Alyawarra kinship system also shows some striking
differences in its way of organizing the kin relationships of Alyawarra society:
aringiya: FaFa (father's father: paternal grandfather)

FaFaBr (father's father's brother: paternal great uncle)
FaFaSi (father's father's sister: paternal great aunt)
BrSoSo (brother's son's son: great nephew)
BrSoDa (brother's son's daughter: great niece)
SoSo (son's son: grandson; only for male speakers)
SoDa (son's daughter: granddaughter; only for male speakers)
nyanya: MoMo (mother's mother: maternal grandmother)

MoMoBr (mother's mother's Brother: maternal great uncle)
MoMoSi (mother's mother's sister: maternal great aunt
SiDaSo (sister's daughter's son: great nephew)
SiDaDa (sister's daughter's daughter: great niece)
DaSo (daughter's son: grandson; only for female speakers)
DaDa (daughter's daughter: granddaughter; only for female speakers)
akngiya: Fa (father)
FaBr (father's brother: paternal uncle)
amatjia: Mo (mother)
MoSi (mother's sister: maternal aunt)
awuniya: FaSi (father's sister: paternal aunt)
apmaliya: MoBr (mother's brother: maternal uncle)
awiyatjia: older Br (older brother)

older FaBrSo (older father's brother's son; older paternal male cousin)
older MoSiSo (older mother's sister's son; older maternal male cousin)
Alyawarra kinship terms indicate the generation, and sometimes the sex, of the reference or
ego (i.e., the person from whom the relationship is expressed), and occasionally the other's age
relative to the ego (i.e., as being younger or older). The terms aringiya and nyanya are two
generations removed from the ego. In this society, it is not relevant to distinguish grandparents,
great uncles/aunts, great nephews/nieces, grandsons or granddaughters, and, as they are

29
reciprocal terms, both a grandson and a grandfather, for instance, may call each other aringiya,
if paternal, or nyanya, if maternal. However, they distinguish the sex of the speaker to refer to
a grandson or a granddaughter: aringiya for male speakers and nyanya for female speakers. It
is also interesting to bear in mind the fact that, the father's brother, paternal uncle, and the
mother's sister, maternal aunt, have responsibilities very close to the father and mother
respectively; hence the use of the same terms to refer, on the one hand, to the father and the
father's brother, akngiya, and on the other hand, to the mother and the mother's sister, amatjia.
The other's age relative to the ego (i.e., as being younger or older) is relevant when referred to
brothers and male cousins: the term awiyatjia refers both to older brothers and to older male
cousins.
Miri, a Tibetan/Burmese language, is spoken in the north of India and its kinship system
also shows some particular characteristics if compared to the English system of kin
relationships. Having the ego as the person from whom the relationship is expressed, in Miri
the kinship terms vary depending on the nature of uncles and aunts: whether uncles/aunts are
father/mothers brother/sister or not. If the structure of a family has an aunt who is father's
sister and an uncle who is mother's brother, the Miri terminology would be as the following
chart shows:
However, if the structure of a family has an aunt who is mother's sister and an uncle who is
father's brother, the Miri terminology would be the following27:
27
The examples on the Alyawarra and Miri kinship systems are taken from a Peter Trudgill's 1990/91
Sociolinguistic Lecture at the University of Essex (England).

30
As language is in some way a reflection of society, a social change can also produce a
corresponding linguistic change (Trudgill 1983a: 28). In the English-speaking world, kin
relationships are not as geographically close and important as they used to be. Consequently,
as now families are less close, terms such as second cousin are less and less relevant. In Russia,
from 1860 to the present, the structure of the Russian kinship system has undergone a very
radical change as a result of also several social changes that affected the structure of families.
In this way, by 1860 the terms shurin and neveska were used to refer to wife's brother and
brother's wife respectively, but now they are simply brat zheny (brother of wife) and zhena
brata (wife of brother). Likewise, the term yatrov, formerly a very important term signifying
husband's brother's wife, has now disappeared entirely. Societies also differ on incest views,
particularly on first cousins. In some countries, normally Catholic societies, you are not
allowed. In other societies, a male person can marry a first female cousin depending on who
cousin she is: father's sister's daughter, mother's brother's daughter, father's brother's daughter,
or mother's brother's daughter.
In addition to kinship systems, the effect of society on language and the way in which
environment is reflected in language can be illustrated with many other instances such as
pronouns of address, colour-terms, lexicon structures, and so on, which are also cross-culturally
variable and specific. Famous examples of the influence of culture in language are the variety
of different words that the Eskimo language has for snow, the variety of words that the Sami
(Lapp) languages of northern Scandinavia have associated with reindeer, and also the large
vocabulary that Bedouin Arabic has for camel. With respect to this example about Eskimo,
John Lyons points out the following:
For example, just as Eskimo is said to have no single word for snow, it seems that most Australian languages
have no word meaning 'sand', but several words which denote various kinds of sand. The reason is obvious
enough in each case. The difference between one kind of snow or sand and another is of great importance in
the day-to-day life of the Eskimo, on the one hand, and of the Australian Aborigine, on the other.
John Lyons (1981: 306)
Lyons (1981: 305-6), like Brown & Lenneberg (1954: 245), when dealing with cultural
differences affecting a language, speaks of codability, which is not necessarily constant and
uniform even throughout a language-community. People tend to notice and remember the
things that are codable in their language, that is to say, things that fall within the scope of
readily available words and expressions that are governed by the fact of being relevant in a
culture or not. The different Eskimo words for snow are as relevant in Australia as the different
words for sand are in the Eskimo society.
II.2.3.c. Linguistic Relativity

We stated that the complex inter-relationships between language and society may take place in

31
different directions: the influence of society on language, which is, as we have just seen, the
case of taboo words, kinship systems, colour-terms, lexicon structures and pronouns of address,
the covariation of social and linguistic phenomena, which is the most common, and the
influence of language on society, which is the case of linguistic relativity, also known as the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or simply the Whorfian Hypothesis. This third direction was first
expounded in the 19th century by the German ethnologist Wilhelm von Humboldt, and in this
century, it was developed by the linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf28.
Humboldt's linguistic determinism advocates that language determines thought: the structure
of a language determines the way people perceive and organize the world. «A speaker's native
language sets up a series of categories which act as a kind of grid through which he categorizes
and conceptualizes different phenomena» (Trudgill 1983a: 24):
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily
understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of
expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without
the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of
communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously
built up on the language habits of the group [...] We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as
we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
Edward Sapir (1929: 207)
Different speakers will therefore view the world differently in so far as the languages they
speak differ structurally. In this way, if most Western countries are so culturally similar, it is,
according to this view, because the grammar of most European languages, collectively referred
to as Standard Average European (SAE), such as English, German, Spanish, French,
Portuguese, Italian, and so on, share many structural features. In order to demonstrate this fact,
that linguistic differences can produce cognitive differences, we have to compare sets of very
different culturally separated languages (Trudgill 1983a: pp. 24-5). If European languages,
SAE, make use of tenses, some American Indian languages do not have tense systems, at least
not as we conceive them, and possibly their concept of time is also somewhat different: In SAE
events occur, have occurred, or will occur, in a definite time (present, past, or future) and space,
whereas in those American Indian languages events are not conceived to occur in that manner,
what is important is validity and evidence, rather than time, whether an event can be warranted
to have occurred, to be occurring, or to be expected. The Hopi Indians of North America in
New Mexico, for instance, have different nuances from SAE for the following sentences:
28
a chemical engineer by training, a fire prevention engineer by vocation, and a linguist by avocation
(Wardhaugh 1986: 212).

32
1. I see that it is new.

2. I see that it is red.
3. I hear that it is new.
4. I hear that it is red.
If in English, each sentence consists of two halves connected by the word that, in Hopi the
equivalent of sentence 1 has one word for that, sentence 2 has another, and sentences 3 and 4
share another, implying different distinctions or nuances, because in that Amerindian culture,
there are three types of 'presentation to consciousness' involved. Peter Trudgill explains the
different distinctions involved:
In sentence 1 the newness of the object in question is inferred by the speaker from a number of different
visual clues and from his past experience. In sentence 2, on the other hand, the redness of the object is
received in the speaker's consciousness as the direct result of a visual sense stimulus. The processes involved
are different, and this difference is reflected in the language. [...] In 3 and 4 the presentation to consciousness
is different again: the redness and newness are both perceived as the result of a direct aural stimulus. In this
case, however, both characteristics are established in exactly the same way, and so only one relating word is
involved.
It seems clear that in some cases differences of language may lead to differences in perception
of the world: the Hopi normally perceives his environment in a rather different way from
English speakers, who in turn have some problems in appreciating the normal Hopi distinction.
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf based his ideas on the study of American Indian
languages, principally the Hopi language of New Mexico. Nevertheless, according to Peter
Trudgill (1983a: 26), any strong form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis cannot be accepted: it
can be argued that thought is to a certain extent conditioned, but not in fact constrained, by
language, among other things, because of the entire possibilities to understand the Hopi
distinctions, though with some problems of appreciation, and to translate between Hopi and
English.
We have seen that language and society are certainly very closely interrelated. These
complex inter-relationships between language and society may occur in different directions:
the influence of society on language, which was the case of taboo words, kinship systems,
colour-terms, pronouns of address, and lexicon structures, the covariation of social and
linguistic phenomena, which is the most common and also the most controversial, the influence
of language on society, which is the case of linguistic relativity. Studying cultural values of
society can help to know more about a given language. Anthropological Linguistics therefore
is concerned with the study of language variation and use in relation to the cultural patterns

