Social Factors Affecting Variation [PDF]

Nonce Borrowings. • A Nonce Borrowing that happens often enough and gets picked up by monolingual speakers of the matr

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Idea Transcript


What can you tell me about the speaker? “Man, money ain’t got no owners. Only spenders” At 0:30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtoM9x-Bfu8

Our social identity can shape our language • • • • • • • •

Place/Region Time/Age Isolation (Physical, Linguistic, Social) Contact Class Ethnicity Gender Situation Specific Factors

• It can shape our word choice, morphosyntax, and pronunciation. • Let us focus on the factor of place: (i) If I wear a bunnyhug I am probably from:___________ (ii) If I loves Newfoundland I am probably from:__________ (iii) If I have a busy /skεdjul/ (rather than /ʃεdjul/), then I am probably from_______________

What is Sociolinguistics? • Sociolinguistics is the subfield of Linguistics that studies the relationship between society and language. • It asks questions such as: What are the social factors that can shape language? How do social factors shape language? How do societies deal with language?

Terms • A group of people that make the same language choices is a called a speech community. • Different speech communities speak different varieties of the same language. • The word speech variety is a keyword in sociolinguistics.

Terms • Sociolinguists prefer the word variety to the word dialect, for 2 main reasons: (i) The word dialect is hard to delimit (ii) The word dialect is not neutral; people reserve it for non-standard varieties of a language; standard varieties (i.e. varieties taught at school) are called languages

Terms • (Socio)linguists draw a distinction between the term variety, and the terms slang and accent (i) Slang: refers only to the lexicon, i.e. to words; words regarded very informal, used in speech rather than in writing; either words new to the language, or old words with new meanings (e.g. grass is slang for marijuana) (ii) Accent: refers only to the pronunciation

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Place • Place/Geographical Location is the most well studied factor affecting variation. • For example, the word gaff ‘steal’ belongs to the regional variety (dialect) of Newfoundland

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Place •

How do we determine the boundaries of a regional variety? 1. We find the speakers in a region with the least outside influence, also known as NORMs  Non-mobile Older Rural Males 2. We run through a questionnaire of lexical features known to show regional differentiation (e.g., What is your general term for the rubber soled shoe worn in gym class?)

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Place •

How do we determine the boundaries of a regional variety? 3. We record each speakers responses 4. We draw isoglosses. An isogloss is a line drawn on a dialect map to indicate that 2 regions differ for a particular linguistic feature http://dialect.redlog.net/ 5. If you find a lot of isoglosses in the same place it seems likely that you’ve found a boundary between dialect areas

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Place • When is a regional variety/dialect born? • Dialectical diversity develops when people are separated from each other geographically. When some geographical barrier separates groups of speakers linguistic changes are not easily spread and dialectical differences are reinforced • When is a dialect (partially/completely) lost?

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Place • Dialect Levelling; It happens when speakers of different dialects form one community. Levelling takes place in 3 stages: (i) the first generation keeps its home dialect (ii) the second generation chooses from all linguistic options available (iii) the third generation levels out the diversity in favor of the most frequent variant

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Place • What’s the situation in Canada? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIoTpkM5N64 • After the American Revolution, about 50,000 Americans who remained loyal to Britain (the Loyalists) moved to the northern colonies. These Loyalists brought their American dialects with them.

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Place • Canadian English is in many respects a blend between American and British English (plus some features that are unique to Canadian English). -Lexicon -Pronunciation -Morphosyntax

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Place You keep your head warm with a…

You drink water from a…

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Place British/Canadian English • She has just gone

American/Canadian English • She just left

• She was in the hospital

• She was in hospital

• I shall leave tomorrow

• I will leave tomorrow

http://www.dialectsarchive.com/

Canadian Raising • Say the following words and focus on the diphthong: around and about • The diphthong in around sounds like [aʊ], whereas in about it sounds like [əʊ]. • [əʊ] is used before voiceless sounds • The phenomenon is called ‘raising’ because a low vowel [a] is ‘raised’ into a mid vowel [ə] http://www.yorku.ca/twainweb/troberts/raisi ng.html

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Time • Time/Age is a further factor affecting language variation • For example, if I sit on a chesterfield (rather than on a sofa), I am probably an older person. • Apparent time hypothesis: Changes over time can be observed by looking at differences between older and younger speakers

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Time • The vowel movement of the U.S. Northern Cities Shift bog block hot

[bɒg] → bag [bæg] [blɒk] → black [blæk] [hɒt] → hat [hæt]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UoJ 1-ZGb1w

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Isolation • A further factor that affects language variation is isolation • A speech community is isolated when it is cut off from its source • Isolated speech communities seem to preserve older ways of speaking and to develop along their own paths • The isolation involved might be physical, linguistic, or social • All three types of isolated speech communities are found in Canada

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Physical Isolation, Newfoundland English • Newfoundland is an island (isolated from other heavily populated areas) • It was settled very early (before the mid 1800s) • Its settlers came from 2 clearly defined areas: southwestern England and southeastern Ireland.  Valuable for dialectologists interested in the dialects of the original settlers

