Chapters 5 and 6

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Chapters 5 and 6 Speech Communities and
Language Variation
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What is language?

• A system of symbols with standard meanings.
• Allows humans to communicate and is the main
  vehicle of transmission of culture.
• Language provides context for symbolic
  understanding.

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Other Communication

• Human
• Direct
• Body language (kinesics), tone of voice, personal
  space (proxemics), gesture
• Indirect
• Writing, mathematics, music, painting, signs
• Nonhuman
• Sounds, odors, body movements
• Call systems, ethologists
• ASL American Sign Language

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PIE
5
Speech Community

• some kind of social group whose speech
  characteristics are of interest and can be
  described in a coherent manner Wardhaugh 116
• fuzzy Wardhaugh 116
• Groups? What does that mean? How do we avoid
  stereotyping?
• Ethnicity, class, geography, etc

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Our search must be for criteria other than, or
at least in addition to, linguistic criteria if
we are to gain a useful understanding of speech
community. (Wardhaugh 118)
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a search for the various characteristics which
make individuals feel that they are members of
the same community (Wardhaugh 118)
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r dropping in NY, though commonly done, is
considered low pahk de cahr dropping in
South England is considered posh fahthah
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h dropping considered low in South England but
normal in most American dialectsEliza Doolittle
vs its erbal Herb
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A speech community is defined as much by what it
is not as what it is. The group must manifest
regular relationships between language use and
social structure, and there must be norms
(Wardhaugh 120)
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Language and Culture not always connected
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Language and Culture not always connected

• Ngoni of Africa
• No longer speak their own language but have
  adopted language of the people they conquered in
  Malawi.
• However, they use that language in ways they
  have carried over from Ngoni, ways they maintain
  because they consider them to be essential to
  their continued identity as a people (Wardhaugh
  120)

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Groups in North America with culture but not
language?

• Which ones
• Are these speech communities?
• Magdalene College, Cambridge!

14
Hypercorrection

• Lower Middle Class speakers sometimesuse
  prestige features at a greater rate thanUpper
  Middle Class speakers. And LMC speakers use
  stigmatizedfeatures at a lower rate than the
  UMC. Because the LMC wish to achieve the
  nexthigher level of status, they attempt to
  talklike members of the next higher class,
  butthey go too far.

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Gender and Language Variation

• Trudgill also studied the effect of genderon
  variation in word-final ing in words
  likerunning (runnin') and swimming(swimmin').
  He found that women tend to use morestandard
  language features than men. And men tend to use
  more vernacularforms in their speech.
• Well try to return to this in the section of the
  text on language and gender

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Discussion Questions p. 122 Take 30 minutes in
groups

• 1. Try to label yourself according to what
  kind(s) of English you speak. Explain why you
  choose the specific terms you use and any
  connotations these terms have for you, e.g.
  Lancastrian, Bakersfeldian, Texan English,
  Californian, American
• 3. In what respects do the following pairs of
  people belong to the same speech community or to
  different ones Presidents Bill Clinton and
  GWBush Madonna and Guy Ritchie Hugh Grant and
  Carey Grant Sean Connery and Ewan McGregor
• 4. Describe the linguistic uses of some
  bilinguals with whom you are familiar. When do
  they use each of the languages? If you are
  bilingual yourself, in what ways do you identify
  with people who show the same range of linguistic
  abilities? A different range?
• 5. Answer question 5, time permitting.

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Intersecting Communities

• A great deal of bilingualism in the modern world
• Most speech communities are fairly fluid
• What should the target language and dialect be?
• Individuals shift identities and speech and
  languages freely

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Communities of Practice

• an aggregate of people who come together around
  mutual engagements in some common endeavor. Ways
  of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs,
  values, power relations in short, practices
  emerge in the course of their joint activity
  around that endeavor Ekert and McConnell-Ginet
  in Wardhaugh 125
• Examples? Gangs, reading groups, etc

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Look at questions 1 and 2 on p. 126
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What is Social Class? Social class involves
grouping people together and accordingthem
status within society according to the groups
theybelong to.What is Social Class? A
number of modern thinkers have tried todefine
what makes a particular socialclass. Is it
accent?neighborhood?occupation?income?
wealth?
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Determinants of Social Class Personal
performance Education Occupation
Income Awards and achievements Wealth
Amount Source Social orientation
Interactions Class consciousness Value
orientation
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The United States of America is a classless and
egalitarian society!!Do you agree or disagree?
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Class Structure in the U.S. Two upper
classes Upper upper Old money Lower upper
New money Three middle classes Upper
middle Professional Middle class White
collar and entrepreneurs Working class Blue
collar Two lower classes Upper lower
Unskilled laborers Lower lower Socially and
economically disadvantaged
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Americans

