Sociolinguistics

Chapter One
The social study of language
The scope of enquiry

Sociolinguistics is the field that studies the relation between

language and society, between the uses of language and the social
structures in which the users of language live. It is a field of study that
assumes that human society is made up of many related patterns and
behaviours, some of which are linguistic.

One of the principal uses of language is to communicate meaning,

but it is also used to establish and to maintain social relationships. Watch
a mother with a young child. Most of their talk is devoted to nurturing the
social bond between them. Listen to two friends talking. Much of their
conversation functions to express and refine their mutual compact of
companionship. When you meet strangers, the way they talk informs you
about their social and geographical backgrounds, and the way you talk
sends subtle or blatant signals about what you think of them. it is these
aspect of language use that sociolinguists study.

In the thirty years or so that it has been recognized as a branch of

the scientific study of language, sociolinguistics has grown into one of
the most important of the 'hyphenated' fields of linguistics. This term
distinguishes the core fields of historical and descriptive linguistics
(phonology, morphology, and syntax) from the newer interdisciplinary
fields like psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, neurolinguistics, and
sociolinguistics or the sociology of language. Standard at times between
sociology (one of the field's putative parents) and linguistics (the other),
the practitioners of sociolinguistics have so far avoided the rigorous

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bounds of a single theoretical model, or the identifying shelter of a single
professional organization. They apply a plethora of methods to a
multitude of subjects that all have in common one single thread:
languages and their use in social contexts.

Sociolinguistics takes as its primary task to map linguistic variation

on to social conditions. This mapping helps understand not just
synchronic variation (variation at a single point of time), but also
diachronic variation (variation over time) or language change.

The close interwining of linguistic and social facts is crucial to a

sociolinguistics approach. Even before small children can speak clearly,
they develop a distinct style of address to be used when speaking to
anyone or anything smaller. As they grow, they add more and more
variations to their speech, and these come to be associated with
recognizable styles. As early as the age of five, children asked to play
roles try to imitate the styles of speech of many different people. These
small variations in language that everyone acquires in normal upbringing
can be used to identify us, or the person we are talking to, or the subject
we are talking about. There is no single-style or single-variety speakers;
no speech community that does not have a choice of varieties; and many
fewer monolinguals than English speakers might imagine.

The existence if patterned variation in language makes it possible

to identify ourselves and others as belonging to certain groups. The social
prestige or stigma associated with these variations makes language a
source of social and political power. Only by including both linguistic
and social factors in our analysis can this complex but rule-governed
behaviour be accounted for. To do this is the chosen goal of the
sociolinguist.

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Complementary approaches

Eschewing the normal acrimony of academic debate, we might say

that the various complementary approaches to the study of language each
find a different aspect of the complex phenomenon to be of enthralling
interest. The formal linguist pursues an autonomous universal system,
significant elements of which are to be explained by the very design and
structure of the human brain. The psycholinguist asks how such a system
works and how it can be learned or lost. The sociolinguist asks how it is
used in a living and complex speech community. The answers to each of
these questions is important to the applied linguist, concerned, among
other matters, with how to help people learn language and how to use it
effectively to deal with problems of practical everyday life.

Just as the formal linguist and the psycholinguist focus their

attention on the language as a system with universal features, so the
sociolinguist looks at the complex connections between the variations
within a language and the matching variations in the social groups that
use it. Why, the song asks, do I say /təm'a:tə/ and you say /təm'a:tə/. Why
d I say "Good morning!" to some people, and "Hi!" to others? How did
Professor Higgins know which parts of Eliza Doolittle's speech needed to
be changed to make her pass from a member of the upper class?
Sociolinguistics is all about variation, and seeks socially relevant
explanations for regular patterns of variation in language use.

A sociolinguist is interested in the way that members of a speech

community can, and do, identify and respond to fine differences in
language usage that are associated, within a speech community, with
social or economic or political or religious or cultural or other divisions
of the society. At what is often called the micro end of sociolinguistics,
the sociolinguist's goal might be to show how specific difference in
pronunciation or grammar lad members of a speech community to make

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judgments about the education or economic status of a speaker. In New
York City, for instance, pronouncing the word "this" as /dis/ or
pronouncing 'bird' as /bərd/, marks the social class of the speaker. In the
same way, the choice of lexical items (saying 'doctor's surgery' instead of
'doctor's office') makes clear on which side of the Atlantic a speaker of
English has been living. Over-average use of tag questions would seem to
mark young females in New Zeland. A high proportion of words from
Modern Standard Arabic marks the vernacular speech of educated Arabs.
As much as speech itself communicates content, so the form of speech,
the selection among available socially marked variants, communicates
important social information about the speaker and the listener and about
their relationship to each other. In other words, adapting Marshall
McLuhan's famous words, the medium (the variety chosen) becomes the
message itself.

At the other – the macro – end of the spectrum, sometimes labeled

the sociology of language as distinct from sociolinguistics, the scholar's
primary attention turns from the specific linguistic phenomena to the
whole of a language or variety (a term we use to include any identifiable
kind of language). In macro – sociolinguistics, we treat language (and a
specific language) alongside other human cultural phenomena. We might
ask, for instance, about the significant of a group of immigrants shifting
completely to a new language or maintaining their old one for some
purposes. Why did most immigrants to the USA from Northern Europe
drop their home language so fast, while Asian immigrants to Britain seem
to be keeping theirs alive? How did Welsh survive English occupation, or
how did Basque and Catalan stay alive under Franco's policy of enforcing
the use of Castillian Spanish? We might investigate the close bonds
between language choice and social identity, asking why their language
remained so important to Maoris, Basques, or Frisians that they have
been willing to undertake political action to preserve it. We might ask

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why speakers of certain varieties are influential and powerful, and why
speakers of other varieties are regularly discriminated against. These
questions concern the use of a language or a language variety as a whole
rather than individual variations, and asking them makes the study of
language a means to understanding a society.

If there is a common theme that emerges from the studies of

sociolinguists, it is that the complex interplay of language structure with
social structure means that any user of language is constantly responding
to and signaling social information. My identity (or rather my various
identities) is recognizable from my choice among all the variants that a
language offers. One might even go so far as to claim that I is this choice
of identity that accounts, better than the other factors we will consider, for
the observable variation in natural speech.

But before we can consider these more specific topics and the
theories held to explain them, it is valuable to make clear what the data of
sociolinguistics are, and what methods are used to collect these data.

The methods of enquiry

What to study and how to study it are closely related questions. A

theory tells us which facts count as data. A science advances either by
posing new important questions about the data or by finding new ways of
observing data to answer important questions. Noam Chomsky initiated a
revolution in linguistics by asking how to account for the fact that
everyone who learns a language (a first language, that is to say) shows
evidence of control of rules that are not evident from normal exposure to
people speaking. Sociolinguists ask a different questions: how to account
for the variation that exists in every language. Because of what they

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study, they are just as concerned with how to answer the question as with
the question itself.

The reason for this concern is because we need to observe a

dynamic phenomenon in its natural setting. In biology, one common way
of studying frogs is by dissecting them, but of course a dead frog doesn't
do very much. In sociolinguistics, the analogue riddle is what Labov
labeled the observer's paradox, namely: how can we observe the way
people speak when they are not being observed?

The enigma arises because sociolinguists believe that language use

is always sensitive to the social relations among the participants in a
speech event. We speak differently to superiors, to colleagues, to friends,
and to children. Our speech patterns regularly change when another
person (especially a stranger) enters the conversation. Even young
children quickly develop markedly different styles for talking to different
people. Given this sensitivity of speech to audience, how can a linguist,
who is a stranger and an outside observer, witness and record the
vernacular and unmonitored speech patterns that close friends use among
themselves? Doesn't the presence of the sociolinguist kill the naturalness
of the speech just as effectively as the dissector's scalpel kills the frog?
There has been no definitive answer. Sociolinguists have countered the
paradox in different ways, as we shall see.

What are the data?

The question of what constitutes interpretable data is a key one in

any discipline. In sociolinguistics, there is a tension between the
observers and the quantifiers. Joshua Fishman has recommend that when
he and John Gumperz were working together on a study of bilingualism
among Puerto Ricans in the Jersey City barrio, Gumperz would

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occasionally ask him to produce evidence to back up an assertion.
Fishman, with his background in sociology and psychology, would bring
in bundles of computer print-out of statistical calculations. When
Gumperz himself was similarly challenged by Fishman, Gumperz, trained
as an ethnographer, would describe a conversation he had overheard at a
party the night before note the Fishman used elicited data that could be
analysed statistically, while Gumperz discovered his data through
observation of the use of language in a natural setting.

Of we try to understand the basis for these two approaches, we

might say that sociologists seek their evidence in the patterns underlying
the answers of a large number of people to many carefully designed
questions. The social forces that control individual speech behaviour are
expressed, sociologists believe, in the statistically determinable
tendencies that can be extracted by analyzing large quantities of data.
Ethnographers, on the other hand, trained to compare the behaviour of
individuals in one culture with the patterns of behaviour observed in
many other cultures, have learned to present their intuitions through the
interpretation of single events that they carefully observe. The two
approaches are complementary.

Whatever method they choose, what sociolinguists are looking for

is evidence of socially accepted rules accounting for variations in speech.
The evidence is in part the speech variation (the differences in
pronunciation or word-choice, or in grammatical choice), in part the
characteristics of the speaker (age, gender, education, place of birth, and
domicile), and in part the nature of the speech encounter (its place, its
topic, the role relations of the speakers). Some of these data can be
collected by observation, some by elicitation. Whether to trust the
observation is of course a problem: the speaker might be pretending or
lying, the observer might be looking too hard or not noticing something

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critical. All of these methodological problems are inevitable in the study
of a living phenomenon like language in its social use.

Given these concerns, many studies make use of multiple data

collected in a number of different ways. If the observed encounter shows
the same pattern as the carefully analysed sample of speech, and if the
attitudinal questionnaire is consistent with the statistical observations, a
sociolinguist can be more confident that the account of the underlying
structure is valid.

The sociolinguist at work

In practice, a number of workable solutions have been found to the

'observer's paradox' of collecting natural speech samples to analyse
variation in pronunciation, sociolinguists studying micro linguistic
variation regularly count the frequency of occurrence of a linguistic
feature under defined social conditions. For finer difference, they may
make precise instrumental measurements of significant speech sounds. In
order to obtain the samples for this analysis, natural speech must be
recorded on tape. This produces the methodological problem. Won't
speakers become self-conscious, and try to make their speech clearer or
more standard in the presence of a tape-recorded? Are the data collected
in this way natural?

Clandestine recording has been tried and largely abandoned. There

are practical reasons, for the tapes are usually noisy and require very
expensive processing. There are also ethical ones. Fifty years ago, a study
of spoken English could be based on surreptitiously recorded telephone
conversations passing through a university switchboard. In a climate of
greater respect for the privacy of their sources, sociolinguists now ask
their subjects for permission to use the tapes that they have made. Tape-

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recorders are now in the open, and researchers are generally satisfied that
any initial anxiety effecting the level of formality will disappear as an
interview continues.

The sociolinguistic interview, modeled on he format developed by

William Labov for his now classic doctoral study of New York City
English, is one of the most common techniques or gathering samples of
language. In the interview, the sociolinguist talks to the subject,
attempting to elicit examples of various kinds of speech. The normal
stylistic level for an interview like this is fairly formal, for the two people
speaking are strangers. There are ways to modify the level of formality.
The easiest alteration is in the direction of more careful attention to
speech, by giving the person being interviewed a passage or a list of
words to read. It is more difficult to relax the formality. Occasional bursts
of informal speech occur when a speaker switches to a topic outside the
interview, such as when a mother being interviewed by a sociolinguist
speaks to her child who has come into the room. Another circumstance is
when the speaker is emotionally involved in an event he or she is
narrating. Taking advantage of this, an interviewer might ask a question
about an occasion when the speaker's life was in danger and so obtain less
self-conscious speech.

Interviews provide a good deal of data, and are therefore invaluable

in studying in depth the language variation of the subjects. By selecting a
sample of subjects carefully, the researcher can make sure that significant
social types (for example, by gender, age, education, occupation) are
represented. One way to do this is to draw the subjects from a sample
previously studied in a sociological survey. But interviews are expensive
in time and effort, so that the number of different people studied is
limited.

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 For studying larger populations, one technique is the covert
collection of non-intrusive responses. Labov used this technique when he
asked salespeople in three New York department stores a question to
which the answer was 'Fourth floor'. This utterance gave him two past-
vocalic 'r's and a 'th' to record. By asking for a repetition, he otained a
second set of data, this time with added stress. A related approach has
been tried using telephone calls made in different languages in a
multilingual city, to find out whether there was prejudice against speakers
of one of the languages.

Once a natural speech sample has been collected, it must be

analysed. Usually, the linguist chooses a variable, a specific feature that
previous observation suggests is likely to prove of social significance. In
New York English, the pronunciation of /r/ after a vowel is such a feature,
and in Plaestinian vernacular Arabic it is the use of /tʃ/ rather than /k/ in
the word for dog, kalb or chalb. Each occasion where the feature could
occur is counted, and the percentage of each variant specific conditions
(for example, by speaker or by style) provides statistical data which can
be compared with other factors.

Because the interviewer usually has some clear preconceptions

about what phenomena are likely to be interesting, a sociolinguistic
interview follows a prepared protocol. After an opening general
conversation, there are likely to be questions about children's games and
rhymes to elicit older vernacular usage, and a question about some
momentous event that might encourage the subject to talk unself-
consciously. There may also be word lists to read or pictures to name to
check out more careful pronunciation of selected sounds or to check out
variations in names of objects. An interview provides extensive statistical
data on a large number of linguistic variations.

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 For sociolinguists working in the ethnographic tradition, the main
technique is the recording (either at the same time with a tape-recorder or
more usually on paper immediately after the event) of natural speech
events in which they have participated. As in other ethnographic
observation, observers' previous experiences have prepared them to
recognize significant exchanges. These examples are not always open to
statistical analysis, but are usually vivid cases which encourage our
acceptance of the validity of the ethnographer's authority and his or her
assertion that they represent a general rule and not an aberrant case.

