SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASSIGNMENT

Language Variation

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Created by: Riska Alfin Pramita SIN: K2208095

TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION FACULTY SEBELAS MARET UNIVERSITY 2011

y Studying Language as a Social Phenomenon Bloomfield nor Firth nor any of the linguists who shared their structuralist concepts directly studied the social uses of language. Until the advent of sociolinguistics in the broadest sense, including studies of discourse, pragmatics, interaction rituals, and subjective evaluation tests which sprang into being around the same time, there were no concentrated attempts at discovering the social significance of linguistic variation. That may be partly explicable in terms of intellectual history. All the social sciences are relatively young. Psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology had their effective beginnings around the turn of the twentieth century, whereas subject areas less intimately involved with the human condition such as algebra, physics, and zoology have ancient origins. Sociolinguistics, as the social science branch of linguistics (along with developmental psycholinguistics), is a newcomer compared to the branch known as theoretical linguistics, which descends from more venerable studies of grammar, rhetoric, and philology. Nor was the shunting aside of the social significance of language an oversight or an accident. Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, noted that speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other (1916: 8). Inconceivable it may have been, but he nevertheless advocated the study of the former without the latter. His famous distinction between langue, the grammatical system, and parole, the social uses of language, came into being expressly to demarcate what he considered the proper domain of linguistic study:
But what is langue? It is not to be confused with human speech [parole], of which it is only a definite part, though certainly an essential one. It [parole] is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty. Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously - physical, physiological, and psychological - it belongs to both the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity. Language [langue], on the contrary, is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. As soon as we give language first place among the facts of speech, we introduce a natural order into a mass that lends itself to no other classification. (1916: 9)

y Linguistic variable The linguistic variable, a concept originating with Labov (1963, 1966), is a linguistic entity which varies according to social parameters (age, sex, social class, ethnicity), stylistic parameters (casual, careful, formal), and/or linguistic parameters (segmental, suprasegmental). Usually the social and stylistic variation will be coordinated in some

way, so that the casual speech of an accountant will be similar to the formal speech of a plumber though that remains to be seen in the course of the investigation. The linguistic variable can be found at all linguistic levels: most common are phonological, such as, for example, (r) might be realized as [ ] or as o in a community which has been r-less and is becoming r-ful; morphophonological as in (ing), the English present participle marker which has two common pronunciations, standard [m] and casual [an]; morphological as in the realization of the past tense form of dive either as dived or as dove; syntactic as in the realization of negated be variously as ain't, isn't, s not, is not; or lexical as in the use of either hero or grinder as the word to designate a particular kind of sandwich. The most frequently studied variables are phonological and morphological. y Style The concept of stylistic variation has always been central to sociolinguistics. The concept of stylistic variation has always been central to sociolinguistics. Rickford and Eckert (2001) offer three reasons for examining style in the study of variation. First, all individuals and groups have their own stylistic repertoires. Hence, the styles in which they are recorded may affect sociolinguistic analyses. Second, stylistic variation in speech provides us with clues for language change in progress. Finally, analyzing styles helps us understand the individuals internationalization of social meaning of variation. considering style as a part of persona management, social distinction, and construction of social meaning to examine the linguistic behaviors and the ideologies of speakers y The Locus Of Variation If structure is at the heart of language, then variation defines its soul. As Sapir (1921: 147) put it, Everyone knows that language is variable. Furthermore, variation allows us to differentiate individuals, groups, communities, states and nations. Notwithstanding the pervasive nature of variability in language, it has often been disregarded or dismissed as tangential to the description of structural patterning and irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence. In fact, it was not until the advent of sociolinguistics a half-century ago that the admission of language variation became more than a footnote to linguistic description. The study of language variation is now one of the most rapidly expanding subfields of linguistics with a well-established cohort of researchers, regular conferences, and scholarly journals, but its status is still somewhat marginal within theoretical linguistics, notwithstanding the insistence of William Labov that the study of language variation is central to the solution of fundamental problems in linguistic theory.