33
and beliefs of man, as investigated using the theories and methods of Anthropology29.
II.2.4. Discourse Analysis

It «looks analytically, in various ways, at texts and conversational interaction with a view to
achieving a greater understanding of textual cohesion and coherence, and rules for carrying out
and interpreting conversations» (Trudgill 1984a: 3), but this cannot be completely identified
with the 'discourse analysis' referred to text grammar or the grammatical analysis of units larger
than the sentence, i.e., textual discourse or text analysis 30 . We said in II.1 that
Ethnomethodology overlaps with some aspects of Discourse Analysis in its studies of
conversational discourse, and that the difference rests on the social aims of the former and the
social and linguistic aims of the latter: ethnomethodological studies in conversational analysis
are concerned only with the social meaning that lies behind conversations, whereas Discourse
Analysis is concerned with its organization: the study of rules for conversational interaction,
rules for the structure of discourse, and rules for the interpretation of discourse.
Dell Hymes (1968: 110), based on Jakobson's functions of language31, speaks of seven
basic factors that are necessarily involved in any speech event: a SENDER (addresser), a
RECEIVER (addressee), a MESSAGE FORM, a CHANNEL, a CODE, a TOPIC, and a SETTING (scene,
situation). These seven factors are the framework that characterizes social interaction, and
therefore they are the basic and invariable principle necessary in any conversational activity:
who speaks to whom, when, how, what, and to what ends.
Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, in Sacks et al. (1974), made the
most influential proposal about the organization of interactive events: after observing audio
recordings of real conversations, they stated that conversation is a kind of organized speech
exchange system which is based on a turn-taking mechanism and is rule-governed:
-A 'turn' consists of not only the right but also the obligation to speak:
If someone were reporting a conversation between Joan and Mary, they might say of one point 'and then
Mary didn't say anything' in spite of the fact that at the moment in question neither Joan nor Mary said
29
For further details on Anthropological Linguistics, see Edwin Ardener (ed) (1971) and Dell Hymes (1983).
30
According to Ralph Fasold (1990: 65), Discourse Analysis can be considered as the field within
Sociolinguistics that has undergone more research activity in recent years than any other. He subdivides Discourse
Analysis into the study of texts, which is a prominent area of Linguistics in Europe and is often called text linguistics,
and the study of interactive events.
31
See Roman Jakobson's «Linguistics and Poetics», Selected Writings III: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar
of Poetry. The Hague: Mouton, 1981.

34
anything. The point is, of course, that it was Mary's 'turn', and that is why she is the one who is deemed to
have remained silent.
-Changes of speakers recur, or at least occur, by means of adjacency pairs, stimulus-plus-

response sequences.
-Overwhelmingly, one party talks at a time, though occurrences of more than one speaker at
a time are common but brief.
-Exchanges of turn (transitions from one to the next) with no gap and no overlap are common,
though they are combined with instances of only slight gap or overlap in most cases.
-There are turn-allocation techniques, by means of which the person currently speaking can
select the next person, or even the next person may be self-selected.
-The order and length of individual speaker's turns, the topic, participants, and distribution of
turns are not predetermined. That is to say, conversational situations are spontaneous and
natural in two senses: on the one hand, because both parties, if they do not know themselves,
«must fairly quickly start making judgements» about what they can accomplish when they
begin to read each other in order to know the kind of language they can use (Wardhaugh, 1985:
24). On the other hand, because of functioning following adjacency pairs, they have to
improvise during the course of the conversation:
The meaning of a conversation, therefore, is something that is negotiated during the course of conversation
rather than directly expressed. What is going on, what is meant, depends on what has gone before, what is
currently happening, and what may or may not happen. It is not fixed, but subject to constant review and
reinterpretation.
Ronald Wardhaugh (1985: 33)
This means, as John Laver & Peter Trudgill (1979: 28) point out, that in a conversation «being
a listener to speech is not unlike being a detective. The listener not only has to establish what
it was that was said, but also has to construct, from an assortment of clues, the affective state
of the speaker and a profile of his identity».
-Conversational interaction makes considerable use of formulas, i.e., routines, and
stereotyped patterns ('frozen chunks') for requesting, advising, apologizing, informing,
agreeing, promising, introducing new topics, turns, interruptions, terminations, silences, and
so on, all that involving a kind of ritual. A conversation has a beginning, a development, and a
conclusion with their own rules. The beginning of the conversation generally involves an
exchange of greetings, and once it has been initiated and the opening forms have been
exchanged, it is necessary the establishment of a topic on which to converse. During the
development of the topic in the interaction, feedbacks (gestures of the listener such as nods of

35
approval: mhm, yes, etc.), the precise moment for an interruption32 («I'm sorry to interrupt»)
and insertion sequences in an interrupted conversational situation («As I was saying»,
«Anyway, where was I?») are important elements in order to guarantee the continuation of a
turn in the turn-taking process. Finally, when the conversation must be brought to a close, there
are pre-closing signals that serve to negotiate the closing. In this way, as Paul Grice (1975: 45)
asserts, conversation is characterized by being a cooperative activity, i.e., conversation implies
a cooperative behaviour, and hence can be regarded as a kind of trade-off:
Conversation involves a kind of trade-off between public benefit and personal profit: you have to give in
order to get. If you do not provide others with responses, feedback, and support, you will find them reluctant
to reciprocate.
Ronald Wardhaugh (1985: 60)
Silence itself is a potent communicative weapon. The pairing of utterances (adjacency pairs)
in conversational situations is so strong that an intentional breaking of the paired relationship
by a failure to supply the second member of the pair can be regarded as a deliberately
uncooperative act. In fact, in a conversation between two English speakers, a silence of longer
than about four seconds is said not to be allowed: if nothing is said after four seconds, there is
a kind of collective embarrassment and a feeling of obligation to say something, and even a
remark about the weather is normally useful.
If we look more specifically at the structure of discourse, we can observe that
conversations consist of structured, though non-randomly, sequences of utterances in the same
way as sentences consist of structured sequences of words. This can be illustrated with the fact
that in most cases conversations are organized so that questions are followed by answers. That
is to say, a discourse structure is typically characterized by the use of the following pattern
(Trudgill 1978b: 5):
(Q1 A1)(Q2 A2)(Q3 A3)
where Q1, Q2 and Q3 are questions, paired with their appropriate answers, A1, A2 and A3. In
Trudgill (1983a: 127) we can find an example of this form:
Q1: Have you written to John yet?

A1: No, not yet.
32
«There are also points in the structure of a conversation where it is possible, and points where it is not
possible, to interrupt a speaker (an irritating fact about small children is that they do not always know the 'rules'
about where those points are)» (Trudgill 1983a: pp. 126-7).

36
Q2: Are you going to write?

A2: Yes, eventually.
However, it is also possible to find more complex sequences in conversations: questions and
answers can appear embedded in one another following this pattern:
(Q1 (Q2 (Q3 A3) A2) Q1)
Erving Goffman (1976: 259) examined conversational dialogue; in his «Replies and
Responses» we can find an example of this type:
┌─── Q1: Have you got the time?

│┌── Q2: Standard or Daylight Saving?
││┌─ Q3: What are you running on?
││└─ A3: Standard.
│└── A2: Standard then.
└─── A1: It's five o'clock.
In Trudgill (1983a: 127) we can also find an example following this embedded pattern:
Q1: Have you seen John yet?

Q2: Is he back?
Q3: Didn't you know?
A3: No, I didn't.
A2: He's back all right.
A1: Well, I haven't seen him.
If we observe summonses, we can see that, like questions, they are normally followed by
answers too (Trudgill 1983a: 127):
Bill, S1: John!

John, A1: Coming!
However, summonses, unlike question-answer sequences, do not allow embedding in their

structure. Emanuel Schegloff (1968) wondered why it is the person that picks up the telephone,
rather than the person that makes the call, who speaks first. Schegloff suggested that it is the
ringing of the telephone itself which is interpreted as the summons part of a summons-answer
discourse sequence; that is why we normally answer «Hello?».

