![]() Two sub-branches, ethnomethodology, and the ethnography of communication, are concerned with style in its contextual and communicative dimension. Both of these cases are examples of change from above, rather than below.Īt its outer edges sociolinguistics merges into the related area of stylistics, and in particular, discourse analysis. This has happened in the case of ‘r’ dropping in parts of America, and ‘h’ dropping in New Zealand and Australia, where vigorous attempts have been made to reintroduce these vulnerable sounds in the environments in which they are most likely to disappear. Once a feature has emerged into consciousness, however, and particularly if it becomes a stereotype, there may be attempts to check its progress by reintroducing some supposedly ‘correct’, and there-fore more prestigious, form. Such changes are examples of change from below, that is, from below conscious awareness. ![]() At a final stage a feature may become so distinctive of a certain section of the public that it becomes a stereotype. If successful, they become adopted more widely by other groups, for whom they become markers. Most innovations start as indicators, with certain social groups unconsciously producing them a good example is ‘h’ dropping. ![]() The first kind of variable is termed a marker and the second an indicator. What appears to happen is that people monitor their production of a variable they are particularly conscious of, whilst those they are less conscious of, they ignore. Interestingly, the findings which have emerged from such studies show that some variables are more subject to stylistic variation than others. So tests have to take into account stylistic factors as well as social ones. They vary their speech according to the formality or informality of the occasion. One complicating factor, however, is that people do not consistently produce a particular accent or dialect feature. On the basis of such data it is possible to chart the spread of innovations in accent and dialect regionally. The results are then set against social indices which group informants into classes, based on factors such as education, money, occupation, and so forth. Sections of the population, known as informants, are then tested to see the frequency with which they produce particular variants. In classic cases, like those undertaken in New York by Labov, or in Norwich by Trudgill, a number of linguistic variables are selected, such as ‘r’ (variably pronounced according to where it occurs in a word) or ‘ng’ (variably pronounced /n/ or /ŋ̍/). ![]() The standard way in which sociolinguists investigate such use is by random sampling of the population. All of these have a bearing on language use. The social variables which influence speech include personal factors such as age, and education, as well as more general ones like nationality, race, and sex. Their overriding concern is with the way in which language varies according to the social context in which it is used and the social group to which it belongs: Labov terms this ‘secular linguistics’. Sociolinguists, on the other hand, are more interested in ‘real’ speech, within and among communities. Generative linguists examine ‘idealised’ samples of speech in which utterances are complete, in a standard form of the language, and free from performance errors. Its popularity has grown very much as a reaction to the more ‘armchair’ methods of generative linguists of the Chomskyan school. It is sometimes referred to as the ‘sociology of language’, although that label suggests a greater concern with sociological rather than linguistic explanations, whereas sociolinguists are principally concerned with language, or, to be more precise, with what Dell Hymes crucially calls ‘socially constituted’ language: with the way language is constructed by, and in turn helps to construct, society. Sociolinguistics is in many ways a blend of sociology and linguistics. Labov was one of the first linguists to turn his attention away from rural, to urban, subjects, in an attempt to analyse the contemporary features of American speech. This kind of dialectology was inherently conservative and was part of larger, comparative language studies pursued under the discipline of philology. Before then there had been a long tradition of studying dialects, usually in remote rural areas, as part of language surveys, but with an agenda largely dictated by concerns to record and preserve historical features of the language. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, largely as a result of William Labov’s work in America, and Peter Trudgill’s in Britain, that it developed into a recognised branch of linguistics. Sociolinguistics, or the study of language in relation to society, is a relative newcomer to the linguistic fold.
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