Variability is everywhere in language, from the unique details in each production of a sound or sign to the auditory or visual processing of the linguistic signal. In fact, one of the amazing facts about human communication is the demonstrated ability to normalize the inherent variation within every spoken or signed message in processing the linguistic signal. Though language variation is persistent and pervasive, it is not all equally interesting, even to those who focus on the systematic nature of language variation, socalled LANGUAGE VARIATIONISTS. For example, there is considerable variation in speech or sign production related to the physical make-up of an individual speaker or signerdifferences in vocal tract size in spoken language or differences in the size of the hands and body used in signingthat is of interest to those who study language normalization, but this is not generally the focus of systematic language variation studies. Similarly, the relative fluency of production related to idiosyncratic behavior is not of concern to those interested in language variation, though the dichotomy between meaningful social differences and socially insignificant personal differences is not always clear-cut. Generally speaking, interest in language variation focuses on differences that have some social significance in terms of group behavior rather than personal idiosyncrasies, though socially meaningful aspects of individual speaker performance are of interest to those interested in language variation.

y Language Variation What Factors Enter into Language Variation? - It's clear that there are many systematic differences between different languages. (English and Japanese, for example). - By \systematic" we mean describable by rules. But what is not as obvious is that languages also contain many levels of internal variation, related to such variables as age, region, socioeconomic status, group identification, and others. - These various dimensions of variation are systematic in the same way as the variation between different languages is. Sociolinguistics is the study of the social uses of language. Studying language variation. proceeds mainly by observing language use in natural social settings and categorizing the linguistic variants according to their social distribution.

Sociolinguistic inquiry has extended far beyond the variationist paradigm delineated in the 1960s and 1970s, which isolated a single feature and quantified observed variation in its use to establish an index of social distinction Since Labovs (1963) pioneering Marthas Vineyard study, sociolinguists have viewed language attitudes as one of the major factors influencing language variation and change. However, as Milroy (2004) notes, analyses of attitudes and of sociolinguistic variables are usually treated independently. Most work on language attitudes has been conducted by social psychologists, independently of analyses of variation, and mainstream variationist work seldom integrates analyses of attitudes and ideologies into accounts of variation and change. Sociolinguistic variation is the study of the way language varies and changes (see in communities of speakers and concentrates in particular on the interaction of social factors (such as a speaker's gender, ethnicity, age, degree of integration into their community, etc) and linguistic structures (such as sounds, grammatical forms, intonation features, words, etc). The study of sociolinguistic variation has its roots in dialectology, emerging in the 1960s partly as a result of inadequate methods in earlier approaches to the study of dialect, and partly as a reaction to Chomsky's generative programme. Unlike earlier forms of dialectology, it uses recordings of informal conversations as its data (and occasionally reading exercises to examine the role of formality in dialect use); argues for the role of quantitative analysis in highlighting dialect differences; and is interested in how social groups variably select different dialect forms. Recent developments in the field of sociolinguistic variation include viewing variation as a reflection of social agency that constructs social meaning and considering how ideologies interact with internal linguistic constraints on variation. Speakers use different linguistic variants in different contexts, and this kind of linguistic variable that shows stylistic variation is what Labov refers to as markers. Finally, stereotypes, the subjects of overt comments, are markers that have tilted in the direction of ideological transparency. In the case of stereotypes, n+1st-order indexicality has become presupposingreplacing an older n-th-order indexical presupposition.