37
The nature of the cohesion of conversational discourse is also studied within Discourse
Analysis. The structure of conversational discourse is maintained through the repetition of
lexical items across speakers, pronominalization, and the use of discourse markers (words with
no lexical content). Deborah Schiffrin (1987) argues that neither the markers nor the discourse
within which they function can be understood from one point of view alone, but only as an
integration of structural, semantic, pragmatic, and social factors. She carried out a comparative
analysis of markers within conversational discourse and concluded that markers provide
contextual coordinates which aid in the production and interpretation of coherent conversation
at both local and global levels of organization. Discourse markers, both the particles mm, uhuh,
oh, well, now, then, actually, you know, I mean, etc. and the connectives so, because, and, but,
or, anyway, etc., perform important functions in conversation.
Discourse Analysis is also concerned with rules for the interpretation of discourse. We
know that sentences can be divided into statements, questions and imperatives, according to
their form, and into assertions, requests, and commands according to their functions:
Statements: (S-V-O) ───────→ Assertions

Questions: (V-S-O) ───────→ Requests
Imperatives: (V-O) ───────→ Commands
However, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between them, since, for instance, a
statement does not only function as an assertion but also as a command; a question can work
not only as a request but also as an assertion; an imperative can function not only as a command
but also as a request; and so on. How is it possible to distinguish between meaningful, coherent
conversations and those which are not coherent? With this respect, Peter Trudgill (1983a: 128)
points out that «it is normally possible, at least for adults, to distinguish between coherent
conversation-type sequences of utterances and random sequences». In this way, it should not
be difficult to distinguish between question-answer sequence (a):
(a) A: Are you going on holiday this year?

B: I haven't got any money.
and question-answer sequence (b):
(b) A: Are you going on holiday this year?

B: My favourite colour is yellow.
Obviously, example (b) does not make sense at all, whereas (a) can perfectly be interpreted.
William Labov (1972b) demonstrated that it is possible to develop rules for the interpretation

38
of discourse. That is to say, there are a number of rules for the interpretation of conversational
discourse that adults have already mastered and that children have not yet and thus do not
always understand. Like example (a), though there is no obvious linguistic connection between
A's question and B's answer, according to Labov, the following is also a perfectly coherent
piece of discourse:
A: Are you going to work tomorrow?

B: I'm on jury duty.
But if there is no obvious linguistic connection between A's question and B's answer and it is
a perfectly coherent piece of discourse, what is the connection? William Labov states that this
kind of cohesion can be handled by a discourse rule as follows:
If A makes a request for information Q-S1, and B makes a statement S2 in response which cannot be expanded
by rules of ellipsis to the form XS1Y, then S2 is heard as an assertion that there exists a proposition P known
to both A and B:
If S2, then (E)S1
where (E) is an existential operator, and from this proposition there is inferred an answer to A's request:
(E)S1.
rule that Peter Trudgill (1983a: 128) interprets as follows:
... if speaker A makes a request for information and speaker B's response is not related linguistically to the
question [...] then that response must be interpreted as asserting that there exists a proposition, known to
both A and B, which does not make a connection, and from which an answer to A's question can be inferred.
In the case of the previous example, the proposition known to both A and B, which B's reply
can be heard as asserting, is that people who are on jury duty are not allowed to go to work
(Trudgill 1978b: 6). When we dealt with the concerns of ethnomethodological studies in II.1,
we saw that in an example like the one above, Ethnomethodology would be interested in the
study of the content of the proposition and the speaker's knowledge of the world, whereas
Discourse Analysis, would be concerned with the form of the discourse rule itself and the fact
of the proposition33.
Walt Wolfram and his then six-year-old son Todd Wolfram (Wolfram & Wolfram
1977) demonstrated the existence of rules of discourse precisely by means of breaking them.
He investigated people's reactions to questionings of the following type:
33
See Trudgill (1978b, 1983a and 1983b).

39
A: How old are you?

B: Thirty-three.
A: How come?
Walt Wolfram & Todd Wolfram here broke the rule by means of asserting, by implication, that
it is not obvious why someone, B in this case, was thirty-three: there is a rule of discourse that
interprets a «how come?» question as an assertion of the fact that there is a non-obvious
proposition which is known to B, but which is not known to A. Reactions to his «how come?»
question showed very clearly that something had gone wrong throughout the conversation, that
is, that a rule had certainly been broken. Therefore, reactions were diverse: some people
laughed and/or were embarrassed, some responded humorously, and other even searched for
some non-obvious proposition that would make sense of the interchange, such as «I look older
than 33 because ...» or «I'm still a student because ...».
We said above that there are a number of rules for the interpretation of conversational
discourse that adults have already mastered and that children do not understand simply because
they have not yet mastered them. According to Dell Hymes (1972), during the process of
acquisition of competence for the first language grammar (Chomskyan competence), children
also acquire what he calls communicative competence, i.e. to become communicatively
competent in conversational interaction; in Trudgill's words:
Young children have to learn not only the pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of their language; they
also have to learn how to use the language in conversational interaction in order to be able to establish social
relationships and participate in two-way communication (rather than monologue).
But such communicative competence is «fed by social experience» (Hymes 1972: 278) and
thus needs more time to be acquired. That is why children sometimes have difficulties with
interpreting conversations; mostly, when they are faced with a speech situation whose
particular rules of interpretation or propositions asserted are still unknown to them. This can
be seen in the following piece of adult-child conversation:
Child: Are we going on holiday this year?

Adult: We haven't got any money
Child: But are we going on holiday?
or in this one:
Linus: Do you want to play with me, Violet?
Violet: You're younger than me. [Shuts the door]
Linus: [puzzled] She didn't answer my question.

40
Walt Wolfram (Wolfram & Wolfram 1977) also confirmed this fact by getting his son, Todd
Wolfram, to carry out the same «how come?» questioning routine as above. The informant's
reaction was the following:
Todd Wolfram: How old are you?

Informant: Thirty-three.
Todd Wolfram: How come?
Informant: Because I was born in 1940.
These examples therefore show that propositions which are obvious to an adult may be non-
obvious to a child, simply because young children are not yet as skilled speakers of their native
language, in the sense of being communicatively competent, as adults.
As Peter Trudgill (1983a: 128) affirms, «conversations, then, are structured, rule-
governed, non-random sequences of utterances». Within Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis
is therefore concerned with the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected spoken or
written discourse. It deals with the organization of conversational interaction: rules for
conversational interaction, rules for the structure of discourse, and also rules for the
interpretation of discourse34. Two Applications of this area are provided in Section VIII.5.
II.2.5. The Ethnography of Communication

In 1962, Dell Hymes (1962) proposed a field of study whose central motive was to create a
theory of linguistic communication grounded in the comparative analysis of many communities
and their distinctive ways of speaking. The Ethnography of Communication, also known as
The Ethnography of Speaking35 or Ethnolinguistics, is therefore a field of study which «looks
at the role of language in the 'communicative conduct of communities' -the ways in which
language is actually used in different cultures. It examines the functions and uses of styles,
dialects, and languages, and looks at the way in which verbal arts and speech acts are
interpreted and carried through in particular communities» (Trudgill 1978b: 7). In other words,
the Ethnography of Communication is concerned with how and why language is used and how
its use varies in different cultures. In addition to Linguistics, it involves aspects from Sociology,
Social Anthropology, Education, Folklore, Poetics and from the kind of Discourse Analysis we
34
Very useful works in this field are D. Burton & M. Stubbs (1975), Michael Stubbs (1983), and Gillian
Brown & George Yule (1983).
35
Ralph Fasold (1990) considers the Ethnography of Communication, rather than Ethnography of Speaking,
as more appropriate since the former suggests a wider scope than the latter.

41
discussed in II.2.4 (conversational discourse analysis), though it tends to be more cross-

culturally based than Discourse Analysis. The origins of work in this field are in part in the
recognition that learning a language of a particular culture is not only learning a large number
of words in that language, or how to construct an endless variety of sentences, but also learning
a language is becoming able to know how to converse and interact like a native. When
discussing Discourse Analysis we said that there are a number of rules for the interpretation of
conversational discourse that adults have already mastered and that children do not understand
simply because they have not yet mastered them: from the point of view of mother tongue,
during the process of acquisition of competence for the first language grammar, in Chomsky's
sense, children also acquire communicative competence, in Dell Hymes's sense, i.e. to become
communicatively competent in conversational interaction. Likewise, from the point of view of
second language teaching and learning, language students, despite having communicative
competence in their native language, have to learn sets of formulas of the target language and
have to understand the cultural values36 which underlie speech in the target community in
order to use them in any situation appropriately and in order to interpret what is said with any
accuracy, since rules for the appropriate use of speech change notably from one society to
another.
Peter Trudgill37 mentions several factors of conversational interaction that are present
and variable cross-culturally (they require specific norms for using language in a particular
community): formulas, silence, loudness, directness/indirectness, telephone behaviour and
distance. So far as formulas are concerned, one obvious aspect of the acquisition of
communicative competence which often impresses foreign language learners is the fact that
language makes considerable use of routines, and stereotyped patterns ('frozen chunks') for
openings, greetings, thanks, apologizing, introducing topics, turns, interruptions, terminations,
and so on, involving a kind of ritual. For instance, English speakers often feel 'constrained' for
the absence of a real equivalent to please in Scandinavian languages, and likewise Europeans
are often distressed for the absence in English of a real equivalent for bon appétit (French) or
buen provecho (Spanish), or for the much narrower function in English of please than
bitte/prego, etc. Trudgill (1978b: 8) examined the relatively recent usage in Britain of the form
cheers!, which affects not only non-English speakers in general but also, within the English-
speaking world, non-British English speakers. Originally this form was a drinking toast but
now it functions both as a formula for leave-taking and for thanking. The problem for non-
British English speakers lies in when cheers! is used and when not, since, for example, you
36
«One has to learn how to use which variety when; which linguistic formulae to employ; and how to be
polite, impolite, friendly, unfriendly, and so on, in an appropriate way» (Trudgill 1978b: 8).
37
In a 1990/91 Sociolinguistics lecture about The Ethnography of Speaking at the University of Essex.