• Tend to think they are middle class or upper
  class or upper middle class
• Tend to think that they will be upper class
  someday

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Indexes of Social Class How you look How you
dress How you talk What you like to do
Where you live What your house looks like
What you eat a lot of food, good tasting food,
good looking food
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Variables of Social Class Power The degree
to which a person can control other people
Wealth Objects or symbols owned by people
which have value attached to them Prestige
The degree of respect, favorable regard,
or importance accorded to a person by members
of society
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Networks and Repetoires

• Various network relationships on p. 127. These
  diagrams show that a person can be part of
  various speech communities, some that intersect
  and some that do not. Certain individuals may be
  in one or more groups but not others.

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Social Class and Speech Style

• Peter Trudgill studied variation in word-final
  ingin words like running (runnin') and
  swimming(swimmin') in Norwich, England. Four
  speech styles Reading aloud of word lists
  Reading aloud of text Formal speech Casual
  speech Trudgill found that variation across
  speech stylesparallels variation across social
  class.
• What method is used in our accent presentations?
  Should we include class?

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Now it is time for a ten minute break. When you
return, we will do 10 to 15 accent presentations
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Language VariationDialects
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Language Variation

• Dialects
• Regional Dialects (geography)
• Social Dialects (class, group, ethnicity, etc)

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Regional Variation

• Traditional study of dialect
• Important part of Historical Linguistics
• Family trees and phonemic splits between
  languages and dialects attributed to time, space,
  etc
• Latin v /w/ to /v/ in later period
• IE. ptr to Latin pater to French pere
• To Germanic fader to English father

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Dialect in Old English

• They no doubt existed, but we dont see them in
  the manuscripts very much because scribes wrote
  the literary standard for of Old English
• Hwaet we gardena in geardagum theodkinginga thrim
  gefrunon

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Dialects in Middle English

• At least five
• KentishSouthernNorthernEast-Midland
• West-Midland

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Kentish

• Kentish was originally spoken over the whole
  southeastern part of England, including London
  and Essex, but during the Middle English period
  its area was steadily diminished by the
  encroachment of the East Midland dialect,
  especially after London became an East
  Midland-speaking city (see below) in late Middle
  English the Kentish dialect was confined to Kent
  and Sussex. In the Early Modern period, after the
  London dialect had begun to replace the dialects
  of neighboring areas, Kentish died out, leaving
  no descendants. Kentish is interesting to
  linguists because on the one hand its sound
  system shows distinctive innovations (already in
  the Old English period), but on the other its
  syntax and verb inflection are extremely
  conservative as late as 1340, Kentish syntax is
  still virtually identical with Old English
  syntax.

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Southern

• The Southern dialect of Middle English was spoken
  in the area west of Sussex and south and
  southwest of the Thames. It was the direct
  descendant of the West Saxon dialect of Old
  English, which was the colloquial basis for the
  Anglo-Saxon court dialect of Old English.
  Southern Middle English is a conservative dialect
  (though not as conservative as Kentish), which
  shows little influence from other languages
  most importantly, no Scandinavian influence (see
  below). Descendants of Southern Middle English
  still survive in the working-class country
  dialects of the extreme southwest of England.

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Northern

• By contrast with these southernmost dialects,
  Northern Middle English evolved rapidly the
  inflectional systems of its nouns and verbs were
  already sharply reduced by 1300, and its syntax
  is also innovative (and thus more like that of
  Modern English). These developments were probably
  the result of Scandinavian influence. In the
  aftermath of the great Scandinavian invasions of
  the 860's and 870's, large numbers of
  Scandinavian families settled in northern and
  northeastern England. When the descendants of
  King Alfred the Great of Wessex reconquered those
  areas (in the first half of the 10th century),
  the Scandinavian settlers, who spoke Old Norse,
  were obliged to learn Old English. But in some
  areas their settlements had so completely
  displaced the preexisting English settlements
  that they cannot have had sufficient contact with
  native speakers of Old English to learn the
  language well.

