Date: 13-Aug-2007
From: Randall Eggert <randylinguistlist.org>
Subject: Introducing Sociolinguistics
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AUTHOR: Meyerhoff, Miriam.TITLE: Introducing Sociolinguistics.PUBLISHER: Routledge: Taylor & FrancisYEAR: 2006
Dinha T. Gorgis, Jadara University for Graduate Studies, Irbid, Jordan.
SUMMARYThis book comprises twelve chapters. The first of which, like most introductorytextbooks, introduces the field, its concerns and practitioners, and the last ofwhich rounds off the sociolinguistic enterprise, as presented by the author.These are the shortest chapters and, unlike the other ten chapters, do notinclude a summary, exercises, and further reading. Notes on the exercises (pp.271-285) are added to ''help readers ask their own sociolinguistically informedresearch questions'' (p. 271). These notes are followed by a glossary whichcontains 168 terms already highlighted in the text. The book closes with a richbibliography and an index.
Central to chapter 2 are the traditional terms 'variable' and 'variant', whichare analogously compared to the phoneme and its members (p. 9). Meyerhoffdiscusses here some major common motivations for sociolinguitic variability andtakes ''the use of naturally occurring speech as the basis for the description ofvariation'' (p. 25). The topics covered in this chapter are examined in detail,both qualitatively and quantitatively, in the following chapters.
Chapter 3 accounts for variation in speech and style-shifting. While the authorallows for the distinction between 'accent' and 'dialect', she chooses to usethe neutral term 'variety' for languages and dialects to avoid ''negativeconnotations'' (p. 28). The chapter introduces stylistic variation within thespeech of a single speaker by appealing to previous studies. It also devotesconsiderable space to explaining the methods used to analyze style-shifting byfocusing on speakers' attention to their speech and thus treating ''variation asconstitutive of non-linguistic factors'' (p. 52).
In chapter 4, Meyerhoff introduces attitudes to different varieties of alanguage, that is, ''the way we perceive the individuals that use thosevarieties'' (p. 54). The key topic in this chapter is 'accommodation theory'which involves both 'convergence' and 'divergence', i.e. accommodation 'towards'vs. 'away from' the speech of one's interlocutors. So this theory ''is a theoryabout interaction, and as such it is concerned with the negotiation ofperceptions and identities between interlocutors in conversations'' (p. 75).
Chapter 5 considers 'politeness' as a variable in speech. The author exploresthe phenomenon across varieties and cultures within Brown & Levinson's theory.Choices of politeness strategies are seen to be determined by power, distance,and cost of the imposition, being a ''scalar measure of how serious aface-threatening act is in a particular society'' (p. 87). It follows that thisshould have practical implications for teaching languages cross-culturallybecause ''one language tends to conventionally use negative politeness strategieswhile the other uses positive or negative politeness strategies'' (p. 97).
Chapter 6 introduces the reader to multilingualism and language choice. Two keyterms are highlighted here, viz. 'vitality' and 'diglossia'. For alanguage/variety to remain vital, i.e. be in use for a range of socialfunctions, a number of factors must be at play. These are the ''institutional,social and demographic factors'' (p. 103). Additional factors, e.g. educational,religious, national, etc. play a significant role in choosing a high or a lowvariety as is the case in the Arab world. The use of more than onelanguage/variety involves code-switching which emerges, among other things, fromthe speakers' conceptualization of ''the relationship between location, addresseeand ingroup identity in different ways'' (p. 117). Meyerhoff, however, sees that''it is difficult to talk about a single motivation or function for a switchbetween codes'' (p. 126).
Having looked so far at the factors that constrain variation, the authorexamines in chapter 7 ''the factors that are strongly associated with what iscalled variationist sociolinguistics'' (p. 127), which studies language changeover time. Thus she introduces us to 'real time' studies of change vs. 'apparenttime' studies. The former are called 'trend studies' which use ''data fromcorpora that include comparable speakers who have been recorded at differentpoints in time. They provide one kind of diachronic perspective on how languagevaries and changes'' (p. 131). If this method is constrained by examining data''from exactly the same speakers over a period of years'' (p. 132), the pertinentstudies which require 'painstaking work' are called 'panel studies'. Apparentstudies, on the other hand, involve ''comparing the speech of speakers ofdifferent ages within a community at a single point in time'' (p. 132). Thechapter sketches four types of change connected with variation across time, viz.age-grading, lifespan, generational, and community change. It also shows therelationships that hold between one type of change and another (cf. pp.150-151). The chapter concludes with the challenges associated with both realand apparent time studies.
Social class is the topic of chapter 8. Meyerhoff introduces several definitionsfor this concept from different perspectives, links it with 'mobility', andcontrasts it with the more fixed notion of 'caste'. She is for the view thatlanguage users can be upwardly mobile due to several factors, but ''may also movedown the class and status ladder because of change to their life chances'' (p.157). So what distinguishes groups of speakers is the relative frequency withwhich they use individual variants. Whether newcomers to sociolinguistics aregood at performing statistical tests or not, they can easily see for themselvesif the ''frequency of a variant in different contexts and among differentspeakers'' (p. 168) is really a function of social class and/or some other moreimportant factors such as personal identity.
