Lecture 1

Introduction to the course

1. The subject and problems of the sociolinguistics

2. A brief history of sociolinguistics

3. The terms and methods of sociolinguistic enquiry

1. Sociolinguistics, as the term itself suggests, is a discipline that is capable of combining linguistic and societal concerns in varying degrees.

As Ralf Fasold in his “Sociolinguistics of Society” states, the essence of sociolinguistics depends on two facts about language that are often ignored in the field of linguistics. First, language varies – speakers have more than one way to say more or less the same thing. Second, there is a critical purpose that language serves for its users that is just as important as the obvious one. It is obvious that language is supposed to be used for transmitting information and thoughts from one person to another. At the same time, however, the speaker is using language to make statements about who she is, what her group loyalties are, how she perceives her relationship to her hearer, and what sort of speech event she considers herself to be engaged in.

There is a question how language can be studied in other way. Noam Chomsky as a successor of Leonard Bloomfield ideas studied language autonomously, as a self-sufficient system. He aimed to find a basic universal grammatical structure that could account for the similarities in the organization of languages, without needing to appeal to the social context in which language is used. For Chomsky, the existence of variation in language simply confuses, diverting the linguist’s attention from the wonderful abstract system that separates human language from other communication systems. For the sociolinguist, however, the most important verity is that a language – any language - is full of systematic variation, variation that can only be accounted for by appealing, outside language, to socially relevant forces and facts.

Sociolinguistics takes its primary tasks to map linguistic variation on to social conditions. This mapping helps understand not just synchronic variation (variation at a single point of time), but also diachronic variation (variation over time) or language change.

Even before small children can speak clearly, they develop a distinct style of address to be used when speaking to anyone or anything smaller. As they grow, they add more and more variations to their speech, and these come to be associated with recognizable styles.

The existence of patterned variations in language makes it possible to identify ourselves and others as belonging to certain groups. The social prestige or stigma associated with these variations makes language a source of social and political power.

2. Sociolinguistics as an academic field of study only developed within the last sixty years, in the latter part of the last century. Certainly, an interest in the social aspects of language, in the intersection of language and society, has been with us probably as long as mankind has had language, but its organized formal study can be dated quite recently.

Sociolinguistics turned out to be a very lively and popular field of study. Today many of its subfields can claim to be fields in their own rights, with academic courses, textbooks, journals, and conferences. They include pragmatics, language and gender studies, pidgin and creole studies, language planning and policy studies, and education of linguistic minorities studies.

The interdisciplinary nature of sociolinguistics has been marked by many researchers. Tucker (1997) summarizes 5 cross-cutting themes that he found salient in forming a new discipline. First, the major fields contributing to sociolinguistics were linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. Second, the field appears to have emerged partially in response to a number of well-articulated and compelling social issues. Third, all the evidence points to a small number of key individuals whose worked in leadership, publications, and conferences, was essential to nurturing the young field. Fourth, he finds a difference in worldview, models, questions, and problems between participants from the center and those from the periphery. Fifth, the early initiatives prospered at least in part because of continuing ‘patronage’ from a small number of organizations and associations.

The first works attracting attention to the social nature of language which led to forming a new discipline emerged in different parts of the world starting the beginning of 20th century and had the bloom around 60^th.

Antoine Meillet wrote in 1905: “language is after all eminently a social fact… but from the fact that language is a social institution, it follows that linguistics is a social science, and the only variable to which we can turn to account for linguistic change is social change, of which linguistic variations are only consequences. We must determine which social structure corresponds to a given linguistic structure and how, in a general manner, changes in social structure