42
cannot use it as a leave-taking formula in a case such as the following:
A: Well, my dear, take care of yourself, and I`ll see you in six months' time.
B: Cheers!
and, similarly, you cannot use it as a kind of thanking formula in a case such as the following:
A: I'd like to take you out to dinner tomorrow night.

B: Cheers!
The exact functions of the form cheers! are outlined by Trudgill (1978b: 8) as follows:
It seems, in fact, that amongst certain sections of the community 'Cheers!' can be employed (a) as a drinking
toast, but particularly (b) as a way of thanking whoever has bought a particular round of drinks, and
presumably by extension (c) as a way of thanking someone for a minor service that they have just rendered
in your presence -the opening of a door, the picking up of a dropped pencil, or something similar. And it is
also used as a leave-taking formula (perhaps by extension of a 'thanks and goodbye' usage and/or of the 'your
good health'-type component of the drinking toast) but only in informal telephone conversations, in familiar
letters, or if the leave-taking is a routine or minor one. Other less frequent uses are equivalent to 'Hello!' in
fleeting encounters where no further conversation is going to take place; and to 'here you are' (cf. bitte, prego,
above) in giving someone something.
If in European societies there are differences in the use of these formulas, in other distant
cultures differences are even more striking. In «How to Ask for a Drink in Subanun», Frake
(1964) described language norms in the Subanun of the Philippines, which employs certain
kinds of speech in drinking encounters. We know that the turn-taking mechanism allows one
person to speak at a time; each party is recognized to have the floor at a particular moment by
means of a role shifting. If Western societies have a 'no gap, no overlap' rule for conversational
turn-taking (Fasold 1990: 40), there are however societies, some Caribbean communities such
as Antigua, where talk is expected of people and it is perfectly normal for everybody to speak
at a time, at least in certain situations (Trudgill 1983a: 131).
Regarding pauses, in conversations there are even rules about silence. There are
cultures, such as the Western ones, in which the pairing of utterances (adjacency pairs) in
conversational situations is, as we know, so strong that an intentional breaking of the paired
relationship by a failure to supply the second member of the pair can be regarded as a
deliberately uncooperative act. There are however other societies in which people do not talk
unless they have something important to say, and therefore quite prolonged silences are
tolerated in their conversational situations (Trudgill 1983a: pp. 131-2). This is the case of North
American Indian languages such as Athabaskan, Apache and Navajo.
Loudness in conversations also varies significantly between one society and another.

43
American people are known to speak louder than British in social interaction. The linguist
Deborah Tannen, from the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University (Washington
D.C.), grew up in a New York Jewish community; at the age of 18 she went to college at
Georgetown University, where she discovered that she had hearing impairment. Therefore, she
began to use hearing aid occasionally, but on coming to Britain she needed it continuously38.
The rules that govern telephone behaviour also vary from one society to another
(Trudgill 1983a: pp. 130-1). In a telephone conversation, whereas in Western societies it is the
answerer who speaks first, in contrast, in Japan it is the caller who is expected to be the first to
speak. Even within Western societies, there are differences in telephone behaviour. The norms
for telephone conversations in French are very different, since it is normal for callers 1) to
check a number, 2) to identify themselves, 3) to apologize for the intrusion, and 4) ask for the
addressee:
Answerer: Hello.
Caller: Is that 123-4567?
Answerer: Yes.
Caller: This is André here. I'm sorry to disturb you. Is Jean there?
Nevertheless, Americans go straight into stage 4:
Answerer: Hello.
Caller: Is John there?
Regarding indirectness/directness in speech situations, there are also some societies

or cultures which use indirectness more frequently than others, and misunderstandings due to
different uses of indirectness are commonplace not only in cross-cultural communication but
also in communication amongst members of the same culture. Normally, subordinates, for
instance, cannot directly state what they like or think. Greeks seem to make beliefs and dislikes
known by rather more indirect means. Deborah Tannen (1982) investigated indirectness in
male-female discourse by Greeks, Americans, and Greek Americans, and came to the
conclusion that conversational style is both a consequence and indicator of ethnicity;
conversational style, according to her, «includes both how meaning is expressed, as seen in
patterns of indirectness, and what meaning is expressed, as in how much enthusiasm is
expected». In Asia, particularly in India, a remark about any object may be taken as a request
for it.
38
Ibidem.

44
Although it is just a hypothesis, according to Peter Trudgill39, in a hierarchical society

a non-native speaker must be more careful with indirectness than in a more liberal society: the
more hierarchical a society is, the more indirect it is in social interaction; in contrast, the more
egalitarian, or liberal, a society is, the less indirect it is in social interaction.
Furthermore, even the distance between participants in conversations also changes
cross-culturally. People either stand near each other or at certain distances when talking
depending on their cultural values of behaving in interaction. In fact, in Semiotics, Proxemics
is concerned with the variation in posture, distance and tactile contact in human
communication; these variations in interpersonal space are often culture-specific, and can be
analyzed in terms of sex, age, intimacy, social role and other such factors. In addition, Kinesics
studies the systematic use of facial expression and body gesture to communicate meaning40.
An important area related to the Ethnography of Speaking is the Ethnography of
Writing, the study of writing systems 41 . Robert Kaplan (1966) demonstrated how cultural
patterns of meaning notably affect the formal organization of written language. After studying
paragraph organization in essay forms in a cross-cultural way, he concluded that the principles
of organization were remarkably different from one language to another, and suggested the
following drawings to show the structural patterns for some languages:
That is to say, with the same topic for writing, an English organizes the whole argumentation
in a linear way -a linear development of the paragraph-, a Semitic does it in a parallel way -
development through parallelism-, an Oriental in a circular and tangential way -using a number
of different outside perspectives-, an speaker of a Romance language organizes the whole
reasoning using many digressions, and a Russian speaker also using many digressions but more
39
Ibidem.
40
See Ray L. Birdwhistell (1972) «A Kinesic-Linguistic Exercise: The Cigarette Scene», in John Gumperz
& Dell Hymes (eds) (1972), pp. 381-404.
41
See Keith H. Basso (1974) «The Ethnography of Writing», in Richard Bauman & Joel Sherzer (eds) (1974),
pp. 425-32.

45
irrelevantly and less related to the substance of the composition than the Romance language
speaker's writing.
The Ethnography of Communication is also concerned with routines, specialized and
ritual speech acts, in particular communities. For instance, in most communities there are rules
for activities such as the narration of stories and the telling of jokes, and even studies of Black
American speech acts, such as 'sounding', can also be considered under this heading42 (Trudgill
1978b: 7). Irony is also cross-culturally variable. British sense of humour is known to be very
different from American; in fact, «many British people in the USA have made remarks of a
teasing, ironic, tongue-in-check sort -only to find that Americans have taken them seriously
and have even, therefore, taken offence» (Peter Trudgill 1985a: x).
John Gumperz (1982b) showed how verbal communication can serve either to reinforce
or to overcome those barriers that exist between individuals of different social and ethnic
backgrounds. Peter Trudgill (1983a: 131) pointed out that differences in the rules for social
interaction between cultures «can often lead, in cross-cultural communication, to
misunderstanding and even hostility», since «where cultural differences are greater, the
misunderstandings can be greater too». That is the reason why John Gumperz & Jenny Cook-
Gumperz (1982: 14) suggest that in an encounter between culturally different speakers a
communicative flexibility is required to be successful.
The Ethnography of Communication therefore «studies the norms of communicative
conduct in different communities, and deals with methods for studying these norms», and the
relevance of this sociolinguistic discipline is obvious (Trudgill 1982c):
... it is becoming increasingly clear that it is a topic of considerable importance, not only to linguists and
anthropologists, but also to language teachers, educationists, language planners, international business
people, and anyone else involved in cross-cultural communication. The recognition by the academic
community, and now increasingly by the wider community also, that human societies may differ
dramatically from one another in the way they communicate, is an important step.
An application of this area is provided in section VIII.343.
42
A good example of an study of this type is in William Labov (1972b) «Rules for Ritual Insults» (see
BIBLIOGRAPHY).
43
For further details on the Ethnography of Communication, see Muriel Saville-Troike (1982), and for an
extensive bibliography on works in this area see Gerry Philipsen & Donal Carbaugh (1986) «A Bibliography of
Fieldwork in the Ethnography of Communication», in Language in Society, 15, 1986, pp. 387-97.

