Unfortunately for the spelling of modern English, the language underwent a large-scale pronunciation change in the few hundred years after printing began to fossilise English spelling..
Trang 1‘I’ (‘ic’), accusative pronoun ‘me’ (‘mê’), genitive pronouns ‘mine’ (‘mën’) and ‘our’ (‘ìre’) The possessive apostrophe in modern English (‘Peter’s book’) preserves the genitive singular endings ‘-es’ for masculine and neuter nouns (see Table A8.1 above), with the apostrophe indicating that the ‘e’ has been omitted (Given this com-plicated history, it is no wonder the possessive apostrophe is so often wrongly used
in modern English.)
The case system was generally lost in favour of a more fixed word-order for sev-eral reasons The gradual influence first of Norman French, and in the later medieval period Orléans French, brought a ruling class speaking a non-case language A huge number of French words were borrowed by English in this period, largely but not exclu-sively in the domains of law and administration, cuisine and fashion, education and manners, architecture and medicine Many of these words would have seemed odd with inflectional endings
Furthermore, Danish influence in the form of Viking invasions and settlement in the east of England before the Norman Conquest and the speakers of the diverse Old English dialects produced a contact situation in which many of the root words were very similar but the inflectional endings were variable: it was natural that these different endings tended to be assimilated towards a single form Given these other factors, the typical Germanic stress on first syllables also meant that inflectional endings came to be assimilated towards an undifferentiated mid-vowel /e/
At the same time, many inflectional forms were altering The northern ‘-s’ suffix for third person verbs began to spread to the south, displacing the original ‘-e2’, now spelled ‘-eth’ (Caxton did not in fact have a ‘2’ block on his Dutch-imported print-ing press, and used ‘Y’ instead, givprint-ing rise to the ‘Ye Olde Englishe’ characterisation:
‘Ye’ was never pronounced /ji/ but always /qe/) The King James Bible form (‘My cup runneth over’) was already archaic by 1611 Standard plural ‘-s’ was being used in pref-erence to the Old English ‘-en’ (‘children’, ‘oxen’) or zero (‘sheep’, ‘fish’) And weak past inflections (‘hanged’, ‘looked’, ‘spelt’) were more productive than strong forms (‘brought’, ‘ran’, ‘hung’)
Towards Modern English
By the time of the introduction and widespread use of printing presses (generally imported from the Netherlands), Middle English relied more on syntactic word-order than inflection Dative and other undifferentiated endings tended towards a word-final ‘-e’ in writing These were still pronounced, and our modern spelling system stands
as a frozen representation of Middle English pronunciation – all the letters in the following words would have been sounded: ‘name’, ‘servyse’, ‘drought’, ‘knight’,
‘through’, and many others
Unfortunately for the spelling of modern English, the language underwent a large-scale pronunciation change in the few hundred years after printing began to fossilise
English spelling This was known as the Great Vowel Shift and was generally
charac-terised by the ‘raising’ of most vowel sounds (that is, the vowel sounds in particular words were replaced by vowels articulated higher on the tongue) So ‘name’ went from Chaucer’s 1400 /na£me/ to Shakespeare’s 1600 /ne£m/, and then later in southern English accents to /neim/; ‘sweet’ went from /sweite/ to /swi£t/; ‘down’ moved from /du£n/ to /dakn/; ‘bath’ went from /bæ0/ to /ba£0/; ‘run’ from /rkn/ to /rwn/
Trang 2and then /ren/, and so on The change started in London and spread away north and westwards You will notice from some of the last few examples here that the Great Vowel Shift did not reach as far as some northern English and Scottish accents, which still retain earlier forms of pronunciation
Changes in vowel quality also caused changes in consonant pronunciation and
stress patterns across words and phrases Rhoticity (pronouncing /r/ in words like ‘car’
and ‘farm’) was gradually lost from all English and Welsh accents, with modern excep-tions only in south-west and north-west England, and Scotland and Ireland The com-mon rhoticity in most American accents is due to the fact that settlers left England largely from rhotic areas and at a time that preceded the general loss of British rhoticity The period of Early Modern English is usually taken to begin soon after 1600, and we can see that by this time many of the forms of pronunciation and grammar are recognisable to present users of English This is not to say, of course, that there has been no historical change in the past 400 years The spread of English around the world has created many more forms of the language than could have existed only within the British Isles All of these other world Englishes have diverged along their own his-torical paths Many of the speakers of these forms (Americans, Indians, Australians, and others) have returned and changed British English too The effects of mass migration, globalisation, and the dominance of English as an international language continue to produce innovation and change (see strand 10) It remains to be seen whether diversity or convergence is the dominating trend in the future
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Defining sociolinguistics
Even if this book is the very first time that you have ever heard of the disciplinary
term sociolinguistics, there is every chance that you will have engaged in discussions
and reflections upon sociolinguistic topics on many different occasions In fact, socio-linguistics is unavoidably all around us In our everyday lives we are constantly engaged in sociolinguistic acts and processes, and most of us have been involved at some time in a conversation about accent and dialect, or ‘correct’ English, or the state
of the education system, and so on So, what is sociolinguistics?