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More on Northern

• They learned it badly, carrying over into their
  English various features of Norse (such as the
  pronoun they and the noun law ), and also
  producing a simplified syntax that was neither
  good English nor good Norse. Those developments
  can be clearly seen in a few late Old English
  documents from the region, such as the glosses on
  the Lindisfarne Gospels (ca. 950) and the
  Aldbrough sundial (late 11th century). None of
  this would have mattered for the development of
  English as a whole if the speakers of this
  "Norsified English" had been powerless peasants
  but they were not. Most were freeholding farmers,
  and in many northern districts they constituted
  the local power structure. Thus their bad English
  became the local prestige norm, survived, and
  eventually began to spread (much later see
  below).

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East-Midland and West-Midland

• The East-Midland and West-Midland dialects of
  Middle English are intermediate between the
  Northern and Southern/Kentish extremes. In the
  West Midlands there is a gradation of dialect
  peculiarities from Northern to Southern as one
  moves from Lancashire to Cheshire and then down
  the Severn valley. This dialect has left modern
  descendants in the working- class country
  dialects of the area. The East-Midland dialect is
  much more interesting. The northern parts of its
  dialect area were also an area of heavy
  Scandinavian settlement, so that northern
  East-Midland Middle English shows the same kinds
  of rapid development as its Northern neighbor.
  But the subdialect boundaries within East-Midland
  were far from static the more northerly variety
  spread steadily southward, extending the
  influence of Scandinavianized English long after
  the Scandinavian population had been totally
  assimilated.

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More on East and West Midland

• In the 13th century this part of England,
  especially Norfolk and Suffolk, began to outstrip
  the rest of the country in prosperity and
  population because of the excellence of its
  agriculture, and crucially increasing numbers
  of well-to-do speakers of East-Midland began to
  move to London, bringing their dialect with them.
  By the second half of the 14th century the
  dialect of London and the area immediately to the
  northeast, which had once been Kentish, was
  thoroughly East-Midland, and a rather
  Scandinavianized East Midland at that. Since the
  London dialect steadily gained in prestige from
  that time on and began to develop into a literary
  standard, the northern, Scandinavianized variety
  of East-Midland became the basis of standard
  Modern English. For that reason, East-Midland is
  by far the most important dialect of Middle
  English for the subsequent development of the
  language.

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Dialect Atlases

• Try to show the geographical boundaries of the
  distribution of a particular linguistic feature
  by drawing a line on a map (Wardhaugh 134)
• Such a line is called an isogloss
• On one side of the line people say one thing, on
  the other they say a different thing.

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Isogloss

• The isogloss is the boundary line between groups
  who say something differently
• When there are a number of different things said
  on one side of the boundary from what is said on
  the other side, we can say that the boundary
  marks a dialect boundary

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Examples from some Middle English Dialects

• Well use the ELMO for this.

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Relic areas and transition areas (Back to modern
examples)

• Simply terms referring to sub areas where shifts
  do not occur. As if the Antelope Valley continued
  to refer to any bubbly soft drink as coke while
  the rest of LA county shifted to calling it
  soda. AV would be a relic area, and perhaps
  Beverly Hills, a status area where the shift
  might originate or Watts a low status area where
  the shift might originate would be focal areas
  and LA county would be the transition area

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The Soda pop page

• http//www.popvssoda.com/

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American Dialect page(note area for San
Francisco dialect)

• http//www.geocities.com/Broadway/1906/dialects.ht
  ml

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Linguistic Atlas of the US and Canada

• The selection of informants tends not to be very
  well controlled Wardhaugh 137
• Broken down into simplified categories like high,
  middle, and low class no education, some
  education, superior education old, middle aged,
  young
• Most studies tend to prefer older people
• One survey of British dialects instructed
  researchers to choose informants who were over
  sixty, at least second generation, and had good
  teeth

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Dialects remember two kinds

• Geographical dialects. Weve just done.
• Social dialects. We discussed social dialect and
  class in the first part of this powerpoint.

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William Labov

• Sociolinguist who we mentioned in the first part
  of this presentation
• Interested in class and did most of his studies
  in New York City.

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Linguistic Variable

• A linguistic item which has identified variants.
• Fishin / fishing/ fishen
• Car / cah With / wit / wif
• Latin / la?in thirty / thirdy
• Coffee / cowfee
• It was a macao Tom not a parrot!
• Hes happy / he be happy / he happy
• Climbed / clomb
• Look for a present for my mom / look for my mom a
  present

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Labov also uses indicator, marker, stereotype

• Indicator a linguistic variable without social
  importance. Cot/caught. merry/marry/Mary
• Marker a linguistic variable with social
  significance. Car/cah, schedule/shedule,
  Magdalene college/ Maudlin college, Down
  Below/LA, Los Angeles/Los Angeles, The
  City/Frisco?
• Stereotype a popular and therefore concious
  characterization of speech of a group. Boid for
  NY, Chap for Brit, Howdy partner, dude for Ca