46
II.3. Linguistic Objectives

This third group, or category, consists of «studies in the field of language and society which
are purely linguistic in intent» (Trudgill 1983b: 2). They are, according to Peter Trudgill,
«based on empirical work on language as it is spoken in its social context and are intended to
answer questions and deal with topics of central interest to linguists». Unlike the previous two
groups, in this category the term sociolinguistics is uncontroversial, on account of the fact that
its objectives are purely linguistic:
All work in this category, in fact, is aimed ultimately at improving linguistic theory and at developing our
understanding of the nature of language, and in recent years, for instance, has led to the development of
'variation theory' -the recognition of 'fuzziness' in linguistic systems, and the problems of incorporating
variability into linguistic descriptions. Work of this sort, that is to say, is very definitely not 'linguistics as a
social science'.
Peter Trudgill (1983b: pp. 2-3)
As sociolinguistic areas with purely linguistic objectives are Traditional Dialectology,

Secular Linguistics and Geolinguistics. It is under this category where Trudgill has most
extensively worked and published44. Chapters IV, V and VII belong to this category.
II.3.1. Traditional Dialectology

Also called Linguistic Geography or Dialect Geography, Dialectology has traditionally been
concerned with the systematic study of regional dialects. Regionally distinctive words -either
in form, sense, or pronunciation- were the centre of attention of dialectologists, who collected,
plotted, and compiled them in dialect/linguistic atlases. The modern study of Dialectology
dates back to 1876, when Georg Wenker made the first dialect survey in Germany. He sent a
list of forty sentences written in standard German to nearly 50,000 schoolmasters in north
Germany asking them to return the list transcribed into the local dialect. The result of the survey
was the first linguistic atlas published, Sprachatlas des Deutchen Reichs, deposited in Marburg
and Berlin in 1881. Wenker carried on gathering questionnaires and in 1926 finished the
Deutcher Sprachatlas. In France, in 1896, the use of trained fieldworkers to gather data began
to take the place of the postal questionnaire. Jules Gilliéron devised a questionnaire that isolated
about 1,500 specific items to elicit responses and chose a fieldworker, Edmond Edmont45, to
44
Cf. Chambers & Trudgill (1980), Edwards, Trudgill & Weltens (1984), Hughes & Trudgill (1979), Trudgill
(1974a, 1978b, 1983a, 1983b, 1984b, 1986a, 1990a), Trudgill & Tzavaras (1975), Trudgill & Hannah (1982), Trudgill
& Chambers (1991), in addition to a large number of articles (see BIBLIOGRAPHY).
45
A grocer by profession, Edmond Edmont, chosen for the astuteness of his hear, cycled through the French
countryside selecting informants and conducting interviews from 1896 to 1900 (Chambers & Trudgill 1980: 20).

47
record them at each interview using a phonetic notation consistently. This last survey, Atlas
Linguistique de la France, has been enormously influential on account of the fact that it was
the first survey to use a direct method and a phonetic notation consistently, and on account of
the efficacy of the project from inception to publication. Similar national surveys were carried
out in Italy and southern Switzerland (Sprach- und Sachatlas des Italiens und der Südschweiz
by Karl Jaberg and Jakob Jud, 1928-1940), Catalonia (Atlas Lingüistic de Catalunya, by A.
Griera, inaugurated in 1924), the United States and Canada (The Linguistic Atlas of the United
States and Canada, coordinated by Hans Kurath, 1939-1943), England (Survey of English
Dialects, S.E.D., conceived by Eugen Dieth of Zurich and Harold Orton of Leeds and
inaugurated in 1948), Spain (Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica, ALPI, coordinated by
Tomás Navarro Tomás46, 1923-1954), Romania, Denmark, Norway, Wales, Scotland, etc.
In all these surveys, the selection of informants was made bearing in mind certain
characteristics that most speakers had to fulfil, regardless of cultural, socioeconomic, and
topographic differences. These requirements are what Chambers & Trudgill (1980: 33) labelled
with the acronym NORMs: informants should be nonmobile (to guarantee that their speech
was characteristic of the region in which they lived), older (to reflect the speech of an ancient
era), rural (where innovations were more unlike to take place), and male (because women's
speech tended, or tends, to be more self-conscious and class-conscious than men's speech).
Questionnaires could be either direct or indirect. The second type of questions can be
divided into two groups: naming, with Talking and Reverse questions as subtypes, and
completing, with Converting questions as subtype (Chambers & Trudgill 1980: pp. 24-8).
Examples of these types of questions are the following:
┌─Indirect Questions: «what is this?» (holding a cup)

│
│ ┌─naming questions: «What do you say to a caller at the door
│ │ if you want him to enter?» (come in)
│ │
│ │ ┌─Talking questions: «What can you make from milk?» (butter, cheese)
│ │ │
│ │ └─Reverse questions: «What's the barn for, and where is it?»
│ │ (focusing on the pronunciation of barn)
│ │
│ └─completing questions: «You sweet tea with ...?» (sugar)
│ Converting questions: «A tailor is a man who ... suits» (makes)
│
└─Direct Questions: «What do you call a 'cup'?»
«How do you say 'fifty'?»
46
Griera's Atlas Lingüistic de Catalunya was later included in ALPI (cf. Manuel Alvar 1973; Gimeno 1990).

48
Linguistic maps can be either display maps or interpretative maps. The former ones are more
common, they «simply transfer the tabulated responses for a particular item onto a map, putting
the tabulation into a geographical perspective»; the latter, interpretative maps, «attempt to
make a more general statement, by showing the distribution of predominant variants from
region to region» (Chambers & Trudgill 1980: 28-33).
Under the climate of historical and comparative linguistics, Traditional Dialectology
was motivated by the Neogrammarian Hypothesis which, supported with the discovery of
Grimm and Verner's Laws, claimed that sound change is universal, continuous and regular;
that is to say, sound changes take place mechanically according to exceptionless laws:
It is a claim of great generality, and rests on equally general assumptions: first, that sound changes, or at
least some of them, take place 'mechanically', which means without the conscious will or even the awareness
of the members of the speech community involved, and second, that all speakers of all languages are subject
to this limitation. A further assumption, characteristic of much nineteenth-century thought, was that a
'mechanical' process allows no room for variation and uncertainty; given a certain set of conditions as input,
the result of the process will be completely predictable, in the form of exceptionless 'laws'.
W. Nelson Francis (1983: 146)
Thus, with the help of those surveys carried out and assuming 1) that dialects were discrete
entities, 2) that speakers were either speakers of a particular dialect or not, and 3) that dialect
boundaries indeed existed, dialectologists began to draw isoglosses47 -the principal theoretical
construct of Traditional Dialectology- on maps standing for the discreteness of dialect areas:
words and pronunciations were not randomly distributed, but confined to particular regions.
Nevertheless, the real situation was much more complicated than that, since when maps for
individual features were combined into overall displays incorporating a number of dialect
differences dialectologists, rather distressed, found not only that a few isoglosses really
coincided but also that they crisscrossed the maps in an apparently casual manner. For example,
in England it is a fact well-known that speakers from the south of the country pronounce pair
of words like put/putt and could/cud with different vowels (/ʊ/ and /ʌ/ respectively in each
pair), and words like path, dance and past with a long a (/ɑ:/), while speakers of northern
varieties of English make no distinction between put or could and putt or cud (they are all
pronounced /ʊ/) and use a short a (/æ/) in path, dance, etc. However, it is not possible simply
47
Strictly speaking, isoglosses are lines drawn on maps separating the geographical areas which have
particular word uses from those which do not, and isophones mark the limits of phonological features; frequently,
however, isoglosses are used in both cases (Trudgill 1975b: 232, and 1990b: 266, note 2). In Chambers & Trudgill
(1980: pp. 112-6) isoglosses are structured regarding the type of linguistic feature they describe: lexical,
pronunciation, phonetic, phonemic, morphological, syntactic and semantic isoglosses.

49
to divide England into two main dialect areas, north and south, on the basis of these
characteristics since, for the most part, the put/putt isogloss does not coincide with the path
isogloss, and even there are areas where speakers have /ɑ:/ in dance but /æ/ in past. Gradually,
what they found is that sound changes may perfectly appear in different ways in different places
and that dialects are not discrete entities at all. As dialect boundaries as such could not be found,
one initial reaction was to suggest that there were no such things as dialects. Eventually,
patterns could be detected on dialect maps, and dialectologists were able to explain certain
types of phenomena which tended to be recurrent from map to map: central places, focal areas,
transition areas, bundles of isoglosses, wedges and relic areas:
Example of a dialect area
In dialect areas there were central places, urban centres, which were the source of focal areas,
also called central or core areas, dialect centres. These focal areas were surrounded either by
transition areas48, which were crossed by many isoglosses and did not belong clearly to any
focal area, or by bundles of isoglosses, numbers of isoglosses running close enough together,
in the same direction, to approach a true dialect boundary. Dialect boundaries do not exist as
sharp lines but as transition areas within a language continuum (see III.3), i.e., most dialectal
differences are of the more-or-less rather than the either-or type 49 , like the colours of the
48
As transition areas resulted from the fact that different innovations travelled similar but not identical
distances in different directions, the differential location of isoglosses could often be accounted for in terms of the
chronology of their origin, in addition to changes in communications networks at different periods of history (Trudgill
1975b: 234).
49
That is the reason why, on another occasion, Trudgill (1983a) says that «a German living near the Dutch
frontier may more easily understand a visitor from Amsterdam than from Munich».

