Sociolinguistics -- synopsis of LING-001 lecture, Monday, Oct. 29, 2001
Written by Uri Horesh
 

"I have resisted the term sociolinguistics for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social. When I first published the studies of Martha's Vineyard and New York City that form the basis of the first part of this book, it seemed necessary to make that point again an again. In spite of a considerable amount of sociolinguistics activity, a socially realistic linguistics seemed a remote prospect in the 1960's. The great majority of linguistc had resolutely turned to the contemplation of their own idiolects. We have not yet emerged from the shadow of our intuitions, but it no longer seems necessary to to argue about what is or is not linguistics. There is a growing realization that the basis of intersubjective knowledge in linguistics must be found in speech -- language as it is used in everyday life by members of the social order, that vehicle of communication in which they argue with their wives, joke with their friends, and deceive their enemies."

(Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. xiii).

 This quote is from the introduction to a volume by Bill Labov, in which we are introduced to the two pioneer studies mentioned above: a study of Martha's Vineyard, MA (Chapter 1), where ethnicitiy, gender and occupation prove to play a role in such obscure phenomena as the centralization of the nucleus of the diphthong /ay/ (imagine a word like "bite" /bayt/ pronounced with a schwa instead of the /a/ vowel); and various studies of New York City, including the now infamous "Department Store Study", where the realization of post-vocalic /r/ is shown to be socially straitified. Labov chose three socially distinct stores in Manhattan: Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy's at Herald Square and S. Klein at Union Square (doesn't sound familiar? That location was occupied in the past few years by a Bradlee's, which you could see during the opening credits of Mad About You on NBC). Using a technique known as rapid anounymous interviewing, Bill elicited the phrase "fourth floor" by asking for directions to a department located on that floor (or in some cases, a depahtment located on that flooh). For a detailed discussion of the results, see Chapter 2 of his book.

Labov and the work done at the Linguistics Lab here at Penn have been at the forefront of sociolinguistics for about three decades, since the Linguistics Department at Columbia University shut down and Labov moved to Penn. While Labov's work is now less focused on the social aspects of language variation and change, some of his former students, most notably Penelope Eckert at Stanford University, have taken the field of sociolinguistics closer to other fields in the social sciences, such as sociology and anthropology. What Labov and his followers still share is the emphasis on variation being an inherent part of language, the study of which should always rely not only on qualitative data, but on quantitative analysis as well. It is therefore not surprising that many of the linguistic variables investigated by sociolinguists are phonological phenomena, whereby speakers are either unaware of their dialectal differences or aware to varying degrees, with or without a sense of social stigmatization.

Much of the work in sociolinguistics has been in large urban areas (i.e., major cities), such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Cairo, Tehran, Belfast, some researchers have recently investigated smaller, more isolated communities (returning to the tradition of the Martha's Vineyard study), such as Okracoke, NC, and other communities in that area and elsewhere. These studies are largely concentrated in the William C. Friday Linguistics Lab at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and are led by Walt Wolfram, currently President of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). NC State has recently hosted the 30th annual vonference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV). Next year's conference will be at Stanford, and in 2003, if you're still at Penn, you're more than welcome to attend it right here at home.

A project combining traditional variationist studies and the use of large-scale corpora is undergoing at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), across the street from Labov's lab on Market Street. The DASL project has some interesting analyses of t/d deletion based on data including a much larger number of tokens than the studies conducted previously by individual researchers.

Language and Gender, a topic discussed in detail in a separate lecture in this course, is gaining interest in the sociolinguistics world. A new association was recently founded, The International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) with its own biennial conference. The study of queer linguistics is also becoming increasingly popular, with an extensive online bibliography and an annual conference at the American University in Washington, DC.

The LSA 2003 Institute at Michican State University will offer a wide array of courses in sociolinguistics and related fields. Penn offers LING-102 in the spring, and quite a few other courses in the undergraduate and graduate level. For more details, feel free to contact me.