Language Variation and Change

Taken and adapted from Hauptseminar, WS 2007/8, Campus

EssenRaymond Hickey, English Linguistics
 Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguists describe how language works in society to better
understand society, but also to investigate the social aspect of
language and its use, structure and evolution.

The Sociolinguistics of Society concerns the role of languages in

societies:
 societal multilingualism
 attitudes toward national languages and dialects
 language planning, language choice, language shift, language
death, language education

The Sociolinguistics of Language concerns language function

and variation in the social context of the speech community:

 forms of address
 speech acts and speech events
 language and gender, language and power, politeness,
language, thought and reality
 language varieties and change
Language Variation and Change
Lang. Variation refers to a change when referring or labeling things.
Causes and variables for Language variation are:
1. Social motivation:
- socio-economic status/power
 English as spoken by upper working class women in
Norwich,
 by saleswomen in New York department stores

2. Variables
- gender
- ethnicity
- region
- Education
- Age
 Linguistic Variation
• Variation through time: stages or periods of a
language
 Old English 449-1150
 Middle English 1150-1500

• Variation in space: regional dialects

 English as spoken in Norwich, Norfolk,
 New England, New York City

• Variation through contact

- Pidgin language
- Creole language
VARIATION AND VARIETY
Variation occurs in the speech of a particular person
from a particular place in a particular group and situation

Variety refers to linguistic characteristics of the variation.

Varieties often differ by high versus low probability for
specific items (this indicates necessity of counting!)
VARIETIES
Varieties may differ in any kind of linguistic item:
pronunciation, word choice, word form and syntax

 Working class men in Norwich tend to pronounce thin and

thing the same way in conversation
 BE speakers say tube, while AE speakers say subway
 White rural speakers in the Midwest U.S. say She come home
yesterday instead of the standard She came home
yesterday
 Black vernacular speakers say I aks her did she know him,
while standard speakers say I asked her if she knew him
Basic concepts you should know:
Dialect: any variety of language spoken by a group of people that
is characterized by systematic differences from other varieties of
the same language in terms of structural, phonological or lexical
features.

Dialect continuum:

Situation in which a large number of contiguous dialects exist, each

mutually intelligible with the next, but with the dialects at either end
of the continuum not being mutually intelligible, i.e. a large
area, where the spoken language differs only slightly from village to
village, but over a longer distance the differences become that huge,
that mutual intelligibility is not possible. Example: Dutch v/s German
Mutual intelligibility
Mutual intelligibility: Despite dialectal and idiolectal
variations in the language of native speakers of a
language, their similarities in pronunciation,
vocabulary, and grammar are enough to permit
mutual intelligibility. They do not need to study or
make extraordinary effort to understand each other.
E.g. A person from New York speaking with a person
from Texas.
E.g. In china Mandarin vs. Cantonese(they are
considered different dialects of the same language).
- In China: Madarin and Cantonese, a special case
Idiolect
an idiolect is a variety of a language
unique to an individual. It is manifested
by patterns of vocabulary or idiom
selection (the individual's lexicon),
grammar, or pronunciations that are
unique to the individual.
 Class and Style
2.1 Class and style
 In sociolinguistic studies, class is determined by rating
status characteristics like occupation, education,
residence, and income on numerical scales
 Styles reflect different degrees of formality and
awareness of speakers about how they're speaking,
what they're saying based on where they are.
 Most formal is word list style, next reading style, then
careful style as in an interview, and finally casual style
 As particular sociolinguistic variable, we can consider
class stratification within social classes.
Overt v/s Covert prestige
- Overt prestige:
Type of prestige attached to a particular variety by the
community that defines how people should speak in order to
gain status in the wider community (standard dialects)
- Covert prestige
Type of prestige that exists among members of nonstandard-
speaking communities that defines how people should speak
in order to be considered members of those particular
communities.
e.g. the young boy in American Tongues
African American speech community
Pidgin vs. Creole language