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William LabovsDepartment Store Study Saks
Fifth Avenue At 50th Street and 5th Avenue,
near the centerof the high fashion shopping
district Macy's Herald Square. 34th Street
and Sixth Avenue,near the garment district S.
Klein Union Square. 14th Street and Broadway,
notfar from the Lower East Side
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Discussion Questions on p. 143

• 1. What is a shibboleth?
• 3. What linguistic variables might be usefully
  investigated in our part of the world? What kind
  of variations have you noticed?
• 4. Examples where people hypercorrect and get
  things wrong? English avacado?
• 5. Whats wrong with double negatives?

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Hypercorrection

• It is I. We want to sound high class sometimes,
  so we say and write things that are stilted
  and/or purple.
• The upper class often dont care what fork they
  use and use slang with relish. Middle class
  people sometimes reveal themselves as middle
  class by being too proper in dress, behaviour,
  and language.

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Labov and class

• In one study (Wardhaugh 147) Labov used
  education, occupation, and income to set up ten
  social classes.
• What class are you? How can we tell?
• House size? In AV there wasnt much variation,
  now there is. Do people with really big houses
  act and speak differently?

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Idiolects and Sociolects

• Idiolect (idios Greek self lect speech as in
  lecture) speech characteristics and linguistic
  behaviour of individuals
• Sociolect speech characteristics of members of
  social groups

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Idiolects

• How can we tell if someone is speaking in a
  unique way because of individual difference
  rather than dialect?
• Clint Eastwood? Truman Capote? Johny Depp as
  Willy Wonka? Carol Channing? Fran Drescher?
  George Bush?

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Data Collection

• How to we properly design and deliver and analyze
  our studies
• Observers paradox, how can we adjust for our own
  biases
• Can any sociolinguistic study be completely
  objective and clean?
• Questionnaires

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Questionnaires four-fold distinctions

• 1. Casual situation
• 2. An interview
• 3. Reading aloud a story
• 4. Reading aloud a list of word pairs

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Casual and careful speech

• We should try to distinguish whether the speech
  involved is casual or careful
• What is the speech of the Please call Stella
  speakers? Does it vary from speaker to speaker?

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Please call Stella

• Are there any words that are clear linguistic
  variables in the paragraph?
• What is the different between the accent of a
  native speaker and the accent of a learner?

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Random Sample or Judgment Sample

• Random usually better way to do it. It is more
  objective, but more difficult to do.
• Judgment sample an investigator chooses
  subjects according to a set of criteria age,
  gender, social class, education, etc These are
  the kind of samples that sociolinguists usually
  take

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Dependent and independent variables

• The linguistic variable in these studies is the
  dependent variable the difference that we are
  interested in.
• Other variables may be incidental or unrelated to
  the correlation being studied.
• Statisticians consider most of these
  sociolinguistic studies to lack sufficient
  rigour.

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Sociolinguistics and scientific studies

• Sociolinguists need to collect reliable data, but
  how can they?
• Since we can not even give satisfactory
  definitions of sociolingustics, or language, or
  society, or dialect, or creole, how can we do
  scientific studies in this field?

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Epistemic relativism vs Logical Positivism

• Relativism sociolinguistic studies are not
  useful because all linguistic norms are relative.
  Jibberish or the sound of gas escaping from a
  tube is as important and interesting as human
  speech
• Logical positivism since we can not be sure
  about any of these claims, we should not make any
  claims. We need scientific proof.
• Theoretical linguistics is about universals. It
  is rigorous and highly structured.

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Is Sociolinguistics

• A science
• A social science
• Part of the humanities
• A liberal studies requirement

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END HERE
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Nonhuman Communication - Washoe

• Born 1965
• Taught ASL 1966
• Mastered 100s of signs
• First nonhuman to learn language

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Nonhuman Communication - Lana

• Taught with keyboard, 1970s
• Able to use and combine signs

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Nonhuman Communication - Koko

• 1970s, first gorilla taught ASL
• IQ of 85 at 4 years old
• Koko learning ASL
• Koko on AOL

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Nonhuman Communication Nim Chimpsky

• 1980s taught ASL
• Wouldnt initiate conversation
• Never signed to other chimps

Nim Chimpsky and his namesake, the famed linguist
Noam Chomsky
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Nonhuman Communication - Kanzi

• 1980s, communicates with lexigrams
• Vocabulary of 90 symbols
• Could understand English
• Command of syntax