50
rainbow:
There really are no dialects and hence no dialect boundaries; instead there is a gradual but continuous and
cumulative change across the countryside. There is no break in the chain of intercommunication from one
neighbourhood to the next, but nonetheless an accumulation of differences which ultimately results in
incomprehensibility between the two ends of the chain. The paradox is that there clearly are dialect
differences at the extremes, but between them only a continuous transition area without boundaries or 'local
dialects' of its own.
W. Nelson Francis (1983: 152)
In this way, though dialects were obviously no longer considered as discrete entities,
they remained valid as 'relative' units: with respect to the linguistic features discussed above
(/ʊ/-/ʌ/ and /ɑ:/-/æ/), we could state now that the north and south of England are unambiguously
focal areas while the Midlands is a transition area.
Language is a dynamic phenomenon, and is continually subject to change; dialect maps
were influential in the development of the wave theory of linguistic change, which evidenced
the inadequacy of the family-tree image of linguistic change50:
It might be true that historically related languages could be regarded as having descended from a common
'parent' language, but one could not ignore the subsequent influence of the 'daughter' languages and dialects
on each other. Innovations starting in one language (or what was later to become a separate language) could
spread to other neighbouring languages rather like ripples spreading on a pond.
FAMILY TREES
Proto-Indo-European Proto-Mayan
Balto- Celtic Illyrian Armenian Albanian Anatolian Tocharian Huastecan Cholan- Eastern
Slavic Tzeltalan Mayan
Germanic Italic Thracian Phrygian Helenic Indo- Yucatecan Greater
Iranian Q’anjobalan
Uralic
Finno-
Ugric
Samoyed
50
Wave-theory is a term used in Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics as part of a dynamic model of
language change; this theory suggests that speech variation spread from a specific linguistic area, having maximum
effect on adjacent languages, and progressively less effect on languages further away. Family-tree Theory is a term
used by nineteenth-century comparative philologists to characterise a genetic model of the relationships between
languages, being a 'family' of languages the set of languages deriving from a common ancestor, or 'parent'.

51
Proto-Indo-European
Germanic Celtic Italic
North West East Insular Continental Latino-

Germanic Germanic Germanic Faliscan
Goidelic
Old Old Old High Gothic Faliscan
English Dutch German Old
Irish Latin
Middle
English Manx Irish Romance
Gaelic
Modern West
English Scottish Romance
Gaelic
Frisian Low Galician Spanish French
German Brythonic
Portuguese Catalan
Welsh Breton
East
Cornish Romance
Rhaeto- Dalmatian Sardinian

Romance
Romanian Italian
From the configuration of certain isoglosses on maps it was noted that linguistic forms had
obviously spread outwards as innovations from particular centres. These spreadings of new
forms took the form of wedges driven into the areas of older forms, where relic areas, territories
preserving the linguistic features of the stage of development previous to the spreading of new
forms, could be found as a result of being left behind and isolated by two encountered wedges.
Those particular centres, focal areas, from which innovations began to spread, were generally
either urban centres or major lines of communication, whereas relic areas tended to be located
in isolated areas like mountain valleys or on the distant periphery of language areas. Linguistic

52
innovations also tended to spread further along major rivers than they did over more difficult
terrain 51 , and bundles of isoglosses sometimes coincided with political boundaries or with
physical barriers. Maps also suggested the probable direction taken by a linguistic change or
could even shed light on problems such as the relative age of two given current forms. As a
result of these evidences from maps, a whole school of linguists, Neolinguistics or Linguistica
Spaziale52, based its theoretical foundations on five principles or areal norms to be used in
Historical Linguistics, amongst them: 1) if, of two linguistic forms, one is found in isolated
areas and the other in areas more accessible for communication, then the former is the older;
2) if, of two linguistic forms, one is found in peripheral areas and the other in central areas,
then the former is the older; 3) if, of two forms, one is used over a larger area than the other,
then that is the older. But, as a method of Historical Linguistics, this Linguistica Spaziale was
proved to be of doubtful value for the number of exceptions arisen to these principles.
Sound-laws themselves, like Grimm and Verner's Laws, have no explanatory value
because they are no more than summaries of what happened in a particular area or
language-community between two points in time. The five neolinguistic principles, or areal
norms, though they have some undoubted value as guidelines, cannot be considered as 'laws'
for their lack of flexibility in a so complex field of study such as linguistic variation. Unlike
these law-generalisations in Traditional Dialectology, it is now clear that linguistic changes
take place where they take place simply because they have the chance to be successful there
better than anywhere else, and once appeared, they spread to other areas if the conditions are
favourable. The processes involved in the origin, development, and diffusion of linguistic
forms, as has already been stated, were therefore more complicated than the simple
Neogrammarian principle and the later generalized principles of Neolinguistics. Not only
geographical features such as physical barriers and distance are involved in the diffusion of
linguistic forms, but also social aspects, such as social barriers, do intervene and are equally
effective:
... social barriers are as effective as geographical barriers in halting or slowing down the diffusion of fashions,
ideas, values and speech forms which have originated in a particular social group, from one section of the
community to another.
And where there are much more mobility and flux is undoubtedly in urban communities
51
«One of the most important dialect boundaries in England runs through the Fens, which until quite
recently was an isolated, swampy area which was very difficult to get across» (Trudgill: 1990a: 7). The Fens are
certain low-lying districts in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and adjoining counties.
52
Cf. Matteo Bartoli (1925, 1945) and Giuliano Bonfante (1947).

53
(Trudgill 1983a: pp. 171-2):
The reason for this difference between urban and rural accents is that linguistic innovations, like other
innovations, often spread from one urban centre to another, and only later spread out into the surrounding
countryside. This is due to the general economic, demographic and cultural dominance of town over country,
and to the structure of the communication network.
Accordingly, Traditional Dialectology consisted of the study of geographically varying

linguistic forms in rural areas, which was of considerable value, since with those surveys
important and interesting linguistic data were recorded before disappearing forever, but that
today would not make sense, since nowadays the greatest proportion of population is the
geometrical opposite of NORMs: mobile, younger, urban, and female (Chambers & Trudgill
1980: 35). It is in urban communities where language is mostly heterogeneous; in fact, as
Trudgill (1983a: 37) stated, «the more heterogeneous a society is, the more heterogeneous its
language is». But the fact that the heterogeneity of language is very much a complex
phenomenon made dialectologists to ignore, deliberately and for many years, the
heterogeneous language of cities and younger speakers, as both creators and reflectors,
simultaneously, of language change in progress, concentrating their studies either on the
idiolect or the speech of NORMs in small, isolated villages, with the aim of finding the 'real'
or 'pure' dialects. Currently «linguistic studies suggest that there is no such thing as a 'pure'
dialect, since most varieties of language appear to be variable and to show signs of influence
from other varieties» (Chambers & Trudgill 1980: 56). In this way, dialectologists were
obtaining an imperfect and inaccurate picture of the speech of different areas, and sometimes
they were considered as 'mere butterfly collectors'; in fact, young native speakers of a particular
area were often disturbed to discover that the speech recorded in field studies of their region
was completely alien to anything that could be familiar to them (Chambers & Trudgill 1980).
In addition to the spatial (geographical) and temporal (particularly diachronic) dimensions
emphasized by Traditional Rural Dialectology, a kind of Modern Urban Dialectology, bearing
in mind a social dimension, a synchronic point of view, and using a more reliable methodology
and techniques, was evidenced to be needed53.
II.3.2. Secular Linguistics

This is the area within the spectrum of Language and Society which Peter Trudgill considers
as Sociolinguistics Proper, since it is the most purely linguistic study of language in the field
53
For further details on Traditional Dialectology by Peter Trudgill, see Chambers & Trudgill (1980),
Edwards, Trudgill & Weltens (1984), Hughes & Trudgill (1979), Trudgill & Hannah (1982), Trudgill (1974b, 1975b,
1982b, 1983a, 1983b, 1984b, 1986a, 1986c, 1986d, 1987c, 1990a, 1990b) Trudgill (forthcoming) «Dialect Contact,
Dialectology and Sociolinguistics».