Some have seen in Meillet the origin of Sociolinguistics, but things are a bit more complicated, and the first year s of that century were witness to a number of intewentions which all headed in the same dircction but did not seem to know about each other. The publication of the volumes of the Linguislic Alias of France by Gillieron and Edmont stretches from 1902 to 1914. During this period, Meillet, who was working with Durkhcim's Journal L’Anneʹe sociologique set forth his conception of language as social fact, and Raoul Guerin de la Grasserie, in an article published in 1909, launched the idea of a "sociology of language." Gillieron's atlas makes visible "linguistic variation by projecting it on a map"; Meillet insists on the social character of language, la Grasserie suggests the exaniination of "the reciprocal actions and reactions between society and language," but there is no convergence of these differcnt approaches, like a chemical reaction which didn't take. This is to say that a large part of the questions we discuss today were already posited but without order, without relation to each other. Furthermore, Meillet, who had a central university position and enjoyed great prestige, never elaborated on a linguistic theory based on the conception of language as social fact, which remained with him only as a pious wish. He never, never even used any expression like "linguistic sociology," "sociological linguistics," "sociology of language" or "sociolinguistics," and his major articles were published under the title Hislorical Linguistics and General Linguistics. In particular, even though he could take into account the social and historical character of language when he studied the lexicon (for example in his articles on the names of man, or those of oil and wine) or the development of languages (for example the history of Latin), this was much more difficult for him in the area of syntax or phonology.

In the 1930s, according to Polome, Professor Gregoire, "the pioneer in this field" (Polomè 1997: 213), gave a course at the University of Brussels devoted to the "sociol­ogy of language." But one has to wait until 1938 for the Norwegian linguist Alf Sommerfelt to attempt the first sociolinguistic description of a language. The first sentence of his book is clear: "this book is an attempt at a sociological linguistics", and he writes later: "As language is a social fact comparable to religion, morals or rules of law, it is obvious that one should study it in the same way as the latter, which is to say that one should use the same general methods of sociology which one combines with the specific methods of linguistics" (Sommerfelt 1938: 6). He does cite Meillet to whose memory the work is dedicated, but mainly he draws on Durkheim, Mauss, Malinowski, Levy-Bruhl, Radcliffe-Brown, that is, the major sociologists and anthropologists of his time. Sommerfelt also worked on Aranta, an Australian aboriginal language whose culture has played an important role in social anthropology, for matters which deal with totemism as well as with comparison of religious and matrimonial systems, in sections and subsections. This tribe forms a typical example, used time and again by anthro­pologists and sociologists, and it is thus not by accident that Sommerfelt is interested in Aranta. His approach became integrated into the humanitics movement of his time, which was much influenced by evolutionism, and his knowledge and understanding make his arguments move persuasive than Meillet’s He is furthermore even more "radical" than Meillet and suggests studying "in the light of the social organization" systems of reference and categories of grammar (Sommerfelt 1938: 13) "to determine whether there exists a correlation between the phonological character of archaic lan­guages and the sound systems of these languages and the structure of the societies which speak them," a program that Meillet never formulated in these terms. And that guides his approach: "in order to determine the relationship which exists between language and society, it stands to reason that one should begin with the languages which belong to the most archaic societies which are known" (Sommerfelt 1938: 14).

When one rereads him today, Sommerfelt's work is not very convincing in its results, but it is his system, a maximalist program, which is noteworthy, attempting to put sociolinguistics at the center of linguistics, a program which has hardly been followed until very recently. Immediately following World War II, there were a number of publicaiions which took up the theme of a relationship between language and society; in 1946, the Italian Bruno Migliorini dedicated a chapter of a book on linguistics to "la lingua e la societa"? and the Swede Torgny Segerstedt put in the title of one of his books the phrase "sociology of language",' the Briton M. M. Lewis published in 1947 a work with an enticing title, but none of this challenged theoretically the weight of Saussurian structuralism, which became established. It is the same with the works of Basil Bernstein (Bernstein 1975) who has furthermore recently emphasized that in his opinion "if socio and linguistics are to illuminate language as a truly social construct, then there must be mutually translatable principles of description which enable the dynamics of the social to enter these translatable principles" (Bernstein 1997: 48).

If we have here, by evidence, a first birthplace of the appearance in Europe of the relationships between language and society, there were another, very different and geographically far away, which played a not negligible role: it concerns the USSR, Marxism and "Marrism." Nicholas Marr had worked out a theory according to which all the languagcs in the world had the same origin, four syllables or "elements" (sal, ber, yon, rosh) whose combination would have given the different words of the different feguages. Language, considered as superstructure, reflected for him dialectically the confrontiition of classes, and so the forms of speech of similar social classes in differ­ent countries ara closer to each other than the forms of speech of different social classes in the same country. It followed from this, in the same way as socialism was the future of the world, that this world would have in the future one single uniform language (which incidentally explains why the USSR had for a long time supported an Esperanto movement: Esperanto could havc been an early manifestation of this proletarian world language).