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Physical Isolation, Newfoundland English • Shibboleth: word that is a stereotype of a speech community, e.g. bye, b'y 'boy' for Newfoundland, aboot 'about' for Canada (both in the video) • Phonological Characteristics: (i) Stopping of interdentals (e.g. dat for that) (ii) word-initial h deletion (e.g. Olyrood for Holyrood) • Morphosyntactic Characteristics: (i) The plural -s is sometimes absent (e.g. two pound) (ii) The 3Sg agreement is generalized (e.g. I goes, you goes, etc)

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Linguistic Isolation, Quebec French • Quebec is a linguistic island • It is an island of French surrounded by a sea of English • It was settled very early (before the mid 1800s) • Its settlers came from northwestern France It is a good example of how isolated language varieties retain older features of a language, while undergoing their own internally motivated change

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Linguistic Isolation, Quebec French • Lexicon: (i) Retention of older forms: doutance ‘suspicion’ instead of doute (ii) English words: bill instead of facture (iii) Words have developed distinct meanings: ma blonde means ‘my girlfriend’ instead of ‘my blond’ • Phonology: tu dis ‘you say’ [tsydi] instead of [tydi]

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Linguistic Isolation, Quebec French • Morphosyntax: je vas (instead of je vais) tu vas elle/il va on va (instead of nous allons) vous allez Elles/ils vont

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Social Isolation, African Nova Scotian English • It was settled after the American Revolution by African Americans who had fought for the British • Some African Americans integrated into the surrounding white communities • Some of them remained separated primarily due to racial segregation (in Preston) • Some Nova Scotia schools remain segregated until 1964

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Social Isolation, African Nova Scotian English • Preserved older features • Some shared with current African American English: (i) Copula Deletion: He gonna go • Some not: (ii) Generalized use of the 3singular -s: I goes

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Isolation -Physical Isolation (separated from other people) -Linguistic Isolation (separated from other speakers of your language) -Social Isolation (separation through attitudes and conventions)

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact • Language Contact

→Code Switching → Borrowings → Lingua Franca → Pidgin → Creole

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact → Code Switching

• Code Switching is the systematic alternation between language systems in discourse. • Common in bilingual communities • Spanglish: Spanish-English switching in the USA (1) Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in English y termino en Español ‘Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish and I finish it in Spanish’ • Franglais: French-English switching in Canada (2) C'est pas beautiful, ca? ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact → Code Switching

• Code Switching may take one of the following forms: (i) The switch involves long stretches of each language (1) Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in English y termino en Español ‘Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish and I finish it in Spanish’ (ii) The switch involves insertion of individual words from a language A to a language B (the matrix language). Often, the inserted words are changed to obey the grammatical rules of the matrix language. For example, in (2) the matrix language is_________ (2) de watcher ton image préférée

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact → Code Switching

• The words that are inserted in the matrix language are called Nonce Borrowings. • A Nonce Borrowing that happens often enough and gets picked up by monolingual speakers of the matrix language is called a borrowing/loan word • So the difference between a nonce borrowing and a borrowing/loan word is that the second one becomes part of the vocabulary of the matrix language.

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact → Code Switching

• Once a word is truly borrowed, it loses its associations with the original language, and is adapted to the pronunciation and morphosyntax of the borrowers. • Here are some borrowed words in English. Do you know the source language? • Alligator Source: Spanish el legarto • Sofa Source: Turkish sofa • to sign Source: French signer • Pterodactyl Source: Greek pterodaktilos

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact → Code Switching

• Sometimes grammatical structures can be borrowed along with individual words. (1) le gars que j'ai donné le job à ‘the guy that I gave the job to’

(Acadian French)

• A vocabulary item: job • A grammatical structure: preposition stranding

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact → Lingua Franca

• Lingua franca: Language used in a contact situation (usually a trade situation) between speakers of mutually unintelligible languages, often the second language of the speakers involved. – East Africa is populated by hundreds of tribes, each speaking its own language. But most Africans of this area learn Swahili as a second language. In this scenario, Swahili is the lingua franca of East Africa. It is used/understood in nearly every marketplace

• English has been called “the lingua franca of the whole world” • French, at one time, was “the lingua franca of diplomacy”

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact → Pidgin

• Pidgin: Language developed in a contact situation (usually a trade or plantation situation) between speakers of different languages. It is nobody's native language. • There are a number of pidgins in the world, including a large number of English based pidgins. • What are their linguistic features? (i) small set of content words (The language that supplies the content words for the pidgin is called the lexifier language) (ii) very simple grammar

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact → Pidgin

• Compare, Cameroonian Pidgin with Standard English. What differences do you observe? Cameroonian Pidgin English Nom Acc Nom Acc a mi I me yu yu you you i i/am he him i i/am she her wi wi we us wuna wuna you you dεm dεm/am they them