To obtain statistically analyzable data about attitudes and

behaviours, a common technique is the questionnaire, a prepared list of
questions to which strangers are asked to respond. Questionnaires have
been used mainly by social psychologists, who ask the people they are
studying (or a carefully selected group of them who can be shown to
represent the wider population) a set of questions about themselves, their
beliefs, and their behaviours. By repeating the same question in different
forms, the psychologist can get some idea of the reliability of the
answers, and by careful wording of questions, attention can be focused on
those features that are to be analysed. One of the difficulties with direct
questionnaires is that they focus attention on the issue so clearly that
people answering might tell you what they think you want to know.
Another difficulty is that questionnaires are fixed in advance and so they
might leave out questions that seem interesting later on. In this respect,
interviews are much more flexible, but of course limited because of the
time they take to give and analyse.

Questionnaires are particularly useful in gathering demographic

data ('How old are you?' 'How many years did you spend at school?'
'What is your occupation?'). They are also used to study attitudes ('What
language do you think is the most useful?' 'What language is the most
beautiful?'). With can-do questions, they are used to obtain self-reports on

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language proficiency ('What languages can you read?' 'In what languages
can you carry on a conversation?').

The approach in this book

This chapter started out by defining the field of sociolinguistics,

and setting as its concern the relationship between language and society.
The field of study is focused on variations in language that may be shown
to be closely related to variations in society. We then considered the
methodological issues that continue to dominate discussion of the field.

In chapter 2 an approach to language study is introduced derived

from anthropology called the ethnography of speaking or communication.
This approach, which starts with language in use rather than with its
abstract structure, will provide us with a basis for the study of
conversation and of politeness. The way that language variation can be
located geographically and socially will start to be explored in Chapter 3.
The division into speech communities, and the geographical and political
factors that lead to the division of languages into identifiable dialects, are
also described in that chapter. Social factors are turned to in Chapter 4.
After defining the notion of style to represent the socially determined
variation in the speech of an individual, gender and social-class effects on
language are examined. In Chapter 5 there is a discussion on the bilingual
– the speaker with two distinct languages – and bilingualism – the effects
of this knowledge and the ways that the bilingual decides which language
to use. In Chapter 6 bilingualism is viewed as a phenomenon from a
social perspective, considering the nature of multilingual societies, the
forces leading to shifts in language use, and the establishment of stable
bilingualism or diglossia. In Chapter 7 ways in which the knowledge
gained by sociolinguistics is applied to social problems are discussed,
such as language policy and planning and language education.

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 Chapter Two
The ethnography of speaking and the structure
of conversation

13
The ethnography of speaking

Sociolinguists believe that the study of language must go beyond

the sentences that are the principal focus of descriptive and theoretical
linguistics. It must go beyond language and bring in social context. It
must deal with the 'real' texts that make up human communication and the
social situations in which they are used. The focus of attention shifts
situations in which they are used. The focus of attention shifts from the
sentence to the act of communication, the speech event.

Building on a model of communication first proposed by Roman

Jakobson, Dell Hymes suggested that any communicative use of language
or speech event is constituted by seven distinct factors, each associated
with a different function. The first two are the speaker-writer and the
hearer-reader; the third if the message form passed between them which
is drawn from the resources of a speech code. The message form
expresses a topic some propositional content which is passed by some
physical means, some channel, visual in the case of writing or sign
language or aural in the case of speech. The speech event is located in
some setting or other. It is possible to study these one at a time, but each
must be included to understand the working of the system. In particular
cases, one or more of the factors can be emphasized. The emotive or
expressive function stresses the speaker-writer's attitude. The referential
or denotative function stresses the topic. Some messages just check that
the channel is open ('Can you hear me?') or assure that it is ('Uh huh').

Dell Hymes proposed that this model should provide the basis for
an ethnography of speaking (sometimes also called an ethnography of
communication), which is an approach to the description of speech events
that calls for an analysis of each of the relevant factors. Each of them may
be studied independently, but all are closely interrelated in forming the

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structure of the whole event. For each genre or kind of speech event, the
factors are realized and related in appropriate ways.

Consider for instance how we might describe a sermon. The typical

speaker is a clergyman, the listeners a group of people constituting a
religions congregation, the setting a churchy or synagogue or mosque, the
channel direct voice or voice amplified by loudspeaker (or in a modified
version, transmitted by radio or television), the message form (i.e. the
actual sounds, words and sentences uttered by the speaker) a register of a
language presumably understood by the congregation, and the topic some
appropriate religious content.

Underlying the event is a complex set of socially recognized rules,

which can be most easily recognized by considering possible breaches of
them. Imagine for instance a preacher who stands there and says nothing,
or reads out an account of a football match. Or think what might happen
when the preacher uses for his sermon a liturgical language like Latin or
Coptic or Sanskirt that is still used for prayer but that the congregation
may no longer understand. Or a congregation that sings a hymn while the
preacher is speaking, or goes to sleep. Or when a lecturer starts to give a
sermon on morality in a physics class. These breaches of normal
conditions for a sermon suggest how one might build a set of rules to
describe a typical sermon as a speech event. One might do the same for
other recognizable speech events, like a chemistry lecture, or a dinner-
party conversation, or a bargaining session, or a lover's quarrel.

The major value of the ethnography of speaking to sociolinguistics

was in setting up an approach to language that went far beyond the
attempt to account for single written or spoken sentences. It widened the
scope to include all aspects of the speech event. This proves invaluable in
considering the structure of one of the commonest of speech events, the
conversation, when two or more people speak to each other.

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The structure of conversations

Linguists have as a general rule focused on the smaller units of

language like sounds, words and sentences, leaving it to other scholars to
examine the larger units that make up speech events. In the case of the
written language, the study of texts and genres has been the task of the
literary scholar. There is also a crossover field of stylistics and poetics
where occasionally linguists and literary scholars study the same objects
and ore occasionally talk to each other about their different views. Oral
literary texts were also studied by folklorists and literary scholars, but the
study of natural chunks of spoken language was generally ignored by
linguists until ethnographers, sociologists and sociolinguists started to
explore its structure.

Because so much earlier linguistic analysis was based on the

written language, it is understandable that the sentence should have been
considered as the important unit to study. But sentences are less useful in
the study of speech, for if you look at the verbatim transcription of a
normal conversation, you will see how few sentences are finished. More
usefully, the conversation interchange is the basic unit of the spoken
language. Its structure was first teased out in some innovative studied of
telephone conversations, where it was shown that a normal telephone
conversation has a number of distinct parts:

Who Utterance Comment

Caller (dials; phone rings) This is the summons
Other Hello? Answer
Caller Hello, this is Joe. Is that Bill? Identification
Other Yes Identity stage
Caller The meeting is still on? Message
Other Yes, I'll see you there. Acknowledgment
Caller OK. Bye. Close
Caller Hangs up

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 How do we know that telephone conversations are rule-governed
behaviour? One quick way is to imagine what is likely to happen if
someone doesn't follow one of the rules we propose. If when you make a
telephone call, you heart he receiver being lifted but no one speaks, the
conversation is usually study. You will usually issue another summons,
saying something like 'Hello! Are you there?' If, on the other hand, like
many children who have not learned the rules yet, you start speaking as
soon as the receiver is lifted, not waiting for the answerer to say
something, there is a moment of confusion. If you call a number and hear
a voice saying 'I'm busy at the moment. Please call back' or 'I'm not here
at the moment. Please leave a message after the beep', you assume you
are talking to a machine and behave accordingly. To hang up without a
formal close is considered abrupt and insulting behaviour.

There is a great deal of culturally and socially determined variation

in the possible choices within the pattern set out here. In England, people
commonly answer the phone by reciting their telephone number.
Telephone operators in offices are trained to answer by identifying their
employer: 'English Department. Good morning!' Intercom calls are
answered with 'Yes' rather than 'Hello'. Asking 'Is X there?' is interpreted
as asking to speak to X. there are national differences in these rules. In
some countries, it is considered impolite to ask to speak to someone else
before initiating a series of polite social interchanges with the person
answering. The development of answering machines and of voice-mail is
adding new structures to the rules, setting new challenges for the novice
or the conservative.

The important notion from out point of view is that there is a

formal structure to conversations, in part determined by the nature of the
event (until the answerer says something, the caller has no one to talk to),
and in part determined by social rules (what it is appropriate to say to
specific people in defined circumstances).

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 This quick analysis of the telephone conversation demonstrates the
existence of socially structured rules for conversational interchanges.
There have been studies of various aspects of conversation, such as the
nature of service encounters (such as between a customer and a seller),
the rules for turn-taking and interruption, the organization of invitations,
the normal patterns of social intercourse in casual conversations.

Service encounters also have a fairly straightforward underlying

structure. The first element is similar to the bell ringing in a telephone
conversation: engaging the attention of the person meant to give the
service. The task here is to establish the channel between speaker and
hearer. This varies according to the social situation and cultural pattern.
In some cultures and situations, it leads to a preliminary social exchange;
in others, it involves simply catching the eye of the clerk or ticket-seller
and making a gesture without saying anything. Shop-keepers in the
Middle East remark on the brusqueness of tourists who start their
conversation by pointing to something and saying 'How much?' Their
normal conversational interchanges starts with a formal set of greeting,
including enquiries after the health of the parties and their presumed
families, comments on the weather or some other neutral subject, and
finally a mention that there is some commercial purpose to the event. In
other words, they require that the topic be broached only after a social
exchange.

One kind of service encounter that has been highly developed in

some societies is the process of bargaining, where the two parties seek to
arrive at a price that satisfies both. In Middle Eastern usage, this often
involves appeals to a neutral bystander, who initially is expected to agree
with the buyer that the first price is too high, but is ultimately expected to
confirm that the seller's last price is a fair one. This kind of negotiation is
even more highly developed in industrial bargaining and in diplomatic
exchanges.

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 Turn-taking, the question of who speaks, is one of the most
intriguing aspects of conversational interchange. The physical constraint
is obvious. If two people are speaking at once, they and others find it
difficult to understand everything said. In various formal situations, there
are clear rules on the order of speaking. In a classroom, teachers claim the
right to control turn-taking. The teacher speaks more or less when he or
she wants, and grants permission to students to talk. In a parliament or
other public meeting, a chairperson is given the authority to determine
who can speak and for how long. In trials, there are clear rules on who
speaks first, who has the last word, who may ask questions, and who
must answer them. Lay witnesses are often confused and usually at a
disadvantage in their lack of understanding of these rules.

In informal conversations and informal meetings, the issue of turn-

taking is often quite complex, depending on power and status. Who has
the floor (the right to talk at any given moment) varies according to rules
of the social group. Once someone has the floor, it is possible to try to
interrupt, but a speaker can ignore this. Silence sometimes leaves the
floor open, but there are turn-holders-ways of signaling that the speaker
intends to continue after a break-like 'umm …' or avoidance of a final
intonation pattern.

Much of the study of discourse has been carried out with a focus on
the meaning or topic rather than the other more social factors, and is
therefore better considered under the rubric of pragmatics. Here, out
focus is the social, and we will analyse in some detail two matters
concerning the influence of social aspects of the relation of the speaker-
writer and the listener-reader in the limitations set in choice of the
message form. First we ask, what is politeness and how does it control
speech? Second, we will look at the socially controlled choice of forms
involved in selecting an appropriate term which to address the person to
whom you are talking.

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Politeness and politeness formulas

Because speech events regularly include both a speaker-writer and

a listener-reader, it is not surprising that language is particularly sensitive,
in the rules for speech use, to the relations between the two parties. Just
as a good actor can utter a single sentence expressing a wide range of
emotional states of the speaker, so the choice of an appropriate message
from can be modified to express a wide range of attitudes of the speaker
to the listener. Given the same general situation, I can pass information or
make a request or simply greet in a whole set of different ways that will
define my attitude to the listener and the importance I give him on her.

In its simplest terms, politeness consists of this recognition of the

listener and his or her rights in the situation. Requests, which are an
imposition on the listener, are mitigated by being made indirectly, as
questions ('Could you possibly pass me the salt?') as statements ('I think
that is that salt beside your plate'), or by adding formulas like 'Please' and
'if you would be so kind'. Social relations are eased by complimenting ('I
do like your new car!' or 'Congratulations'). In some languages, there are
elaborated sets of politeness formulas, like in Arabic saying mabruk to
someone who has just bought something new, or na?iman to someone
who has just had a haircut or a bath or a short map. For each formula,
there is an appropriate reply, 'allah ybarik fik (may God bless you) to the
firs and 'allah yn?am ?alek (may God refresh you) to the second in
American-English, the equivalent is saying 'You're welcome' in reply to
'Thank you'.

The most common kinds of politeness formulas are involved with

greetings. Greetings are the basic oil of social relations. To fail to greet
someone who expects to be greeted signals either some unusual
distraction or a desire to insult the person. Each social group has its own

20
set of rules about who should be greeted, who should greet first, and what
is an appropriate form of greeting.

English greetings range from an informal 'Hi!' through a neutral

'Good morning' to a slowly disappearing formal 'How do you do!' It is
common to add a second party of the greeting, a purely phatic 'How are
you!' to which no reply is expected. Arab greetings use an elaborate set of
paired greetings-plus-responses, depending on time of day or otyher
social aspects of the situation.

The study of greetings, therefore, provides a first useful method of

exploring the structure of a social group. A second area showing patterned
variation in speech and similarly studied within the ethnography of
communication has been the conditions on the use of terms of address.

Terms of address

The choice of second-person pronoun and the related phenomenon

of terms of address in Western European languages in particular shows
the formalization of politeness and status in a language. A number of
languages offer the same sort of choice as French of addressing a single
person using either the singular pronoun tu or the plural vous.