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Nonhuman Communication Jane Goodall

• Gombe Game Reserve
• Chimps need stimulus to make sounds
• Since 1960s

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Animal v. Human Communication

• Four differences
• Productivity (infinite expressions)
• Displacement (past, present, future)
• Arbitrariness (no link between word and sound)
• Combining sounds (phonemes)
• Dime versus dine or lock versus rock in English
• English has 45 phonemes Italian 27 Hawaiian 13
• Nonhuman animals cannot combine sounds (11
  correspondence of sounds)

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Anatomy of Language
Motor cortex

• Brain
• Size
• Laterality
• Wernickes area
• Brocas area
• Motor cortex

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Sociolinguistics

• Like descriptive linguistics in a way, in that
  sociolinguists are concerned with the ethnography
  of speakingcultural and subcultural patterns of
  speech variation in different social contexts.
• Examples
• Pronunciation and dialects
• Honorifics and social status
• Gender differences
• Multilingualism

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Anatomy of Language

• Respiratory System
• Larger lung capacity
• Larynx, pharynx
• Tongue, lips, nose
• Hyoid

82
Structure of Language

• Phonology (sounds)
• Morphology (words)
• Syntax (sentence structure)
• Semantics (meaning)
• Pragmatics or grammar (rules)

83
Structure of Language - Phonology

• The study of sounds of a language.
• No human language uses all the sounds humans can
  make.
• IPA International Phonetic Alphabet
• Phonemes and phones
• /l/ and /r/ phonemes (English has 40)
• /p/ and /ph/ phones
• Ghoti fish (tough, women, position)
• Other sounds
• Tones, nasals, clicks (Genesis in the !Kung
  language)

84
Structure of Language - Morphology

• Morphemes are the smallest units of language.
• Words (dog, cat) free morphemes
• Prefixes (un-, sub-)
• Syllables (-s, -ly )
• Declining and conjugating
• Verbs are conjugated (am, are, is)
• Nouns are declined in some languages
• Latin, Greek, German, Russian, etc.
• Word form changes based on position in sentence.

bound morphemes
85
Structure of Language - Syntax

• Rules for how to put together sentences and
  phrases.
• Six possible arrangements, based on Subject,
  Verb, Object
• English is SVO The girl will hit the boy.
• Forming questions English V1SV2O?

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Structure of Language - Syntax

• Example of syntax
• Lewis Carrolls Jabberwocky
• Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
• Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
• All mimsy were the borogoves,
• And the mome raths outgrabe.
• Verb Noun Adjective

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Structure of Language - Semantics

• The meaning of symbols, words, phrases, and
  sentences of a language.
• Ethnosemantics and kinship terms
• Aunt/uncle versus non-gendered cousin

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Evolution of Language

• Old Theories
• bowwow and ding-dong
• Locke, B.F. Skinner, Descartes
• New Theories
• Noam Chomsky
• Universal and generative grammar
• Principles and parameters
• Creoles, pidgins, and Ebonics
• Sapir-Whorf

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Historical Linguistics

• Focuses on how language changes over time and how
  languages relate to one another.
• Anthropologists are interested in cultural
  features that correlate with language families.
• Reconstruction of languages
• Proto-Indo-European
• Sino-Tibetan
• Linguistic divergence
• Gradual or by force

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Historical Linguistics Old English

• Compare Old, Middle, and Modern English
• Beowulf (Old English)

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym
gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft
Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum,
meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas.
Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings of
spear-armed Danes, in days long sped, we have
heard, and what honor the athelings won! Oft
Scyld the Scefing tore the mead-bench from
squadroned foes, from many a tribe awing the
earls.
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Historical Linguistics Middle English

• The Canterbury Tales (Middle English)

This worthy lymytour, this noble Frere, He made
alwey a maner louryng chiere Upon the Somonour,
but for honestee No vileyns word as yet to hym
spak he.
This worthy limiter, this noble friar, He turned
always a lowering face, and dire, Upon the
summoner, but for courtesy No rude and insolent
word as yet spoke he.
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Descriptive Linguistics

• Also called structural linguistics
• Tries to discover the rules of phonology,
  morphology, and syntax of another language,
  especially those with no written dictionary or
  grammar.
• Seeks to discover language rules that are not
  written down but are discoverable in actual
  speech.

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Fun Stuff

• Language as art
• Calligraphy
• Illumination

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Fun Stuff

• Internet and English
• as a tool of mass communication
• as a way to propagate non-standard English
• as a dialect, or a linguistic event?
• Romeo Juliet - IM style