Since Labov (1966), sociolinguistics has vastly expanded our understanding of language variation and change. However, the paradigms that emerged have focused far too exclusively on dominant languages in modern developed urban... [ view full abstract ]
Since Labov (1966), sociolinguistics has vastly expanded our understanding of language variation and change. However, the paradigms that emerged have focused far too exclusively on dominant languages in modern developed urban contexts (e.g. Stanford 2016), and it is not yet clear that they can be applied to the majority of the world’s societies. This colloquium focuses on Labov’s ‘principle of attention paid to speech’, which is traditionally modelled as a single dimension along which sociolinguistic styles can be ordered. However, recent observations present problems for this particular approach to measuring style variation. For instance, Clarke (2009) documents a case of new dialect formation among Innuaimun speakers in Canada. While socially stratified variation was present, the data are characterised by an absence of stylistic variation, which, Clarke argues, ‘may be attributable to the absence of [...] a prestige standard [or] orthographical norm’ (2009:120). Similarly, Gafter (2016) identifies the challenges in analysing read speech among Hebrew speakers, in a community in which reading as a speech event is conceptualised differently to most English-speaking contexts. In his data, more attention to speech does not necessarily result in the most ‘standard’ or ‘normative’ variants. Little research has been dedicated to contexts where there is no (single) standard or prestige variety governing linguistic behaviour in the way that attention-to-speech predicts. This colloquium brings together an international set of contributors who explore how style variation can be modelled in communities where conceptualisations of ‘standardness’ and ‘formality’ are atypical in the variationist literature.
References:
Clarke, Sandra. 2009. Sociolinguistic stratification and new dialect formation in a Canadian aboriginal community: Not so different after all? In James Stanford and Dennis Preston (eds.), Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 109-128.
Gafter, Roey. 2016. What’s a stigmatized variant doing in the word list? Authenticity in reading styles and Hebrew pharyngeals. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20(1): 31-58.
Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Stanford, James. 2016. A call for more diverse sources of data: Variationist approaches in non-English contexts. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20(4): 525-541.