In earlier usage, the plural V form (vous in French, Sie in German)

was used to address someone of higher status, who would return the T
form (tu in French, du in German). Thus, a servant would use V to a
master who would reply with T. in medieval French, this moved through
the whole chain of being, withGod speaking to the angels as T, or men
using T for animals. V could also be used between equals. There
developed over time a tendency to switch from V-V use to T-T use, as a
sign of intimacy. The French verb tutoyer, to use T to someone, refers to
this change of familiarity. At one stage, in German student society before

21
the First World War, the switch was accompanied by a formal ceremony.
In early twentieth-century French society, two adult males who had
served in the army together would use T to each other. While the pattern
has been relaxed, it remains impolite to use T to a stranger. It has been
complained that students in Canadian-French immersion programmes are
sometimes addressed only with the T fom, and so have not learned the
appropriate use of the V form with adult strangers.

With the growing egalitarianism of modern life, there has been a

slow breakdown in the formality of address systems. The ideologically
based switch from V to T associated with communism has been
documented in Russian novels of the period. French children return T to
their parents. Many speakers of Swedish now use T even to strangers.

A related phenomenon in languages hat do not have the T/V

distinction is the use of address terms. English once had the thou/you
distinction and still offers a range of address terms, ranging from Title
Alone (Sir, Your Majesty, Madam, Constable) through Title+Last Name
(Mr Jones, Dr Smith, Lord Clark, Miss Jones, Mrs Jones, perhaps Ms
Jones) to First Name to Multiple Names (including Nicknames). The
conditions for choosing vary socially. Increasingly, in North American
and British academic circles, people who have just been introduced as
'Professor X, meet Dr Y' move immediately to first names. There are still
interesting cases of uneven usage. American doctors and dentists use first
names to all their patients, but expect Dr X in return. Teachers in many
societies receive Title or Title + Last Names, but return first nme (or in
some schools, last name).

In Arabic, there is an elaborate set of address patterns. One

interesting feature is the custom of addressing friends and acquaintances
by the name of their eldest son: a woman is addressed as um Ahmed,

22
mother of Ahmed, and a man as Abu Ahmed, father of Ahmed. The
custom is even extended to people without children.

Title plus first or last name is a common pattern in many

languages. Non-relatives may also be addressed with terms of
relationships, as in an English pattern of training children to address
adults of the parent's generation as Uncle John or Antie Mary. In Tongan,
on the other hand, while there is a complex hierarchical system with
almost feudal ranks, people are never addressed by kinship or other titles,
but only by their name.

Military usage related to address systems shows special patterns.

Peace-time armies with strict discipline and emphasis on ceremonial are
likely to have strict rules for addressing superiors. In the US Marine
Corps, senior officers were addressed in the third person ('Would the
General like me to bring him a cup of coffee?') and other officers received
'sir' from their inferiors. Non-commissioned officers were addressed by
rank ('Yes, sergeant.') In a different setting, such as under battle
conditions, things changed. An officer was addressed directly, often by a
regular nickname. Company commanders, for instance, were addressed as
'Skipper' and sergeant-majors as 'Gunny'. More democratic armies often
make a point of dropping special address rules along with saluting. These
changes parallel the changes from V to T under similar circumstances.

The ethnography of speaking moved the focus of analysis from the

sentence to the speech event, and offered a first approach to the analysis
of natural speech, by showing patterns that could be understood if social
information were included. In this, as in any other study of language in
use, the aspect that became more obvious to the sociolinguist was the
existence of regularly patterned variation. It provided a wider canvas on
which to paint the complexity of language behaviour in its social setting,
and a technique for capturing some of the ways in which each may reflect

23
the other. It opened up the way to the study of language in use, to the
importance of different channels, to the critical importance of relations
between speaker and hearer, and to the social context of language.

Against this wider background, we return to the central issue with

which sociolinguistics is concerned, the existence and nature of regularly
patterned variation in language and the role of social factors in
accounting for this regularity of pattern. In the ethnography of speaking,
the setting is usually defined socially. But setting can also be defined in
geographical terms, and can also be placed in terms of the patterning of
social class.

24
 Chapter Three
Locating variation in speech

25
Speech communities and repertoires

The non-hyphenated fields of linguistics like phonology, semantics,

and syntax focus on the language system ideally abstracted from all social
context. Psycholinguistics deals with the individual speakers' acquisition
and use of language, and related this to mental processes. Sociolinguistics
is concerned with language in situ and in vivo, alive in its geographical
and social setting and space. What this space is like, we now consider. To
start with, because our main interest is in social matters, we will deal with
social space, and look for the location of varieties of speech within
definable social units.

Some of the units with which we are concerned are already familiar
and established social groupings. Thus, we can study the language of
families, neighbourhoods, villages, cities, states, countries, or regions.
However, for theory building and planning observation, we need a more
flexible and abstract concept, provided by the notion of a speech
community.

For general linguistics, a speech community is all the people who

speak a single language (like English or French or Amharic) and so share
notions of what is same or different in phonology or grammar. This would
include any group of people, wherever they might be, and however
remote might be the possibility of their ever wanting or being able to
communicate with each other, all using the same language. The notion is
preserved in such a concept as 'la francophonie', the French-speaking
world, and it can serve as the basic slogan for political co-operation.
Underlying it is the idea of a group of people who could, if they wanted,
speak to each other.

Sociolinguists, however, find it generally more fruitful to focus on

the language practices of a group of people who do in fact have the
opportunity to interact and who, it often turns out, share not just a single

26
language but a repertoire of languages or varieties. For the sociolinguist,
the speech community is a complex interlocking network of
communication whose members share knowledge about and attitudes
towards the language use patterns of others as well as themselves. There
is no theoretical limitation on the location and size of a speech
community, which is in practice defined by its sharing a set of language
varieties (its repertoire) and a set of norms for using them.

The idea that the members of a speech community share norms

about the selection of varieties is important. Though they might not all
know and use each of the varieties, they recognize the conditions under
which other members of the community believe that it is appropriate to
use each of them. Londoners recognize Cockney and Mayfair varieties of
English though they may themselves use neither. A small social network
(such as regular patrons of a coffee shop) forms a speech community, and
so does a large metropolis or a country, a region, or a communication
network (like the Internet). In each case, the goal of sociolinguistic study
of such a community is to relate the significant language varieties to the
significant social groups and situations.

In small Israeli Palestinian villages, there are commonly four

significant varieties making up the linguistic repertoire: the village
vernacular (a dialectal variant of Palestinian Arabic), Classical or Modern
Standard Arabic (the fus-Ha taught in school and used for writing and
public speaking), Modern Israeli Hebrew (learned by those who worked
outside the village or went to high school), and some school-learned
English. The village dialect is considered appropriate for most daily
activities; Modern Standard Arabic is used only in educational or
religious or formal public functions; Hebrew is kept for use outside the
village; and English for educational use.

27
 In a city, the pattern is likely to be even more complex. Inside the
walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, there are thirty or more languages
used by different residents in different settings. In Hong Kong, while
most local Chinese use Cantonese most of the time, many have learned
and use Putonghoa (Standard Mandarin), whose status changed with the
reversion to Chinese sovereignty, and all who go to school learn and (less
often) use English. In Toronto, Mebourne, New York, or London, English
is the common language, but in certain neighbourhoods it is regularly
found sharing the repertoire with dozens, even scores, of immigrant
languages. In other cities, like Brussels, there is a clear division between
areas where French or Flemish dialects are dominant.

The speech repertoire may be divided functionally as well as

spatially. On the Navajo Reservation in the Western United States, most
people spoke Navajo up to a few years ago, but most writing was done in
English. The many FM radio stations announced the Country and Western
music they most of the time in Navajo, but the tribal newspaper was
published only in English. The Tribal Council conducted its meetings in
Navajo (using an interpreter for communication with government
officials), but its decisions were recorded and published in English. Most
schools at that time tried to teach Navajo-speaking pupils to read English.
In the last few years, more and more children have been starting to speak
English.

Smaller networks-groups of people who communicate with ach

other regularly-also contain consistent patterns. One might, for instance,
study the linguistic differences that make up the communicative
repertoire in a modern officer or research centre equipped with computers
and telephones and faxes. A researcher with a problem might send off a
quick e-mail question to a colleague in the next room, or ask the same
questions by telephone. If the answer is complicated, it might be handled
by sending (by fax or computer) a copy of a previously written paper.

28
When the exchanges become too involved, the colleagues might arrange
(by phone or e-mail) a face-to-face meeting. Each of these
communications media will involve different stylistic choices, and the
variants can be considered as making up the repertoire. In the same way,
international organization might, like the European Community, have a
formal policy governing choice of language from the repertoire available.

The speech community is, therefore, the abstract 'space' studied in

sociolinguistics, the location in which the patterned variations in selection
from the available repertoire takes place.

Dialect

There are longer- established approaches to the issue of variation as

a result of geographical location. Well before sociolinguistics became
identified as a discipline, students of language gave serious attention to
the variations in language that correlated with the locality where the
language was spoken. The study of regional dialects played a major role
in the historical linguistics that flourished in the late eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries, until the interest in diachronic changes (over time)
was challenged by the concern for synchronic description of a language
system at any one time, with a preference for the present.

The earliest scholars concerned with regional dialectal variation

were the philologists who set out first to explain differences in
manuscripts according to the place where the manuscript was written, and
later used their collected observations to reconstruct the history of the
language. Essentially, there are two principles underlying social accounts
of dialect variation. The first is that all languages change over time, as
new words are added to deal with new concepts or as contact with other
languages and 'phonetic drift' leads to modifications in phonology. The

29
second is that people who communicate with each other tend to speak
similarly. Assume a group of people all setting off from one place where
they lived together and spoke the same language, with sub-groups
stopping off and forming communities isolated by distance or
geographical boundaries from other speakers of the language. Over time,
the language spoken in each place will change. The longer the groups are
isolated, the more their varieties will have changed. With the breakdown
of isolation in the modern world, as roads are built and as radio and
television enter more and more homes, dialectal variation tends to
diminish and languages become more and more homogenized.

Dialectology is the search for spatially and geographically

determined differences in various aspects of language. For each village or
region that they study, dialectologists want to know the typical local
vocabulary or pronunciation. As a result, their subjects of choice are
usually older people who have lived all their lives in one location and
who have had a minimum of education. Once found, they are quizzed by
the fieldworkers for names of objects or pronunciations of words or
strange expressions.

In the popular wisdom, there is recognition of the 'broad/æ/' of the

Yorkshireman, the glottal stop of the Cockney, the Texas drawl, the /r/-
less dialect of upper-class Boston. These are stereotypes, fixed and
prejudicial patterns of thought about people that may be mistaken, but
they focus on the most obvious feature of the local accent. There are also
obvious differences in lexicon. Peanuts may be called groundnuts or
goobers or pinders in different parts of America. There are places in the
USA where you buy potatoes in a bag and they put your groceries in a
sack; others where you find potatoes in a sack and take your groceries
home in a bag. Where older dialect terms remain, you might hear tote or
poke or toot used instead of bag or sack.

30
 Careful plotting of these different variants permit dialectologists to
recognize major regional differences. Thus, the eastern United Stated has
a northern zone where both grease and greasy are pronounced with an /s/,
a transitional zone where grease is with a /s/ and greasy with a /z/, and a
southern where both are /z/. Differences may be quite striking: Texas
English, for instance, has one fewer vowel than general American usage,
making no difference between the vowel of pin and pen, so that a Texan
is careful to distinguish between a writing pen and a sticking pin.

In long-settled European countries, dialect atlases show the effects

of earlier settlement patterns and of contact. One can trace which areas
were originally Celtic, or see evidence of the limits of Roman occupation.
In a more recently settled country like the USA, the atlases reveal the
differences in original settlement on the Eastern seaboard, showing from
what part of England the settlers came and what other linguistic groups
they were later mixed with. The US atlases also permit plotting the
Western movement of pioneers from the Eastern seaboard along the
different pioneering trails.

Geographical differences continue to provide grist for the

sociolinguist mill, but the studies have become more complex as the
influence of other factors has been accepted. A recent study of the
Mexican-American border, for instance, indicates that distance from the
border is indeed one of the explanations of Spanish language maintenance
among people who have crossed into the United States, but that it needs
to be set against other sociological factors such as education and mobility.
Geographical space, in other words, is not enough to account for
language variation.

This becomes clear if we look at the regular discussion of the

difference between a language and a dialect. From a linguistic point of
view, regional dialects tend to show minor differences from their

31
immediate neighbours, and greater differences from distance varieties.
Thus, one can demonstrate the existence of a chain of dialects from Paris
to Rome. At the Franco-Italian border, however, although there is no
linguistic break in the chain, the political distinction is enough to make it
clear that one has moved from dialects of French to dialects of Italian.

The decision of what language a dialect belongs to is therefore

social and political rather than purely linguistic. As long as Yugoslavia
was united, linguists could talk about Serbo-Croatian as a language, with
regional variations. With the separation into distinct and warming
territories, and with the subsequent transfer of populations and insistence
on ethnic difference, Serbian and Croatian have now emerged as distinct
languages. In the Netherlands, only Frisian is recognized as a distinct
language; all other regional varieties are labeled dialects. A language, it
has been remarked, is a dialect with a flag, or even better, with an army.
The kinds of differences in patterns of variation that are produced by
geographical or spatial isolation are regularly transformed into powerful
mechanisms for asserting and recognizing social differences.

32
 Chapter Four
Styles and Social Class

33
Styles

Geography provides a good beginning when we want to explain

language variation. Dialectology is able to account for many of the
differences that otherwise play havoc with those who seek a pure unified
language with a single set of correct forms. The differences between
dived and dove, between footpath and pavement, set difficult quandaries
for someone trying to describe the English language. Being able to add
regional labels to variations helps a great deal. Thus, dictionaries can
label forms as British, American, or Australian, implying the existence of
unmarked correct forms.

But even if this is accepted, there remains the issue of variations

within individual speakers who come from a single location. Speakers of
English sometimes use 'don't' and sometimes use 'do not'. If you carefully
record anyone speaking, you will find that there is still patterned variation
in the pronunciation of a single phoneme, in the choice of words, and in
grammar.

