50 years of British
sociolinguistics: What do
we know now that we
didn't know before?
Paul Kerswill
University of York
19 April 2018
Language variation
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Research Seminar on
Sociolinguistic Variation
November 1976
• Organised by Euan Reid (Walsall College)
• Summing up by Robert Le Page (York)
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… pla … to gathe togethe the uite
small number of people working on
studies of British English using a
Labovia
ethodology …
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Le Page in his Summing-up :
• Several of the authors in quite different
ways, were nevertheless concerned
primarily with refining the linguistic
description, whether it was of idiolect, or
variety, or register, and then secondarily
saying how the variety they have described
was used .
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Mixed languages?
• David Sutcliffe on Afro-Caribbean speech in
Birmingham: a macaronic mixture of lects ,
though the speakers were clear about what they
were speaking to whom
• Reminiscent of translanguaging (Lüpke)
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It e a e evide t at a early stage of orga isi g the
eeti g,
however, that there was a much wider interest in the proposed
seminar, and what eventually took place might more
a urately e des ri ed as a sy posiu
It see s likely fro
the respo se to the Walsall Se i ar that a
further meeting would be found useful in a year or two, and
that one welcome development would be an attempt to
es ape fro
our hauvi isti li itatio to studies o variatio
reported i E glish
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1978
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1980/87
1982
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1991
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Sociolinguistics Symposium
• https://www.ss22.ac.nz/about.html
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UK Language Variation and
Change Conference (UKLVC)
• Reading University, 4th-5th April 1997 - First UK Language Variation Workshop
• I am organising a workshop/symposium around the theme of language variation and
variationist approaches to language change. This is in response to what I see as a need,
particularly in the UK, for a forum at which variationists can exchange ideas relatively
informally outside the context of large and successful conferences such as the
Sociolinguistics Symposium, where the burgeoning and welcome interest in all things
sociolinguistic has tended to swamp the variationist perspective.
• There will be a round table meeting over two days in Reading, with no parallel sessions and
with contributions of around 30 minutes PLUS 10 minutes discussion. This would restrict
the number of papers to around 12.
• I will also restrict the number of participants to around 40 (I don't want to organise anything
huge!). My primary aim is to bring together UK researchers (those based in the UK or
researching UK languages), though I would not discourage interested others.
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• 32 presentations
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Jack Chambers: SOCIAL EMBEDDING OF CHANGES
Paul Kerswill & Ann Williams: DIALECT LEVELLING IN TWO ENGLISH TOWNS
Enam Al-Wer: ANALYSING VARIATION IN ARABIC
Docherty & Paul Foulkes: VARIATION IN THE REALISATION OF 'RELEASED' /t/ IN TYNESIDE AND DERBY
David Britain: LEXICAL DIFFUSION AND THE A/A: SPLIT: EVIDENCE FROM THE TRANSITION ZONE
Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy: PARADIGMATIC COMPLEMENTARINESS IN LANGUAGE VARIATION
RESEARCH: APPROACHES TO DIFFUSION
Gunnel Melchers: PATTERNS OF LINGUISTIC VARIATION IN A BIDIALECTAL COMMUNITY: SHETLAND
John Widdowson: HIDDEN DEPTHS: EXPLOITING ARCHIVAL RESOURCES OF SPOKEN ENGLISH
Clive Upton: A SURVEY OF REGIONAL ENGLISH?
Jenny Cheshire and Jamal Ouhalla: FOCUS AS A CONSTRAINT ON SYNTACTIC VARIATION
Susan Pintzuk: LANGUAGE CHANGE VIA GRAMMATICAL COMPETITION: THE CHANGE FROM OV TO
VO IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH
John M. Kirk: VARIATIONIST STUDIES OF IRISH ENGLISH SYNTAX
Gisle Andersen: I GOES YOU HANG IT UP IN YOUR SHOWER, INNIT? HE GOES YEAH. THE USE AND
DEVELOPMENT OF INVARIANT TAGS IN LONDON TEENAGE SPEECH
Ioannis Androutsopoulos: EXTENDING THE CONCEPT OF 'SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIABLE' TO GERMAN
YOUTH SLANG
Lesley Milroy: VARIATION AS AN INTERACTIONAL RESOURCE
Peter Trudgill: THE GREAT EAST ANGLIAN MERGER MYSTERY
Jean Aitchison: FROM PREFERENCES TO HABITS TO RULES: A NATURAL PROGRESSION?
Sali Tagliamonte: WAS/WERE VARIATION ACROSS THE GENERATIONS: VIEW FROM THE CITY OF YORK
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UKLVC 1 – areas
• Change across geographical areas (levelling, diffusion, mergers)
• Bidialectal communities
• Regional surveys
• Phonetic/Phonological variation
• Discourse variation
• Syntactic variation
• Using spoken and historical corpora to study variation
• Change in older varieties
• Slang, style
• Interactional (socio)linguistics
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UKLVC 10 – York, 2015
• 115 submissions
• 24 paper acceptances (plenary-only sessions)
• 50 poster acceptances
• 123 participants
• Keynotes:
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Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
Ghada Khattab
Lesley Milroy
Paul Kerswill
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UKLVC 10 – York, 2015
• Salience and exemplar models
• Levelling and diffusion
• UTI (ultrasound tongue imaging)
• Perception and cognitive representation
• Style and individual variation
• Celtic languages and Celtic varieties
• Indexicality
• Contact and geographical variation
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Three new areas?
• Salience/exemplar models
• Perception and cognitive representation
• Indexicality
• Silverstein and indexicality
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• Social class, social structure and British
sociolinguistics, 1974 (–2015?)
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Random sampling and class
• Peter Trudgill (Norwich), 1974
• Tyneside Linguistic Survey, 1972
• Now part of Newcastle s DECTE project
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Class (over?)simplied
• Phonological Variation and Change (Newcastle
and Derby, mid-90s)
• Milton Keynes (early and mid-90s)
• Glasgow (1990s)
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Glottal stop and th-fronting in
Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull
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Great British Class Survey 2013
(Savage, Devine et al.)
• We devised a new way of measuring class, which doesn't define
class just by the job that you do, but by the different kinds of
economic, cultural and social resources or 'capital' that people
possess.
• We asked people about their income, the value of their home and
savings, which together is known as 'economic capital', their
cultural interests and activities, known as 'cultural capital' and the
number and status of people they know, which is called 'social
capital .
Source: BBC website
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GBCS and sociolinguistics
• Blurring of the boundary between middle and working
classes.
• This also implies that there is no explicit stratification between the
intermediate classes – this is how people conceptualise class
anyway
• The idea of capital is already part of how sociolinguists
analyse language use – especially through the idea of
linguistic capital (i.e. what your way of speaking is worth in
a given context, such as work or leisure)
• BUT has yet to be operationalised in sociolinguistics!
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Multicultural, multilingual
Britain
• Investigations of the Windrush generation:
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David Sutcliffe 1982, 1986
Viv Edwards 1986
Mark Sebba 1986
Roger Hewitt 1986
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Urban contact dialects – a new
way of creating a new dialect
• Multicultural London English
• Jenny Cheshire, Sue Fox, Eivind Torgersen and me
(2004 – 2010)
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Conclusion
• Do we know more now than we did then?
• Yes!!
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Conclusion
• Much more is actually known about how languages
come to be spoken by different sorts of people,
leading to variation
• Much more information now, much of it only made
possible following the advent of audio recording
• Major advances in data storage
• Corpora
• Automatic instrumental analysis of data
• Theory?
• Slow, but more knowledge now
• Think more about social good – impact
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• Thank you!
• Questions, comments?
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