Broadly speaking, sociolinguistics can be defined as investigating the interplay between language and society Researchers who work in this field of language study
are commonly known as sociolinguists One of the crucial areas which sociolinguists
focus upon is how we vary our language use in different social contexts, referred to
as variationist sociolinguistics.
Think about how you vary your style of speaking depending upon what social context you are in, who you are talking to and other factors, such as who could poten-tially overhear you Compare the following:
q The language that you would use as an interviewee in the public setting of a job interview, whilst being interviewed by a panel of three company directors, with
A9
Trang 3an informal conversation in the private setting of your home with three long-term friends from your local regional area
in the public setting of the workplace when you know that you are in earshot of your boss, compared with a telephone conversation with the same intimate in the private setting of your own home with no overhearers
Consideration of these different social contexts raises a set of issues which lie at the
core of sociolinguistic investigations Differences in the levels of formality of a situ-ation will affect the speech styles we choose to adopt, as will any differences in per-ceived social status and power between speakers, along with the closely related issue
of how much solidarity or social distance we perceive there to be between ourselves
and our fellow interactants
Another area of keen interest for sociolinguists alongside language variation is the
study of language change, in particular, how language changes over time (see B8).
You have already come across examples of this in A8, where we set out how some regional and social changes in society have influenced changes in the English language
system These considerations can be viewed as belonging to the sub-discipline of
his-torical sociolinguistics.
During the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, sociolinguists
examined regional variation, cataloguing differences between speakers in specific
geo-graphical areas There was a focus in particular upon using older speakers from rural locations who had never left the area of their birth, as they were perceived to speak a form of ‘pure’ dialect These informants were also all male, as at the time of record-ing men were perceived to be a more reliable, ‘purer’ source of language data than women These speakers are collectively known by the acronym NORMs (non-mobile older rural males) The principal aim of this research was to record variations so that dictionaries and grammars of regional varieties could be published
The modern-day discipline of sociolinguistics developed during the 1950s and 1960s when sociolinguists rapidly expanded their areas of research interest Instead
of limiting investigations to rural locations and older males only, interest grew in exploring more complex geographical regions in urban areas, where a variety of different speakers had physically moved around, resulting in different varieties coming into contact with one another
Furthermore, the traditional focus upon regionality expanded to include a
com-bined focus upon social variation, with the social identity categories of age, sex,
socio-economic class and ethnicity being examined for patterns of variation Younger and older, male and female speakers from different socio-economic backgrounds and ethnicities emerged as important and fruitful subjects of research
The modern discipline of sociolinguistics has grown at a rapid rate At the end
of the first decade of the twenty-first century there is now a broad range of well-established sociolinguistic sub-disciplines, which sit both within and alongside the more traditional approaches to language variation and language change These sub-disciplines include, amongst others: language and ethnicity, language and gender, language and age, multilingualism, language planning and policy, language attitudes and World Englishes (the subject of strand 10) Certain areas of pragmatics also cross
Trang 4over into sociolinguistics, as mentioned in A3 A prime example of this is studies on the sociolinguistics of politeness, for instance when linguistic politeness is examined from the perspective of the social variable of gender
Key terms
Within sociolinguistics a key distinction is made between the terms accent and
dialect, which is often blurred in everyday conversations and popular culture
publi-cations Accent refers to pronunciation Dialect is a more encompassing term which refers to lexis and grammar as well as pronunciation
One of the key features of the language system which sociolinguists examining
regional variation will study is accent Sociolinguistic researchers who explore accent
variation thus also tend to be trained phoneticians, often referred to as socio-phoneticians (D1) Another significant area of interest continues to be in investigations
of dialect
Whilst traditional research and initial modern-day sociolinguistic studies tended
to focus upon accent and dialect and thus on investigations at the phonological, lexical and grammatical level, it is important to emphasise that sociolinguistic study can take place at any level of the linguistic rank scale, encompassing a range of the layers
of the language system you will come across in this book Sociolinguistic studies can
be conducted by investigating phonetics, lexis, grammar, syntax, discourse and prag-matics, or a combination of these different elements
We now want to return to the point which we made right at the beginning of our consideration of how to define sociolinguistics, when we mentioned the frequency with which conversations on sociolinguistic topics take place in everyday talk There is a very useful set of sociolinguistic terms which helps to elucidate this point further in
terms of our own language awareness These are the categories of stereotypes, markers and indicators, coined by North American sociolinguist William Labov (1972) Labov
has played a significant role in the development of modern-day sociolinguistics and
he is commonly accepted to be the most influential founding figure in the discipline
It is impossible to engage in wider reading on the topic of contemporary socio-linguistics without coming across reference to Labov or the findings of his studies
The first of Labov’s categories, stereotype, refers to obvious features of language
usage, such as the use of ‘chuck’ as a term of endearment in Lancashire, or ‘queen’, fulfilling the same endearing function in Liverpool, the use of the ‘eh’ as a tag in Canadian and New Zealand English, or the use of the agreement marker ‘och aye’ in Scottish English These features are those that are most obviously noticed and will be those that are most frequently commented upon in everyday conversations and discussions about how language varies between speakers Stereotypes tend to be associated with vocabulary items and are therefore far easier to spot than phonological or grammat-ical variations
What language stereotypes exist in your own local area? Who uses them? Do you use them? Why/why not? In what contexts do you hear them being used /use them yourself ? What attitudes do you have towards these stereotypes?