54
of Linguistics that refers to a methodology: a way of doing linguistics. When William Labov
coined the term 'secular linguistics' he meant doing linguistic research in the secular world:
real-world linguistics, or field linguistics, in the sense of going down into the real world and
doing empirical work on language as it is spoken by ordinary people in its social context in
everyday life, rather than armchair linguistics, theoretical and introspective study of language
carried out in your own office. However, while this subject area is the most studied in Language
and Society, the term as such was not commonly accepted and was abandoned, «perhaps
because, in its most common usage, the term 'secular' implies the complementary
'ecclesiastical', which hardly seems possible» (Chambers & Trudgill 1980: 207). This empirical
linguistic approach, led by William Labov in the United States and Peter Trudgill in Great
Britain, advocates that it is crucial to base work in these fields on empirical research54: they
prefer when theory emerges from data rather than the opposite. In this way, sociolinguists are
to be practitioners of this linguistic science.
We stated in Chapter I that the origins of Sociolinguistics, particularly Labovian
Sociolinguistics, must be found in Saussure's langue and parole and Chomsky's competence
and performance. Both approaches concentrated on the systematic homogeneity of langue and
the competence of an ideal speaker and ignored the heterogeneity of parole and the actual
performance of the speaker for their supposed unmanageable nature:
... the object of linguistics must ultimately be the instrument of communication used by the speech
community; and if we are not talking about that language, there is something trivial in our proceeding. For
a number of reasons, this kind of language has been the most difficult object for linguistics to focus on.
William Labov (1972a: 187)
Linguistics was therefore defined in such a way as to exclude the study of social behaviour or
the study of speech. Labov (1972a: Ch. 8) gives four distinct difficulties in investigating
everyday speech that, in the past, made clear the basic motivation for the concentration on
langue or competence to the exclusion of other data:
1) the ungrammaticality of everyday speech,

2) variation in speech and in the speech community,
3) difficulties of hearing and recording real speech, and
4) the rarity of syntactic forms.
In this way, it is not difficult to realise why in the past linguistic studies were of the armchair
54
«I don't think there is anything more sterile than theorising without any data, especially taxonomic-type
theories classifications» (personal communication, see APPENDIX).

55
type. It is in fact not uncommon to find linguists who only follow a laboratory, or office,
research instead of going out to the street to analyze real everyday conversation facing these
difficulties. The problems concerned with the study of intuitions are simply that intuitions are
not entirely reliable, since some authors consider, for instance, linguistic forms as grammatical
or ungrammatical according to the theory they want to argue: Bloomfieldian linguistics
asserted that native speakers never make mistakes, some years later, however, Chomskyan
linguistics asserted that speech is full of ungrammatical forms; in fact:
When challenges to data arise on the floor of a linguistic meeting, the author usually defends himself by
stating that there are many 'dialects' and that the systematic argument he was presenting held good for his
own 'dialect'. This is a odd use of the term, and it raises the question as to what the object of linguistic
description can or should be.
William Labov (1972a: pp. 191-2)
On a different occasion, and with this very respect, Labov (1972c: pp. 106-7) asserts that «if
'my dialect' means no more than 'people disagree with me', it is certainly an illegitimate and
unworthy escape from serious work». This does not mean that introspective research is not
necessary at all. Both procedures, armchair and secular linguistics, are needed:
The critique of the conventional linguistic methods just given must not be taken as a suggestion that they are
abandoned. The formal elicitation of paradigms, the exploration of intuitive judgements, the study of literary
texts, experimentation in the laboratory, and questionnaires on linguistic usage are all important and valuable
modes of investigation. The first two procedures must be mastered by anyone who hopes to do significant
linguistic analysis.
William Labov (1972a: pp. 201-2)
Secular Linguistics, or Sociolinguistics Proper, is thus empirical, it gets real data, and
bases theory on linguistic facts, not on speculation and intuition. As claimed at the end of II.3.1,
it studies that sort of modern urban dialectology in a social and synchronic dimension: the
tendency towards the study of social and urban dialects reflects the growth in the synchronic
approach to the study of language (ongoing linguistic changes) as opposed to what was
becoming a kind of 'linguistic archaeology' (Dialectology). Assuming that variation in language
is socially conditioned and making use of the methods and findings of social sciences, like
Sociology and Anthropology, and modern technical innovations, such as portable high-fidelity
tape recorders, their first aim is to get a representative full picture, cross-sectionally, of the
local speech variety in the population of a urban community: they select informants by random,
normally for a recorded interview, and correlate data obtained, pre-determined features
(linguistic variables), with social parameters, such as age, sex, social class and occupation,
ethnicity, religious affiliation, etc., also called non-linguistic or social variables; those
linguistic variables that significantly correlate with social variables are labelled sociolinguistic

56
variables. In addition, they try to get the informant's free discourse, vernacular speech, as much
natural as possible, Labov's observer's paradox55, since their studies are not only concerned
with social variation between individuals of different social rank but also with stylistic variation
within the speech of a single informant, and thus they put the informant into various contexts:
casual, excited, formal, careful, and reading speech. Their second, but no less important, aim
is to record the informant's communicative competence as opposed to his performance. That is
to say, Secular Linguistics wants to know the individual speaker's knowledge of the appropriate
kind of language for the various social situations in which he finds himself and his ability to
switch easily from one style to another, and not just his mere performance.
We stated in Chapter I that Sociolinguistics is closely related to dialectological studies.
But what is the nature of their relationship? There is a natural evolution of studies in language
variation both theoretically and methodologically: if Traditional Dialectology has so far been
mostly interested in language variation geographically and diachronically (processes that have
already taken place), Secular Linguistics is also concerned with language variation but
synchronically and in the social context (processes still taking place)56. In our view, if we draw
a three-dimensional axis containing a diastratic axis (social dimension, also including a
diaphasic or stylistic dimension), a diachronic axis (temporal dimension), and a diatopic axis
(spatial or geographical dimension), we get a very interesting contrast as the following chart
shows: on the whole, Traditional Dialectology studies language variation in a two-dimensional
way, i.e. temporally and geographically, whereas Secular Linguistics studies language
variation in a three-dimensional way, i.e. temporally, geographically and socially (including
the diaphasic dimension: style):
55
«the aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not
being systematically observed» (Labov 1972a: 209).
56
W. Nelson Francis (1983: 150) describes Traditional Dialectology as 'item-centered', in the sense that
its «interest is focused on individual facts of the variable distribution of a single sound without attempting to relate
them to the overall structure of the dialects involved», whereas Secular Linguistics can be described as
'speaker-centered', since its interest is focused on the speaker's competence and performance.

57
If dialectologists selected elderly rural informants to avoid the problem of the stylistic level
and Labov's observer's paradox, secular linguists, or 'real-world' linguists, on the other hand,
tend to be very concerned with the problems of the influence of the interviewer and the
taper-recorder, and thus with the difficulty of obtaining casual speech, the vernacular. In fact,
while both disciplines are interested in the vernacular speech, their motivations are different,
since Traditional Dialectology has considered the vernacular as the variety least influenced by
the standard, site of the 'pure' or 'real' homogeneous dialect, whereas Secular Linguistics
considers it as systematic, regular and the site of ongoing changes (Trudgill 1983b: 42). Peter
Trudgill (1983b: Ch. 2) gives an overall evaluation of the inadequacies, lacunas of traditional
dialectological works and also its merits with respect to sociolinguistic studies: Dialectology
and Secular Linguistics have reciprocally aided each other, however, this mutual help could be
improved even more; in fact, «ideally the two methods, the dialectologist and the
sociolinguistic, should be combined» (see II.3.3). Dialectological studies have considerably
helped Sociolinguistics in terms of data supplied and the use of questionnaire forms, and
simultaneously Dialectology has also benefited from Sociolinguistics in terms of concepts and
methods, though it could learn more from the sociolinguistic methodology: the encouragement
to use, and trust, tape-recorders and spectographs; the realization of pilot studies in each area
under investigation considering previous works on the locality; field-workers should be natives
or familiar with the area in order to avoid wrong preconceptions57; greater attention should be
57
Trudgill (1983b: 34-35) applies here the Labovian principle 'the more we know, the more we can find
out': «This does not, obviously, mean that we should not venture to do linguistic or dialectological work in fields,
areas or languages that are unfamiliar. It simply means that the more we know about a variety, the more insights we
obtain about its nature and structure, and the more we know what questions to ask ourselves next in planning further
research. Conversely, the less we know about a variety the less certain we are of what questions to ask about it,

