Doubts: UNIT 1

1. James Milroy: Some new perspectives on sound change: Sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians.

5/3/09

For those of you who might not have understood the solidarity constraint and its opposition to the attraction of prestige accents, here is something from Stockwell (2006)

AGE AND GENDER (Stockwell 2006; 15-16)


Sociolinguistics has mainly been concerned to describe a 'freeze-frame' of society at a particular modern moment (which means it is synchronic). Traditionally, the disciplines of philology and etymology have been concerned with the processes of sound and word change over time, taking a diachronic approach to linguistic study. However, sociolinguistics has been able to develop techniques providing insights into language change by using age variation as a social variable.


Sociolinguistic insights into change

Undertaking a longitudinal sociolinguistic study is possible over a few years but more difficult over longer periods. However, there are two ways in which sociolinguists can analyse change. One is to compare older studies and records of sociolinguistic features with modern studies. The other method is to investigate the variations in usage across the age ranges, since older people will manifest earlier forms of language learned in their youth. William Labov (1963 and in 1972b) employed both methods in his study on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard. Labov compared the findings of the 1930s Linguistic Atlas of New England with his own study, and also investigated modern usage correlated with age (and also geography and ideology -where on the island people lived and what was their attitude to island life). Martha's Vineyard was selected for study as a linguistically unusual place: for example, people there have rhotic accents even though the rest of New England remains non-rhotic (unusually in the US). Labov was interested in a local pronunciation that centralised the vowel sounds in 'night' and 'house' to the middle of the tongue; so that instead of being pronounced /nait/ and /ha?s/ they were closer to the Scottish and Canadian-sounding /n??t/ and /h??s/. This centralisation was seen as a particular feature of the local island accent.


He found that the highest "centralisers" (that is, those who emphasised their local accent the most) were those who had the greatest loyalty to island life. This included fishermen living away from the main tourist centres (and so not dependent on it), especially men aged between 31 and 45. The most strong 'centralisers' were those who had been away to college on the mainland and then chosen to return. Not only does this show language loyalty, but Labov was able to use the diachronic evidence to show that the centralisation that had been dying out in the 1930s was actually being reinforced in assertion of the island's native identity.

 

Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
Barry Pennock Speck
© Carolina Cody Aldaz
cacodyal@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press