Studying Language Variation

An Informal Epistemology

J.K. Chambers

Societies can obviously exist without language, as witness the social organizations of carpenter ants, honey bees and great apes. But languages cannot exist without societies. Language is quintessentially social, and throughout recorded history, normal human beings have shown unbounded capabilities for social inter­course, conversational interaction, repartee, self-expression, and tale-telling both real and imagined, all governed by intricate sets of conventions normally beneath consciousness.

Before language existed, our hominoid ancestors organized bands for food-gathering and habitats for sheltering their young; and probably, by analogy with the great apes, not much more. In the absence of language, finding daily sustenance and preventing yourself and your young from becoming sustenance for others are pretty much full-time activities. Since survival and propagation can be achieved in the absence of language, it was obviously not survival and propagation that called language into being. Rather, language is the tool for virtually every human aspiration beyond plain survival and propagation.

Sociolinguistics is the study of the social uses of language, in its many guises. In this chapter, I sketch an informal epistemology of sociolinguistics by outlining its historic development as a linguistic discipline (in Section 1), the persistence of social evaluation in language matters (in Section 2), the place of sociolinguistics among the linguistic sciences (in Section 3), and its relation to communicative competence (in Section 4) and to communicative intelligence (in Section 5).

1 Sociolinguistics as a Discipline

Studying the social uses of language proceeds mainly by observing language use in natural social settings and categorizing the linguistic variants according to their social distribution. The most productive studies have emanated from determining the social evaluation of linguistic variants. These are also the areas most susceptible to scientific methods such as hypothesis-formulation, logical inference, and statistical testing.

Notwithstanding the pervasive effects of the social milieu on the accents and dialects which are its medium, the study of socially conditioned variation in language is relatively recent. Variationist sociolinguistics became an internationally recognized branch of the linguistic sciences in the 1970s. Its effective beginnings as a movement can be quite specifically traced to the early 1960s, when William Labov presented the first sociolinguistic research report at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (December 1962) and published “The social motivation of a sound change” (Labov 1963). Those events were not the first public airings of socially relevant linguistic studies, as we shall see, but they were far and away the most influential. Unlike the ones that came before, Labov's initiatives inaugurated a discipline. One reason for their success, though probably not the most important one, was the relative maturity of the sociolinguistic framework that Labov had devised. His analyses introduced three striking innovations into the prevailing linguistic culture: (i) correlating linguistic variants with class, age, sex, and other social attributes, (ii) incorporating style as an independent variable, and (iii) apprehending the progress of linguistic changes in apparent time. All three are hallmarks of the sociolinguistic enterprise to this day.

Labov's success was partly attributable to the simple fact that the time was ripe. Ancillary investigations into the social uses of language, including studies of discourse, pragmatics, interaction rituals, and subjective evaluation tests, sprang into being around the same time.

Labov recalls feeling considerable trepidation as he prepared to present his results in public for the first time. “In those days … , you practically addressed the entire profession when you advanced to the podium,” he recalled (in 1997). “I had imagined a long and bitter struggle for my ideas, where I would push the social conditioning of language against hopeless odds, and finally win belated recognition as my hair was turning gray. But my romantic imagination was cut short. They ate it up!” The easy reception may have obscured the revolutionary turn that sociolinguistics represents in the history of language study.

Advances in the nascent discipline came quickly. Labov's methods gained breadth and depth with his own work on the social stratification of English in New York City (Labov 1966) and in a large-scale project based at Georgetown University on the inner-city African-American community in Detroit (Shuy, Wolfram and Riley 1968). The theoretical core of the new discipline was bolstered by a perspicacious statement on its empirical foundations (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968), which stands as the manifesto for the enterprise. Sociolinguistics shucked off any hints of anglocentric provincialism with studies of Montreal French (Sankoff and Sankoff 1973) and Panama City Spanish (Cedergren 1973). It also crossed national boundaries with studies in Norwich, England (Trudgill 1974), Edinburgh, Scotland (Reid 1978) and Belfast, Northern Ireland (Milroy and Milroy 1978). Word about these and other developments spread rapidly, months and sometimes years before the official publications, through conference presentations, dissertations and working papers.

Enthusiasm for the new discipline was undeniably fanned by the revolutionary zeal that went along with overturning some old pieties. Linguistic heterogeneity had been banned in linguistic orthodoxies from Saussure to Chomsky, and so were its correlates such as social attributes, contextual style and apparent-time. Now they were seen as liberating. “The key to a rational conception of language change – indeed of language itself,” Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968: 100) declared, “is the possibility of describing orderly differentiation in a language serving a community.”

Before sociolinguistics gained a foothold in the second half of the twentieth century, there had been a few maverick precursors. The term “sociolinguistics” had been coined a decade before Labov's inaugural presentation by one Haver C. Currie in 1952, in a programmatic commentary on the notion that “social functions and significations of speech factors offer a prolific field for research.” With baptismal zeal, Currie (1952: 28) proclaimed, “This field is here designated socio-linguistics.” Nothing came of Currie's suggestion, though the name stuck. Years later, Labov expressed misgivings about the word itself. In 1972 (xiii), he wrote: “I have resisted the term sociolinguistics for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social.” By then, however, it was too late. Non-social linguistics did not disappear, and the term sociolinguistics, like psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and other academic derivatives, serves its purpose.

Dialectology is sometimes viewed as a precursor of sociolinguistics but the relationship between them is oblique rather than direct. Systematic dialectology goes back to at least 1876 and thus antedates modern linguistics as well as sociolinguistics. Both dialectology and sociolinguistics are in the broadest sense dialectologies (studies of language variation). However, traditional dialectology embraced the strictures of structural linguistics, concentrating on regional speech patterns of mainly rural, old-fashioned speakers elicited one item at a time (Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 13–31). In terms of intellectual history, sociolinguistics can be viewed as a refocusing of traditional dialectology in response to cataclysmic technological and social changes that required (and facilitated) freer data-gathering methods using larger and more representative population samples (Chambers 2002). In its goals as well as it methods, it is a radical departure.

There is now a branch of sociolinguistic dialectology in which region is one independent variable among the other social and stylistic variables (as in the chapter by Britain in this volume). It is much more beholden to sociolinguistics than to dialectology.

Traditional dialect studies with genuine sociolinguistic bearings are very rare. The exception that proves the rule is Louis Gauchat's study of vernaculars in the Swiss village Charmey (1905 [2008]). Gauchat (1866–1942), professor of philology at University of Zurich, visited the alpine village on several occasions and became acutely aware of social stratification in the local dialect. He was also acutely aware that this variability ran counter to the prevailing wisdom at the time, which held that the dialect of an isolated village with a virtually immobile population should be homogeneous. “If unity can indeed exist in the speech of a village one would expect to find it in Charmey,” Gauchat said (1905 [2008: 228]). Instead, he found “variation in the pronunciation, morphology, syntax, and lexicon” (236). No doubt conscious of his renegade mission (though he never came right out and said so), Gauchat sets down the variation in an analysis rich in insight, thorough in detail and sound in argumentation. He emerges, in hindsight, as the patriarch of varia­tionist linguistics (Chambers 2008). Some six decades before Labov, he correlated linguistic variants...