58
paid to the heterogeneity of speech communities and the variability of speech, establishing and
quantifying the linguistic variables; and an increased emphasis on ongoing linguistic changes
and other synchronic phenomena, in addition to their interest in historical processes and
conservative varieties, i.e. a preference for studying processes themselves rather than their
results. Thus, to sum up, although both Traditional Dialectology and Secular Linguistics study
linguistic variation, their techniques, methods, objectives and motivations are different: the
former preferred a diachronic and geographical viewpoint for language changes already
undergone in rural areas, whereas the latter prefers a synchronic, geographical and social point
of view for ongoing language changes in urban areas, which is what dialectologist always
avoided, especially the heterogeneous language of cities and younger speakers as both creators
and reflectors, simultaneously, of language change in progress. In any case, the sociolinguistic
approach is greatly altering the role and function of dialectological studies, since, up to the
sixties, dialectologists' interest was focused more on the result of linguistic processes than on
the processes themselves.
Secular Linguistics, Sociolinguistics Proper, or Modern/Sociolinguistic Urban
Dialectology, is therefore the most purely linguistic study of language in the field of Linguistics
and refers to a methodology developed by William Labov: a way of doing linguistics, which is
real-world linguistics rather than armchair linguistics. The fact that language significantly
correlates with social features does not at all mean that sociolinguistic studies are simply
correlational and descriptive works of little theoretical interest, but that their primary concerns
are «to learn more about language, and to investigate topics such as the mechanisms of
linguistic change; the nature linguistic variability; and the structure of linguistic systems»
(Trudgill 1978b: 11). This has been the sociolinguistic area most widely known and studied
since the beginning, in the sixties, of the systematic study of language in its social context.
Secular Linguistics is also the sociolinguistic area where Peter Trudgill has been most
influential58. Chapters IV and V are concerned with this sociolinguistic urban dialectology and
show how it works, and Section VIII.1 is an application of this area of research.
II.3.3. Geolinguistics
Chambers & Trudgill (1980: Ch. 12) speak of Geolinguistics, or Geographical Linguistics, as
and the more likely we are to make mistakes -and the more need there is, therefore, to guard against these mistakes».
58
He has extensively published on Secular Linguistics: Chambers & Trudgill (1980), Laver & Trudgill (1979),
Trudgill (1972a, 1973a, 1974a, 1974b, 1978a, 1978b, 1981a, 1982a, 1982b, 1983a, 1983b, 1985b, 1986a, 1986b,
1986c, 1988a, 1988b, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 1989d, 1990g), Trudgill (forthcoming) «Dialect Contact, Dialectology
and Sociolinguistics», «Dialect Typology and Social Structure», Trudgill (n.d.) A Sociolinguistic Study of Linguistic
Change in Urban East Anglia, and Trudgill & Tzavaras (1975) (see BIBLIOGRAPHY).

59
the confluence of three areas: linguistic geography (Dialectology), urban dialectology

(Secular Linguistics) and human geography (Geography), whose goal is the capacity for
language motivated by what is increasingly known as 'variation theory'. Peter Trudgill (1983b:
Ch. 3) claims that dialectologists «should not be content simply to describe the geographical
distribution of linguistic features but they should also be concerned to explain this
distribution». That is, by saying exactly why and how linguistic features, under linguistic
change, spread from one location or social group to another, we would be able to understand,
more accurately, the sociolinguistic mechanisms that lie behind the geographical distribution
of linguistic innovations. For this purpose, dialectologists have to use certain techniques and
theoretical concepts developed by social geographers. Dialect maps should be greatly improved
by using geographical cartographic techniques59: the landscape is uniformly divided up into a
number of areas, cells, and investigators have to calculate the percentage of use of a given
linguistic feature in each cell, at given points in time, in the same way as William Labov
calculated percentages for different social class cells; i.e. they have to show not only the
geographical location of a particular phenomenon but also, for instance, its density and social
distribution. Theoretical concepts developed by social geographers, such as patterns of
diffusion, the neighbourhood effect and the gravity model, can give account for the relative
population density of adjacent areas, networking between a given area and large population
centres, the geographic location of an innovation, the innovating social group, the relative
prestige of given varieties, linguistic distance amongst varieties, and the linguistic system itself
as a resistance factor. The application of these techniques on maps and the dialectologists'
awareness of these theoretical concepts from Geography could make Linguistics ascertain the
geographical diffusion of linguistic features, that is, why linguistic innovations appear and
spread to a centre A from a centre B and not from centre C.
Therefore, in the same way as the linguistic variable, with the help of sociological
theory and methods, can improve our knowledge of the relationship between language and
society, «the linguistic variable, together with a number of methodological and theoretical
insights from human geography, can improve our knowledge of the relationship between
language and geography, and of the geographical setting of linguistic change»:
A dynamic dialectology or geolinguistics making use of time-incorporating geographical diffusion models

and sociolinguistic and geographical techniques that permit the handling of gradient phenomena, may be
better able to describe and even explain some of the processes involved in the geographical diffusion of
linguistic innovations.
59
Peter Trudgill refers to the techniques used on maps by the Swedish geographer T. Hägerstrand, who
argued that «when studying changes we cannot draw boundary lines and observe their displacements. Instead we
must ascertain the spatial diffusion of ratios» (Hägerstrand 1952).

60
Chapter VII can be considered concerned with this eclectic discipline proposed by Peter
Trudgill, Geolinguistics60.
In this way, as justified at the beginning of this Chapter and not with the aim of being
reiterative, we have extensively examined the three different objectives that Peter Trudgill
distinguishes within the spectrum of language and society: studies that are clearly
sociolinguistic in nature, since they use sociological data for linguistic purposes or both, and
studies which are not clearly sociolinguistic, since they use linguistic data merely for
sociological purposes.
In any case, Trudgill considers the importance of studies of an interdisciplinary nature,
claiming for an encouragement of co-operation between scholars such as linguists and
sociologists, but he also warns us that although «ultimately, the labelling of disciplines and the
drawing of boundaries between them may well be unimportant, unnecessary, and unhelpful»,
in the case of Sociolinguistics a too general term can be an obstacle for differentiating
objectives:
In the case of sociolinguistics, however, we have to take care that a too widely extended umbrella term does
not conceal differences of objectives to the point of misunderstanding: the many people working in the field
of language and society are doing so for a number of different purposes.
The ultimate goal would not be to isolate the discipline but to inter-relate it with other areas;
however, in order to achieve this goal, it is necessary first to clarify the identity of the discipline
as such. This classification of the different sociolinguistic areas within the spectrum of
Language and Society is probably the most complete and accurate one provided so far. We
could include here, and in fact Trudgill does (1984a), «one of the most important and best
publicized areas of sociolinguistic research in recent years»: Language and Sex. Work in this
area is closely related to all the other sociolinguistic directions: for instance, it involves The
Sociology of Language, The Social Psychology of Language and Anthropological Linguistics
when dealing with attitudes to language use by men and women, and sexism in language;
Discourse Analysis and The Ethnography of Communication with sex differences in the
conversational strategies; and Secular Linguistics with sex differences in the usage of particular
linguistic features. Chapter VI is entirely concerned with this novel area of research and section
VIII.6 with its applications.
60
In addition to Chambers & Trudgill (1980), Peter Trudgill also proposes this field of study elsewhere ( cf.
Trudgill 1974b, 1975b, 1983b, and 1990b). Further works on Geolinguistics are in Trudgill (1983a, 1986a, 1986b,
1986c, 1987c, 1988a, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 1990f, 1990g).

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Chapter II:

DIRECTIONS IN LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY

•Sociological Objectives: those studies where objectives are wholly sociological, or

•Linguistic Objectives: those studies where objectives are purely linguistic:

In this way he differentiates those studies that he considers to be clearly sociolinguistic in

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

II.1. Sociological Objectives: Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology overlaps with some aspects of Discourse Analysis in its studies of

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

following is a perfectly coherent piece of discourse:

A: Are you going to work tomorrow?

II.2. Sociological and Linguistic Objectives:

II.2.1. The Sociology of Language

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

Therefore, dialect differences in British schools constitute an educational problem when

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

What we have seen is a language planning activity in a, let us say, multi-dialectal

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

of Language are activities of language planning in multilingual speech communities. If there

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

II.2.2. The Social Psychology of Language

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

If the case of Martha's Vineyard demonstrates that attitudes to language can be a

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

II.2.3. Anthropological Linguistics

II.2.3.a. Taboo Words

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

1.-Dirty Words, usually referring to sex and excretion;

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

These substances are unconsciously tabooed.

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

II.2.3.b. Kinship Systems

Father - Mother Son - Daughter Nephew - Niece

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

4) through 'cousin' modification: first/second/third cousin, once/twice (generations

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

aringiya: FaFa (father's father: paternal grandfather)

nyanya: MoMo (mother's mother: maternal grandmother)

awuniya: FaSi (father's sister: paternal aunt)

apmaliya: MoBr (mother's brother: maternal uncle)

awiyatjia: older Br (older brother)

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

II.2.3.c. Linguistic Relativity

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

1. I see that it is new.

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

II.2.4. Discourse Analysis

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

-Changes of speakers recur, or at least occur, by means of adjacency pairs, stimulus-plus-

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

(Q1 A1)(Q2 A2)(Q3 A3)

Q1: Have you written to John yet?

UNIVERSITY OF MURCIA: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY (J.M. HERNANDEZ CAMPOY, 1992)

Q2: Are you going to write?

(Q1 (Q2 (Q3 A3) A2) Q1)

┌─── Q1: Have you got the time?