Styles and Formality

A first useful explanation is provided by the notion of style and the

related dimension of formality. At times, we are more careful, and at
times we are more relaxed in our speech or writing, just as at times we are
more careful or more relaxed in other kinds of behaviour like how we
dress or eat., this varying level of attention to variety forms a natural
continuum, the various levels of which can be divided up in different
ways. Each language has its own way of doing this: some, like Javanese
or Japanese, have a finely graded set of levels, marked specifically in
morphological and lexical choice.

How many distinct points there are on what is rally a continuum is

not important, but most accounts of language (such as those in good

34
dictionaries and complete grammars) now make some reference to levels
of stylistic variation. The cautious writer or speaker is wanted in this way
how others might react to possible choices, just as etiquette books advise
readers how to avoid embarrassment in social settings.

In the sociolinguistic interviews that Labov conducted in the New

York City study referred o earlier (see Chapter I), he found evidence of
the informal style (the vernacular he was most interested in) being used
when a person he was interviewing interrupted to speak to a child who
had entered the room, or offered a cup of coffee to the interviewer, or
became excited about the story he or she was telling. In the interview,
Labov would elicit more formal use by asking the subject to read a
passage or read a list of words. To obtain more casual speech, he asked
the subject to tell an emotionally significant story. This gave him three or
four levels, and the possibility of comparing changes in certain features at
each of them.

In bilingual communities, these stylistic levels may be marked by

switching from one variety to another. Officials in Switzerland who use
Swiss German in intimate and casual circumstances move to High
German for informal and formal speech. Paraguayan city-dwellers switch
on Guarani for casual and intimate speech and jokes. Speakers of Arabic
who use the vernacular in normal conversation shift to Modern. Standard
Arabic when they are giving public speeches.

The commonly accepted explanation for this stylistic variation is

the care that speakers and writers take with their expression. The more
formal the situation, this explanation goes, the more attention we pay to
our language and so the more we are likely to conform to the favoured
and educated norms of our society. It is in large measure an effect of
formal education, especially common where the educational system aims
to pass on the prestigious norms associated with literacy.

35
 Attention or care is a good explanation as far as it goes, but it
leaves open the question of where the norms come from, and it does not
deal with the possibility of conscious choice of a less or more formal
style. One explanation or these cases is the idea of audience design. A
speaker who can control more than variety chooses a level of speech
according to the audience he or she is addressing. We might consciously
choose an informal style when speaking to strangers in order to seem
friendly. Related to this is unconscious accommodation; we automatically
adjust our speech to be more like that of our interlocutor. Both of these
approaches offer some idea of the importance of language in establishing
social relations and in representing a speaker's sense of identity, a topic
we will explore later in more detail.

It should be noted that this recognition of stylistic levels as being

appropriate to specific social situations is in opposition to normativism,
the approach taken by purists who claim that there is one 'correct' version
and that all variation is incorrect and bad. When Webster's Dictionary in
its fourth edition introduced stylistic labeling and listed such informal
usages as 'ain't', there were many who criticized its admitting the
barbarians into the gates of pure English.

Specialized varieties or registers and domains

Dialect concerns variations that are located regionally or socially.

Style refers to differences in degree of formality. A third set of variations
concerns the special variety (or register) especially marked by a special
set of vocabulary (technical terminology) associated with a profession or
occupation or other defined social group and forming part of its jargon or
in-group variety. People who work at a particular trade or occupation
develop new terms for new concepts. Phrases like hacking and surfing the
net have no obvious meaning to those who are not keeping up with the

36
computer revolution. Terms like a sticky wicket and hit for a six are
understood best by people with some experience of cricket.

A specialized jargon serves not just to label new and needed

concepts, but to establish bonds between members of the in-group and
enforce boundaries for outsiders. If you cannot understand my jargon,
you don't belong to my group. (You might have noticed how in this
serious of books, the writers are careful to identify new terms by putting
them in bold, and to explain them in a glossary, all to make it easier for
the novice reader to join the group of experts.)

Australian aboriginal secret societies developed their own special

forms of language. Thieves and underworld jargons sometimes ???????)
are another example. The goal of these was often ?????? it hard for the
outsider to understand conversations. This is not limited to the
underworld. In Alsace, where the ???? that so many people knew German
made Yiddish more widely understandable, Jewish horse traders were
reported to have used a great number of Hebrew terms for numbers and
parts of a horse so as to keep their language secret. In the course of time;
these terms might get known by all professionals in the field, and form
part of the register of horse-traders. Gangs and other closed peer groups
often develop their own forms of jargon to serve as markers of group
membership and also to make their speech less intelligible to outsiders.

Dialects, styles, and registers as we have presented them are ways

of lebelling varieties of language. The starting point of our classification
is the linguistic variation, which we attempt to explain by associating it
with a specific set of social features. We might choose to work in the
reverse direction, by classifying social situations, and then naming the
variety that is suitable for it. A register is a verity of language most likely
to be used in a specific situation and with particular roles and statuses
involved. Examples might be a toast at a wedding, sports broadcast, or

37
talking to a baby. A register is marked by choices of vocabulary and of
other aspects of style.

A useful way of classifying social situations is to analyse them into

three defining characteristics: place, role-relationship and topic. Together,
these make up a set of typical domains. One common domain is home.
Domains are named usually for a place or an activity in it. Home, them,
in the place. The role-relationships associated with home (the people
likely to be involved in speech events) include family members (mother,
father, son, daughter, grandmother, baby) and visitors. There are a
suitable set of topics (depending on the cultural pattern) such as activities
of the family, news about family members, the meal, the household. A
particular variety of language is appropriate to the domain. In a
multilingual community, different languages may well be considered
appropriate for different languages may well be considered appropriate
for different domains. In a multilingual family, different role-relationships
might involve different language choice. For instance, husband and wife
might use one language to each other, but father and children might use
another.

Another common domain is work. The place might be a factory or

an office or a store. The role-relationships include boss, worker,
colleague, customer, foreman, client, to mention just a few. The topics are
work-related. Now we can understand some of the sociolinguistic
complexity that occurs when two people who have one role-relationship
at home (such as father and son) have another at work (boss and worker,
for instance). When they speak, they can choose a register or language
variety to show which relationship is dominant at the time.

38
Slang and solidarity

The importance of language in establishing social identity is also

shown in the case of slang. One way to characterize slang is as special
kinds of 'intimate' or in-group speech. Slang is a kind of jargon marked
by its rejection of formal rules, its comparative freshness and its common
ephemerality, and its marked use to claim solidarity.

Solidarity, or common group membership, is an important social

force that has a major impact on language. The solidarity relations (the
claims that we belong to the same group) underlie the notion of
accommodation mentioned above. When we are talking to someone, most
of us unconsciously move our speech closer to theirs (which explains
why our accents change after we have lived in a new place for a long
time). Similarly, by choosing the form oef language associated with a
specific group, we are making a claim to be counted as a member of that
group.

This contrasts with the power relation, in which a person's speech

carries a claim to be more or less powerful than the other. Slang is
primarily speech claiming group membership, and it rejects the power
dimensions associated with formal language.

Often, slang is associated with peer group and gang speech,

intentionally used to obtain some degree of secrecy. It may be compared
to the secret languages found in some tribes. In one Australian aboriginal
language, there is a men's society with a secret language in which every
word means its opposite. Pig Latin is a children's secret language in
which a meaningless vowel is inserted after every syllable. Canay uyay
unayderaystanday thisay? In southern Arizona, the Spanish-American
young people developed a secret variety called Pachuco in which they
used idioms translated literally from English to Spanish, which couldn't
be understood by either their Spanish-speaking elders or their Eglish-

39
speaking fellow students. Cockney rhyming slang (for example, 'titfer' for
'hat', abbreviated from 'tit for tat') has also been widely publicized.

Slang regularly transgresses other social norms, making free use of

taboo expressions. The use of words like 'fuck' and 'shit' in public media
has become a mark of liberation or a sign of revolt, depending on one's
point of view. But slang also sets up its own norms, the norms of the in-
group, so that the gang is easily able to recognize a lame or outsider, who
does not understand or who misuses slang terms. Slang thus serves social
functions, setting and proclaiming social boundaries and permitting
speakers to assert or claim membership of identity or solidarity groups.
Slang is a feature of the speech of the young and the powerless. Its
dynamic nature is partly an effect of the need to develop new in-group
terms when slang terms are adopted by other speakers.

Social stratification

While note had been taken earlier of the effect of social class on
speech, it was the work of William Labov in New York that established
social stratification, the study of class distinction in speech, as a major
topic in sociolinguistics. Labov himself started out with a purely
linguistic question. He waned to know how, in the terms of the structural
linguistics that was in vogue when he was a graduate student, to set up a
phonological analysis that included features that were sometimes zero.
What were you to do, he asked, in New York City, where speakers
sometime pronounced the /r/ after a vowel (post-vocalic /r/) and
sometimes didn't? The notion of free variation, the notion that the choice
of variant was uncontrolled and without significance, was widely used for
such cases, but it seemed an unsatisfactory dodging of the question.

40
 He wondered next whether there was any scientifically observable
explanation to the variation. In a clever pilot study (see above, page II),
he found that the shop staff (socioeconomically similar in level, but finely
varied by the differences in customers and prices) showed regular and
predictable variation. The percentage of r-coloration (any tendency to
pronounce post-vocalic /r/), he found, correlated closely with the social
level of the customers of the store. In fact, in one store, he found a higher
percentage of use of the prestige feature among salespeople on the higher,
more expensive floors of the store.

In later studies, using extensive interviews with subjects selected

on the basis of their socioeconomic classification, the relevance of
sociolinguistic evidence to socioeconomic stratification was firmly
established in cities, variations in speech provide clear evidence of social
status.

There are historical explanations for social differentiation. The

striking observation was a tendency in the upwardly mobile and socially
insecure lower-middle class to over-use (relative to the normal slope)
socially desirable features in very careful speech and reading. The
hypercorrection suggests that the feature is recognized as a stereotype
rather than still serving as an unconscious social marker.

The analyses we have discussed to date of these variations have

depended on associating linguistic features (for example, the percentage
of r-coloration) with social or demographic factors (gender, educational
level, socioeconomic status). As far as it goes, the explanatory power of
these correlations appears good, but correlation and causation are not the
same thing. We obtain a more powerful account of what is involved if we
add social psychological factors like attitude and accommodation and
consider them as causes.

41
Accommodation and audience design

How is it that dialect differences and stylistic differences emerge?

This simplest solution is that people tend to talk like the people they talk
to most of the time. The physical isolation of villages explains why their
dialects are different from the dialects of neighbouring villages, and even
more different from those of more distant villages and towns. Similarly,
the social isolation of specific groups explains why their languages or
dialects remain relatively unaffected by that of other groups. It was
because the religious groups in Baghdad had limited contact with each
other that the Christians, Moslems, and Jews there maintained distinctive
dialects. It was the social distance between the castes in an Indian village
that led to differences in their speech.

An alternative suggestion is to consider that driving foirce as

audience design, a concept mentioned earlier on page 33. In this view, the
speaker, consciously or not, chooses a stylistic level appropriate for th
audience he or she wishes to address. The notion comes from radio
announcers, who suit their style to their audience. The same announcer
will be found to have distinct styles when reading a news items on a
national station and when introducing a song on a popular music station.
By selecting a style appropriate to a particular audience, the announcer is
identifying himself or herself with the audience or claiming membership
of the group .

Adding this social dimension increases the explanatory power. One

speaks most like the people with whom one regularly associates, but one
may also choose, in appropriate circumstances, to allow one's speech to
move in the direction of another group. As we noted earlier, many speech
sounds are not always pronounced in the same way by the same speaker,
but their realizations form rather a pattern not unlike the patterns of bullet
or arrow hits on a target. While there may be a rare bull's-eye, the shoes

42
as a whole form a more or less consistent group. If one moves one's aim,
the whole group moves, with the centre changing.

In conversations between people with differing pronunciation, it

has been noticed that there is a common tendency for the pronunciation of
the two to move slightly closer together. This process, called
accommodation, explains the way that a person who moves to a new part
of the country gradually modifies his or her speech in the direction of the
new norm. Because we are taking about changes in probabilities and
percentages, of use of some features often converge. It is common to find
that your speech – choice of vocabulary, grammatical forms, and even
pronunciation – moves towards that of your interlocutor.

The opposite effects also occurs, when a speaker chooses not to

converge but to diverge, by moving his or her speech away from the other
party. Rather than converging, one may choose to stress features that
connect one not to the other person present, but to an absent but valued
hypothetical audience, such as a peer group or an admired outsider. We
have already mentioned the same phenomenon in the use of non-strand
slang for showing in-group membership.

This powerful sociolinguistic phenomenon would seem related to

the most fundamental linguistic features involved in social bonding. Just
as two speakers talking together tend to be moving in the same rhythm so
they unconsciously adapt their speech to accommodate to each other. It is
this sympathetic movement and its absence that enable a speaker easily to
pick out which members of his or her audience are not listening.

The same factor also accounts for the tendency to speak like one's
friends and peers, and to modify one's speech either in their direction, or
to some other socially desirable prestige group. Consciously and
unconsciously, one uses one's speech, through selecting among socially
labeled variants which need not change meaning or interfere with

43
intelligibility, to express a claim of solidarity and social group
membership. In an early study of the speech of high-school students on
Martha's Vineyard, an island off the New England coast, it was shown
that the height of their /æ/ (as pronounced in words like cat and mat)
signaled either their intention to live the rest of their life on the island, or
their desire to move to the mainland.

The existence of variation in language, therefore, is not accidental

or meaningless. It adds a vital set of social dimensions, making it possible
for language to reflect and record an individual's demographic,
geographic, sociological, educational, and religious background. It helps
constitute identity; it claims solidarity; it expresses attitudes towards
power and prestige. This rich complexity helps us understand both how
and why language changes, for the social forces injected into variation
provide the dynamism of change.