Moving from the rather unfavorable notion of social class nowadays to socialnetworks and communities of practice in chapter 9, the author overviews a numberof case studies carried out by some prominent researchers who differentiatebetween 'dense' and 'loose' networks. The distinction between these two termsinvolves scalar familiarity: the more able a speaker is to identify groupmembers, the more dense the network (cf. p. 187). On the other hand, a communityof practice, which is a specific kind of social network, is identifiable againstworkplace, e.g. tailors (experienced vs. novices), compared with othercommunities of practice. Both of these key notions in the chapter are said tonest with social class ''in terms of how locally they are defined and how muchemphasis they place on speakers' attitudes and actions'' (p. 199-200).
Gender, as kept distinct from both grammatical gender and sex, has been thesubject matter of heated arguments among sociolinguists for decades now. Chapter10 sees gender as a social and cultural category; ''something acquired orconstructed through your relationship with others and through an individual'sadherence to certain cultural norms and proscriptions'' (p. 202). The chapterdraws a distinction between gender exclusive and gender preferential features inlanguage. The former are linguistic features that directly index gender becausethey are pertinent to a particular sex, e.g. pronouns, whereas the latterindirectly index gender because they are distributed across speakers or groupswith a frequency difference such that vernacular variants are constitutive ofmasculinity as a social identity rather than being merely a reflection of themale sex. The author reviews three principles that account for gender andvariation (cf. Labov 1990, 2001). These principles, which are criticized for thegender paradox they display (cf. pp. 220-222), identify the circumstances inwhich women are likely to lead men in the use of standard vs. vernacularvariants above and below the level of awareness.
Chapter 11 examines how contact between varieties affects variation and change.At the outset, Meyerhoff acknowledges the fact that ''[a]ll variation and changecan be viewed as the outcome of some form of contact between differentindividuals or members of different groups'' (p. 238). Contact can be the resultof an ''increased mobility of speakers'' (p. 239), globalization, e.g. English asa lingua franca, borrowing between varieties of the same language (sociallyand/or regionally) as well as between world languages, and the creation ofpidgins and creoles. In a word, transmission is, irrespective of 'space', anever-ending process.
EVALUATION
Although the audience of this textbook, which is exceptionally error-free andwonderfully typeset, are primarily meant to be undergraduates, the exercises areso rich with stimulating ideas that graduates can develop them into theses.Unlike other introductory textbooks, an exercise is immediately included next tothe relevant point(s) of discussion. Above all, further aid to working out theexercises is given in ''Notes on the exercises'' at the close of the book. Theother merit of the book is its coverage of most recent advances in the field andtheir connections with theory. However, although there is a rich and up-datedbibliography, it is a pity not to find anywhere in the book references to otherexcellent introductions such as Hudson's (1996) and Wardhaugh's (2002). This isunfortunate, for example, because Hudson's (1980) first edition had alreadyestablished 'variety' as a cover term supported by more solid reasons (seechapter 2) than Meyerhoff's avoidance of ''negative connotations'' associated withdialects and languages. At the same time, Meyerhoff does acknowledge Holmes's(2001) equally excellent introduction, and best-seller.
I do not wish to push my opinions too far and make preferences among theavailable textbooks, yet Meyerhoff could have included a section on updatemethodology (cf., e.g. chapter 5 in Hudson) and another on advances in datacollection and problems associated with it (cf., e.g. chapter 6 in Wardhaugh). Iimagine that the author would agree with me that these two issues are quitehelpful for the researcher-to-be in sociolinguistics. Newcomers tosociolinguistics badly need not only acquaintance with research problems, forwhich the book receives high credit, but how to work on them, i.e. procedures,the difficulties they might encounter in particularly conservative societies,e.g. the Arab world, and how to circumvent at least some of them. They also needto know the difference and/or similarity between the sociology of language andsociolinguistics and the points at which they converge and/or diverge.Nonetheless, Meyerhoff is obviously quite aware of the interdisciplinary natureof the field. These comments should in no way reduce the strengths of the book;for I must admit that I have enjoyed reading it.
REFERENCESHolmes, Janet. 2001. _An Introduction to Sociolinguistics_. London: Longman.
Hudson, R.A. 1996. _Sociolinguistics_. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
Labov, William. 1990. The intersection of sex and social class in the course oflinguistics change. _Language Variation and Change_ 2:205-154.
Labov, William. 2001. _Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors_. Oxford:Blackwell.
Wardhaugh, Ronald. 2002. _An Introduction to Sociolinguistics_. 4th ed. Oxford:Blackwell.
ABOUT THE REVIEWERDinha T. Gorgis is currently professor of linguistics at Jadara University forGraduate Studies, Jordan. He has been mainly involved in teaching graduatecourses, e.g. phonology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics,discourse analysis, contemporary English grammar, and translation. He isco-editor of _The International Journal Linguistik_ online, co-editor of WATAmagazine, and is member of IPrA. His most recent publications include ''Binomialsin Iraqi and Jordanian Arabic'' (2005) in _The International Journal of Languageand Linguistics_, Vol. 4, No. 2, 135-151, and ''Romanised Jordanian ArabicE-Messages'' (2007), in _The International Journal of Language, Society, andCulture_, Issue 21, 1-12. He reviewed Yavas (2006), LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3630,and Evens & Green (2006), LINGUIST List, Vol-18-1165, and has recently writtenthree book notices for eLanguage, which will appear soon.
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