No two speakers of a language speak exactly the same way, between group variation they used intergroup variation. No individual speaker speaks the same way all the time, within speaker variation they used intraspeaker variation. As noted, the linguistic variable can cover a full range of linguistic units and relationships. By the same token, the relationship of the variants to each other is not necessarily limited by the fundamental typology operative in linguistic analysis and description. For example, a given phonological variable may encompass allophonic fluctuation within a given phoneme, different phonemes, or combine allophonic and phonemically distinct variants within a unitary variable. Thus, the pronunciation of the vowel of English words like coffee or caught may involve variants that range from different phonetic productions within the same phonemic vowel (e.g. [kaofi] vs. [ko fi]) to a phonemic merger with another phonemic unit (e.g. the vowel of caught and cot are both pronounced as []). In this case, the variants appear to be united by the fact that they exist within a single lexical item. Furthermore, in some applications of the linguistic variable, variants may involve competing systems or grammars so that variation cannot even be considered inherent within a unitary system. Under this interpretation, typological correspondence or equivalency in the competing systems is the apparent basis for including different variants in a linguistic variable. The notion of the linguistic variable has been applied to a full range of levels within language, though not without some argument about its appropriate application. Phonological and morphosyntactic variation have tended to dominate language variation research in synchronic and apparent time studies while syntactic variation has been a significant locus of investigation in diachronic studies. For synchronic and apparent time studies, which have tended to use natural conversational interviews as their primary databases, there is both a practical and theoretical explanation for the focus on phonology and morphosyntax. In natural conversation, syntactic phenomena simply do not occur at sufficient frequency levels for meaningful quantitative analyses of systematic variability, the procedural underpinning for variation studies. But there have also been theoretical concerns about the application of variation studies beyond phonology related to the assumption of semantic equivalency , that is, the notion that there is no change in referential meaning based on the selection of one variant or another. The focus on syntax in diachronic studies of language variation is, to a large extent, a product of the kinds of available texts for investigation. Historical documents tend to be more reliable for examining grammatical than phonetic and phonological variation.

Furthermore, the increasing accessibility of mega-corpora with automated search capabilities for historical texts has made the investigation of syntactic variability much more accessible to variation researchers. y Dialect Acquisition a complex variety of factors contributes to adult dialect acquisition. Some studies focus on social factors such as social network, extent of exposure, the status of the linguistic variable, attitudes, and identity to explain dialect acquisition by adults, while others concentrate on linguistic factors such as the notion of salience to account for the acquisition of new dialects. Since the reasons for changes in adult speech are less clear, it seems that a combination of different factors, both social and linguistic, needs to be examined to explain why and to what extent adults change or maintain their native dialects. y The Social Basis for Linguistic Variation The foundations of variationist sociolinguistics come from the rudimentary observation that the variants that occur in everyday speech are linguistically insignificant but socially significant. The linguistic equivalence of the variants of a linguistic variable is evident in a comparison of any paired variants, as, for instance: Adonis saw himself in the mirror. Adonis seen hisself in the mirror. These utterances differ with respect to two morphological variables: (1) the verb see is represented in the first sentence by saw, the strong form of the past tense, and in the second by seen, and (2) the reflexive pronoun takes the form himself in the first and hisself in the second. Notwithstanding these differences, the two sentences convey exactly the same grammatical meaning and everyone who speaks English with even minimal competence recognizes their semantic identity. The sentences do, however, convey very different social meanings as a direct result of their morphological variants. That is, they carry sociolinguistic significance. The first, with its standard forms, is emblematic of middle-class, educated, or relatively formal speech, while the second is emblematic of working-class, uneducated, or highly colloquial

(vernacular) speech. These differences will also be readily recognized by virtually every speaker of the language.

y Sociolinguistics as a Discipline Leaving aside a few maverick precursors, variationist sociolinguistics had its effective beginnings only in 1963, the year in which William Labov presented the first sociolinguistic research report at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and also the year in which he published The social motivation of a sound change. Those events mark the inception of linguistic studies imbued by the identification of linguistic variants correlated with social factors, by the incorporation of style as an independent variable, and by the apparent-time apprehension of linguistic changes in progress.