The possibility of using variation in language to identify group

membership can have harmful effects, when it is associated with
prejudice. Telephone operators at car factories in Detroit were reported to
be trained to recognize Afro-Americans by their speech and to say there
were no jobs available. Where there is prejudice against foreigners or
members of a social class, speaking a stigmatized variety can do serious
harm. In a study in New York, adding non-standard features to a taped
sample of a voice led listeners to lower their judgment of the
employability of a speaker. The more stratified a society, the more likely
it is that speaking a prestige variety will be rewarded, and that speaking a
non-standard variety will lead to prejudicial treatment.

While it is possible, as we have seen, to recognize factors like these

through the study of variation with a single language variety, they are
even more salient when two or more languages are involved. In the next
chapter we will look at bilinguals and bilingualism.

44
 Chapter Five
Bilinguals and bilingualism

45
Language socialization

Children acquire language and social skills together. Their

sensitivity to the social uses of languages is already apparent in their early
learning of different varieties. Even while they are still in the babbling
stage, many children have a different way of addressing small objects
(animals, toys, other babies) from the way they address adults. If they do
this, they are showing that they have learned that babies are talked to
using a different variety. This register that is used to speak to babies is
called baby talk, and has been shown to occur in many languages. From
an early age, children learn that there is more than one variety of
language.

There are in fact a vast set of social rules about language that a
child must acquire to be successfully socialized. One is the rule for
conversational organization. Knowing when to speak and when to be
silent, how to enter a conversation, when to speak quietly, and when
clearly, are all part of the conversational rules that children have to learn.
Equally confusing at first are the pragmatic rules, such as comprehending
hat a question may be a request. We may be frustrated when speaking to
child on the phone. 'Yes!' he answers when we ask 'Is your mother there?',
making no effect to fetch her. Children have to learn the social
conventions for language use. Learning these social conventions is a key
component of socialization.

One of the most revealing opportunities for studying language

socialization is in the case of children growing up bilingually, for they
manage not just to keep the two languages separate, but to learn quickly
which language to use to which person. They also realize which people
can be addressed in a mixture of the two languages. In this way, bilingual
children can be said to develop control over three distinct varieties of
language. The study of bilingualism provides an excellent laboratory for

46
learning how a child can learn to be a member of two (or more) distinct
societies.

The description of bilingualism

While it is the case that event speakers of a single language

(putative monolinguals) control various styles and levels of that language,
it is very common that people develop some knowledge and ability in a
second language and so become bilingual. The simplest definition of a
bilingual is a person who has some functional ability in a second
language. This may vary from a limited ability in one or more domains,
to very strong command of both languages (which is sometimes called
balanced bilingualism). The assumption that there must be a single
definition leads to confusion, such as when one person is talking about
the highly skilled multiple-domained balanced bilingualism of an exert
translator and interpreter, and the other the uneven skills of a recent
immigrant. Additional confusion is caused by the common use of the
term bilingual to refer t a socially-disfavoured minority group: in Texas,
for instance, it is restricted to Mexican-Americans.

Rather than worrying about definition, it is more useful to consider

what is needed to describe the nature of an individual's bilingualism.
Clearly, the first (and not necessarily easy) element is to identify each of
the languages. We will often need to clarify which variety is involved: to
distinguish between Cantonese and Putonghoa, or between Egyptian and
Moroccan Arabic, or between High German and Swiss German.

A second important feature is the way each language was acquired.

It is useful to distinguish between mother (or native) tongue learning,
second (or informal) language learning, and foreign (or additional)
language learning. Each of these suggest different possible kinds of

47
proficiency. It is useful also to note the age of learning and the time spent
using the language. We describe two bilinguals in this way: 'X is a native
speaker of Cantonese and learned English in school.' 'Y grew up speaking
Moroccan Arabic, but was educated in French and has lived in Paris since
the age of 15'.

Another set of distinctions is hat of skill – reading, writing,

speaking, understanding speech. It is not uncommon for people to speak
one language and read and write another. Many Navajos use their own
language in conversation, but read in English. Until the literacy
campaigns of recent times, Ethiopians who spoke Amharic were mnore
likely to read G'iz than Amharic. The receptive skills of reading and
understanding speech are often stronger in a learned language than are the
productive skills of speaking and writing. Many people obtain reading
knowledge of a language at school, but cannot speak it.

In describing the bilingualism of an individual, another set of

differences is often evident in the performance of certain internal
functions. Bilinguals usually prefer one language for functions such as
counting, doing arithmetic, dreaming (some people dream in language,
others don't), cursing, or praying silently.

Another useful way to describe bilinguals is by describing the

external functions they can perform in each language. These might be
expressed as 'can do' statements: X can read a daily newspaper, can carry
on an informal conversation, can give a lecture. One special ability (not
true in the case of all bilinguals) is the skill of translation from one
language to the other. Another useful approach to describe a bilingual's
language use is by domains rather than by functions/

A domain, as we have discussed above on page 34, is an empirically

determined cluster consisting of a location, a set of role-relationships, and a set of
topics. Just as this notion was useful for identifying the use of registers, so it is useful

48
for considering bilingualism. For each of the domains, a bilingual is likely to have a
preferred language. Here are some examples of domains:

Location Role-relationships Topics

Home Mother, father, son, Domestic, personal, etc.
daughter, etc.
Neighbourhood Neighbour, shop-keeper, Weather, shopping, social
street-cleaner greetings
School Teacher, student, principal Social greetings,
educational
Church Priest, parishioner, etc. Sermons, prayers,
confession, social

Bilingual have a repertoire of domain-related of language choice.

The home-school or the home-work switch is probably the most common,
with one language learned at home from parents and the second learned at
school an used at work. When there is a language shift in progress,
certain traditional domains may remain favoured for the use of one
language. For the Maori people, before the recent language revival
activities began, the marae where traditional ceremonies and meetings
took place remained the strongest bastion of Maori language use. The
bilingualism we mentioned earlier in Swiss adults is domain-related, with
High German used in the work domain and Swiss German in the home
and neighbourhood. In his study of Puerto Ricans in New Jersey, Fishman
noted strong Spanish maintenance in home, neighbourhood and church,
and strong English usage at school and at work. It is normal for
immigrants to continue to use their original language in the home and in
religious domains, while using the new language in work, education, and
public domains.

Because domains are composite concepts, there is the possibility of

conflict and therefore marked choice between languages. Thus, two
people who normally speak the standard language at work might use their
home language there to signal either a change of role-relation (family

49
member or friend rather than co-worker) or topic (a home or
neighbourhood topic) while still being in the some location. We shall take
this up again later when we talk about switching. At this point, the
important notion is that a bilingual's use of his or her two language is
likely to vary considerably according to domain.

Code switching and code mixing

Bilinguals often switch between their two languages in the middle

of a conversation. These code-switches can take place between or even
within sentences, involving phrases or words or even parts of words. The
switching of words is the beginning of borrowing, which occurs when the
new word becomes more or less integrated into the second language. One
bilingual individual using a words from language A in language B is a
case of switching, but when many people do, even speakers of B who
don't know A are likely to pick it up. At this stage, especially if the
pronunciation and morphology have been adapted, we can say the word
has been borrowed.

There are various kinds of code switching Immigrants often use

many words from their new language in their old language, because many
of the people they speak to know both languages. In situations like this,
bilinguals often develop a mixed cope. In such a case, we might want to
distinguish between code switching of the two languages and the mixed
variety. The history of English shows many such mixed codes, as first
Danish and later Norman words were added by bilinguals. The various
contemporary Englishes, such as Jamaican English or New Zealand
English, can be seen as mixed codes, with the addition of local lexicon as
their most obvious feature.

50
 For a bilingual, shifting for convenience (choosing the available
word or phrase on the basis of easy availability) is commonly related to
topic. Showing the effect of domain differences, a speaker's vocabulary
will develop differentially for different topics in the two languages. Thus,
speakers of a language who have received advanced education in a
professional field in a second language will usually not have the terms in
their native language. Scientists trained in an English-speaking country
giving university lectures in their own language often mix in English
words or even switch to English phrases and sentences.

More interesting effects are achievable by shifts concerned with

role-relationships. It is important to note that each of a bilingual's
language is likely to be associated not just with topics and places, but also
with identities and roles associated with them. In the midst of speaking
about work matters in Language A, a sentence or two in Language B will
be able to show that the two speakers are not just fellow-employees but
also fellow members of an ethnic group. The use of tags and expressions
from Language B while speaking Language A enables a speaker to make
this kind of identity claim easily. This kind of shift, called metaphorical
switching, is a powerful mechanism for signaling social attitudes or
claiming group membership or solidarity.

The selection of a language by a bilingual, especially when

speaking to another bilingual, carries a wealth of social meaning. Each
language becomes a virtual guise for the bilingual speaker, who can
change identity as easily as changing a hat, and can use language choice
as a way of negotiating social relations with an interlocutor.

The bilingual individual thus provides a rich field for

sociolinguistics study. A full understanding of bilingualism, however,
depends on a deeper understanding of the nature of the speech

51
communities in which they operate. In the next chapter we will look at
societal multilingualism.

52
 Chapter Six
Societal multilingualism

53
Multilingualism

The discussion of speech communities and repertoires in Chapter 2

foreshadowed our detailed consideration of the interest that sociolinguists
take in bilingual and multilingual societies. Bilingualism and
multilingualism, whether in an individual speaker or in a social group, are
the most obvious and salient cases of variation to observe. With stylistic
or dialectal variation, identifying each variety is harder and open to
dispute, but with distinctly recognized languages, there is generally
agreement on the varieties and their names. We can study how two or
more languages intertwine and separate without first being forced, as we
are when we talk about stylistic variations within a single language, to
establish the criteria for difference. It is both the salience and the
commonness of multilingualism that has led to its being so well studied.

Monolingual speech communities are rare; monolingual countries

are even rarer. Even a country as linguistically homogeneous as Japan has
its linguistic minorities like the Ainu and the Koreans, marginalized as
they might be. True, many countries have developed an explicit or
implicit language policy as though they were monolingual, but it is rare
(and becoming rarer) for linguistic and national borders not to overlap in
various complex ways. Most countries have more than one language that
is spoken by a significant portion of the population, and most languages
have significant numbers of speakers in more than one country.

Historically, multilingual communities evolve in a number of ways.

One is as a result of migration, the voluntary or involuntary movements
of people speaking one language into the territory of people speaking
another. When the Hopi Indians permitted or encouraged a group of Tew
Indians to move from the Rio Grande area to the Arizonan mesas (each
group has a different version of the story), they produced a bilingual
village, Hano, among nine that were Hopi-speaking. Mutual distrust and a

54
ban on intermarriage that lasted into the beginning of the twentieth
century kept the villages socially distinct. Later, the bilingual villagers of
Hano added Spanish and Navajo to their language repertoires, and after
the introduction of Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, joined the rest of the
Hopi in shifting towards English use.

Involuntary migration or forced movement of population was

common in the ancient Middle East, as is recorded in the Biblical account
of the Babylonian exile, and has continued to be a significant force
accounting for multilingual communities. In the nineteenth century, the
British policy of brining indentured Indian workers to the Fijian sugar
plantations led to Fiji's current division between speakers of the
indigenous Fijian dialects and Hindi-speaking descendants of the original
plantation workers. The African slave trade moved large numbers of
native speakers of different languages into the East and West Indies, and
led to the formation of the pidgins and creoles (to be discussed in a later
section). In the twentieth century; the Soviet policy of forced movement
of populations assured that many of the newly independent post-Soviet
countries are saddled with a challenging multilingual problem. In the
Baltic states, it is the Russian immigrants, once the rulers, who are faced
with the challenge to learn the now dominant Estonian, Latvian and
Lithuanian.

In the years after the Second World War, Northern European

countries, too, enhanced their multilingualism by encouraging guest
workers from the Mediterranean areas. There are significant Turkish
minorities in many parts of Europe, and Greek, Spanish, Algerian, and
Italian immigrants moved north in the same way. In a response to the
social and linguistic problems produced, a new Norwegian multilingual
policy is intended to cope with (and encourage the maintenance of) nearly
a hundred languages.

55
 Voluntary migration has produced major changes in the linguistic
make-up of many countries in the world. While some of its
multilingualism was produced in other ways, the United States, as the
world's foremost receiver of voluntary immigration grew quickly into a
multilingual society, constantly assimilating large quickly into a
multilingual society, constantly assimilating large numbers of the
immigrants through a melting-pot policy. In the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, the United States absorbed large communities of
speakers of German, Norwegian, Greek, Italian, Yiddish, Polish,
Ukrainian, Japanese, various Chinese languages, and Spanish. The rate of
absorption was slowed down after 1923m when strict immigration laws
were passed. There was some relaxation of this policy in the post-war
period, including an influx of South East Asian speakers of Vietnamese,
Cambodian, Laotian, and other languages, and a recent wave of
immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Most of these groups have
acquired English, and many have given up on their traditional languages.
Throughout this period, continued immigration, legal and illegal,
especially of Spanish-speakers, and the rise of ethnic awareness have
been threatening to upset this comfortable monolingual trend.

Migration from the countryside or from small towns to the large

metropolitan cities that have grown everywhere in the twentieth century
is another major cause of multilingual communities. In the Third World as
much as in the developed countries, this movement to the cities is
creating huge megalopolises, conurbations with populations in the
millions, attracting complex patterns of multilingualism, and producing
major problems for social, economic, and political development. As
African cities expand at an ever-increasing rate, they too become highly
multilingual.

Multilingualism has also historically been created by conquest and

the subsequent incorporation of speakers of different languages into a

56
single political unit. The incorporation of Brittany, Alsace, and Provence
into France submerged the languages of these regions. The spread of
English power over the British Isles produced multilingualism and lead to
the loss of some Celtic languages. The growth of the Russian empire
under the Czars, continued under Soviet rule, made the Soviet Union a
multilingual country. The conquest of Central and South America by the
Spaniards and Portuguese eventually produced countries with large
indigenous minorities, some still speaking many Indian languages. The
occupation of New Mexico and Texas and the incorporation of Puerto
Rico by the growing United States included new Spanish-speaking
populations within territorial limits.

