Summary and study guide

In this chapter, you have read a few things about sociolinguistics. The present section is trying to help you remember better by providing a short summary and giving some key words for each section.

8.7. Summary and study guide

You learned that sociolinguistics was concerned with natural language use and language vari-ation (and not hypothethical sentences). Because observing language use is only possible when we have data, sociolinguistics relies on specific methods of data collecting: sample, population for data to be processed statistically, and lots of interaction with members of small communities for ethnography. Labov’s department store study is an example for the first. If the methodology is good in a study, then the results will be valid for the large popu-lation, and not only the small sample.

The next three sections dealt with three types of variation: regional, individual and social.

These varieties can all be described on all levels of linguistic description (e.g. phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax) because variation can occur on any level.

Regional variation includes languages and dialects. Because these two concepts cannot be differentiated by only linguistic means (mutual intelligibility), they are usually distinguished by social and cultural factors (e.g. writing system, religion, history). Accents are not dialects:

they involve only pronunciation, people’s characteristic ways of talking. An accent tells you where a person is from. A foreign accent warns us that the speaker is not a native speaker of the language concerned.

The individual variety is called idiolect. It marks specific ways of expressing the speaker’s identity.

Social variation includes varieties related to socio-economic status, ethnic varieties and gender (or sex-related) varieties. Labov and others showed that r-pronunciation or r-dropping (a lin-guistic variable) was related to socio-economic status (higher, middle or lower classes). Black English Vernacular (BEV) is an ethnic variety of Standard American English and its grammar is systematically different from the grammar of the standard. The last social variety discussed was men’s and women’s speech. In some languages, females and males speak as if they had two different dialects (different verb forms related to speaker’s sex, and sometimes to lis-tener’s sex as well). In English, women tend to use more standard forms than men.

The last section was about following norms. The first part discussed the standard, which turned out to be a prestigious and idealized variety. The standard sets the norm for people in educated language use. The second part stated that people do not always use their language according to the standard: instead, they follow the grammar in their heads. When we try to describe the rules of a language as it is used, we create a descriptive grammar. This is different from prescriptive grammar, which instructs people how to use language. Language purism is related to prescriptivism. Independently of whether we accept prescriptivism or descrip-tivism, we need tolerance and acceptance of language variation when we meet people. This is probably the most important thing you can learn from this chapter.

Points to Ponder

1. A tall building has a liftin Britain and an elevatorin the USA; yet giving someone a liftin British English (BrE) is giving someone a ride(and not an elevator) in the USA (AmE). Can you find similar confusing pairs of words / expressions? List them. (See 5.8.2.)

2. West Midlands dialect (England). Translate the following joke about bay windows into standard English, using the glossary provided below:

“What sort of windas am them?” “They'm bay windas.” “Well if they bay windas wot bin them?”

Glossary: am= are, ay= is not(related to ain't), bay= are not, bin= amor, emphati-cally, for are.

3. Prepare a list of the varieties you may speak, based on the information in the chapter.

Can you associate at least one characteristic with each?

4. Click on the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS) website (given under “Kretzschmar” in the Bibliography below). Click on and read

“Introduction” (on the left).

a) “Browse” among the expressions. See what happens if you click on F (or any other category). Get acquainted with the site.

b) Click on “Analyses” (on the left) and then on “Density estimation maps”. You will see a list of expressions that have been put on a map. Click on the first and see some other alternatives for that expression. Possibly also using a map of the USA, can you tell in which state “a week ago Sunday” was most frequently used?

c) Click on DARE (on the left) and play with it.

5. If you had the opportunity to organize Labov’s department store research in your mother tongue, what would be the linguistic variable(s) that could possibly be related to various socio-economic classes? (Think about sounds or words or grammatical forms that are often considered ‘incorrect’ or ‘strange’. They may be indicators of something in society.)

6. Do you agree with the common belief that a linguist always knows what is correct?

(Hint: think of the varieties anyone speaks.) Explain why you think what you think.

7. Listen to female speech, especially the voice, on a TV channel in your mother tongue.

Then switch to an American (not a British!) channel and listen to the female voice there. Switch to and fro between the channels. Are there any differences between women’s voices as represented in the two languages?

8. Have you ever received any comment on your own way of talking? In other words, has anyone ever commented on the variety of language that you use? If yes, what was it and in which variety type would you place it?

Points to Ponder

Suggested Reading

Fromkin, V. - Rodman, R. (1998): An Introduction to Language. Harcourt Brace: Fort Worth One of the most popular introductory textbooks on linguistics. Easy to read, great examples and funny cartoons.

Kontra M. (1990): Fejezetek a South Bend-i magyar nyelvhasználatból.

A Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Nyelvtudományi Intézete: Budapest

This book is a good example for a sociolinguistic study on the use of Hungarian among émigrés in the USA. Very interesting. The examples will make you smile.

Labov, W. (1966 / 1982): The Social Stratification of English in New York City.

Center for Applied Linguistics: Washington Start reading Labov with this book.

Wardhaugh, R. (2002) (4th ed.): An Introduction to Sociolinguistics.

Blackwell Publishers: Oxford / Cambridge

A popular textbook. Very exhaustive. Recommended for those who are interested in sociolinguistics.

f one morning you got up and decided to stop talking, would you lose your knowledge of language? Of course not! Your knowledge of language is internalised, and this is what linguists call competence; what you actually say when you speak is called performance.

In the tradition of generative grammar pioneered by Noam Chomsky, it is competence that is the most important and linguists can gain insight into the workings of language by look-ing inside themselves, by introspection. Another way of studylook-ing language is to look at per-formance, at what people actually say and write. Collections of such data have a long history – think of all the hand-written slips of paper that used to be necessary to compile a dictionary.

That was in the years b.c. (before computers). Since then it has become possible to collect and store huge amounts of language data in corpora. This means that it is now possible for linguists to study language with new tools and in new ways. For example, researchers can make use of the same data source repeatedly to study different kinds of language features, or to compare studies of these. This is true for non-native speaker researchers as well. Although it sometimes seems that corpus data and native speaker judgment data are competing ways of investigating language, they can also be seen as complementing each other. You can read about what corpora

are, how they are compiled and what they can be used for in the next chapter.

József Horváth

Corpus Linguistics

University of Pécs

Department of English Applied Linguistics

9.1. Introduction

1. I could not cope with the problem of expressing my ideas in an exact way, consequently I 2. I could not get rid of my second person singular personal pronouns. I continuously gave 3. I could so as to fulfill the requirements of a good essay which is subjective now I know.

4. I tried to be more careful and accurate as a whole. I managed to eliminate most of those 5. I tried to translate expressions word- by-word in lacking an up-to-date dictionary such as 6. I tried to use the language as creatively as I could so as to fulfill the requirements of a 7. I used a lot of abbreviations ("can't" or "isn't") and noteforms (underlining important 8. I wanted a quick result, therefore the presentation of my work was simply awful

9. I wanted to be more wise than I really was. It is best represented by the fact that I wrote a 10.I wanted to have my own special style even if it was ridiculous sometimes to read such The lines 1 to 10 above are taken from students’ essays. They wrote their texts for various courses at the University of Pécs. I asked them to give the scripts to me on computer disks, too. The reason? I wanted to put together several dozen such texts because I was building a