y Language Change One of the most fruitful areas for the application of language variation analysis is language change, given the fact that change necessarily involves variation. Speakers do not go to bed one night using a particular form only to wake up the next morning to find the form categorically replaced by another one. Variation exists whether the change involves a gradual, imperceptible shift in the phonetic value of a vowel within a continuum of phonetic space or is an abrupt, readily transparent change involving a major syntactic realignment of phrasal constituents. In the progression of language change, there is a transitional period of co-variation between old and new variants. Though all change seems to involve variation, this does not mean that all variation necessarily implies change. Some variation may be stable, a product of internal systemic and natural performance phenomena rather a reflection of dynamic directionality. Sorting out dynamic and stable variation is, however, not always obvious, and can not necessarily be determined a priori. In most cases, decisions about transitional and stable variation can only be made after examining patterns of variation across time and by considering underlying psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic principles that might help determine the difference. Although the variability inherent in change has sometimes been ignored in historical linguistics under the traditional assumption that language change could not be directly observed, the empirical analysis of language change at different points in real time and in apparent time (i.e. the assumption that differences across different generations of

speakers at a given point in time will mirror actual diachronic change) indicates that the variable transition of variants proceeds in an orderly fashion over time and space. Labov's intention when establishing sociolinguistic variation as an approach to investigating language was not simply to make what in many cases appear to be obvious correlations between social factors and language use, but to demonstrate how language changes spread through society. He showed by carefully plotting a speaker's social position alongside their use of linguistic variables, that linguistic changes tended to be led by certain social groups - not by the lowest or highest social classes in society as we might expect, but by the central groups - the upper working and lower middle classes. Labov found that upper working class speakers tended to be the leaders of unconscious linguistic changes that were more common in casual speech, and that the lower middle class led changes towards overtly prestigious standard forms. Language changes, of course, take time, and one question that vexed linguists was how to observe changes in progress given that they take so long. It was previously assumed that change could only be observed retrospectively, after different states of the dialect had been observed at different points in time and comparisons made subsequent to several observations. Labov simulated a broad time span by adopting a socalled apparent-time method. He compared speakers of different ages (who had acquired language at different points in time) instead of comparing people of a particular age now with those of that same age 20, 40 etc years ago. Naturally, this method shortens the length of time required to conduct the research, but questions have been raised about this method since it assumes that people's dialect remains fairly stable from adolescence onwards y Looking forward in sociolinguistic variation The model of analysing language variation and change that Labov developed has been extremely popular and has been applied to many speech communities around the world. Recent approaches, however, whilst accepting the basic framework (e.g. the linguistic variable), have suggested that sociolinguistic variation studies have been sociologically nave by correlating isolated social facts about a speaker (e.g. their gender, their social class, their ethnicity) with language use, rather than observing how social groups form and evolve and analysing the dialect that emerges from that social practice. So rather than saying 'here are some broad social categories, let's look at the language use of each category' (a top-down approach) researchers are beginning to propose that we say 'let's examine self-forming social groups and see if these groupings are reflected in linguistic structure' (a bottom-up approach). One researcher who has taken this latter approach

is Penny Eckert (2001). She engaged in extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a secondary school in Detroit in order to gradually piece together a picture of who hung out with who, who were the central members and the less central members of the emergent groups and so on. She was then able to plot group membership against a large number of linguistic variables. Her research is particularly important in making us realise just how gross categories such as 'female' or 'adolescent' or 'working class' are, lumping together very different people into the same group, and that a sensitivity to how real groups of people are formed and maintained provides a very rich seam for future sociolinguistic analysis.

Bybliography Chambers,J. K. 2004. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford: Backwell publishing Identity, Ideology, and Language Variation: A Sociolinguistic Study of Mandarin in Central Taiwan By SZE-WEI LIAO (B.A.: National Taiwan University, , 2003. M.A.: Columbia University, 2005). 1-59 NIKOLAS COUPLAND. Style: Language variation and identity. (Key Topics in Linguistics). Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. 2007, xiv, 209. Wolfram,Walt. 2006. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2nd Edition. Raleigh: North Carolina State University www.faculty.washington.edu/wassink/LING200-lect19/socio1.pdf www.language/variation-sgl
http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1054