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact → Pidgin

Cameroonian Pidgin English Nom Acc Nom a mi I yu yu you i i/am he i i/am she wi wi we wuna wuna you dεm dεm/am they • No gender distinctions; fewer case distinctions

Acc me you him her us you them

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Language Contact → Creole

• Creole: A language, which started as a pidgin, adopted by a community as its native language and learned by children as their first language • Creoles often arose on slave plantations in certain areas where slaves of many different tribes could communicate only via the plantation pidgin. For example Haitian Creole, based on French, and Tok Pisin, based on English, developed in this way. • Creoles expand the number of content words and grammatical distinctions found in the original pidgin

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Class • Class or socioeconomic status (SES) may shape our linguistic choices and our linguistic choices may reflect our class. • Examples from England: • http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/regionalvoices/social-variation/

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Class • Labov (1972) studied the presence/absence of postvocalic /r/ in speakers of New York. • Presence or absence of /r/ in words such as car, beer, beard (the presence of /r/ is the prestigious variant) – /r/ more often dropped by speakers of lower social classes – /r/ more often dropped in less formal speech – In very careful speech, lower middle class produces more /r/ than upper middle class 

How can we explain the latter point?

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Class • Labov (1972) studied the presence/absence of postvocalic /r/ in speakers of New York. • Presence or absence of /r/ in words such as car, beer, beard (the presence of /r/ is the prestigious variant) – /r/ more often dropped by speakers of lower social classes – /r/ more often dropped in less formal speech – In very careful speech, lower middle class produces more /r/ than upper middle class

 'hypercorrection' due to 'linguistic insecurity‘ among a social group attempting to move up to the class ladder

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Ethnicity, African American English (AAE) • Ethnicity may shape our linguistic choices and our linguistic choices may reflect our ethnic background • Let us consider African American English

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Ethnicity, African American English (AAE) • Ethnicity may shape our linguistic choices and our linguistic choices may reflect our ethnic background • African American English is an ethnolect, in the sense that is spoken by an ethnic group. • It shows a number of distinguishing features that have been taken to be signs of a “deficient, illogical, and incomplete” language and of “genetically inferior speakers”. • Of course, there is no scientific basis for these associations. Actually, many features that are attested in AAE are also attested in other American/English dialects and/or in other languages.

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Ethnicity, African American English Phonological Features • R-Deletion /r/ is deleted everywhere except before a vowel. As a result fort and fought, court and caught, etc sound the same in African American English • Dissolving final consonant clusters [tεsәs] tests

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Ethnicity, African American English Syntactic Features • Double Negatives I don’t know nothing (instead of I don’t know anything) • Deletion of the verb “be”/ Zero Copula Forms John happy (instead of John is happy right now) • Habitual “be” John be happy (instead of John is usually happy)

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Ethnicity, African American English • Food for thought: • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_KKLkmIrDk • http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/languageprejudices-dont-make-sense-negative-aks-ask-racist92881

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Ethnicity, African American English • There are different theories as to the factors that led to the systematic differences between African American English and other American English dialects. • A view that is receiving increasing support is that AAE was once a creole. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Africans who spoke different languages were grouped together to discourage communication and slave revolts. • In order to communicate, the slaves created an English based pidgin

Do you think this email was written by a man or a woman? Why? “Subj: Sorry I haven’t written Dear syco330 thank you very much for all your lovely letters. I'm sorry, I'm not as good a letter sender as you. I have had a very busy morning. Three lectures in a row (in the same lecture theatre) and then quite a fun tutorial. The tutorial was for English 124, the most horrible paper you can take. I'm doing health science, if you hadn't guessed. Anyway I'm getting hungry so I think I'll finish this message and go and have some lunch. I apologise for any spelling mistakes, of which I'm sure there are plenty. I can't spell for peanuts. Have a good day, I'll write again soonSYCO322” (data from Thomson and Murachver, 2001, p. 207)

Gender may shape our language and our linguistic choices may reflect our. • In electronic discourse • Women (in Western societies) are more likely to: -refer to emotions, use intensive adverbs and modals -make compliments and ask questions -use minimal responses and tag questions -use subordinating conjunctions and oppositions -use linguistic forms associated with politeness • Men (in Western societies) are more likely to. . . -make reference to quantity -use non-standard forms or 'make grammatical errors' -provide opinions -use more words and talk more often in conversation (see Thomson and Murachver, 2001, and references therein)

In conversational discourse • Women (in Western societies) are more likely to: -try to keep conversation going (M-hm…really? Oh my wow!) -engage others -organize turn taking -maintain a single topic for longer -demonstrate sympathy by sharing problems and experiences • Men (in Western societies) are more likely to. . . -interrupt -change topics -avoid disclosing their problems

Social Factors Affecting Variation: Gender • There is a name for these differences! • Women have a rapport style (that is a discourse style designed to build and maintain relationships), whereas men have a report style (that is a discourse style designed to communicate factual information).

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