The term marker, sometimes called a social marker, refers to a feature where there
is still some conscious awareness of variation by language users, but far less so than with stereotypes These features may thus still become the topic of everyday conversations
Trang 5about language usage Markers are very important to academic sociolinguistic study,
as they are features with clear social significance, firmly associated with particular social groups and speech styles Rhoticity, defined in A8, is a good example of a marker of the social status of the speaker Some people, for example in south-west and north-west England, regard it as a prestigious feature that marks them out from other groups; while some of those other groups might regard it as a stigmatised feature Elsewhere, for example in most of North America, rhoticity is seen as a prestigious variable mark-ing social status; similarly, notable exceptions exist amongst some other groups (see A12 and B9 for further discussion)
How many markers can you think of for your own local area? Again, consider who uses them and whether you use them yourself Why/why not? If you use them,
in what contexts do you use them / hear them being used? What attitudes do you have towards these markers?
Finally, indicator refers to features which are below the level of consciousness and
can only be spotted by trained sociolinguists These features are therefore not expected to occur as topics of everyday conversation about language usage Crucially, there is no social encoding associated with these variants – individual speakers will use the same language feature regardless of context or whom they are speaking with
So, whilst different groups may use indicators differently, such forms are not associ-ated with any social indexing In certain parts of North America, some speakers will pronounce the vowels in ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ exactly the same in all settings, whereas others will not There is no consequence for speakers either way in terms of any positive
or negative social evaluation – merging these vowel sounds is not socially encoded
It is important to note that there can be slippage between these three different categories over time: indicators can become markers, which in turn can then become stereotypes
Communities, networks and practices
By searching for sociolinguistic speech patterns and examining differing speech styles sociolinguists quickly discovered that an analytical apparatus was required in modern-day sociolinguistics in order to explain how individuals interact with one another as members of different groups
One of the most influential frameworks is that of a speech community A good way
to define a speech community is to start by considering what it is not Sociolinguists argue that a group of individuals cannot be defined as a speech community simply
by virtue of the fact that they speak the same language Speakers of the English lan-guage do not, therefore, constitute a speech community Not only are speakers of English geographically disparate, there is far too much variation among different varieties of the language Simply consider the differences that exist between American English and English English (the English spoken in England) without even beginning to touch upon the number of different varieties that exist within the two countries (a range of fur-ther, global examples will be explored in strand 10)
Furthermore, it is important for analytical sociolinguistic categories to be defined
on something other than linguistic criteria in order to avoid the methodological
prob-lem known as circularity This probprob-lem arises when linguistic features are used to
identify a group that the study will then go on to analyse linguistically A category
Trang 6from outside the language system itself is required in order to come up with a
justifiable and legitimate definition of a group
Labov came up with a useful and influential definition which moves away from the
circularity problem He argued that a speech community can be defined by speakers’
participation in a shared set of norms These norms can be found either by overtly
asking speakers for evaluations of one another, or by finding clear patterns of
lan-guage usage
In a series of studies in New York City, Labov discovered that a set of shared norms
existed between speakers, which helped him define New York as a speech
commu-nity He argued that, whilst there was clear language variation according to different
social class groupings, the more formal a situation became, the more members from
every social class group in New York would alter their speech style and use more prestigious language variants, such as rhoticity Speakers thus shared a set of norms:
they moved closer to prestigious speech variants in more formal situations (see A12
for a more detailed illustration)
The speech community can be seen as a rather abstract concept Speakers can be
geographically disparate and researchers can have very limited contact with them
In contrast with the speech community are two other approaches, known as social
networks and communities of practice.
The social networks model focuses on the frequency and different types of
con-tact that a specific cluster of individuals share It then examines how the closeness
of the social ties that exist between speakers will influence their language usage
Researchers who follow a communities of practice model examine particular groups
of individuals who physically come together to engage in a specific, regular activity
Shared sociolinguistic practices and goals develop over time between these groups of
people Examples of communities of practice can include sports teams, friendship groups,
colleagues in a workplace and students in a seminar Close-knit communities tend to
sustain particular linguistic identities and features
There are values in all three of these different frameworks for conceptualising groups,
depending upon what sociolinguists are aiming to analyse The speech communities
approach is useful if analysts want to survey language usage in broad populations of
people The social network approach is useful for observing how the social closeness
or social distance of a particular network affects language usage The communities of
practice model is useful for observing how a specific group develops shared language
practices, as well as how membership categories are co-constructed and how
member-ship can change over time
WORLD ENGLISHES
World Englishes is a recently emergent area of sociolinguistic study It is a field which
has grown rapidly since the early 1980s, reflecting the spread of English as an
inter-national language, initially highlighted in A8 The expansion of different varieties of
Englishes around the world has been intensified by English as the global language of
A10