Colonial policies also led to multilingual states. While the Moslem

Empire largely replaced the indigenous languages with Arabic, pockets of
multilingualism remained - the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, the
Aramaic speakers in Syria, the Copts in Egypt, the Berbers in Algeria and
Morocco, to mention a few and the language mixed led to the great
variations in the spoken Arabic dialects held together by the general
acceptance of an overarching Classical Arabic. When Spain conquered
Latin America, it created countries where Spanish dominated a mixture of
marginalized indigenous varieties, including some, like Mayan, that had
previously had their turn as the dominant language in a multilingual
empire.

When the major European powers divided up African in the

nineteenth century, they drew boundaries that left most post-
independence states without a single majority language, and usually with
languages that had many speakers outside as well as inside the new state
borders. They thus opened the way, wittingly or not, for a tendency to
adopt the colonial government's metropolitan language as a needed lingua
franca. Newly independent states like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and

57
Singapore also faced complex language policy decisions that were
heavily weighted with effects if colonial policies.

Many of these former colonies might be considered cases of forced

federation. More rarely, there has been voluntary federation. One classic
case is Switzerland where speakers of French, German, Italian, and
Romansch formed a multilingual state. Another is Belgium, where
Walloon speakers of various French dialects, Flemish speakers of various
Dutch dialects, and some speakers of German dialects added to the
package, now form an uncomfortable but working French-Dutch
bilingual state. Other federations, like the Serbo-Croatian union in
Yugoslavia, or the Czech-Slovak union, brought into existence in the
halcyon days of the post-First World War spirit of tolerant democracy and
held in place in the post-Second World War period by Soviet power, have
proved to be unstable after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

These diverse historical circumstances have produced many

different kinds of multilingual mixes, sometimes stable and sometimes
volatile and short-lived. The most common result of this language contact
has been language conflict, producing pressure from one language on
speakers of other languages to adopt it. This pressure, whether the
conscious result of a planned policy or the effect of a multitude of
unplanned factors, has produced challenges to social structure that many
people have begun to worry about. The study of language maintenance
and of language shift has thus become a central concern of sociolinguists
interested in multilingual societies.

Language loyalty and reversing language shift

Many people nowadays have become troubled by the extinction of

various species of animals and birds, and lists of endangered species are

58
regularly publicized. Linguists have noticed that languages too are in
danger of dying, and for some time have been studying language loyalty,
the ability (or lack of it) of speakers of a language to stand up to the
pressure of more powerful languages. they have expressed distress at the
threatened fate of endangered languages, languages that are no longer
being passed on to children as native languages, but are spoken by a
contracting and aging group of adults.

One early major study looked at what happened to the immigrant

and indigenous languages of the United States when faced by the
inexorable power of English. Most American immigrant languages were
slowly sapped of their strength as younger speakers shifted to English not
just in the public domains, but also in their own community and homes.
Some factors appeared to speed up the process or slow it down. The
greatest resistance to language shift was found in groups that chose to
isolate themselves both linguistically and culturally from the mainstream.
Two clear cases were isolationist Mennonite Christian groups (especially
Hutterian and Old Order Amish) and the ultra-orthodox also the dress and
social conduct of their new country. In these cases, the isolation was self-
imposed.

A second group that maintained their languages were those who

were segregated and isolated by the outside society and whose access to
the easy social mobility that other immigrants enjoyed was obstructed by
social discrimination. The clearest cases here were the indigenous Native
Americans and the various Spanish-speaking indigenous and immigrant
groups. When they were denied access to jobs, housing, and education,
they were at the same time cut off from easy access to the English that
was assumed to be the way to assimilation.

Language shift has been studied in many parts of the world. There
are groups that have worked actively to reverse the seemingly inevitable

59
language shift that occurs when small weak languages, or the languages
of marginalized groups, comes into contact with large powerful languages
used and favoured by the majority or dominant group. There have been
many attempts to correct this loss of linguistic diversity. A commonly
cited case is the national effort to revive the use of Irish in Ireland, a
nationalistically inspired effort to revive the use of Irish in Ireland, a
nationalistically inspired and state-supported initiative to preserve Irish in
the western areas (the Gaeltacht) where it was still spoken, and to teach it
through the schools in the English-speaking areas, students continue to
learn Irish at school, but to use it very little outside school or afterwards.
Even in the Gaeltacht there has been a continued loss, largely because of
the failure to combine social and economic planning with linguistic. At
first, the continuing poverty of the area led Irish speakers to move away
to the cities or emigrate, in both cases switching to English; later,
economic development plans brought in English speakers looking for
jobs.

More successful was the revitalization of Hebrew, a strong

ideologically based process realized between 1890 and 1914, mainly in
Ottoman Palestine, by returning Zionists who were looking to build a
new nation using an old language. in agricultural settlements, in new
towns like Tel Aviv, and in communal settlements, Hebrew was
revitalized. It had the component of vitality or natural intergenerational
transmission restored after some 1700 years during which it had only
been learned as an additional language. building on the widespread
knowledge of the continually enriched written language, and driven by
the force of their ideological commitments, the revivers were successful
in establishing modern Hebrew as the language used for all purposes in
Israel today.

Activities aimed at reversing language shift are sometimes private

and small (as with the few hundred enthusiasts working to revive the

60
Cornish language) but often public and political. The efforts to save
French language, culture, and identity in Quebec threaten to divide the
province from the rest of Canada. In Spain, the post-Franco policy of
granting semi-autonomy to the regions has led to strong government-
supported campaigns for Basque and Catalan. In the Baltic States, the
collapse of the Soviet Union has permitted the restoration of the power of
Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. We shall return to discuss this issue
later when we talk of language planning and policy.

Language and politics

Language is regularly used in the exercise of political power. A

government can attempt to control its minority groups by banning their
language, as Turkey bans the use of Kurdish by one its larger minorities.
By requiring that voting material be made available in Spanish and other
minority languages, the US Federal Voting Act tried to increase minority
participation in government. By offering extra pay to federal Civil
Servants who knew both English and French, the Canadian government
attempted to weaken the demand for Quebec separatism. By requiring all
its citizens to pass examinations in Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian, the
newly independent Baltic states attempted to redress the balance of power
for indigenous citizens over the large Russian minority populations that
were dominant during the period of Soviet rule. The issue of language
choice is most critical in the case of a newly independent state, as well be
discussed in the next chapter.

There are more subtle uses of language in politics. The use of a

regional or a social dialect by a political leader is often a claim to a
specialized ethnic identity. South American politicians sometimes claim
greater regional identity by using more Indian features in their Spanish.
Labour-party politicians I England have sometimes used regional accents

61
to mark a dissociation from middleclass speech and values. Anwar Sadat
backed away from Pan-Arabism by using more Egyptian vernacular in his
speech when the norm for Arab public speech is the Classical language.

Language rights

The issue of language or linguistic rights provides an opportunity

to attempt to take an ethical rather than a scientific view of language
contact and conflict. There are a number of possible approaches. One,
favoured by some linguists, puts emphasis on the right of a language, like
any other endangered species, to survive. Because every language
incorporates some unique features derived from the rich and varied
experience of human beings, language loss (i.e. the loss of all its
speakers) is seen s serious as the loss of an animal or bird species. There
are two possible ways of dealing with this. Most commonly,
anthropological linguists have worked t preserve, in grammar, dictionary,
and collections of texts, as much of the language as possible while there
is still one speaker alive. More recently, linguists have provided support
to the speakers of the language in their efforts at reversing language shift.

The second approach is to focus not on the rights of the language

as an abstraction but on the rights of the speakers of the language. Here,
we may distinguish between the rights of the speakers of a language to
use it, and their rights to maintain it by teaching it to their children.

The first of these issues concerns the rights of linguistic minorities

or of individuals who do not speak the national or official languages of a
political unit. To the extent that a state recognizes the right of its citizens
and other inhabitants to access to work, health care, housing, education,
justice, and democracy, so it must take care to deal with the potential
lessening or blocking of these rights for those who do not speak, read, or

62
write the official or national language or languages. There are several
ways this right may be recognized. One is the provision of adequate
instruction in the official or national language or languages to all who do
not control it – not just children, but new immigrants and temporary
foreign workers. A second is the provision of interpreting and translating
services to those who have not yet had the opportunity to learn the
national language. This first language right, therefore, is the right to learn
the national language, and in the meantime, to be assisted in dealing with
those situations where lack of control of it leads to serious handicaps.

A second right is not to be discriminated against, in access to work,

education, justice, or health service, on the basis of being identified as a
member of a group speaking another language or variety. This refers to
the way in which linguistic minority members, however competent they
may be in the standard language, are often classified as 'bilinguals' and
afforded lower status. It also refers to the way in which speakers of an
unfavoured dialect or accent or other variety of a language are
automatically recognized as 'different' on linguistic grounds, and
discriminated against. It should be noted that this right is part of the larger
right not to be discriminated against on the basis of group membership,
religion, gender, ethnic group, or other factors irrelevant to the matter
being decided.

A third right concerns the right of a group of speakers of a

language to preserve and maintain their own favoured language or
variety, and to work to reverse any language shift to the status or prestige
variety. Here, there are some more complex issues. One is the potential
conflict between the rights of individuals and groups. A group may wish
to preserve its language, which is generally a language more able to deal
with modern life and economic success. Another is the issue of who
should pay for the reverse shift efforts. Should it be the language
community, and should it be provided outside the regular school system?

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Examples of this are the Greek and Chinese afternoon schools in the USA
and some other countries, the Jewish Day School movement that has
grown up in the USA, Canada, Australia, Latin America, and elsewhere,
and the international schools that operate in many countries. Or should it
be the state, in programmes to provide bilingual education to as many
minority groups as possible? In this issue of linguistic minorities, it is
generally accepted that indigenous minorities, like the Native Americans
in the United States, have a higher claim to maintaining language,
religion, and culture, than do immigrant groups who came by choice.

Considering language rights takes us into major issues of language

policy, which will be dealt with in Chapter 7.

Pidgins and creoles

A second aspect of language contact3is the development of distinct

varieties of language. A pidgin language is one that evolves in
circumstances where there are limited relations between the speakers of
different languages, such as a marker, or where there is a special situation
of power relations, being typical of the kind of master-slave relations,
being typical of the kind of master-slave relation on a plantation. It is a
variety of language that is marked by the fact that it is not a native
language of anyone, but is learned only in contact by people who
normally continue to speak their own language inside their community.
The complexity of a pidgin varies according to the communicative
demands placed on it; as there are increasing functional demands, there is
a growth in the power and complexity of the pidgin to meet them.

A pidgin is a social rather than an individual solution. There are

cases where individual speakers acquire only a limited control of a
language in which they need to do business. Such, for instance, was the

64
limited knowledge of Navajo developed by white traders. Each speaker
made his own mistakes and compromises. The term pidgin is better kept
for social varieties with established norms.

A pidgin involves the mixture of two or more languages.

sometimes, the grammatical system is based more or less on one
language and the vocabulary is largely taken from another. In all cases,
the grammar is simplified, that is to say certain features of the base
language are dropped. Many different pidgins have been identified and
described, including, to name a few, Nigerian Pidgin English, Papuan
Pidgin English, Vientnamese Pidgin French, New Guinea Pidgin German,
Kenya Pidgin Swahili, Fanalago (a pidgin based on Zulu), and Chinook
Jargon.

In many social circumstances, pidgins have become quite stable

over time. Spoken only as second languages, and functioning in limited
domains as languages of wider communication, they are learned
informally in contact and used especially as trade languages. in
multilingual areas where each of the existing language groups maintain
their distinctiveness and do not intermarry, the pidgin continues.

In many cases, there is a further development. This occurs when, as

a result of intermarriage of a couple whose native languages are different
but who both speak pidgin, the pidgin is spoken at home ad learned by
children as a first or mother tongue. In the terms of contemporary
linguistic theory, this leads to some fundamental changes. Children
acquiring the language do so in the same way that children acquire any
other language, and it is believed that this involves the same appeal to
innate linguistic capacity and universals that accounts for first language
acquisition. New features emerge as a result both of this and of the
growing complexity of he social circumstances in which the language is
used. It is no longer just a contact language, with limited social functions,

65
but is called on to deal with an increasingly wide range of social needs.
The process is called creolization, as the language expands and develops,
displaying greater phonological and grammatical complexity.

Some of the better-described creoles are Haitian Creole, Tok Pisin

(a creolized version of a New Guinea Pidgin English), and Hawaiian
Creole English; some of the most recently recognized include Berbice
Creole Dutch and Palanquero (Colombian Creole Spanish). These creoles
appear to have much the same grammatical complexity as other natural
languages, although they of course show many of the characteristics of
their original pidgin status, such as the blended phonology, and the
existence of two or more grammatical and lexical bases.

A third stage of development can occur when speakers of a creole

or pidgin are introduced, usually by education, to the standard language
on which the creole or pidgin was originally based. There can ensue whet
has been labeled a post-creole continuum, in which the various levels of
social and stylistic variation may be filled by a version of the standard
language at the upper end and of the creole or pidgin at the lower end. A
Jamaican may, in various social situations, choose the creole called
Jamaican version of English, or may switch from one to the other as in
other kinds of code switching.

Diglossia

A third aspect of language contact relates to the issue of functional

allocation. With a handful of languages, two distinct varieties of the same
language are used, side by side, for two different sets of functions. The
term diglossia (modeled on the word bilingual, and using Greek rather
than Latin forms) was coined originally to label this phenomenon. In the
Arabic-speaking world, there is the contrast between the Classical
language and regional dialect. The same pattern, more or less, occurs in
the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland with High German as the

66
standard language and Swiss German as the vernacular, in Haiti with
French and Haitian Creole, and in Greece with the literary variety,
katharévusa, and the vernacular, dhimotikí. While there are somewhat
different historical reasons for each, and while the functional distribution
is somewhat different, they share a set of distinctions. In each case, the
standard (or H, from Higher) variety is used for literacy and literary
purposes and formal, public, and official uses, while the vernacular (or L,
from Lower) for informal conversation and daily use. Paralleling the
differences in use are differences in form. The grammar of the L variety is
generally simpler. For instance, fewer distinctions in the L variety are
marked by the use of grammatical suffixes. There are also major
differences in the vocabulary of the two varieties.

