3.3 Language, languages and linguistic varieties

particular version of this approach: all phenomena are historically located; they exist in relation to other phenomena that give it meaning, whether or not we are aware of it. Language, of course, enters into such a historical context at different levels and in different ways. Objectivism is the theoretical perspective which purposedly ignores the sociohistorical grounding of interpretations and claims the possibility of a universal, context-independent set of criteria for the description of a given phenomenon. When we talk about “sentences,” “complements,” “prepositions,” “inflection” or individual sounds, we ignore – for the purpose of analysis – their sociohistorical and psychological grounding in particular speech acts and speech activities produced by particular subjects at a particular time, in a particular place.

The difference among different approaches to the study of cultural phenomena, speech included, lies in the extent to which researchers operate within one set of assumptions or the other. Researchers also vary in the extent to which they try to move in and out of these two different modes. Formal linguists, for instance, tend to live in an objectivist world of phenomena, where sentences and meanings have lost their connection to particular situations and are examined for their supposedly universal properties. They step out of such a world only to gather more data, i.e. examples for further analysis. Linguistic anthropologists, on the other hand, try to devise ways of maintaining a connection between linguistic forms and its producers. Both groups, however, work with theoretical constructs. The notion of “speech event” used by ethnographers of speaking (see chapter 9) is just as theoretical as the notion of “verb” used by grammarians or the notion of “adjacency pair” used by conversation analysts (see chapter 8). In the world “out there,” there are no verbs, no speech events, and no adjacency pairs. There are particles of matter moving around in certain recurrent and yet not fully predictable patterns. We interpret such experiences as and through symbolic means, including linguistic expressions. That’s what it means to be human. The anthropological study of language aims at clarifying the factors that go into the production of such representations, including their similarities and differences. Such a study, however, cannot proceed without reexamining the very notion of “language.” Despite its routine use by social scientists, the term “language” is often left unanalyzed. I will continue this discussion of linguistic diversity by returning to the meaning of “language” and proposing to replace it with a number of alternative notions, including linguistic varieties, repertoire, and speech community.

3.3Language, languages, and linguistic varieties

It is important to distinguish between “language” and “a language.” The former refers to the human faculty to communicate using particular types of signs (e.g. sounds, gestures) organized in particular types of units (e.g. sequences) and the

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Linguistic diversity

latter refers to a particular sociohistorical product, identifiable with a label such as “English,” “Tok Pisin,” “Polish,” “Swahili,” “Chinese,” “American Sign Language,” “Sign English.” Although sociolinguists (and linguistic anthropologists) routinely use the term “language” in the first, general sense, much of the research in sociolinguistics in the last four decades has shown that the identification of “a language” as the linguistic system used by a given group of people can be quite problematic. Every time we subject a language (e.g. “English,” “Swahili,” etc.) to systematic investigation, we discover that it displays a considerable variation across speakers and situations. This means that we cannot be sure that what we are describing for a few speakers or even for an entire group of people will have a social distribution larger than that group. Not only are there places, for instance, in Melanesia, where several different “languages” are recognized within a relatively small territory – Papua New Guinea is supposed to have more than 750 languages –, but even in large urban settings where speakers might consider themselves speakers of the “same language,” there might in fact be rather different forms and rules for their interpretation. Just like a group of teenagers hanging out at the same intersection every afternoon might have their own special style of speaking, different from the style used by their parents and maybe even from their older siblings, members of a profession will have their own lexicon and assumptions about how to describe a problem or prescribe a solution. This means that in our investigations we need to be aware of variation and be prepared to use or devise methods that allow us to get a sense of the relationship between the group of people we study and the larger networks in which they operate (L. Milroy 1987; Milroy and Milroy 1992). In the past, linguistic anthropologists have been skeptical of some of the theoretical assumptions implicit in the quantitative methods necessary for assessing intragroup variation, but they have been dealing mostly with small groups or relatively small data sets. As more linguistic anthropologists extend their work to urban environments, they will have to reassess their evaluation of quantitative sociolinguistics and face the challenge of a confrontation with its methods and theoretical assumptions.

Sociolinguists have also taught us that we cannot always trust members’ characterization of linguistic differences and groupings. What people call “a language” as opposed to “a dialect” might simply be due to social stigma or to the political decision to give one particular dialect the status of standard language. For these reasons, sociolinguists prefer the term variety (also linguistic variety or variety of language), to be thought of as a set of communicative forms and norms for their use that are restricted to a particular group or community and sometimes even to particular activities. Sociolinguists’ varieties might cover what other researchers call languages, dialects, registers, or even styles (Andersen 1990; Biber and Finegan 1994). The advantage of using the term variety is that it does not carry

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3.4 Linguistic repertoire

the usual implications associated with words like “language” and “dialect” and can cover the most diverse situations, including “all the languages of some multilingual speaker, or community” (Hudson 1980: 24).

In addition to the notion of social distribution, the term “variety” also implies the concepts of linguistic repertoire and speech community, both of which are central for a clarification of “language” as the object of our study.

3.4Linguistic repertoire

Linguistic repertoire is a concept originally introduced by Gumperz (1964: 137) to refer to “the totality of linguistic forms regularly employed in the course of socially significant interaction.” The assumption in this case is that speaking a language means to be involved in a continuous process of decision-making, although not necessarily a conscious one (see also Ervin-Tripp 1972). Repertoire is thus a concept that can apply to either groups or individuals (Platt and Platt 1975). Whether an individual’s repertoire can ever be the same as the repertoire of his community is partly an empirical question. It can be ascertained through detailed investigation of the speech of individuals matched against the range available in their community. But it also depends on our choice of the constituting elements of repertoire (or units of analysis) and the boundaries of the community in which the repertoire is found. If we only concentrate on phonological variation and a small community, for instance, it might be easier to find individuals whose repertoire coincides with the repertoire of their community. If we include larger units (e.g. lexical choices, speech genres) and we widen the boundaries of the community, it will be unlikely that individuals would be able to match the repertoire of their community.

The notion of repertoire then raises a number of issues. The first is the issue of variation. Does the study of repertoire give us a sense of the extent to which variation is pervasive in a given speech community? Can it shed light on how important variation is? The second is the issue of meaning. Once we ascertain the existence of a range of possible choices (phonological, syntactic, lexical, etc.), can we also tell whether a decision with respect to one of the alternative forms has implications for individual speakers? The third issue concerns the social and cultural organization of a repertoire. What are the criteria by which individual speakers make choices within a given repertoire? Can we trace such choices to individual, situational, institutional factors? How important is the type of social organization in which a repertoire is assessed? Most of the work on sociolinguistic variation is done in communities where social differences can be framed in terms of social classes. Do other kinds of social systems (e.g. small egalitarian communities, caste or feudal types of systems) treat repertoire differently? The fourth question has to do with individual freedom and change. To what extent do

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