 Pidgin language:
Language developed by speakers of distinct language
who come into contact with one another and share
no common language among them with the purpose
of doing business.
- originates to overcome communication barriers
- typically spring up in trading centers
- made of mixtures of elements from all of the
languages in contact
- most of the vocabulary derived from socially or
economically dominant language
Creole language

 Creole language:
A language that develops from contact between
speakers of different languages and serves as the
primary means of communication for a particular
group of speakers
- different from pidgin, Creole language serves as the
first language for speakers. For example: Slave
plantation in USA, where Africans from linguistically
diverse backgrounds could only communicate in a
pidgin as a L1.
INTERMISSION
Types of speech communities: Bilingualism
A type of linguistic situation in which two languages co-exist in a
country or language community without there being a notable
distribution according to function or social class. Within Europe
Belgium, in those parts where French and Flemish are spoken
side by side, provides an example of bilingualism. Do not confuse
this with diglossia. A bilingual is an individual who speaks two
languages almost equally and does not show a functional
distribution of the languages. One must stress 'almost equally' as
one language nearly always predominates with any given
individual. True bilingualism can be seen as an ideal state which
one can approach but never entirely reach.
Types of speech communities: Diglossia

A type of linguistic situation in which there is a division between two

languages or two varieties of a language such that one variety, the so-
called 'high' or H variety, is used in public life — in addresses, in the
media, in schools and universities, etc. — and another variety, the so-
called 'low' variety or L variety, is used in domestic life — with family and
friends. Examples of diglossic situations are to be found in Switzerland
(Hochdeutsch and Schwizerdütsch), in various Arabian countries
(Classical Arabic and the local dialect of Arabic), Paraguay (Spanish
and Guaraní), in Haiti, there is the Haitian creole French and Standard
French.
Types of speech communities: Language
Maintenance

The extent to which immigrant speakers of a certain language retain

knowledge of the original language in the host country into the following
generations. Here language communities vary. The Irish, for example,
gave up their native language immediately in the United States whereas
the Estonians have shown a remarkable degree of language
maintenance. The reasons for this have to do with the attitude of the
respective groups to their original language. For the Irish their native
language was associated with a background of poverty and deprivation
and so they switched gladly to English in America.
Sociolinguistic of Society or Sociolinguistics of
language? SS or SL

1) It is important to notice how language and society interacts, how social

attitudes, social ambition and social bonding affect the manner in which
people speak.

2) Language Variation and change may affect the internal structure of

language as a consequence of external social factors.

3) Insightful is to examine closely how speakers use social networks to

strengthen their identification with the social group to which they feel
they belong.

4) To evidence wider context in which societies are embedded and how

language relates to culture in general (linguistic anthropology.
5) To express the relationship of gender and language use

6) To explain how the phenomena of politeness is evidenced in language

samples.
Case studies
r-Lessness in New York City:
lack of [r] in words as four, card etc. in New York dialect
- misconception: there is a total lack of [r] in those words for
speakers of the dialect.
- Labov: speakers vary their use of [r] according to their social status.
high status: the use of [r]
low status: the lack of [r]
hypothesis: salespeople tend to reflect the prestige of their customers.
Salespeople from the highest prestige store would exhibit
the highest incidence of [r] in their speech, while those
from the lowest prestige store would exhibit the lowest
incidence of [r]
Case: New York Department stores

Percentage of [r]s in floor

Casual Careful
Saks 63 64
Macy’s 44 61
S. Klein 8 18
Pau Princivalli case:

- bomb threats were made in repeated telephone calls

to the Pan American counter at the Los Angeles
airport.
- Paul Prinzivalli, a cargo handler who was thought by
Pan American to be a "disgruntled employee," was
accused of the crime, and he was jailed.
- Evidence: Princivalli’s voice sounded like the tape
recordings of the bomb threat caller
- Labov’s defense:
Pau Princivalli: New York
bomb threat caller: the Boston area of
Eastern New England
- Linguistic fingerprint