One of the major differences is understandably in the prestige of

the two varieties. The H language is associated generally with a body of
important literature and carries with it the prestige of a great tradition or
religion. It is more stable, being protected from change by its association
with written texts and by an educational system. It is also likely to be
used over a wider region and thus can serve some unifying purpose. The
L varieties are more localized and show dialectal variation and the
tendency to change of unwritten dialects.

While developed originally to apply to cases of two varieties of the

same language, the notion of diglossia can also be applied to the way in
which two (or more) distinct languages come to divide up the domains in
the linguistic repertoire of a speech community. In colonial situations, for
instance, the language of the government takes on many of the attributes
of an H language, while the various vernaculars fit the H function and
Navajo the L. Another classic case is Paraguay, where Spanish is the H
variety (used in literacy, education, and government, and associated with
city life) and Guarani is the vernacular, spoken in the villages and used in
the cities as a mark of informality and Paraguayan identity.

67
 Diglossia thus refers to a society that has divided up its domains
into two distinct clusters, using linguistic differences to demarcate the
boundaries, and offering two clear identities to the members of the
community. It is important also to note the political situations in which
diglossia often occurs, with the H language associated with power.
Educational pressure is normally in the direction of the H variety, and
those who cannot master it are usually socially marginalized. At the same
time, the L variety maintains value as a marker of membership of a peer
or ethnic group.

While the classical diglossic cases have been stable for a long time,
sociopolitical changes are starting to have their influence. Reference has
been made to the possible emergence of an intermediate variety of
Arabic, a kind of Educated Standard Arabic. In many countries, too, the
globalization of English has introduced a third significant language, so
that triglossia or polyglossia is starting to emerge. This tendency confirms
our central theme, the close interwining of social and linguistic structure,
so that changes in one are reflected in changes in the other.

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 Chapter Seven
Applied Sociolinguistics

69
Language policy and language planning

The very centrality of language to social life, the value of language

as a means of access to power and influence, and the symbolic value of
language in establishing social class and ethnic identity, all produce
conditions where people want to engineer language or language choice
itself.

In this chapter, we will look at a number of kinds of language

planning or policy activities. These terms represent fashion rather than
other differences. When sociolinguists started to be involved in the 1950s
and 1960s, they preferred the term language planning as the term for any
effort to modify language form or use. In the late 1980s, the regular
failure of national planning activities seems to have encouraged the more
neutral seeming term, language policy.

Exactly where these activities arise depends in large measure on

the perceived language situation of the social organization involved. For
instance, in a situation where there are seen to be two or more languages
available, any attempt to set up norms or rules for when to use each is
what is called status planning. A decision to make one language official,
or to ban another from use in school, or to conduct church services in a
third are cases of status planning. The most studied cases are in deciding
on official or national languages for a newly independent state.

Once a language has been fixed as appropriate for use in a specific

situation (i.e. as the official language, or in printing books, or in schools),
any effort to fix or modify its structure is called corpus planning. The
coining of new terminology for languages coping with modernization, or
the Young Turk policy to remove Arabic words from Turkish, or the
French efforts to rid the language of English words, or the Dutch
decisions to change spelling, are all cases of corpus planning.

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 One aspect of corpus planning is the process of language
standardization, which consists of attempting to standardize grammar and
pronunciation towards some norm that is discovered or invented by some
officially appointed or self-proclaimed group of language guardians. This
process may be called normativism or prescriptivism by linguists who
study it, or 'keeping the language pure' by those who carry it out.

A language status decision often produces a situation that some

people need learn a language that they do not normally speak. In Finland,
for instance, the decision to recognize both Finnish and Swedish as
official languages means that Finns must learn Swedish and Swedes
Finnish. Sometimes called language acquisition planning, this process of
language education policy is also involved when a government decides
which foreign languages are to be taught in school or through other
means. Similarly, a national policy to develop literacy in a language
might be considered a kind of language acquisition policy.

For various reasons, a country or other social group may wish to

encourage other people to learn their language. Language diffusion policy
is sometimes associated with religious missionary work, as Islam spread
Arabic, or with the national concerns of imperialist powers, as in Soviet
activities to spread Russian throughout the USSR and Soviet-dominated
Eastern Europe, or the French policy to spread la francophonie.

In countries where there is clear recognition of the existence of two

or more respected languages and associated ethnic groups, such as
Belgium, Switzerland, or Canada, status planning is an important activity.
This is also the case in newly independent states where there exists a
myriad of languages that must be chosen between, as in post-colonial
India, Indonesia, or Nigeria. In a country where there is believed to be
only one important language, and where other indigenous languages tend

71
to be marginalized, the principal activity tends to be some aspect of
corpus planning, such as the purification of the standard language.

Status planning

Status planning typically becomes an important activity when a

country becomes independent, but it has probably already been a central
concern of the nationalistic activities that preceded the actual
independence. As mentioned earlier, nineteenth-and twentieth-century
nationalist movements generally included a choice of a national language
in their ideological package. Thus, newly independent Norway
proclaimed its freedom in moving away from Danish power and language
influence, but became involved in a bitter and continuing struggle as to
what form of language to use; is eventual compromise has been to
recognize the official equality of two varieties, called Riksmal and
Nynorsk. The Irish nationalist movement took the restoration of Irish as
its goal. The Zionist movement at the turn of the century proclaimed its
interest not just in peoplehood and territorial regeneration, but in the
restoration of Hebrew as national language.

The decision is particularly harsh in a post-colonial state with a

selection to be made among a number of indigenous language. in India,
the costly and still uncertain solution was to recognize seven languages in
the constitution. In many new African states, with the lack of congruence
between language boundaries and the political borders that had been
drawn as the colonialist powers carved up the continent, the choice
among competing ethnic and tribal languages was part of a struggle for
central power.

In these cases, the decision has often fallen on the colonial

language as the official language for the new state. This is especially

72
likely to be true in those cases where colonial policy was most successful
in imposing belief in the value of the metropolitan language, and where
the colonial language is only spoken, perhaps imperfectly, by a small
educated elite. Such a policy was followed by France in all its territories
and by Portugal in its territories and by Portugal in its colonies.

Issues concerning status planning continue to make headlines. New

Zealand has finally agreed that the Treaty of Waitangi by which it
obtained sovereignty over the Maori in 1840 requires it to recognize
Maori as an official language alongside English. Post-apartheid South
Africa ponders a language policy that will provide appropriate stats
alongside Afrikaans and English for the many languages spoken by the
African majority, recalling no doubt that it was a language issue-riots in
Soweto by African school children who were upset by a government
decision to have them learn in Afrikaans rather than English – that may
be considered the beginning of the successful campaign to destroy
apartheid.

Language-status policy is by its very nature a political activity.

Linguists are sometimes consulted, but decisions are made by
government or elected parliament and sometimes form part of the
constitution. The status decision determines which language or languages
are to be used in various public functions, by government, the legal
system, the media, and the educational system.

Sometimes there is an explicit policy spelled out by constitution or

law. As mentioned earlier, the Indian constitution lists the seven
constitutional languages and lays down their use for official and
educational purposes. A recent French law (ruled unconstitutional by the
constitutional court) attempted to make it illegal for public meetings
(including international scientific congresses) to use languages other than
French. The Soviet Constitution proclaimed that all languages were

73
equal. The Quebec government passed a law requiring that all public
signs and advertisements should appear only in French, and another that
laid down that any child whose parents had not themselves gone to an
English language school in the province must have French-medium
instruction.

In other cases, questions of language status are determined by

national, regional, or local law, or are left to local practice. Present United
States policy is a mixture of some local laws, some court-inspired
recognition of language rights (See earlier discussion), and various local
practices. Recently, however, a political campaign has begun to make
English the only official language. In Israel, while Hebrew and Arabic are
formally recognized as official language for certain purposes, there is de
facto recognition that most public signs are in English as well.

While the term official language suggests governmental

recognition, it is worth determining what precisely this status implies. In
Quebec, the official status of French determines language use in signs and
in education. In New Zealand, the official status of Maori effects mainly a
requirement that government bodies adopt a Maori translation for their
name and include it in their otherwise English announcements. In the
respective Spanish autonomous regions, the new official status of Basque
and major government agencies concerned with the diffusion of the
language. In the United States, the Voting Rights Act required the use in
electoral ballots of major minority languages. in the constitution of the
State of New Mexico written after its incorporation into the USA, there
was a requirement for pharmacists to be bilingual in Spanish and English.
In countries with recognition of the need for second language knowledge,
there is often a requirement or a salary supplement for officials with the
favoured competence.

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 Religious bodies often have significant language status policies.
The decision of the Roman Catholic Church to change the language of the
Mass from Latin to the local vernacular echoed a decision made four
centuries earlier in the Reformation by the Protestant Churches.
Hinduism, Orthodox Judaism, Islam, and Greek and Russian Orthodox
Christianity, on the other hand, all have language policies which support
maintenance of the status of a sacred language.

A political decision on the status of a language, if it is in fact to be

implemented, usually leads to other activities. Often, a language whose
status has changed needs to be modified in some way. This is corpus
planning. And often it will need to be taught to people who do not speak
it: this involves various kinds of language-diffusion policy, language-
acquisition planning, or language-education policy.

Corpus planning

When it has been determined that the status of language is to be

moved to a more elaborate level of standardization or to an expanded set
of functions, the task of corpus planning begins. One of the most common
processes is the need for modernization and elaboration of vocabulary.
The rapid increase of concepts associated with the modern world, and the
expansion of terminology needed to label all the new objects involved in
modern technology, set a major challenge for all languages.

One obvious example is the computer I am working at now, which

is a laptop or, to be more precise, a sub-notebook. I just had to have a new
motherboard put in, as the old one would not accept the PCMCIA card
that is supposed to be used to connect my diskette drive. But my double-
spaced hard drive offers me a megabyte of memory (not to mention the
16-K RAM that my programs can access) and my trackball or mouse

75
makes it easy to control my passive matrix screen. Most of the words I
have italicized are ones that were not needed in English a decade ago, or
have taken on new meanings quite recently. The problem facing any
language that wishes to deal with the modern world is that it must keep
up with the new developments.

There are some obvious choices. A language can simply take an old
world (like drive or screen) and give it a new meaning. A computer in the
Oxford English Dictionary (1933 edition) is a person who does
calculations. A mouse still seems a quaint word to most of us for a
pointing device. To say that a computer has a memory as a storage devise
is a pretty obvious metaphor (and so I suspect is storage device).

Another technique is to coin a new term, like trackball, diskette, or

megabyte, by combining existing words or morphemes into more or less
transparent forms. For many languages, the simplest technique would
seem to be borrowing from another language where the term is in use
because the concept or object has already bee invented.

English is one language that has borrowed freely. From its

beginnings in regular contact with first Danish, then French, its lexicon
was constantly being enriched not just by coinages but by borrowing.
During the periods of scientific and technological development, English
freely coined new words based on Latin or Greek (or even, to the horror
of Classical purists, with elements of both).

As part of his policy of unifying France, Cardinal Richelieu

encouraged the establishment of the Académie Françoise, one of whose
principal charges was to be to maintain the unity and purity of the French
language. This is still continues to do, protesting regularly the tendency
towards Franglais and the use of words like le weekend and le biftek.

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 One of the earliest kinds of corpus planning, called for as a
language takes on official, standard, and educational functions as a result
of changed status, is the developing of an orthography. Writing has not
been invented very often, but more commonly it has been borrowed and
adopted from one language to another. Most recent orthographies are
slight modifications of other alphabets. The Roman alphabet is most
commonly used, under the influence of European languages. The Stalinist
policy of linguistic centralization involved also changing the
orthographies of many languages in the Soviet area of influence from
Roman or Arabic orthography to the Cyrillic in which Russian and related
languages are written. A major component of the Turkish Westernization
movement was to change from Arabic to Roman script. Romanization has
been proposed for Hebrew and Chinese, but with no success, for the
weight of tradition has been too strong. The cost of maintaining a non-
Roman alphabet is not small, as those who tried to develop a typewriter
for them discovered, but computers are simplifying things.

But to develop an orthography is only a first stop in the process of

standardization and modernization; later, we will look at the related task
of developing mass literacy.

Normativism and prescriptivism

When in 1970 a programme was started to teach Navajo children to

read their own language, one of the first inconveniences was the absence
of a typewriter that could produce the special diacritics and letters (a
French acute accent, a Czech cedilla, and a Polish slashed L) that the
developers of the Navajo orthography chose. (Incidentally, one of the few
corpus planning decisions the Navajo Tribal Council made was to spell
the name of the tribe in English with a 'j' rather than an 'h'). A new
problem soon turned up.

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 The first reading book one of the assistants wrote was a story of a
cat, for which the writer used the Navajo word mósi. A little later, another
writer included a cat in a book, but chose rather to write it mási. The
Navajo dictionary, which had been written some thirty years before, listed
both spellings. The Navajo linguist who had collaborated in writing the
dictionary and was now mási a lecturer in the language at the Navajo
Community College backed the dictionary, saying that he always told his
students to write words as they and their family pronounced them. The
spelling mási was therefore used in the second book, with a note for
teachers in the back of the book that some people used mási, while others
said mósi. The teachers were unhappy with the decision. They had been
trained in English where there is usually only one correct spelling, and
considered it wrong to be called on to teach rules that allowed too many
choices.

In this attitude, they reflect the point of view of most Western-

educated people who assume and expect that language rules are set, clear,
unambiguous, and to be enforced. Some teachers of English as a foreign
language complain in the same way about differences between British
and American usage. This idea of 'correctness' is a mark of developed
literate societies. In pre-literate societies, one regularly finds notion of 'a
good speaker', by which is meant someone who has power to speak
persuasively in public, but seldom the notion of 'correct' speech and
spelling.

If you look at an Elizabethan book, you will note that printers were
not concerned about 'correct' spelling, varying the spelling of the same
word on a single line if it made the words fit in better. As printing and
education spread, however, the notion of correctness became increasingly
important. In the absence of an Academy legally charged with the task,
dictionary and grammar-book writers took it upon themselves to describe
and define what they considered standard and correct usage, and to

78
prescribe these standards as required. Even when the description was
clearly labeled as an arbitrary choice of one out of a number of varieties,
it was generally accepted in a society seeking methods of gate-keeping as
the mark of education and acceptability. George Bernard Shaw's
Pygmalion (or the musical adaptation, My Fair Lady) is a touching and
accurate account of how changes in speech and dress permitted a
Cockney flower-girl to move into the high society from which she was
otherwise barred.

Prescriptivism, therefore, is an understandable development in a

mass education system where successful learning of prestige speech
styles is a first step in social upward mobility. It is, however,
unfortunately accompanied by a mistaken belief that speakers of non-
standard varieties of a language are less intelligent, or less inherently
capable than standard speakers. When linguists argue that all languages
are equally good, they are attempting to fight the common prejudice that
assume that standard languages and their speakers are inherently superior
to non-standard language and their speakers. Every variety, they maintain,
has the potential to handle all tasks, and there is no evidence that people
who speak a non-standard language are intellectually inferior to people
who speak a standard language with literacy and with formal education
means that a key goal of many systems is to provide access to the
standard language to the largest possible section of the population.

Language acquisition planning or language education policy

Teaching the standard language to all is one of the first tasks of

most educational systems. In traditional religious education, the task of
the religious school is usually to develop literacy in the language of the
sacred texts: Hebrew for Jews, Classical Arabic for Moslems, Sanskrit for
Hindus, Old Church Slavonic for Russian Orthodox, Giiz for Ethiopian

79
Christians and Jews. In secular education, the equivalent first task is
developing control of the written standard language.

The task is regularly complicated by the fact that the spoken

language of the home is commonly not the standard written language of
the school. N the case of languages of religious texts, this was usually
obvious. Teachers in ultra-orthodox Jewish religious schools find it
natural to teach Yiddish-orthodox Jewish religious schools find it natural
to teach Yiddish-speaking children in Yiddish to read texts written in
Hebrew. In diglossic situations like those mentioned earlier, the problem
is made more difficult, for the teachers and pupils sometimes have no
respect for the L variety they actually speak, and claim or pretend to be
speaking the H variety.

The first task of a formal educational system is usually, therefore,

the teaching of the national standard language, with emphasis on literacy
in it. Depending on social and political pressures, the system aims at
students acquiring other varieties too. Especially in countries which
recognize more than one language as part of the national tradition, there
may be a programme to teach the other official language or languages. as
noted earlier, for example, in Finland, all Finnish speakers are expected to
learn Swedish and all Swedish speakers to learn Finnish. Similarly, in
Quebec, all English speakers learn French and all French speakers learn
English, and in Israel, Arab children learn Hebrew and Arabic is in turn
compulsory for Hebrew speakers.

Language diffusion policy or linguistic imperialism

Political and military conquest have been major causes of language

spread. Aramaic in the ancient world, Greek in the Eastern

80
Mediterranean, Latin in Western Europe, Arabic in the Middle East and
North Africa, Mayan in Central American, Manding in West Africa are all
cases. In these cases, the rulers did not follow an explicit policy of
requiring the conquered to learn their languages, but essentially left the
choice open. Similarly, when a language has been essentially left the
choice open. Similarly, when a language has been spread by trade (as for
instance Swahili in Africa), the diffusion has been more or less
unplanned. Even language spread by missionary activity have not
necessarily been the result of direct planning, for missionary groups
commonly accept that the sacred texts will need to be translated if they
are to be understood. It is for this reason that missionary activity so often
leads to the development of vernacular literacy.

It is important to distinguish between this kind of unplanned

language intervention, where altered circumstances encourage conquered
or converted or commercialized populations to learn the language of their
conquerors, missionaries and traders, from a planned language diffusion
policy. In the first, we are dealing with the kinds of language shift we
have talked about earlier; in the second we have a deliberate policy of a
government or other institution to change language acquisition and use.

Language-diffusion policy may be internal or external. When a

country decides that all its inhabitants, whatever their home language,
should learn and use the national language, we have a case of internal
diffusion. When New Zealand started teaching all its Maori pupils in
English in 1870; when the British required English in Welsh schools;
when France would not allow Occitan, Breton, or Basque in its schools;
when Stalin pushed for the use and higher status of Russian in all Soviet
schools; or when China assumes that all pupils speak and should learn
Putonghoa, these are all examples of language-education policy that
involves conscious and planned internal diffusion of a standard or official
language.

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 Policy in conquered lands or colonies is both internal and external
diffusion. Because the territory concerned is now under the control of the
imperial rulers, it is not unnatural that they want to make governing easier
by encouraging some at least of the colonial subjects to learn their
language. Colonial language education policies have varied in their
commitment to language diffusion. There have been, and continue to be,
policies of language diffusion beyond national and even imperial
boundaries. One of the earliest and strongest of these has been a French
tradition of encouraging the spread of the French language beyond its
national and colonial borders.

More recently, Germany has taken up language diffusion activities

in its support for the Goethe Institute. A number of other countries work
through the cultural attachés in their embassies or through semi-
governmental bodies to encourage the diffusion of their national
languages. teaching the national language, as well as teaching about the
national culture, is sometimes seen as an effective way of spreading
influence and developing international interest in trade and tourism.

The spread of English – imperialism or hegemony?

The recent world-wide diffusion of English, so that it now looks set

to become a world language, has raised not just concern among speakers
of other language, but controversy among sociolinguists. To what extent,
they argue, is it the result of conscious planning by the governments and
experts of English-speaking countries like the United Kingdom, the
United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, and to what extent is
it the result of a large array of factors connected with modernization and
globalization?

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 A closer look at the process by which English has in this century
developed into a global language suggests that in fact the demand has
continually exceeded the supply. Language diffusion efforts of English-
speaking countries have tended to be attempts to exploit world-wide
desires to learn the language. There has been little need to fan the interest.
The association of English with modern technology, with economic
progress, and with internationalization, has encouraged people all over
the world to learn English and to have their children learn it as early as
possible. The more this has succeeded, the greater the reason for others to
want to have access to the power and success assumed to be a result of
knowing English.

The demand is not new: as early as the 1920s, Japanese and

Chinese business leaders were starting to value knowledge of English.
And it is deeply entrenched: event at the height of the Cultural Revolution
in China, when there was deep suspicion of modernity and foreign
influences, Chairman Mao continued to speak in favour of teaching
English.

From the point of view of many observers, this growing linguistic

hegemony of English is dangerous and harmful, and it is not unnatural to
seek someone to blame. But whatever the cause, the spread of English is
producing a new sociolinguistic reality, by threatening to take over
important functions from other major languages, and by furthering
language shift. It is an important task of sociolinguistics to understand
this process.

83
Glossary

84
Accommodation Adjusting one's speech to converge with or diverge from
the speech of one's interlocutor. [33, 42]

Anthropocentric speech use of the masculine (man, he) to to include the

feminine. See accommodation theory. [38]

Audience design Adjusting one's speech to be similar to that of a realk or

imagined listener. [33, 41]

Baby talk A register regarded as appropriate for addressing babies. [44]

Balanced bilingualism very strong (almost equal) command of two

languages. [45]

Bilingual A person who has some functional ability in a second language.

[45]

Black English The vernacular variety used by Afro-Americans in the US,

sometimes called Ebonics or Afro-American Vernacular English.
[83]

Borrowing The integration of a word from one language into another.

[49]

Cant Thieves' and underworld jargons. [34]

Clandestine recording Collecting data surreptitiously. [10]

Code switching Changing from language to language in the midst of an

utterance. [49]

Competence Underlying knowledge of a language; cf. performance. [48]

Compound bilinguals Bilinguals who learned one language after (and so

through) another; cf. co-ordinate bilinguals. [48]

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Conversational interchange The basic unit of the spoken language, where
two or more speakers take turns to speak. See turn-taking. [16]

Co-ordinate bilinguals Bilinguals who have learned each language in

separate contexts and so keep them distinct; cf. compound
bilinguals. [48]

Corpus planning An attempt to fix or modify the structure (writing

system, spelling, grammar, vocabulary) of a language. [66]

Creole A pidgin once it has native speakers. See creolization. [62]

Creolization Changes in a pidgin as a result of adding vitality or mother

tongue speakers, [62]

Diachronic variation Changes in a language over time. See historical

linguistics; cf. synchronic variation. [4]

Dialect A variety of a language used recognizably in a specific region of

(a social dialect) by a specific social class. [27]

Dialectology The search for spatially and geographically determined

differences in various aspects of language. [28]

Diglossia A situation when two distinct varieties of the same language are
used, side by side, for two different sets of functions. [63]

Domain Typical social situation with three defining characteristics: place,

role-relationship, and topic. [34]

Endangered language Language that is no longer being passed on to

children as a native language, but is spoken by a contracting and
aging group of adults. See languages loss. [55]

Ethnographic observation The recording of natural speech events by a

participant-observer. [12]

86
Ethnography of speaking Sometimes also called the ethnography of
communication, an anthropological approach to the study of
language use which is based on the actual observation of speech.
[14]

Floor The right to talk at any given moment in a conversation. See turn-
taking. [19]

Formality Degree of care taken with speech. See style. [31]

Free variation The notion that the choice of variant is uncontrolled and
without significance. [39]

Gender [r] A grammatical class; (2) a term for socially marked sexual
variation. [36]

Generic masculine use of the grammatically masculine form (man, he) to

include the feminine. See anthropocentric speech. [38]

Genre kind of speech event, or kind of literary form. P15]

Historical linguistics The study of language change over time. See

diachronic variation. [27]

Hypercorrection Tendency to over-use socially desirable features in

careful speech and reading. [41]

Interference A feature of one language appearing when speaking or

writing another. [49]

Jargon Speech used by a marked group of people such as a trade or

occupation; cf. cant, slang. [33]

Language acquisition planning or language education policy Policy

determining which languages should be taught and learned. [67]

87
Language conflict Situation where two or more languages compete for
status. [55]

Language contact Situation where two or more languages are brought into
contact by virtue of bilingualism. [49, 55]

Language diffusion policy Policy to spread a language to people who do

not speak it. [67, 75]

Language loss A process by which speakers of a language slowly stop

using it, resulting in its dying out. See endangered language. [59]

Language loyalty The ability (or lack of it) of speakers of a language to

stand up to the pressure of more powerful ones. [55]

Language maintenance A situation where speakers continue to use a

language even when there is a new language available. [55]

Language of wider communication Language chosen by speakers of

several different languages to communicate with each other. [61]

Language planning, or language policy Any effort to modify language

form or use. [66]

Language shift Changes in the degree of functional use from one

language to another. [55]

Language standardization The imposing of a norm on the grammar and

pronunciation of a language. [67]

Macrosociolinguistics or the sociology of language Area of

sociolinguistic study which concentrates on the use of a variety and
its social significance. [6]

Metaphorical switching Changing from one language to another to signal

a change in role relationship; cf. code switching. [50]

88
Microsociolinguistics Area of sociolinguistic study which concentrates on
linguistic variables and their significance. [6]

Mixed code A variety with extensive code switching used by bilinguals to

talk to each other. [49]

Networks Groups of people who communicate with each other regularly.

[26]

Non-intrusive responses A research technique involving asking strangers

short non-personal questions. [11]

Normativism The claim that there is one 'correct' version and all variation
is deviant. [33, 67]

Observer's paradox How can we observe the way people speak when they
are not being observed? [8]

Orthography Writing (and spelling) system. [72]

Performance Linguistic behaviour (as opposed to linguistic knowledge);

cf. competence. [48]

Pidgin A variety of language that is not a native language of anyone, but

is learned in contact situations; cf. creole, creolization. [61]

Politeness Recognition of other's rights in a social situation. [19]

Post-creole continuum When speakers of a creole or pidgin are

introduced, usually by education, to the standard language on
which the creole or pidgin was originally based. [62]

Register Variety associated with a specific function. [33]

Repertoire Collection of varieties or languages spoken by a group of

people. See speech community. [25]

89
Reversing language shift Efforts by a group to resist language loss. [57]

Revitalization The restoration to a language of vitality. [56]

Service encounters Occasions in which one person (client, customer,

patient) seeks help from another (seller, clerk). [17]

Slang A kind of jargon marked by its rejection of formal rules. See cant.
[35]

Sociolinguistic interview Technique if a recorder conversation intended to

collect speech samples. [10]

Sociology of language See microsociolinguistics. [6]

Solidarity Feeling of shared experience and common group membership.

[35]

Speech community (1) All the people who speak a single language (like
English or French or Amharic); (2) a complex interlocking network
of communication whose members share knowledge about and
attitudes towards languages use. [24]

Speech event Act of human communication. [14]

Status planning Any attempt to set up laws or norms for when to use a
language. [66]

Stereotypes Fixed and prejudicial patterns of thought about kinds of

people that are often mistaken. [28, 37]

Styles Varieties of language used by an individual appropriate to a level

of formality. [4, 31]

Synchronic variation Variation at a single point of time; cf. diachronic

variation. [4]

90
Terms of address Second-person pronouns, or names, or titles, used when
speaking to someone. [20]

Turn-holders Ways of signaling that the speaker intends to continue after

a break, intended to keep the floor. [19]

Turn-taking Rules for determining who speaks when in a conversational

interchange. See floor. [18]

Variable A linguistic feature (a sound, word, or grammatical form) which

has more than one variant, each of which has a sociolinguistic
significance. [11]

91